Fantazius Mallare/The Kingdom of Evil (Magill’s Guide to Science Fiction and Fantasy Literature)
At a glance:
- Author: Ben Hecht
- First Published: 1922
- Type of Work: Novels
- Type of Plot: Fantasy—superbeing
- Time of Work: Undefined
- Setting: Mallares house and a world he creates in his mind
- Genres: Long fiction, Fantasy
- Subjects: Folkloric or magical people, Sex or sexuality, Hallucinations or illusions, Sculpting or sculptors, Giants, Superman or superbeings, Dwarfs, Gypsies
- Locales: Dreamscape, Earth
The Plot
Ben Hecht’s Fantazius Mallare: A Mysterious Oath relates the story of the title character, a misanthropic, psychopathic madman who considers himself a superbeing. He strives to be a god and battles against reason and his senses. Mallare, a thirty-five-year-old sculptor, despises reason, sanity, and thought; of these three “vices,” he lacks the first two. The artist, for example, visits an amusement park and returns home with a paralyzed black hunchbacked dwarf. He makes the dwarf his servant and names him Goliath simply because such an appellation is...
[The entire page is 1433 words long]
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