Paperback Library, $0.50
Sci-fi, 1966 (Reissue)
The Purple Cloud is an Edwardian apocalypse novel that answers the question, what if Victor Frankenstein had a superiority complex, a diary, and no one left on Earth to stop him from being the absolute worst?
Our protagonist, Adam Jeffson — yes, Adam, because subtlety is for cowards — races to the North Pole for a fortune and wakes up to find apparently everyone else on Earth dead, leaving him alone with nothing but his ego and the scent of violet miasma. And what does Adam do with this great cosmic silence?
Does he mourn humanity?
Does he contemplate the fragility of life?
Does he reflect upon the indifference of the cosmos?
No.
He builds himself a giant marble palace, wears dead emperors’ crowns, and declares himself Supreme Ruler of a lifeless planet. It’s the literary equivalent of a man alone in a parking lot awarding himself Employee of the Month.
Adam Jeffson is magnificently awful. He’s like Byron if you locked him in a room with nothing but mirrors. Every page is a purple-tinged monument to his own perceived greatness. He rants about women, other races, past civilizations, and the sins of humanity — often in the same paragraph — before going on a tirade about his own moral superiority. The man is a walking, self-important X thread before X existed.
His “I alone am left to brood upon the utter extinction of my species… I suppose I am the most magnificent man who has ever lived. Naturally!” attitude is both hilarious and a little tragic. That inflated ego combined with the slow psychological unraveling makes for such a peculiar cosmic horror protagonist. He’s not terrified by cosmic indifference so much as aggrieved that it doesn’t acknowledge his greatness.
By the end of The Purple Cloud, Adam Jeffson fully settles into this delusional, messianic role — convinced that he is the new Adam of a post-apocalyptic Eden, with Lallie, a female survivor of this apocalypse, as his Eve, destined to repopulate the earth with pure, vegan, presumably radiation-resistant humans who will never build battleships or poison themselves with tobacco again.
It’s kind of hilarious how his misanthropy and grandiosity converge at that point. “All the previous attempts at humanity were flawed, but now, guided by me, the most magnificent man to have ever lived, we shall start again — and this time there will be no meat.”
This story is not cosmic horror in the Lovecraft-ian sense of indifferent alien gods, but it is cosmic in that it deals with human insignificance, the futility of civilization, and man’s desperate need to find (or invent) meaning after the universe shrugs us off. Except instead of succumbing to nihilism, Adam declares himself the only meaningful thing left.
Mr Shiel, through Adam, rants about how humanity’s moral and spiritual degeneration was all tied to eating meat and waging war, and now the earth must be repopulated by gentle plant-eaters, with him as their benevolent (if terrifying) patriarch. It’s almost quaint in its early eco-apocalyptic vibe — if it weren’t so loaded with Mr Shiel’s uncomfortably controlling ideas about women and purity as evident in Adam’s behavior and actions toward Lallie.
As for the prose, purple doesn’t even begin to cover it. It’s ultraviolet. Whole passages sound like they were written by someone dramatically clutching at their cravat while on a laudanum bender. And yet — and yet — it works. There’s a cadence, a rhythm, a fever-dream quality that makes it impossible to look away, like a Victorian trainwreck narrated by a man convinced he’s the reincarnation of Alexander the Great.
This a wild book. Absolutely nuts. A fever dream of self-worship, apocalypse porn, and moralizing disguised as cosmic punishment.
And here’s where it gets really fascinating: it’s impossible to read this without thinking about MP Shiel himself.
The whole vegan utopia subplot in The Purple Cloud seems less like a reflection of Mr Shiel’s lifestyle and more like a vehicle for one of his recurring themes: the idea that humanity’s moral and spiritual downfall is inevitable unless radically corrected by some catastrophic, purifying event.
For example, the renunciation of meat-eating is symbolic — a shorthand for rejecting the bloodthirsty, violent tendencies of old humanity. It’s less about diet and more about moral allegory.
MP Shiel was very much a fin de siècle Decadent, with all the flamboyant excess and moral preoccupations of that literary movement: fascinated by sin, purity, decline, and apocalypse.
However, if anything, Mr Shiel’s real-life behaviors — his criminal record, his grandiose personality, and his taste for controversy — suggest a man far more self-indulgent and morally compromised than his character Adam Jeffson’s final preachy arc would imply.
It’s one of those weird literary cases where an author’s fictional moralizing reads less like a personal manifesto and more like performative sermonizing for dramatic effect.
In short, this book isn’t about Adam Jeffson. It’s about MP Shiel and his projections. This book is not cosmic horror because the universe doesn’t care. It’s cosmic horror because we’re trapped in the crumbling, megalomaniacal psyche of a man who thought he was born to be Emperor of the End Times. It’s not so much a novel as a spiritual striptease of a man desperately insisting that he’s God’s final word on the human race while standing in a graveyard.
And I loved every bizarre, overwrought minute of it. It’s unquestionably a must-read for anyone interested in the weird, wild edges of early horror fiction and the men behind it!
