The Snuggly Satanicon

The current volume, edited and translated from the French by Brian Stableford, brings together fourteen stories composed in the thriving tradition of "literary Satanism" that was pioneered in the 1820s and continued throughout the century and into the twentieth, which subjected the figure to closer and more skeptical scrutiny than the theologians of the past, attempting a more clinical analysis of the idea. Including such fiendish pieces as "A Dream of Hell" by Gustave Flaubert, which was written when the author was sixteen years old, and "Dead Man's Dale," a classic tale of the Devil by the great Romantic writer Charles Nodier, The Snuggly Satanicon provides a useful additional piece of a much vaster jigsaw comprised by one of the chief imaginary motifs of modern literature, helping to provide a broader glimpse, and hence a more accurate appreciation, of a bigger picture.