The Devil that Slumbers

London: John Hamilton, 1925. First Edition. Rare in or out of jacket.

Pulp thriller in which a journalist and a detective battle the Expropriation Society, a criminal organization whose ostensible goal is the establishment of a worldwide communist utopia. The Society's seemingly impossible crimes are the results of an insane doctor's careful use of post-hypnotic suggestions on his unsuspecting patients. Macabre elements include a corrupt industrialist who psychologically tortures his young wife with his collection of snakes and a criminal mastermind who is determined to revenge himself on a romantic rival by injecting the young man with a strain of leprosy. While much of "The Devil That Slumbers" is routine commercial fare, the concluding chapter of the novel prefigures the lurid weird menace scenarios of the Shudder Pulps of the 1930s.

Rear board mottled, else Very Good in a Very Good dust jacket. Jacket is chipped, with the "T" in "The" on the front panel missing, with a few short closed tears, light creasing, and a dampstain to the verso of the front panel.


[Book #136632]