Bloody Baudelaire - by R.B. Russell

BLOODY BAUDELAIRE

by R. B. Russell

(Ex Occidente Press 2009)

This is a stunning novella I've just been compelled to read in one sitting - compelled by a fear of its words changing before I got to them.  It starts as a country house shenanigan where young people might say in a different book: "Anyone, for Tennis?" 

Not that famous Monty Python sketch, well, maybe it is, in a sense. 

 No, it is something seriously decadent  and Dorian Gray and Stephen Poliakoff and pre-Raphaelite ... with Elizabeth-Bowen-esque nihilism of a fractured soul.  The Tabula Rasa of love ... and a rite of torture that unfolds so slowly in such a quick book, one is driven along by it.  This whole force of onward fiction has a very clever ending.  I believed every word. 

I felt I wrote it.  The book itself - as a physical object - struck me as one of those old French books whose pages you needed to uncut.  But someone had done it already.

Very well done indeed. In two Acts.