Serpentine Supplications: A Collection of Sacrilegious Texts

By Stephan Friedman

Serpentine Supplications is a collection of strange tales and ecstatic poetry, carefully structured to form a twisted labyrinth that ends where it began, like a snake biting its tail. The journey starts with the protagonist, Victor Zander, undergoing initiation in a magical order and having a transcendental experience. Another story tells how Victor embarks on a phantasmagoric, transformative trip induced by a psychedelic drug. A grandfather's diary found in the attic of an old summer cottage describes childhood traumas and fears, otherworldly apparitions and occult research. Amongst the ruins of post-World War II Wroclaw, a Red Cross worker tries to save an orphan from a terrible fate. Young Mircea stops to spend the night in a quiet Sighișoara village and encounters a sex-crazed witch, a Walpurgis night sabbath, and secret Jewish magic. A nightwalker named Cioran pays a visit to a depressed divorc? and takes his friend away to the catacombs of vampires. In Jerusalem, a disillusioned journalist finds an ancient manuscript, meets an obscure Ophidian cult, and has a vision of Lilith. The sense of the supernatural and grotesque permeates these twelve pieces of macabre and decadent prose and verse, bouncing between biographical reality and ethereal dimensions. This book would be a worthy addition to any serious library of weird fiction.

"Friedman ... ultra-powerfully stares you in the eye with this whole book's essence (featuring Cioran, Artaud, a woman called Mary like the Mary Magdalen who for me nurtured the instable God particle, utter absinthe studenthood, ineluctable despair, vivid sex, a facing of death and all its barbed accoutrements so that death, by becoming even harder to face, becomes somehow easier), and you will either come away immaculately reinvigorated ... by this work or tantamount to destroyed by it..."
- D. F. Lewis

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: B09MYVV5T8
• ISBN13: 9798758236444
• Release Date: December 2021
• Publisher: Independently Published
• Length: 122 Pages
• Weight: 0.31 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.3" x 5.0" x 8.0"