Strange Tales from a Lonely Studio is a famous legendary novel in the mid-Tang Dynasty, written by Niu Monk and Ru. Lu Xun said: "In the Tang Dynasty, many people chose legendary articles and compiled them into an episode, but most of the works collected by Xuan Hemo's Strange Tales from a Lonely Studio (a brief history of Chinese novels) explained things before the Sui and Tang Dynasties. I remember the Tang Dynasty, before Dezong Zhenyuan. This book may have been collected between Zhenyuan and Yuanhe years. Because after the Changqing period, the author has been an official for senior officials and is keen on party struggle. I am afraid that I will never have time to do such novels again. As for the individual works written during the Daiwa period, it may be that the editor accidentally sneaked in from his book. The theme of this book mostly involves immortal Taoism, reincarnation of destiny, ghosts and gods, etc. This is related to the author's deep belief in Taoism and his love for exotic things. In art, the condensed story is novel, euphemistic and long, which gradually increases the detailed description and dialogue between the characters, and has obvious development compared with the previous strange novels. For example, in the article "Liu Satire", several girls drink together and ridicule each other, and the language is very vivid; "Wu Ying You" wrote four strange poems and sang in harmony, intending to express the story fiction in the name of the protagonist; Compared with Tao Yuanming's Peach Blossom Spring, Gu describes the ideal world and the kingdom of God in a more detailed and vivid way. In addition, Guo Daigong wrote that before Guo made his fortune, he heroically killed the pig monster of General Tuoba GUI, which saved the people, and the plot was tortuous and vivid, which was quite quoted by later generations. In terms of writing skills, the author no longer follows the strict historical biography style of the original legendary novels, but adopts more free forms and techniques that are more suitable for short stories. Many of these articles have broken the narrative structure of time and experience sequence, and used the methods of changing narrative perspective, interleaving time and space, combining sequence with flashback; Some only take a few paragraphs from the protagonist's life to show all the connotations of the characters; Some speed up the narrative rhythm and quickly push the story to a climax after revealing contradictions. Correspondingly, in the aspect of characterization, enigma records pay more attention to dynamic description, which makes the characters more vivid and layered. All these reflect the artistic innovation of Mystery Record.

The record of mystery in New Tang Book, History of Song Dynasty and Chongwen General Catalogue is 10. This book was lost in the Song Dynasty. In later editions, Taiping Guangji included 365,438+0 articles and 25 excerpts from Lei Shuo. There are four volumes and forty-four printed editions of Chen in Ming Dynasty, but there are still some discrepancies with the lost articles cited in Taiping Guangji, and there are miscellaneous questions that continue to puzzle.