When the Whip Comes Down: A Novel About de Sade

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...Sade's jolting collision with the here and now exposes the moral confusion and emptiness at the heart of our genocidal century."" - Publishers Weekly. ""Cross one of Anne Rice's eerie vampires with the historical Marquis de Sade and you get the protagonist of this provocative but murky novel."" - Library Journal.