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Don’t Put That Thing in Your Mouth, Either: Ben Peek’s “Edgar Addison, the Author of Dévorer (1862-1933)”
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Don’t Put That Thing in Your Mouth, Either: Ben Peek’s “Edgar Addison, the Author of Dévorer (1862-1933)”
Strange desires and willing prey…
By Ruthanna Emrys, Anne M. Pillsworth
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Published on July 16, 2025
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Welcome back to Reading the Weird, in which we get girl cooties all over weird fiction, cosmic horror, and Lovecraftiana—from its historical roots through its most recent branches. This week, we cover Ben Peek’s “Edgar Addison, the Author of Dévorer (1862-1933),” first published in June 2025 in Nightmare Magazine. Spoilers ahead!
Edgar Addison was born in Nottingham, England. His father, Lord William, was heir to a title gained in 1713 through bribes and “near treasonous promises.” A violent man, he outlived two wives (whom he beat) and murdered two servant mistresses. Lord William’s third wife, Lady June, was thirty years his junior. She had three children, Edgar being the oldest. While Edgar was still young, William fell from his horse and broke his neck. The death was suspicious, but no one (including Edgar) troubled to investigate it.
Edgar took after his mother. He was an unremarkable student who loved the adventure tales of Dumas and Verne. The aspiring novelist wrote stories about boys who fell into mysteries by chance and a “certain lack of parental oversight.” Notable, given his later career, is “The Winter Brothers and the Grave Robbers.” The villains sold modern corpses as ancient mummies to be used in the curative mumia. They were foiled when a rich lord ate some “mumia,” only to declare that it tasted not like an Egyptian but like an Irishman.
When Edgar was fourteen, his tutor told him about the 16th-century Hungarian soldier, Gyorgy Dozsa, who led a peasant revolt against the landed nobility. When captured, Dozsa was seated on a red-hot iron throne and fitted with a burning crown. Nine of his followers were forced to either eat their leader’s flesh or be killed themselves. Those who ate were freed to live in lifelong shame. Edgar’s shame started that night, when he dreamt he was Dozsa, watching his soldiers eat. His pleasure awakened him.
The dream, and the pleasure, would recur for many nights. Deeply disturbed, Edgar tried to purge his revolting desire by giving up meat and drinking only water. He grew thin, but he couldn’t bring himself to confide his trouble. When his mother warned him against mimicking his father’s violent temperament, Edgar knew he’d never be like William. At nineteen, following his mother’s remarriage, he left home to pursue his dream of writing. Though he received a generous allowance, he took various jobs for inspiration, ending up as a sailor. His ship was wrecked, with Edgar and a few of his shipmates escaping to a small island. There Edgar’s long-suppressed desires returned. He fantasized about offering himself to his fellow castaways, who’d feast on his raw flesh. However, rescue came before such sacrifice was necessary.
Edgar moved to Paris to pursue writing again. This time he had some success with a novel, Damnation. He also did translations. The most famous was his privately published French translation of Stoker’s Dracula, a novel with which he felt a special bond. The translations earned him a place “on the edge of French literary circles, neither fully embraced nor exiled.” Joris-Karl Huysmans would write of Edgar as “shy and tall and a terrible writer.” He would also introduce him to his future wife, Madeleine Bloy.
The widowed Madeleine was ten years older than Edgar. She had a reputation for being “formidable, passionate, and a lover of absinthe.” She told Edgar she’d never remarry unless her husband “would submit to her love and allow her to consume him.” In earnest of his desire to be that man, Edgar sent her a vial of his blood. Madeleine kept it undrunk on her dressing table. Before long, she and Edgar became lovers, and she found that his willingness to utterly surrender his body was even more thrilling than she’d imagined. She would bite and scratch him, lick his wounds. On their wedding night, as previously planned between them, Edgar tore out his left eye. Madeleine ate it raw while straddling him. This consecration of their love was threatened when she vomited, but laudanum steeled her to lick him clean. He found it a moving act of devotion.
The consumption of flesh became mandatory for the couple’s sex life. Edgar would carefully excise bits of himself and present them to Madeleine on special plates. She’d eat the flesh raw, as Edgar believed fire would “tarnish” its purity. Before long, Madeleine relied on laudanum to continue pleasing him. Depressed, Edgar withdrew from public life to write his translations and work on his magnum opus, Dévorer. This collection of confessional essays would obsess him for years. By 1919, Madeleine’s friends noticed her growing unhappiness and assumed Edgar was the problem. In fact, her health was failing, and in 1921, she was diagnosed with cancer.
As the disease consumed her, Edgar grew desperate. Convinced that his healthy flesh would heal her, he fed her the fingers of his left hand, finally cutting off the entire hand, a wound that nearly killed him. Madeleine continued to decline. A week before her death, she converted to Catholicism and refused to eat Edgar’s final “sacrifice” of his right pinky. She told him she loved him, but regretted what they’d done. This admission devastated Edgar, who felt she was abandoning him, repudiating their special intimacy as perversion.
Edgar became reclusive. He stopped translating, nor would he leave any other writing behind when he died a decade after Madeleine. The original edition of Dévorer, a clothbound volume of 147 pages, Edgar published privately. Not until 1967 did a small press called Beurre Fragile republish the book. Before long, it became an underground cult sensation. Many more editions, including translations from the original French, would follow.
The author of Addison’s brief biography is sure he’d have been horrified by his posthumous “popularity” and wouldn’t have agreed to its wider publication. Dévorer, the biographer writes, is “at its very core, an account of [Addison’s] struggles, and his failure to attend to them.”
Weirdbuilding: Addison’s story fits well with the tangle of Lovecraft, Crowley, and other artists and cult leaders around at the same time.
Libronomicon: Addison translates Dracula, and feels a special bond with the tale.
Madness Takes Its Toll: …to the tune of an eye, a hand, and a finger, as well as any number of pounds of flesh.
Anne’s Commentary
Edgar Addison’s biographer describes his juvenile story in which a man eats mumia, a supposed cure-all originally prepared from a resinous bitumen. When “mineral pitch” became hard to acquire, mumia might be compounded from a resinous exudate scraped from mummies, also a rare substance. Eventually apothecaries might simply label desiccated mummy flesh as mumia, while fraudsters like young Edgar’s grave robbers might pass off the desiccated and powdered flesh of any old corpse as this panacea. To ingest it was an act of medical cannibalism. Edgar had cannibalism on his mind at quite a tender age, kind of. However, it wasn’t until he was fourteen that Edgar had “his first real experience with the cannibalism that came to define his life.”
For some reason, Edgar’s tutor decided to tell him about Hungarian rebel Gyorgy Dozsa’s nasty execution and its nastier aftermath, surely not part of your average British gentleman’s education. Maybe the tutor was a fan of Hungarian history or of secular martyrdom in general, but whatever his motivation, the story strongly triggered Edgar and set him on the dark path of vorarephilia. Yes, human fetishes really do include the erotic desire to consume another person, or to be so consumed oneself, which was Edgar’s specific kink. In “vore play,” the consumed is called the prey of the consuming predator, but Edgar apparently considered himself a willing martyr, sacrificing himself for the good of his consumer—a Christ (or Dozsa) figure rather than a rabbit.
Dozsa’s horrific ending triggered me, too, in a weirdly nostalgic way. We, the good Irish and Italian Catholics of South Troy, largely patronized St. Mary’s Church. St. Mary’s had a splendid marble set of the Stations of the Cross, which hyperrealistically depicted Christ’s last day and crucifixion, so I was early on acquainted with sacred gore. Our Stations booklets featured similarly hyperrealistic etchings of each stop on the way to Golgotha. What we lacked at St. Mary’s was living color; the marble carvings were white, the etchings black and white. I guess that tempered the horror enough so I didn’t really mind it.
But one Sunday, I can’t remember why, we attended mass at St. Lawrence’s. A prominent feature of this church was a life-size mural of Lawrence’s execution, in livid living color. Smack in the center was the saint himself, naked but for the obligatory loincloth, and chained supine to what looked like one of the giant grills on which our local fireman staged their yearly chicken barbeque. The coals under the mural grill were so hot they spurted blue-edged flames that licked Lawrence’s back and legs. I remembered how bad it hurt just to inadvertently brush against a grill, so the most terrible thing about this painting was the saint’s face, serene but for a certain wry twist to his lips. My mother whispered that the saint was probably about to deliver his famous last words, which were: “Turn me over. This side is done well enough.”
And so the legend indeed goes. Lawrence is the patron saint of librarians and archivists, tanners and cooks—and comedians. Well earned, that last patronage, though I didn’t find Lawrence’s farewell at all funny as a kid. His death gave me more nightmares than all the other saints’ grisly martyrdoms combined. It’s a good thing nobody told me about Dozsa’s red-hot throne and crown, and that when he was broiled enough, the executioners started handing out hunks of his flesh like the firemen handed out well-crisped breasts and drumsticks. At least, as far as I know, no one lunched on Lawrence.
If this is wrong, don’t tell me. It was bad enough that my jovial Aunt Madeleine (yes, really, Madeleine) jested after mass that it was too bad they overcooked Lawrence. Any good chef knows that saint is best served medium-rare.
Edgar’s Madeleine ends up being a sympathetic character, in that she realizes her domination fetish doesn’t mesh long-term with her husband’s extreme vorarephilia, prey (or sacrifice) variety. We’re not told what type of cancer she died of, but how wretched if it was a neoplasm of the digestive tract!
I can believe that even a confessional as grotesque as Edgar’s little magnum opus would over time accumulate a considerable underground readership. But if I ever come across Dévorer while prowling the stacks at Miskatonic or my favorite arcane bookshops, I am not borrowing or buying it.
Okay, so I might peek at his little instructional drawings. Sometimes you’re masochistic enough to consume something spiced too hot for your stomach, though knowing you’ll regret it later. In the night, in the dark… augh.
Ruthanna’s Commentary
There was a period in ’60s and ’70s specfic when authors seriously explored which familiar taboos were necessary for civilization, and which were optional. A lot of this work centered around their newfound ability to get stories published with sex in, but a surprising number went after the real forbidden fruit—that is to say, the forbidden meat. Donald Kingsbury’s Courtship Rites offers cannibalism as a solution to a resource-poor environment; Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land assures us that mortuary cannibalism is fine if you’re sufficiently enlightened. The trend has died down in recent years, but there are still plenty of books on the shelves that share more than I, personally, want to know about the myriad flavors of humanity.
Most of these stories focus on the eating side of the equation. Many readers are likely to find this more comfortable. Humans are scavengers and predators. It’s not a big leap to imagine new things on your plate. And, well, if you were stuck in the Donner Pass, what would you do?
On the prey side, there are also plenty of stories where cannibalism is a threat due to post-apocalyptic biker gangs, or colonialist blood libel. But stories focused on the willingly vivicannibalized… there are only a couple of subgenres where you’re likely to find that. Vampires are the genteel version: victims/donors get pale and exhausted, but you fundamentally maintain your bodily integrity until and unless you turn into a bat. When it comes to actually serving up one’s own eyes and fingers, there are certainly stories for people who share Edgar Addison’s tastes (so to speak). For those of us shuddering in a frenzy of Your Kink Is Really Not My Kink, what remains is serious body horror.
This is, in fact, the sort of body horror that gives me screaming heeby jeebies. You all saw me cringe at the thing with the fingernails in The Night Guest, which was partly leftover cringe from that one scene in Firestarter. King also has another scene with a garbage disposal that I would be just as glad to have never read, but which sticks vividly in my mind almost forty years later. To these I can now add my desperate attempts to not consider the logistics of wedding night eye-pluckery.
Wrenching my mind to other topics, Addison’s obsession seems not merely the whim of the god who bestows fetishes, but a reaction to his father’s violence. He assures his mother that he will “never become such a man.” And what could be more different from a man who destroys others, than a man who destroys himself for others? Even if those others must drug themselves in order to properly appreciate his sacrifices?
Given the trends described above, it’s probably not coincidence that Dévorer goes cult-viral in the ’60s. But what does it mean that it becomes a ritual “for those who had just become adults”? Or that people are still writing about it and giving it “modern recognition” in the 21st century?
Maybe that, too, is something I would prefer not to consider.
Next week, we hope nothing bad happens to anyone’s fingers in Chapters 47-59 of The Night Guest.[end-mark]
The post Don’t Put That Thing in Your Mouth, Either: Ben Peek’s “Edgar Addison, the Author of <i>Dévorer</i> (1862-1933)” appeared first on Reactor.
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