A Lout and a Hussy or Two Fiends in Love: The most evil book ever written

By J Greg Deane

It is only rarely that I have been privileged to read a work as inspiring, uplifting and totally demoralising as A Lout and a Hussy or Two Fiends in Love: A tale of eternal reciprocal recurrence and constant exchange, an aspect of the human condition that is fated and ineluctable. Though events and responses are often so similar to what has come before, ways of interpreting and value recurrences are subject to so much subjective change as to deprive them of consistency or meaning as signposts. It is pointless to wallow in despair, or strive for redemption through good deeds; what is a transgression to day or a saving grace in the moment of performance may be turned on its head according to shifts in mores that had seemed immovable a short time before. Instead the wise and the damned is happiest who surrenders himself to appetite and vicious pleasure and does not seek a reliable or sensible moral compass. Only hypocrites resist this philosophical approach and only succeed in making themselves more miserable.

Even if I had regarded myself as a happy man before reading this divinely inspired work I would have been plunged into an abyss of despair by the time I had been disabused of the illusion of goodness and hope after reading the first three chapters. However, though this great work does not add to happiness, it fills the reader with a redemptive despair. Mr. Deane dispels false hope so that his reader can more easily accept that death is the best possible outcome of being, that ending one's life is the only sure release from suffering.

Mr. Deane reminds me of a passage from Anatole France in his essay The Garden of Epicurus, in which he convincingly maintains that both physical evils and moral evils, the miseries of the soul as well as the senses are merely paths to the debasement of happiness, the humiliation of justice. There are so many paths to misery and failure it is hard to choose the worst one, especially as which is the worst one depends on one's perspective. As the anti-heroine, Clothilde, observes: "Sometimes I gasp for air as if I am drowning I a stormy sea of perspectives. There are unending waves of them."

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: B09SV2C3TB
• ISBN13: 9798418470652
• Release Date: February 2022
• Publisher: Independently Published
• Length: 462 Pages
• Weight: 1.35 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.9" x 6.0" x 9.0"