Là-Bas

Là-Bas, often translated as Down There or The Damned, is a novel by Joris-Karl Huysmans, first published in French in 1891. The book sits between Against the Grain of 1884 and En Route of 1895 in the sequence of major Huysmans novels and addresses the dark religious territory that lies on the way from Decadent aestheticism toward Catholic conversion.

The novel follows Durtal, a French writer working on a biography of the fifteenth-century French nobleman Gilles de Rais, who was a companion of Joan of Arc and was later executed for serial murders of children and for involvement in Satanic ritual. Durtal’s research into Gilles de Rais brings him into contact with contemporary Parisian occult and Satanic circles, and the novel includes substantial material on late nineteenth-century French occult practice including a famous detailed description of a Black Mass.

Là-Bas was controversial in its time and remains one of the most powerful French treatments of the Satanic and occult themes that influenced various subsequent writers.