The Stranger

It's hard to imagine it was made into a film. But it was Orson Welles, and it was 1946 right after the first English translation, in the middle of the red scare so maybe, at the height of our collective paranoia it may have been possible. It was published first in 1942 in French of course. In 1954 he even recorded an audio book himself. It was his true first novel, his prior work all being non-fiction. There are three primary English translations.

Stuart Gilbert (1946): Formal and stiff.
Matthew Ward (1989): More even handed and modern, my preference.
Joseph Laredo (1983): Similar to Ward but not as immediate.

"And I, too, felt ready to start life all over again. It was as if that great rush of anger had washed me clean, emptied me of hope, and, gazing up at the dark sky spangled with its signs and stars, for the first time, the first, I laid my heart open to the benign indifference of the universe. To feel it so like myself, indeed so brotherly, made me realize that I’d been happy, and that I was happy still. For all to be accomplished, for me to feel less lonely ,all that remained was to hope that on the day of my execution there should be a huge crowd of spectators and that they should greet me with howls of execration." -Camus

The Strange Woman

Ben Ames Williams, author of short stories and novels, was born in Macon, Mississippi in 1889. Strangely his best work was set in Bangor Maine. Much of the book feels dated, but when he delves into a sefarers gothic his provse comes alive in a dark 'Billy Budd' kind of way. He repeatedly descibes a hydrophobia that I don't think has ever been matched.

1.

"He imagined the canoe overturning, felt the strangling water flood his laboring lungs, saw his body sinking with last spasmodic reflex jerkings of arms and legs to rest at last on the dark, slimed bottom of the lake till great sluggish fish with toothless mouths came to pluck at the soft, decaying flesh."

2.

"...and he imagined the canoe broken against these ledges and saw his own helpless body caught by the current and whirled downstream, to smash against the toothed rocks with sodden. bruising blows, and he imagined the egglike crunch of a cracked skull or the hideous grating grind of breaking bones in his arms and legs. "

The paranoid fears of course were skilled foreshadowing for the real incident

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