Pranks, Punk and Industrial Culture from V. Vale

Back to The Torture Garden

Excerpts:

• Introduction
• Murder
• Robbery and Business
• Pearls
• Tortures
• The Cadaver

Reviews:

…sadistic spectacle as apocalyptic celebration of human potential…A work as chilling as it is seductive.”

— The Daily Californian

Here is a novel that is hot with the fever of ecstatic, prohibited joys, as cruel as a thumbscrew and as luxuriant as an Oriental tapestry. This exotic story of Clara and her insatiable desire for the perverse and the forbidden has been hailed by the critics.”

— Charles Hanson Towne

…daydreams in which sexual images are mixed nightmarishly with images of horror.”

— Edmund Wilson

Mirbeau, massing his words in viscous passages, creates a literary equivalent to the moist greasy substance of the victim’s muscle, fat and bone.”

— Paper