Heliogabal

In the exceedingly rich repertoire of horrific, debauched, and opulent twists of fate from the decadent late Roman period, the life of Heliogabal stands as a borderline case: a god-emperor at fourteen, murdered and thrown into a sewer at eighteen, a priest and libertine, a conscious administrator of decay and anarchy amidst the most grandiose political order the classical world has produced. Everything we know about his life is already marked by the intensification of all contrasts. It is a biography that consists solely of excesses. In this biographical novel, Antonin Artaud pours all the rage and despair he harbors against the world of his time at the beginning of the 1930s. With a powerful language full of violence and exaggeration, he revolts against society by reflecting himself in Heliogabal.