The Vesuvius Club

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«With its quaint dust jacket and Beardsely-inspired illustrations, the book feels like a visitor from a more elegant era; it has the smell of fin de siècle about it… [Lucifer Box] belongs to a lineage which stretches from Sherlock Holmes to the indestructible James Bond, via the queasy phantasmagoria of Sax Rohmer’s Fu Manchu stories… But Gatiss is more than a pasticheur; he has ambitions beyond literary ventriloquism. Midway through the story, Box is revealed to be bisexual, and we feel that this is a novel which Doyle, Stevenson, and Rider Haggard would not have been allowed to write. Giddily inventive and packed with delirious incident, it suggests a postmodern project comparable to Michael Faber’s The Crimson Petal and the White.»

— The Times Literary Supplement (London)

«Gatiss mixes in The League of Gentlemen’s penchant for horror with large doses of arch wit and louche laying about. It’s Oscar Wilde crossed with H. P. Lovecraft… this could be the bit of fluff you’ve been looking for.»

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