#97

Imagine a fabulist the caliber of Garcia Marquez writing a novel using such disparate source material as Shakespeare, de Sade, Swift, and Wilhelm Reich; even plumbing the combined catalogs of these heavyweights you'd be hard-pressed to posit something as wonderful as Angela Carter's The Infernal Desire Machines of Dr. Hoffman. How is it I'd not heard of her? This is heady stuff, like Iris Murdoch on mescaline.

Desiderio is enlisted on the side of rationalism to assassinate Dr. Hoffman, who uses machines powered by erotic energy to attack reality with hallucinatory imaginings made corporeal. Desiderio's adventures are to say the least surreal. Simply marvelous stuff.