The Other Side has some gripping ideas, and it was fun to read though it if only to see their development through the history of weird fiction. We have:

• a proto-kafkaesque bureaucracy

• a kind of hyper-irrational economy where the prices of things come about randomly, catapulting people from prince to pauper and back again (sort of presaging The Lottery in Babylon?)

• plenty of industrial things falling to nature ("the marsh was eating away at the station, the building was tilted, the platform was covered in mud and rushes, mire was creeping into the waiting rooms from the rotted doors...")

• various post-colonial things going on which I think were just of-the-time racist but maybe someone more educated could tell me were actually self-conscious or something.. entire buildings are shipped from central europe to be erected in Pearl, there is a tribe of people native to the area who coincidentally look exactly like europeans, there is a french quarter filled with gypsies and prostitutes, etc.

All that said I think I was reading this more for the historical interest than for its own enjoyment--not yet allowing itself to do anything too crazy, the book forces a traditional narrative structure on itself that adds a tedious justification for (and journey to) Dreamland, and culminates in a heavy-handed climax where the tyrant of Pearl kinda redeems himself by defeating a herald of change literally named The American. Also the old-timey racism is lowkey very funny (such as a line about how any Hungarian from outside Budapest is "basically Asiatic").

Finally, there are a handful of illustrations which prompted me to look up the rest of Kubin's visual art and I gotta say, it is a lot better than this book:

https://thecharnelhouse.org/2014/12/02/the-weird-world-of-alfred-kubin-beyond-the-other-side-1908/