A young man moves into an apartment whose previous tenant has just killed herself. He is calm, shy and polite. Yet his strange neighbors immediately declare an undercover war on him. What for? Do the terrifying mysteries he witnesses from his window exist outside of his morbid imagination? Is the landlord sincere when he swears, This is a calm building?

In this novel, in which the most day-to-day realism feeds the nightmare, the author portrays a suffocating, sordid world in which the grotesque and the dramatic always go hand in hand. And when he describes how the trap intended to lead a man to death – and to his ruin – works, he welcomes us into a “panique” vision of the world.

Roman Polanski made a stunning cinematic adaptation of this Roland Topor novel.