The Red Spider
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"Delphi Fabrice" (the pseudonym of Gaston-Henri-Adhémar Risselin, 1877-1937), the most adamant of Jean Lorrain's disciples, is credited with authoring over one hundred books. None, however, is more bizarre than The Red Spider, here presented in English for the first time in a virtuoso translation by Brian Stableford. The novel, seeking to out-Decadent the most decadent of its predecessors, features Andhré Mordann, an ether-drinking hero seemingly modelled on Lorrain himself, who, in this "black, black, black tale"-a tale of true horror and madness-traverses the boulevards of decline, hobnobbing with drunken prostitutes and homosexual strong-men, licentious merrymakers and waterfront idlers-and, of course, the dancer gloved in imperial crimson.
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“I have acquired a taste for murder. I torture the flowers!
“Leaning over them, I pour little drops of violent poisons, which make them die slowly, very slowly; some, like orchids, have petals that flutter, which one might think were flapping wings; and, my eyes bright, my hands clenched, and my respiration halting, I watch and rejoice in their agony. . . .
“What abominable being am I becoming? Two days ago I brutally tore apart, petal by petal, all my red violets. I kneaded them between my fingers and rolled them into little balls, and the juice that ran along my hands resembled a thin and frail ribbon of blood. Yesterday, I burned lilies atrociously, large lilies in all the majesty of their expansion; then I tried to care for their burns. I surrounded them with minute cares. Most of them were dead this morning, but some have survived. Those bear in red stigmata the traces of their suffering. And what other dolors await them tomorrow?”
