The Red Sorcerer is the third novel I’ve read by late-Decadent author Delphi Fabrice, and it presents some difficulty in interpretation. French Decadence is typically viewed as a fin de siècle phenomenon, which means that, literally, it ended on the last day of 1899. Literarily speaking, one can easily make a case for Decadence extending a few years into the 20th Century. The Red Sorcerer was published in 1910, well after either definition. So is it Decadent literature? More fundamentally, is it literature? In his introduction, translator Brian Stableford reveals The Red Sorcerer was “published as a 64-part feuilleton serial in Le Journal”. The feuilleton was a lurid, cliffhanger-laden genre of French fiction presented in serial format by newspapers of the time. Its purpose was to hook readers into buying future editions of the newspaper to find out “what happens next”. As such, it’s hardly a genre that promises high culture. There’s even good reason to question whether Fabrice himse...