Delphi Fabrice – The Red Sorcerer

The Red Sorcerer, originally published as a 64-part feuilleton serial in Le Journal  between 31 July 1910 and 3 October 1910, and here appearing in English for the first time in an expert translation by Brian Stableford, is one of the more extreme entries in author Delphi Fabrice’ s already highly unusual canon.

Perhaps the most spectacularly peculiar manifestation of Fabrice’ s fervent desire to test and extend the limits of the permissible and the conventional in his fiction, The Red Sorcerer is a showpiece of crime and vice in which he removes the gloves of discretion completely, setting out to depict the world of prostitutes and their pimps with a frank and extreme brutality—so frank and so extreme, in fact, that it required a strange supernaturalization completely at odds with his supposed Naturalism.

Though the novel is certainly very unsavory, it is also quite extraordinary and thus worthy of attention as a specimen of the Decadent world view, and of a grim and relentless authorial sadism that tempts the suspicion that a complex psychology must lie behind it.