"Sex, murder and devastating black humour mark these three novellas from the 1940s. In Oscar, the narrator of death and exploitation fails to fend off the evil that envelops him. In Simeon, the abuse of sexual and family power ends with violent death, and in The Dark Philosophers itself, the grimly humorous philosophers gather in an Italian cafe in the Terraces to tell the dark tale of revenge that they engineer."--BOOK JACKET.