 The first three stories are short stories, and the fourth and fifth are long enough to be called novellas (the fourth is over 44,500 words long, and the fifth is over 27,500 words long).The title is taken from , a deliberate misquotation of the passage which describes humanity as perceiving the world "through a glass darkly".The stories, which belong to the Gothic horror and mystery genres, are presented as selections from the posthumous papers of the occult detective Dr. Martin Hesselius.