Monk Lewis is surrealist in the beauty of evil
- André Breton
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Born out of the shocks of the French Revolution and published in 1796 when its author was just twenty, The Monk brought M.G. Lewis M.P. instant success and notoriety: prosecution, the condemnation of respectable society, and admiring notices from readers as discerning as Mary Wollstonecraft and the Marquis de Sade. Over a century later Antonin Artaud would rework a text which had long preoccupied him, and whose evocations of clerical abuse, incest, demonic sexuality, and malign inherited destinies echoed his own obsessions, all played out under the sign of the supernatural: 
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an imposition of magic onto a reality which it absorbs and works into the form of a novel by means of the hallucinatory and real poetry of the higher spheres, of the deep eddies of the invisible.
 
by Matthew Gregory Lewis, as retold by Antonin Artaud
Translated by John Macmillan
Introduction by Stephen Barber
Artworks by Martin Bladh