Portrait of an Englishman in His Chateau
A Gothic tale in the manner of the Marquis de Sade and Octave Mirbeau's Torture Garden. It was originally published anonymously in Paris in 1953. When the unnamed narrator crosses the causeway to the Chateau of Gamehuche, he enters a surrealist nightmare of debauchery and violence. The proceedings at the chateau are presided over by the master of Gamehuche, M. de Montcul, formerly the English diplomat, Sir Horatio Mountarse. With a cast of willing and not-so-willing acolytes, he serves up an over-refined cuisine of obscenity, sexual perversion and unspeakable cruelty. The book could be described as a dispatch written from the frontiers of depravity. J. Fletcher's translation is the first English version of Pieyre de Mandiargues disturbing cult classic.