Life is an abandoned Amusement, a pleasure of ruins. Few are the solitary souls with a penchant for the sublime who spend their existence being irresistibly attracted to crumbling buildings and abandoned places. This book is an ode to this particular attraction – the feeling of Ruinenlust. Part fiction collection, part ensemble of essays, the volume presents a collaboration of two minds preoccupied with the themes of ruination. The eight fictions by D. F. Lewis, collected here for the first time, feature characters thrust into depopulated, often devastated landscapes as we follow their encounters with an enigma. The fictional pieces are accompanied by a literary equivalent of the Kaiserpanorama experience wherein the reader is presented with ten short essays by Sławomir Wielhorski centering on some of the most attractive vistas of ruins and decay in weird fiction from the early Gothics to the modern masterpieces of the genre.