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The DANNY QUADRILOGY by Chancery Stone THE DANNY QUADRILOGY is a huge stylistic achievement, a Jacobean drama on an epic scale, reaching into realms far darker than anything ever dreamt of in Shakespeare's philosophy. It belongs more firmly in the shadowy corridors of John Ford, the secret rooms of Christopher Marlowe, the feral imagination of John Webster - in short, in a place where gouging out eyes with steel spikes and unwittingly fucking your sister are commonplace tragedies. For modern audiences, however, it may be imagined more easily as film noir, a long running soap opera from the dark side, something that HBO might commission as a creative pièce de résistance designed to out-swear Deadwood, out-abuse OZ and out-rape Rome.It is the home of supernaturally compelling characters, blessed with the phallocentric charisma of sexed-up animals, goats in human form, satyrs. They act out every sick fantasy in graphic detail, strutting their sex, violence, perversion and addiction as if they were proud of it. It is shot through with acts of random madness, cruelty, corruption, lies, deceit at every turn. It shocks, mystifies and amazes us, each volume plunging from one outrage or disaster to another, fresh revelations bombarding us from all sides until we do not know who or what to believe. It compels us to read on, even when we are addled and exhausted, trying to unravel their mystery, trying to get further inside them, understand them, all the while being swept up in their feverish passions for all the wrong people. THE DANNY QUADRILOGY is a big, gut-bursting feast of excess. An excess of emotion, an excess of sex, flesh, fear, savagery, love, loss and insanity. Nothing in it is normal, or explicable, or comprehensible. It is like real life with the colour contrast turned up, the sound turned down and the electrodes attached to your genitals. It is torture, rapture and disease all in one delicious, sickening package. It is beyond good and evil, it is simply necessary. Read it and weep.
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