The Vesuvius Club: Graphic Edition
"Darkly erudite and fiendishly unputdownable -- Lucifer Box is the most likeable scoundrel since Flashman."-- Jasper Fforde, author ofThe Big Over EasyandThe Eyre Affair"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 siecle 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 apasticheur;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 post-modern project comparable to Michael Faber'sThe Crimson Petal and the White."--The Times Literary Supplement(London)"Gatiss mixes inThe League of Gentlemen'spenchant 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."--The Telegraph(London)"It's Gatiss's impeccable lightness of touch and huge delight in wordplay that makes this a joy. Studded with epigrams, asides, such wonderful names as Strangeways Pugg and Everard Supple, this is a wickedly written romp to put a smile on the face of anyone amused by the strange alchemy of the words 'a peculiar horror of artichokes'"--SFXmagazine (UK)"Plenty of sly comic detail (Box lives at Number 9 Downing Street 'because someone has to') and a surrealist narrative that fans ofThe League of Gentlemenwill recognize...kidnapped scientists, poisonous centipedes, foggy chases through London by hackney cab, and a fiendish volcano-based conspiracy that provides the big SFX climax. It's all great fun."--Time Out(London)"The preposterous Lucifer is an entertaining hero andThe Vesuvius Clubis a hugely enjoyable romp."--Imagemagazine (UK)"Self-deprecatingly subtitledA bit of Fluff...Gatiss' prose is upholstered in a rather superior grade of fluff: redolent of soft leather chairs in fine gentlemen's establishments, and the cracking of whips in the basements beneath them....Set amid the decadent fleshpots of the Edwardian demi-monde, the novel introduces the raffish toast of London society, Lucifer Box, leading portraitist of the age and undercover agent on behalf of His Majesty's government....Box works his way dandyishly through a sequence of adventures which leads him to penetrate a secret Neapolitan crime ring, plus the willing rinfs of several secretive Neapolitans....perniciously addictive piece of escapism."--The Guardian(London)"Lucifer Box, society darling and spy, investigates the secret Vesuvius Club. Brilliant stuff."--Heatmagazine (UK)"In the appallingly appealing Lucifer Box, Mark Gatiss has created an anti-hero for the ages. Watching the number of chapters, then pages, dwindle, was heart-rending. No one has ever combined the seedy, the stylish, the rumbustious, the raffish, the egregious, the outrageous, the high and the low with such wit and grace."-- Stephen Fry, author ofRevengeandThe Liar"Mark Gatiss has brought his customary wit and outlandish style to the page...sharp, witty and shocking."--Derby Evening Telegraph(UK)--This text refers to an alternatePaperbackedition.