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11 books
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7 voters
Decadent Books
Showing 1-50 of 965
The Picture of Dorian Gray (Paperback)
by (shelved 27 times as decadent)
avg rating 4.13 — 1,889,230 ratings — published 1890
Against Nature (Paperback)
by (shelved 23 times as decadent)
avg rating 3.79 — 15,318 ratings — published 1884
Là-Bas (Down There)
by (shelved 15 times as decadent)
avg rating 3.96 — 4,763 ratings — published 1891
The Craziest Book Ever Written (Kindle Edition)
by (shelved 13 times as decadent)
avg rating 3.52 — 153 ratings — published
The Torture Garden (Paperback)
by (shelved 12 times as decadent)
avg rating 3.74 — 2,846 ratings — published 1899
Naked Lunch: The Restored Text (Paperback)
by (shelved 8 times as decadent)
avg rating 3.46 — 98,795 ratings — published 1959
Paris Spleen (Paperback)
by (shelved 7 times as decadent)
avg rating 4.23 — 15,535 ratings — published 1857
Les Fleurs du Mal (Paperback)
by (shelved 7 times as decadent)
avg rating 4.19 — 80,811 ratings — published 1857
French Decadent Tales (Paperback)
by (shelved 7 times as decadent)
avg rating 3.96 — 216 ratings — published 2013
Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas: A Savage Journey to the Heart of the American Dream (Paperback)
by (shelved 6 times as decadent)
avg rating 4.06 — 379,331 ratings — published 1971
The King in Yellow (Paperback)
by (shelved 5 times as decadent)
avg rating 3.54 — 30,544 ratings — published 1895
Junky (Paperback)
by (shelved 5 times as decadent)
avg rating 3.84 — 71,613 ratings — published 1953
Lolita (Kindle Edition)
by (shelved 5 times as decadent)
avg rating 3.87 — 948,458 ratings — published 1955
Monsieur Vénus (Paperback)
by (shelved 5 times as decadent)
avg rating 3.80 — 1,018 ratings — published 1884
The Decadent Reader: Fiction, Fantasy, and Perversion from Fin-de-Siècle France (Paperback)
by (shelved 5 times as decadent)
avg rating 4.44 — 102 ratings — published 1998
The Great God Pan (Paperback)
by (shelved 4 times as decadent)
avg rating 3.67 — 16,745 ratings — published 1890
The Dedalus Book of Decadence: Moral Ruins (Paperback)
by (shelved 4 times as decadent)
avg rating 4.17 — 69 ratings — published 1990
American Psycho (Vintage Contemporaries)
by (shelved 4 times as decadent)
avg rating 3.80 — 363,846 ratings — published 1991
Les Liaisons dangereuses (Paperback)
by (shelved 4 times as decadent)
avg rating 4.05 — 59,073 ratings — published 1782
Bruges-La-Morte (Paperback)
by (shelved 4 times as decadent)
avg rating 3.70 — 3,141 ratings — published 1892
Maldoror and the Complete Works (Paperback)
by (shelved 3 times as decadent)
avg rating 4.25 — 3,971 ratings — published 1869
In the Miso Soup (Paperback)
by (shelved 3 times as decadent)
avg rating 3.62 — 45,507 ratings — published 1997
Hadrian the Seventh (Paperback)
by (shelved 3 times as decadent)
avg rating 3.45 — 581 ratings — published 1904
Monsieur de Phocas (Paperback)
by (shelved 3 times as decadent)
avg rating 4.13 — 184 ratings — published 1901
Interview with the Vampire (The Vampire Chronicles, #1)
by (shelved 3 times as decadent)
avg rating 4.02 — 651,781 ratings — published 1976
The Cathedral (Paperback)
by (shelved 3 times as decadent)
avg rating 3.66 — 238 ratings — published 1898
The Hill of Dreams (Paperback)
by (shelved 3 times as decadent)
avg rating 3.85 — 1,361 ratings — published 1907
The Soul-Drinker and Other Decadent Fantasies (Paperback)
by (shelved 3 times as decadent)
avg rating 4.24 — 41 ratings — published 2016
Imaginary Lives (Hardcover)
by (shelved 3 times as decadent)
avg rating 3.97 — 1,267 ratings — published 1896
Les Diaboliques (Pocket Book)
by (shelved 3 times as decadent)
avg rating 3.73 — 2,037 ratings — published 1874
Becalmed (Paperback)
by (shelved 3 times as decadent)
avg rating 3.85 — 296 ratings — published 1886
Nightmares of an Ether Drinker (Hardcover)
by (shelved 3 times as decadent)
avg rating 3.95 — 227 ratings — published 1895
Salomé (Paperback)
by (shelved 3 times as decadent)
avg rating 3.71 — 21,008 ratings — published 1891
Perfume: The Story of a Murderer (Paperback)
by (shelved 3 times as decadent)
avg rating 4.04 — 556,089 ratings — published 1985
A Season in Hell and The Drunken Boat (Mass Market Paperback)
by (shelved 3 times as decadent)
avg rating 4.32 — 9,706 ratings — published 1872
The Secret History (Paperback)
by (shelved 3 times as decadent)
avg rating 4.15 — 1,035,962 ratings — published 1992
The Dedalus Book of German Decadence: Voices of the Abyss (Paperback)
by (shelved 3 times as decadent)
avg rating 4.13 — 47 ratings — published 1994
The Dedalus Book of Russian Decadence: Perversity, Despair and Collapse (Paperback)
by (shelved 3 times as decadent)
avg rating 3.99 — 69 ratings — published 2007
Aphrodite: Moeurs antiques (Pocket Book)
by (shelved 2 times as decadent)
avg rating 3.75 — 514 ratings — published 1896
The Atrocity Exhibition (Paperback)
by (shelved 2 times as decadent)
avg rating 3.76 — 7,220 ratings — published 1969
On the Road (Paperback)
by (shelved 2 times as decadent)
avg rating 3.61 — 449,260 ratings — published 1957
Complete Works (Paperback)
by (shelved 2 times as decadent)
avg rating 4.40 — 9,465 ratings — published 1870
Neo-Decadence Evangelion (Paperback)
by (shelved 2 times as decadent)
avg rating 4.80 — 49 ratings — published 2023
Tess of the D’Urbervilles (Paperback)
by (shelved 2 times as decadent)
avg rating 3.84 — 303,165 ratings — published 1891
Nil-Pray (Kindle Edition)
by (shelved 2 times as decadent)
avg rating 4.45 — 11 ratings — published 2017
Collected Poems (Paperback)
by (shelved 2 times as decadent)
avg rating 4.02 — 57 ratings — published 1902
Drowning in Beauty: The Neo-Decadent Anthology (Paperback)
by (shelved 2 times as decadent)
avg rating 4.73 — 81 ratings — published 2018
A Dowry of Blood (Hardcover)
by (shelved 2 times as decadent)
avg rating 3.93 — 103,872 ratings — published 2021
In the Night Garden (The Orphan's Tales, #1)
by (shelved 2 times as decadent)
avg rating 4.03 — 9,282 ratings — published 2006
“The conventional use of words and of narrative structure is deliberately subverted in decadent fiction; language deviates from the established norms in an attempt to reproduce pathology on a textual level. With its emphasis on aberration and artifice, the decadents' approach to the language of fiction frequently leans towards the baroque and the obscure.”
― The Decadent Reader: Fiction, Fantasy, and Perversion from Fin-de-Siècle France
― The Decadent Reader: Fiction, Fantasy, and Perversion from Fin-de-Siècle France
“Masks! I see them everywhere. That dreadful vision of the other night - the deserted town with its masked corpses in every doorway; that nightmare product of morphine and ether - has taken up residence within me. I see masks in the street, I see them on stage in the theatre, I find yet more of them in the boxes. They are on the balcony and in the orchestra-pit. Everywhere I go I am surrounded by masks. The attendants to whom I give my overcoat are masked; masks crowd around me in the foyer as everyone leaves, and the coachman who drives me home has the same cardboard grimace fixed upon his face!
It is truly too much to bear: to feel that one is alone and at the mercy of all those enigmatic and deceptive faces, alone amid all the mocking laughs and the threats embodied in those masks. I have tried to persuade myself that I am dreaming, and that I am the victim of a hallucination, but all the powdered and painted faces of women, all the rouged lips and kohl-blackened eyelids... all of that has created around me an atmosphere of trance and mortal agony. Cosmetics: there is the root cause of my illness!
But I am happy, now, when there are only masks! Sometimes, I detect the cadavers beneath, and remember that beneath the masks there is a host of spectres.”
― Monsieur de Phocas
It is truly too much to bear: to feel that one is alone and at the mercy of all those enigmatic and deceptive faces, alone amid all the mocking laughs and the threats embodied in those masks. I have tried to persuade myself that I am dreaming, and that I am the victim of a hallucination, but all the powdered and painted faces of women, all the rouged lips and kohl-blackened eyelids... all of that has created around me an atmosphere of trance and mortal agony. Cosmetics: there is the root cause of my illness!
But I am happy, now, when there are only masks! Sometimes, I detect the cadavers beneath, and remember that beneath the masks there is a host of spectres.”
― Monsieur de Phocas
