The narrative follows Lucan and Gray as they embark on a chaotic journey through the world's most decadent cities after fleeing Edinburgh. Their escapades include a dubious medical procedure in St. Petersburg, witnessing an orgy in Naples, and exploring astral travel in Cairo. While the authors aim for a humorous and risqué tone, their experiences often lack depth and fail to engage readers, resulting in a travelogue filled with superficiality and repetitive antics. The book offers sporadic wit but ultimately disappoints with its shallow character development.
"There is an odd, subversive book called The Decadent Gardener by Medlar Lucan and Durian Gray. The introduction describes the decadent gardening ethos thus: 'In the garden, the decadent seeks to create a moment of beauty, which should be allowed to fall into decay and ruin.'Gardening, Lucan and Gray believe, is 'little more than systematic violence in pursuit of beauty', and the gardener is first and foremost a sadist. These two, the Kropotkin and De Sade of horticulture, understand that'nowhere are sex and death more intimately bound together than in the garden.' For them the garden is a place of 'agony, self-doubt and betrayal.' They remind us that, if we are to believe the Bible - not that they would be inclined to - the first murder was carried out by a gardener.And the first garden was a place where sin beckoned wherever you turned.The book abounds with piercing, pricking truths.The flower, they remind us, for example, is nothing but a sexual organ.The Decadent Garden consists of the plans for a series of thematic gardens that Lucan and Gray had conceived for a wealthy patroness. Each garden would symbolise an aspect of nature as they saw it. The Cruel Garden would consist largely of impenetrable thickets of thorns.The Fatal Garden would contain only representatives of the vegetable world's many poisonous denizens: among them, black bryony, dropwort and, of course, deadly nightshade.In the Narcotic Garden, by the side of the opium poppy and cannabis sativa, would grow more obscure mind-altering plants such as mandrake, henbane and thornapple. The Priapic Garden would be populated by those species whose flowers and foliage assumed the most suggestive phallic and vulvic shapes.Their Torture Garden carried the libertine ideas of Lucan and Gray furthest and is perhaps best left to the reader's imagination.Because Lucan and Gray barely realised their designs(they were too decadent to bother), their gardens flourish mainly in the mind."
Publikace pro ty, kdo potřebují oživit náladu ve své kuchyni, ale i pro inteligentní čtenáře se smyslem pro humor. Tato nevšední kuchařka, zahrnující mj. kapitoly "Hnití a rozklad", "Krev – životní ingredience", "Gastronomické mauzoleum", "Mohu doporučit pudla", "Večeře s Caligulou", "Snídaně Velkého inkvizitora" anebo "Sladký zub markýze de Sade" byla mnoha západními literárními kritiky a publicisty označena za knihu roku. Obsahuje černý humor i recepty z nejrůznějších epoch a období, doplněné odpovídajícími literárními citáty. Dekadentní kuchařka rozhodně nepatří k běžným publikacím daného žánru. Její obsah je částečně děsivý a způsob přístupu i stylu ji povyšuje na literární záležitost.
The Hell Fire Touring Club ist die Realisierung einer literarischen Fiktion. Der österreichische Künstler Paul Renner begab sich zwei Jahre lang auf eine Pilgerschaft in neunzehn Stationen, um sich „vor den schillerndsten, von Kerzen erleuchteten Altären der größten Décadents der Geschichte niederzuwerfen“. Begleitet wurde er von Medlar Lucan und Durian Gray, den ehemaligen Betreibern des Edinburgher Restaurants `The Decadent, das nach vielen Skandalen und einer aufsehenerregenden Polizeirazzia 1994 geschlossen werden musste.
