Wilhelm Reich in Hell

Falcon, AZ: Falcon Press, 1986. First Edition. Octavo. 21cm. Publisher's decorated card wraps. [xiii]; 165pp. A little light wear to the edges of the card wraps, and a small crease to the front panel; internally clean and fresh. A very good copy.

An unsurprisingly bizarre and challenging work from Wilson, in the form of a dramatized trial taking place in the afterlife and featuring Marilyn Monroe, The Marquis de Sade, Satan, Wilhelm Reich, and the Baron von Sacher-Masoch. Ronald Reagan is called as a witness, Reich is declared insane by the American Medical Association represented by an aggressive punk band. There's a lot happening.

The play, perhaps a little surprisingly, was performed at the Edmund Burke Theatre in Dublin in 1985, and has been staged subsequently in a number of countries. It reads rather like a cross between "The Devil and Daniel Webster", and Nicolas Roeg's "Insignificance" but performed by the characters from Scooby Doo. Of all the investigative thinkers and alt-rational psychonauts that survived into the 1980's, Wilson is probably one of the most fearless, and certainly one of the most enduring dissonant voices from the period.