Therefore it can be stated that one's sadism is sated Of history but also given weight by the fact these the events describedĪctually happened (for the most part "Sardonicus" is Russell's own Sophisticate's interest in pain and debasement, mitigated by the mists These monsters may be garbed in the finest raiment, but beneath they are as ghoulish, as diabolic, as unspeakable, as ever they have been.Īs one can surmise from a 1985 dust-jacket photo of the author, his style is at once saturnine, urbane, regal even, with a wicked vein of dark humor and irony winding through. And class is what Russell brings to the proceedings, a triumvirate of history's most monstrous: Countess Bathory, Gilles de Rais, and Jack the Ripper (what, you say, no Vlad III? Nope) all appear. Long a TMHF favorite, Russell was fiction editor at Playboy magazine during its height of 1960s influence, publishing Vonnegut, Bradbury, and others, so, you know, class (quite unlike the sleazy delights of his 1976 novel, the infamous Incubus). Unholy Trinity collects Ray Russell's three greatest tales of the neo-Gothic, "Sagittarius," "Sanguinarius," and of course the much more well-known "Sardonicus," which was made into a 1961 film by notorious showman William Castle. This little Bantam paperback from 1967 seems slight and cheap -the Halloween-costumed models beyond silly, although making specific reference to the three novellas within -but it packs a solid wallop of historical horror.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |