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.