The Necrophiliac

Writing: The writing itself is disgustingly beautiful. In the sense that it really portrays the characters personality and the time period in which it’s set in (although it’s never specifically mentioned. Ex: November 19, 19.., I can only assume it’s within the 1900’s, if not consider me humiliated.) The book is in the form of a diary. I don’t mind it, I actually prefer insight into characters every day lives and what they think. Though there’s no real plot (which I can understand that some people will not like), it’s more of occurrences that the character has and writes down. I like it. It gives it a sense of normalcy though he is everything but that. The writing itself is good, the author/character uses synonyms for his victims private parts as another way of dehumanizing and maybe a way to avoid the very valid negative confrontation with his actions. He will often use words like “member”, “sweet hot little thing”, “manhood”. Very rarely will he refer to the parts as their actual name. The book is not gorey at all for those who hate reading gore. Character: Our character in this book is a male, his age is undisclosed but I imagine he’s 20-30, considering the fact that he hauls bodies home. His name is Lucien, he is an antique seller. He’s a lonely yet very crude man. He is “willingly” single (I say willingly because he chooses his corpses over real people). I believe he is “willingly” single due to the fact that intimacy with the living doesn’t satisfy him like the dead does (there’s a diary entry in the book where he is disgusted with the sensation of intimacy with a real living person and then proceeds to stop). Lucien is a strange man who I can only assume takes pride in his “work” (desecrating and disrespecting corpses). He most definitely knows what he’s doing is wrong (almost got caught a few times before), yet he is exhilarated with his doings. He subconsciously brags about himself and his victims. He very much dehumanizes the corpses he robs. I don’t believe he sees them as humans and more like “charity work” because as he takes them home, he would often show these corpses affection in the acts of showering them, cleaning them up when he’s done using them, showing greed and sadness as he forces himself to throws their used bodies in a river to avoid suspicion and get rid of evidence of his doings, constantly thinking about past victims he’s already used and thrown, often describing his victims in grotesque yet beautiful details while admiring their dead bodies. It’s no secret that he has a weird love obsession with each of his victims but I think he also has a sex addiction in which only the dead can satisfy. This is a frequent thing as well. He goes out of his way to steal them from their freshly dug graves because he cannot wait (literally and figuratively). He uses his victims multiple times over the course of 1-2 weeks and feels saddened to see them decompose and eventually have to rid himself of them. He doesn’t really have a backstory, all he mentions is his past which he states that when he was a young boy, his mother had fallen deathly ill. He was afraid of the dark shadows in his house. And he figured out how to pleasure himself as a kid (8 years of age I think), then following that he says he was interrupted by a relative who barged in to tell him his mother is dead and dragged him to come see her in the middle of his pleasuring then that relative continued to make pushy remarks for him to show affection to his dead mothers body as a goodbye. He also has a weird occurrence and frequently mentions purity in regards to the woman corpses he takes. He mentions virgin more times than I can count. Regardless, he is neither too picky about the corpses he takes though I assume he takes woman corpses more frequently than men’s because they’re lighter. He really isn’t picky with age either which is what disgusts me the most. To be vague, he’ll try it just as he would any other. Book: The book is a decent size, a little bit on the smaller size but it’s okay, it is a 5x7 (i measured it). There aren’t many pages, there’s only 91 pages. This book has no chapters or footnotes or anything of the sort but that doesn’t bother me. ENDING: To not spoil the book for those getting into it, there is an end to the book which results into something. It’s not highly built, tension/stress causing story leading up to it, but there is an end. It’s not just endless stories of his days. So hopefully there’s something to look forward to as you read and come towards the ending of this book. PSA: I DO NOT AGREE WITH HIS ACTIONS AND I THINK HIS ACTIONS ARE ABSOLUTELY GROTESQUE AND DISGUSTING AND YOU SHOULD THINK THE SAME. this book/character goes into really obscure gross detail about the victims and how he cares for them as he uses them, as well as the words he uses to describe them as if describing something beautiful like the rare sighting of a mythical creature in the forest but please be aware this is a sex driven, mentally ill, obsessed MAN. HE IS A BAD PERSON. Okay thank you to whoever reads my review, I just wanted to give an overview because I hate when people don’t really describe what the book is like😔

If you like the macabre you were really going to like this book its really gruesome right from the first page and pretty much all the way through .The only downside it ends abruptly, it leaves you hanging!

I saw a couple reviews of this and each one talked it up a lot. How beautiful the writing is and how sad you can become over the character. How it makes you think about your own mortality, etc. While I can agree with the beautiful and at times true poetry of rendered even through the disturbing accounts that are in this diarist like novella, I'm unsure about the depth of sadness and pity, along with the thoughts of mortality really project clearly. The morbid humor from the character made me feel less sympathetic for him. It wasn't that it was just morbid, but it was at the same time often sleazy in my opinion. If there character was an average, humdrum heterosexual, he would still fall under the 'creep' category. Even the heart wrenching parts are not enough to redeem him for much pity. The mortality thought, maybe in a roundabout way or simply for the fact that the book is entirely focused on death and once in awhile the thoughts the main character has could be no doubt thought of any other way than at least verge suicidal. I can see many other angles but I do not feel they came through nearly as well as the poetry and imagery of the author derived through her words. It was interesting, If you are looking for something unusual, lonely, poetic, gothic, and disturbing psychologically and emotionally. The paperback book itself is very beautiful in it's own right with it's ruff paper jacket and eggshell, non-glossy appearance and it's slightly heavier than average pages... It is nice to look at and hold.

This book was beautiful, morbid, poetic, gross, and definitely not for the faint of heart. I went in completely blind. Because the synopsis compared this book to Poe and Baudelaire, I expected murder and a slow and subtly disturbing ambiance. I also assumed the title was a metaphor. I was mistaken. By the end of the second paragraph I was thoroughly shocked, and I paused to consider whether or not I wanted to continue reading. I did. This author is kind of brilliant in my opinion. She imagines the life of a man who is a romantic, a bit of a poet, a perfectionist, refined (or at least considers himself to be), and is completely obsessed and sexually aroused by death. I have not read many books that have successfully woven together horrific acts with beauty, but this was by the far the best. If you can tolerate a highly descriptive dive into this subject, you should definitely read this book!

Oh my god???? Cover the cover to read in public. The printing was great, shipped in great condition.

Lucien is an antique dealer, a French gentleman, and a necrophiliac. The book is told from the first person perspective in diary form as we follow Lucien's dark adventures robbing graves and taking back the recently interred back to his home where his actions with them are described in unflinching detail. There isn't much else to the story - the types of dead people changes such as going from a young woman, to an older woman, to a man, to a child, and to a mother and her baby. Each encounter is described tenderly in the style of a romance novel except that one of the (unwilling) participants is dead. Gabrielle Wittkop does try to explain her protagonist's behaviour but I found her explanation to be a bit pat. Lucien masturbates for the first time shortly before his grandmother tells him his mother has died and that he must say goodbye. As he kisses the corpse of his mother he forever links the two things together - sexuality and death; a bit too convenient, no? I think the reality of the mind of a necrophiliac would be less logical than that to the point that their behaviour and their choices would be unexplainable and utterly confounding to the ordinary person. Lucien is a fascinating person though. At times he appears strangely normal as he goes about his ordinary daytime life. At horrifying moments, like when he's with a dead infant, he clearly sets down what he believes to be the distinctions between himself and an infamous French medieval nobleman called Gilles de Rais who raped and murdered children. I think the shortness of the book (83 pages on smaller than average pages) helps the book as I don't think I could have finished it at even twice the length. The repeated trysts that Lucien describes with the various corpses are both distasteful and dreary to read by the end of the book and the lack of a plot means the reader is left with descriptions of putrefying bodies and Lucien's methods of maintaining the bodies for days on end. Wittkop has created an original character in Lucien while gifting him with an eloquent voice that never fails to disturb. Her writing is truly high quality and the book is easy to read for that reason, while being difficult to read because of the subject matter. The Necrophiliac is a morbidly engrossing read that anyone interested in horror or gothic literature might want to check out. There certainly aren't many books like this out there!

This piece of work is a literarily stunning composition of some of the most vile first-hand (fictional) accounts of depravity I’ve ever read. Like a Victorian-leaning action-adventure periodical, set in a nondescript time, where the main character is actually a disgusting, grave-robbing sexual predator and necrophiliac... and we’re forced to watch as his prose settles like a rain cloud of spores on our minds. Where the need for this lies in today’s society, I don’t know. I understand the way-back ways of stunning vocabulary acrobatics, since that’s somewhat how they talked back then. But this florid prose being written only in the 1970s seriously escapes me. It presents itself as immediately pretentious, and then just dribbles in enough pretty words to attract us, before committing heinous acts of indecency. So now I guess this is in my head for good, then. Great. Just great. But I admit - I did this to myself. And you likely will, or already have, too. Curiosity is a bitch.

Gabrielle Wittkop's The Necrophiliac was originally published in France in 1972, but only recently was it translated into English. This short novella is related in the form of a journal, in which the narrator recounts his various sexual encounters with dead people, including children. Because of its style and subject matter, Wittkop's story asks to be judged alongside its literary peers, demanding admittance to a literary subculture that combines the transgressive practice of pornography with a serious philosophical investigation into the overlapping themes of life and death. One does not, after all, read works like this for the sake of titillation. Despite its sexually explicit themes, The Necrophiliac is intensely focused on the theme of how death shapes our understanding of life's purpose. So just who are Wittkop's putative peers? Obviously, there is the Marquis de Sade who, in works like The 120 Days of Sodom and Philosophy in the Bedroom , combined sexual cruelty with a probing examination of the meaning of life in a godless universe. From the nineteenth-century, we might single out Edgar Allan Poe who, while hardly pornographic in the traditional sense, nonetheless demonstrates an intense interest in perversity, as well as Charles Baudelaire, whose poem "The Corpse" (from The Flowers of Evil ) seems particularly relevant here. In the twentieth-century, the obvious representative would be Georges Bataille, whose novella Story of the Eye is a masterpiece of intellectual pornography. The enduring fascination of those earlier works lies in the adventurous way in which they pushed the boundaries not only of taste, but also of thought, in new directions. It is a sensation I didn't get from reading The Necrophiliac which, given its original publication date of 1972, seems like a pale imitation of those earlier writers. Taken on its own, it is a stylish, accomplished piece of fiction, but when placed in the larger context of the genre, it can only be seen as a minor work.

Per gli amanti di antieroi lirici come il Maldoror di Ducasse o del Jean-Baptiste Grenouille di Patrick Suskind, questo breve libro farà la vostra gioia. L'argomento è già espresso nella copertina, il nostro antieroe Lucien è un'altra di quelle peculiari anime perse da inserire nel gotha assieme ai suoi due illustri compagni per efferatezza ed amore. Una storia scritta in forma di diario in prima persona ci dà l'impressione di aver trovato questo testo per sbaglio, di essere a nostra volta dei voyeur... scelte linguistiche più che efficaci, trama chiara, discesa nella dannazione garantita. Testo in inglese.

This could be considered as a disturbing read. However it is written so poetically. It is a must for someone who is looking for a unique read.

I actually really enjoyed the reading of this book! Touchy subject but, well written.

Nice book. Short tho.

Poorly written, with orthography mistakes and without footnotes for phrases in other languages. A brief and boring story, it was nothing but an endless loop.