When the unnamed narrator crosses the causeway to the Chateau of Gamehuche, he enters a surrealist nightmare of debauchery and violence. The proceedings at the chateau are presided over by the master of Gamehuche, M. de Montcul, formerly the English diplomat, Sir Horatio Mountarse. With a cast of willing and not-so-willing acolytes, he serves up an over-refined cuisine of obscenity, sexual perversion and unspeakable cruelty. The book could be described as a dispatch written from the frontiers of depravity.

The authors bring their wit and monstrous imaginations to play across the entire history of sport, with chapters ranging from the Greek athletic ideal and its perversions to the Nazi Olympics of 1936 and the use of drugs, alcohol and visionary states of being.

In the same style as The Decadent Cookbook a nd The Decadent Gardener, this book sees the hedonists Medla r Lucan and Durian Gray laying bare the transgressive nature of another bourgeois passion - travel. '

"There is an odd, subversive book called The Decadent Gardener by Medlar Lucan and Durian Gray. The introduction describes the decadent gardening ethos thus: 'In the garden, the decadent seeks to create a moment of beauty, which should be allowed to fall into decay and ruin.'Gardening, Lucan and Gray believe, is 'little more than systematic violence in pursuit of beauty', and the gardener is first and foremost a sadist. These two, the Kropotkin and De Sade of horticulture, understand that'nowhere are sex and death more intimately bound together than in the garden.' For them the garden is a place of 'agony, self-doubt and betrayal.' They remind us that, if we are to believe the Bible - not that they would be inclined to - the first murder was carried out by a gardener.And the first garden was a place where sin beckoned wherever you turned.The book abounds with piercing, pricking truths.The flower, they remind us, for example, is nothing but a sexual organ.The Decadent Garden consists of the plans for a series of thematic gardens that Lucan and Gray had conceived for a wealthy patroness. Each garden would symbolise an aspect of nature as they saw it. The Cruel Garden would consist largely of impenetrable thickets of thorns.The Fatal Garden would contain only representatives of the vegetable world's many poisonous denizens: among them, black bryony, dropwort and, of course, deadly nightshade.In the Narcotic Garden, by the side of the opium poppy and cannabis sativa, would grow more obscure mind-altering plants such as mandrake, henbane and thornapple. The Priapic Garden would be populated by those species whose flowers and foliage assumed the most suggestive phallic and vulvic shapes.Their Torture Garden carried the libertine ideas of Lucan and Gray furthest and is perhaps best left to the reader's imagination.Because Lucan and Gray barely realised their designs(they were too decadent to bother), their gardens flourish mainly in the mind."