SchrummSchrumm, or The Sunday Quicksands Excursion

Translated by K. E. Gormley, with an introduction by Éric Dussert / September 2025 / 5.375 x 8, 320 pp. / 978-1-962728-07-2

One morning, the legendary, lurid, and sinister Sunday Quicksands Excursion Company bus stops outside the professional excursionist SchrummSchrumm’s building. His registration application having been accepted, despite the fact he had never submitted an application, SchrummSchrumm lets himself be stripped down, smeared with catechumenal balm for hallucination protection, manacled to armrests and floor of the bus, and eventually blindfolded for the journey to the distant walled city of Misunderstanding. It is there that SchrummSchrumm will undergo a series of increasingly absurd ritualist initiations under the supreme rule of Abocketaback as he prepares for the incessantly forestalled excursion to the Quicksands on the city’s outskirts. Absurdity gives way to nightmare, which again reveals itself to be absurdity, as hero and reader seek, against regulations, a logic to this passage through barbed-wire entanglement, the Great Iron Gate, the Enchanted Poplar Forest, the Original Pissoir, and the Primordial House, before reaching the unsettling, and possibly unsettled, Secret embodied in the seven concentric circles.

A unique novel whose surrealism is one of horror rather than the marvelous, SchrummSchrumm, or The Sunday Quicksands Excursion represents a dark prelude to the revolutionary spirit of May 1968 in France, a piercingly sinister flipside to the premise of one’s desires being taken for reality. It is a delirious machine that feeds on doubt and produces death.

“SchrummSchrumm is a mad book.”—Nicolas d’Estienne d’Orves, Le Figaro Magazine.

“SchrummSchrumm is without a doubt one of the great novels of the twentieth century, one of those books that will never cease to astound us.”—Éric Dussert

“Combet has written a fine, calmly ferocious book. . . . An important book, too, whose meanings and mines have yet to be exhausted.”—André Hardellet

Fernand Combet (1936–2003) wrote five books over twenty years. Though his first book, SchrummSchrumm, or The Sunday Quicksands Excursion, was celebrated on its original publication in 1966, Combet’s lack of interest in performing a literary career, his thirst for travel, and his pursuit of isolation led him to pass away largely forgotten.

Éric Dussert is a writer, editor, and literary critic specializing in forgotten literary texts.