 |
Frankenstein '69
Olympia, London, 1972
The blurb on the back:
A creepy castle is the centre for sex research, and Ygor and his randy wife Hortense conduct experiments on their two willing students, Amos and Maralyn. The Olympia Press is 'a literary enterprise that has profoundly influenced contemporary writing and culture'. - The New York Times There was a time when Olympia Press, the publishing company founded by Maurice Girodias, was at the leading edge of modern fiction, bringing us the likes of William Burroughs, Lawrence Durrell and Henry Miller. Now, personally I'm of the opinion that the world would have been in no way impoverished if none of these authors had ever published a single word, but I'm aware that in some quarters there are some people who even now still rate this kind of proto-hippy self-indulgence. More usefully, in the period before the Lady Chatterley trial, Olympia was the only publishing house which was prepared to issue English-language editions of the likes of de Sade and Jean Genet. (Being based in Paris, you see, it escaped the absurdly draconian British obscenity laws.) By the 1960s, however, all of this had changed. Pretty much anything was now publishable by pretty much anyone, and Olympia - relocated to London - had lost its edge. What they ended up with was nonsense like this: a truly awful bit of sci-fi porn that leaves nothing to the imagination and owes nothing to inspiration. It's not erotic, it's not big and it's not clever. It's Mary Shelley I feel sorry for. ENTERTAINMENT VALUE: 1/5 HIPNESS QUOTIENT: 2/5
more serious Frankenstuff...  sci-fi home |
