When the Whip Comes Down

This hallucinatory, lyrical novel posits that the Marquis de Sade, having survived for 178 years after his recorded death in 1814, indulges his obsessive erotic fantasies in the company of initiates - young men and women whom he has invited to his isolated country home. This de Sade drives a Mercedes and is familiar with the modern world of nuclear bombs, cocaine, AIDS, Picasso's Guernica, Hitler, William Burroughs and LSD...