When the Whip Comes Down: A Novel About De Sade - Softcover

This hallucinatory, lyrical novel posits that the Marquis de Sade, having survived for 178 years after his recorded death in 1814, indulges his obsessive erotic fantasies in the company of initiates--young men and women--whom he has invited to his isolated country home. This de Sade drives a Mercedes and is familar with the modern world of nuclear bombs, cocaine, AIDS, Picasso's Guernica , Hitler, William Burroughs and LSD. Sade's feverish ruminations on his years of imprisonment, his hatred of conformity and his sexual fetishes are interwoven with the narratives of Jeanne, a prostitute who describes whipping the nihilistic aristocrat; Philippe, a Parisian fashion designer who designs sets and costumes for de Sade's psychodramas; and Stephen, an artist recruited to paint and photograph his host's debaucheries. English novelist/poet Reed (whose novel Delirium re-created the life of Rimbaud) believes that de Sade, who longed to live out the reality of his wounded psychic interior, expressed potentials lurking within each of us. Sade's jolting collision with the here and now exposes the moral confusion and emptiness at the heart of our genocidal century.
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Cross one of Anne Rice's eerie vampires with the historical Marquis de Sade and you get the protagonist of this provocative but murky novel by the author of Inhabiting Shadows (Peter Owen, 1990). Through the centuries, Reed's marquis returns each fall to his mysterious chateau, where he acts out his fantasies, "inventing himself" with many partners. Passages of strikingly poetic images alternate with convoluted, obscure prose: "He wanted to kill sex in the act of having it, because it failed to realize the future." It's not at all clear what any of this means. Perhaps the totally self-centered figure of de Sade is simply not compelling enough to carry the weight of Reed's philosophy, which as laid out in the introduction is concerned with "the new, the unbalancing of the status quo.... We need to be shocked out of complacency." This novel will shock, but whether it does anything else is debatable.
- Beth Ann Mills, New Rochelle P.L., N.Y.
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.