The Decadent movement in literature, which flourished from the 1880s until the turn of the century, drew its inspiration equally from gothic novels, Baudelaire and the morbid funeraries of Poe, the psychotropic ravages of alcohol and exotic drugs, and the Satanic dream-art of such Symbolist painters as Redon, Stuck, Delville and Rops. Although the group of European writers that includes J-K Huysmans, Auguste Villiers de l'Isle-Adam, and Paul Verlaine are generally held to epitomise the Decadent literary aesthetic, there was also a core of English or English-speaking authors who between them produced a reservoir of dark reveries which often surpassed those of their continental counterparts.
BLOOD, SPERM & BLACK VELVET collects 12 of the most delirious and subversive writings of English Decadence, including works by Oscar Wilde, Aubrey Beardsley, Arthur Machen, M.P. Shiel, Aleister Crowley, Count Stenbock and several others, in a single, unprecedented volume of nightmare, black fantasy and erotic decay.
Wilde, perhaps the quintessential decadent, is represented by three works from varying disciplines: a short “faery” story (“The Nightingale And The Rose”), a novel (“The Picture Of Dorian Gray” – presented in its original, overtly homo-erotic Lippincott edition), and a drama for the stage (“Salome”, a hypnotic lunar fugue of lust and decapitation).
Aubrey Beardsley, Wilde's illustrative collaborator on "Salome", provides the extraordinary erotic fantasy "Under The Hill", whilst Arthur Machen, another author associated with publisher John Lane's The Bodley Head, conjures the Satanic horror of "The Great God Pan".
Also included in its entirety is Aleister Crowley's notorious blast of pornographic decadence "White Stains", as is Simon Arrow's baroque "Count Fanny's Nuptials", a rarely-reprinted reverie of decadent delirium.
Five shorter texts complete the volume: "Xelucha" and "Vaila" by M.P. Shiel are stunning concoctions of funereal phantasmagoria; "The Holocaust" by R. Murray Gilchrist is a fragment from a strange past, whilst James Elroy Flecker's "The Last Generation" vividly imagines a future apocalypse. Finally, "The Other Side" by Count Eric Stanislaus Stenbock – an eccentric Estonian aristocrat who spent much of his life in England and wrote his works of bizarre decadence in English – is a typically homo-erotic vision of lycanthropy.