Meeting Mister Mephistopheles

DescriptionThis is a play about the entry into Hell, about the agony that has no relief, about the distress that cannot be soothed, about the pain that will never be cured... It is set in the aloofness of a Cambridge college, during the turbulence of the 1960's... A new undergraduate, Ayub Peters, finds that he is going all too rapidly mad in the environment of cold Cambridge snobbery. Demons are everywhere, damnation emerges in each encounter, and his strange and shadowy college tutor, Mister Mephistopheles, orchestrates the student's descent into psychosis and suicide... But perhaps Cambridge actually is a nest of devils, and, through his so- called 'schizophrenia', Ayub Peters is discovering the real cruel dark core of this seemingly glittering university... Let us participate in insanity, and seem to find there...truth... About the AuthorZekria Ibrahimi (born in 1959) is defined by his schizophrenia. It first hit him long ago, in his late teens. He is fifty years old now, grey and frail, almost a pensioner, with all the aches and injuries of age, and he does not always want to remember how, as an adolescent in the late 1970's, he suddenly became afraid of everything surrounding him, and, worst of all, of himself. He would run around the countryside and knock at the doors of strangers because he feared the apocalypse was pursuing him ... He would pick up rubbish outside in alleys and streets and hoard it in his not very palatial lodgings ... He was always wandering away from home, searching for ... what would never be found again ... the straight route, the level way ... He was a tramp, freezing during the nights in public toilets where he had various unsavoury insects as company on the cold concrete ... There were years of pain when his schizophrenia became almost his only companion- albeit a sadistic one, punishing him even as he hugged it. Perhaps, to echo both R. D. Laing and Emily Dickinson, it is the entire globe, it is general society, that is truly insane. Schizophrenics simply burrow all too deeply under the surface. They reach the very core of the savage reality in us all. Most varnish over the anarchic truth within through the superficial sham paraded as 'civilization'. Schizophrenics prefer to be uncomfortably honest barbarians. For the accident- prone Zekria, the System is all callousness, and no cure. Eventually, after much psychotic shouting on Hammersmith Broadway, the hapless Zekria was confined at the Charing Cross unit in the West London Mental Health Trust. Following the unsafe unstable freedom of his schizophrenia, came the restrictions of Section 3. He would not have survived without the multi- racial compassion of the individual doctors and nurses in Charing Cross. Yet the overall SYSTEM remains an ogre of rules and restraints, and the INSTITUTION of psychiatry can be as cold and vicious as in the days of lobotomy and insulin shock. Now he is elderly, but still he muses about being locked up, drugged up, about how, with schizophrenia, the treatment can be worse than the disease...

The prolific author of vintage thrillers, Fergus Hume rose to fame following the publication of his first novel, ‘The Mystery of a Hansom Cab’. It became the best-selling mystery novel of the Victorian era and went on to inspire Arthur Conan Doyle to write ‘A Study in Scarlet’, featuring Sherlock Holmes. This comprehensive eBook presents Hume’s collected works, with numerous illustrations, rare texts appearing in digital print for the first time, informative introductions and the usual Delphi bonus material. (Version 1) * Beautifully illustrated with images relating to Hume’s life and works * Concise introductions to the major novels * 64 novels, with individual contents tables * Features many rare novels for the first time in digital publishing * Images of how the books were first published, giving your eReader a taste of the original texts * Excellent formatting of the texts * Famous works are fully illustrated with their original artwork * Rare story collections * Special chronological and alphabetical contents tables for the short stories * Easily locate the short stories you want to read * Scholarly ordering of texts into chronological order and literary genres Please visit www.delphiclassics.com to browse through our range of exciting titles CONTENTS: The Novels The Mystery of a Hansom Cab Professor Brankel’s Secret Madame Midas The Girl from Malta The Piccadilly Puzzle The Gentleman Who Vanished Miss Mephistopheles The Man with a Secret A Creature of the Night Monsieur Judas When I Lived in Bohemia Whom God Hath Joined The Fever of Life The Chinese Jar The Island of Fantasy The Harlequin Opal The Lone Inn The Gates of Dawn The Third Volume The White Prior Tracked by a Tattoo The Clock Struck One The Rainbow Feather The Devil-Stick The Red-Headed Man The Silent House in Pimlico The Indian Bangle The Crimson Cryptogram The Vanishing of Tera The Bishop’s Secret The Lady from Nowhere A Traitor in London The Millionaire Mystery A Woman’s Burden The Pagan’s Cup The Turnpike House A Coin of Edward VII The Silver Bullet The Yellow Holly The Mandarin’s Fan The Red Window The White Room The Secret Passage Lady Jim of Curzon Street The Opal Serpent The Wooden Hand The Black Patch The Purple Fern The Amethyst Cross The Sealed Message The Green Mummy The Crowned Skull The Sacred Herb The Solitary Farm The Peacock of Jewels The Mikado Jewel The Spider The Pink Shop The Mystery Queen Red Money A Son of Perdition In Queer Street The Lost Parchment The Red Bicycle The Short Story Collections Chronicles of Faeryland The Dwarf’s Chamber and Other Stories Hagar of the Pawn-Shop The Dancer in Red The Short Stories List of Short Stories in Chronological Order List of Short Stories in Alphabetical Order Please visit www.delphiclassics.com to browse through our range of exciting titles or to purchase this eBook as a Parts Edition of individual eBooks