Salome / Under The Hill

SALOME is an evocation of biblical horror in which blasphemies inflame an atmosphere that seethes with a dangerous erotic charge from the very outset. Relentless, hypnotic repetitions in the words, arranged in fugue cadences, lend the proceedings a masturbatory, oneiric quality: the tale unfolds with the inexorable acceleration of an orgasmic nightmare.

Aubrey Beardsley's UNDER THEe ^HILL, a short work commenced in 1894 but left unfinished at the time of Beardsley's premature demise, nonetheless achieves the quintessence of Decadence, an evocation of a synaesthetic pleasure dome to rival Huysmans' A Rebours. This, allied to its extraordinary catalogue of sexual perversions, makes it a unique and indispensable text for any who seek the uttermost extremes of the manifest imagination.

This joint edition of SALOME and UNDERe ^THEe ^HILL, united by twenty of Beardsley's unsurpassable drawings, is a timely rehabilitation of these two all-too-often ignored fin-de-siecle texts, and constitutes a volume of unadulterated erotic decadence which stands at the pinnacle of the genre.