Vathek

Vathek, ninth caliph of the Abbasids, has an eye so terrible that a single angry glance can kill. Hungry for every pleasure and every secret, he builds a tower of fifteen hundred stairs, sacrifices fifty children to a mysterious stranger and sets out with his sorceress mother Carathis for the ruined city of Istakhar, where the treasures of the pre-Adamite sultans and the halls of Eblis await him. Written in French by the young William Beckford in 1782 and first published in English in 1786, Vathek is one of the strangest and most extravagant novels of the Gothic age. Published with the translator’s explanatory notes and the memoir of Beckford by William North.