The Tenant

By Roland Topor

Translated from French by Francis K. Price

A masterful psychological thriller, The Tenant tells of Monsieur Trelkovsky, an ordinary man with ordinary desires against whom apparently ordinary circumstances conspire until he is enmeshed in an extraordinary and terrifying situation. With supreme skill and economy, Topor lures us into a nightmare world of paranoia, collusion, harrowing injury and suicide – a world which, we come to feel, is separated from the normality of everyday life by the merest sliver of sanity. 

Roman Polanski made a film based on the book in 1976. 

The book that inspired the genuinely terrifying Polanski movie, The Tenant is a hallucinatory classic of literary horror somewhat akin to a fusion of Patrick Hamilton and Edgar Allan Poe. - GQ

It is unforgettable, gripping. - Ronald Frame, Le Monde

As cold and quiet and deadly as a snake in the bed. - New York Times

Grotesque and harrowing. The Tenant is a powerful fable set in the twilight zone.  - Observer