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M(atthew) P(hipps) Shiel |
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M. P. Shiel's first book, Prince Zaleski (1895), opens with a short story called "The S. S." It is a mystery concerning a series of apparent suicides which are revealed to be murders perpetrated by the "Spartan Society," a group dedicated to the elimination of genetic weaklings. With its almost uncanny foreshadowing of a group known by the same initials five decades later, the story illustrates much of what makes Shiel so fascinating yet so difficult to read today. On the one hand, there is the dark, at times even baroque, prose draping the decadent posturings of the narrative's exotic detective, Prince Zaleski. This is a Holmesian mystery as it might be imagined by J. K. Huysmans or Edgar Allan Poe, but Shiel's prose style is unique: long, rhythmic sentences replete with strange, startling words tumbled together from every possible literary resource. On the other hand, there is the frightening sense that the author does not wholly disapprove of the eugenic scheme hatched by the society.
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