The Devil's Bride

by Quinn, Seabury

• ISBN13: 9781902197524
• ISBN10: 1902197526
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2012-07-31
• Publisher: Scb Distributors

Summary

THE DEVIL'S BRIDE was the only full-length mystery featuring French occult detective Jules de Grandin. Inspired by Aleister Crowley, and rich with Lovecraftian visions of a gibbering xenomorphic evil from the "dark" continents, THE DEVIL'S BRIDE is an epic tale of black magic, murder and mutilation, rape and torture, and genocidal race war.This new edition of THE DEVIL'S BRIDE also includes a bonus story, HOUSE OF GOLDEN MASKS, in which vicious white slavers are abducting young girls and subjecting them to bizarre rituals of torture and sexual degradation. Seabury Quinn's tales of Jules de Grandin were amongst the most popular to appear in Weird Tales magazine, with over 90 episodes appearing between 1926 and 1938. The stories were notable not only for their supernatural overtones, but also for strong elements of sadistic violence, misogynistic torture and cruelty, negative racial profiling, and frequent scenes of female nudity. In fact, Quinn was sure to include at least one scene of a naked girl under duress in every piece, so that resident cover artist Margaret Brundage was provided with suitably lurid visual material. As relics from a less enlightened age, Quinn's stories can only now be read at face value, and by doing so the reader will enter a weird, sexually perverse world of murder, mayhem, and machine-gun diplomacy.

Excerpts

Hangings of dark-red stuff draped loosely from the ceiling of the hall, obscuring doors and windows, their folds undulating eerily, like fluttering cerements of unclean phantoms. Candles like votive lights flickered in cups of red glass at intervals round the walls, their tiny, lambent flames diluting rather than dispelling the darkness which hovered like vapor in the air. Only in one spot was there light. At the farther end of the draped room was an altar shaped in imitation of the Gothic sanctuary of a church, and round this blazed a mass of tall black candles which splashed a luminous pool on the deep red drugget covering the floor and altar-steps. Above the altar was set a crucifix, reversed, so that the thorn-crowned head was down, the nail-pierced feet above, and back of this a reredos of scarlet cloth was hung, the image of a strutting peacock appliqued on it in flashing sequins. On the table of the altar lay a long cushion of red velvet, tufted like a mattress. Two ranks of backless benches had been set transversely in the hail, a wide center aisle between them, smaller aisles to right and left, and on these the congregation sat in strained expectancy, each member muffled in a hooded gown so that it was impossible to distinguish the features, or even the sex, of a given individual. A faint odor of incense permeated the close atmosphere; not sweet incense, such as churches use, but something with a bitter, pungent tang to it, and - it seemed to me - more than a hint of the subtle, maddening aroma of burnt cannabis, the bhang with which fanatics of the East intoxicate themselves before they run amok. But through the odor of the incense was another smell, the heavy smell of paraffin, as though some careless person had let fall an open tank of it, soaking the thick floor-covering before the error could be rectified. Somewhere unseen to us, perhaps behind the faintly fluttering draperies on the walls, an organ was playing very softly as Renouard, de Grandin and I stole quickly through the curtained doorway of the ante-room and, unobserved, took places on the rearmost bench. Here and there a member of the congregation gave vent to a soft sigh of suppressed anticipation and excitement, once or twice peaked cowls were bent together as their wearers talked in breathless whispers; but for the most part the assemblage sat erect in stony silence, motionless, yet eager as a flock of hooded vultures waiting for the kill which is to furnish them their feast...