The protagonist of Becalmed seeks spiritual shelter in the countryside. He finds not rest but a nightmare - a gruesome crumbling house, peasants both stupid and cunning, and the landscape - indeed the whole natural world - in a ghastly state of decay. "A hemorrhage of ordure," Huysmans calls it. His descriptions of Gothic intensity provide a total inversion of naturalism which is emphasized by the remarkable dream passages which intercut the novel.

In many ways this is Huysmans' most extraordinary book, and despite its immediately following Against Nature, Zola called it "his most intense work" - later André Breton celebrated it in his Anthology of Black Humour.