Blood, Sperm, Black Velvet — Oscar Wilde

The Decadent movement in literature, which flourished from the 1880s until the turn of the century, drew its inspiration equally from gothic novels, Baudelaire and the morbid funeraries of Poe, the psychotropic ravages of alcohol and exotic drugs, and the Satanic dream-art of such Symbolist painters as Redon, Stuck, Delville and Rops. Although the group of European writers that includes J-K Huysmans, Auguste Villiers de l'Isle-Adam, and Paul Verlaine are generally held to epitomise the Decadent literary aesthetic, there was also a core of English or English-speaking authors who between them produced a stream of dark reveries which often surpassed those of their continental counterparts. BLOOD, SPERM ANd BLACK VELVET collects 12 of the most delirious and subversive writings of English Decadence, including works by Oscar Wilde, Aubrey Beardsley, Arthur Machen, M.P. Shiel, Aleister Crowley, Count Stenbock and several others, in a single, unprecedented volume of nightmare, black fantasy and erotic decay.