A thrilling tale of the Devil's final ride between the darkness and dawn, watching as mankind falls victim to the curse of progress and speed, rejecting all peace and silence, all reflection and godliness. As he goes, he gathers phantoms and monsters, hell-bound victims and dark shadows, all the while telling the natural world to rejoice, for it will soon be free of the curse of Man.
Written in 1910, this Christian tome is as relevant today as it was a century ago, as people fall victim to the next and fastest thing, falling away from God in the process. The devil's visceral delight in modernity is poetic and chilling "Come, ye pretenders to holiness—ye thieves of virtue, who give ‘charity’ to the poor with the right hand, and cheat your neighbour with the left! Come, all ye morphia-fed vampires and slaves to poison!—grasp at my wheels and cling!”
Corelli lived in the spaces between. Even her birth is still shrouded in mystery, and was the grandest Romance and Christian writer of her era. She outsold Arthur Conan Doyle, H. G. Wells, and Rudyard Kipling put together. Critics hated her, calling her "the favourite of the common multitude", and she hated them in return. A favourite of Winston Churchill, Queen Victoria and William Gladstone. She was also a lesbian, with a her 'companion' of 40 years to whom she left her entire estate and is buried alongside her in a couples grave. Her friends included Mark Twain, Ouida, the Empress Frederick of Germany, and Alfred Tennyson, while her writing tried to reconcile Christianity with reincarnation and astral projection.
"a woman of deplorable talent who imagined that she was a genius, and was accepted as a genius by a public to whose commonplace sentimentalities and prejudices she gave a glamorous setting." - Grant Allen
"the imagination of a Poe with the style of an Ouida and the mentality of a nursemaid." -James Agate
