Published on Horror Homeroom [2025]

In 1844, the philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer penned a curious and somewhat controversial essay titled ‘The Metaphysics of Sexual Love’. With devilish and gloomily elegant prose, Schopenhauer’s essay articulates a theory of sexual love and desire that is negative, irrational, and perilously self-destructive to all those who experience it. In one of the essay’s more bombastic sections, Schopenhauer' describes the sexual instinct thusly:


“Every day it brews and hatches the worst and most perplexing quarrels and disputes, destroys the most valuable relationships, and breaks the strongest bonds. It demands the sacrifice sometimes of life or health, sometimes of wealth, position, and happiness. Indeed, it robs of all conscience those who were previously loyal and faithful. Accordingly, it appears on the whole as a malevolent demon, striving to pervert, to confuse, and to overthrow everything.”


For Schopenhauer, the demonic temperament of sexual love is manifest in the way romantic and lustful passions drive an individual to act dangerously and erratically, often to their own physical and psychological detriment. In the throes of amorous and erotic fervour, we find ourselves susceptible to an unconscious force which treacherously impairs our better judgement and obfuscates our capacity to assess a situation clearly and rationally - like a somnambulist who, lost in a dream, unwittingly wades into the churning waters of an ocean or dances blindly along the parapets of a rooftop. It is for this reason that Schopenhauer viewed the sexual impulse as the most visceral and commanding expression of The Will: that spectral, noumenal propellant which throbs ominously and generatively behind the crude representational maps and configurations we project onto reality, ensnaring all human-subjects in an infernal cavalcade of ceaseless desiring. From this Schopenhauerian perspective, sexual love is an illusionary siren’s call, a shimmering and seductive phantasm which exists only to envelop one further in the impersonal rhythms and ghostly pulsations of The Will.


Schopenhauer’s depiction of sexual love as a diabolically magnetic and mystical force, originating beyond the representational parameters of time and space, is at the heart of Kieran Saint Leonard’s impressive debut novel A Muse. Published this year by Hyperidean Press, A Muse weaves together autobiography and the Gothic into a compelling and hallucinatory account of the complexities of desire, spiritual awakening and artistic inspiration.


The novel centres on a ‘character’ named Keiran Saint Leonard, an indie musician who moves from London to an abandoned church in the Yorkshire Moors with his fiancée. Their escape “from the merciless murmurings of London” to the English countryside, however, coincides with the death of their beloved cat Harold, which triggers Leonard’s already fragile psyche to dramatically unravel, flooding his vision of reality with all manner of uncanny hauntings and nightmarish entities. His fiancée abruptly departs, leaving Leonard alone and secluded in the brooding Yorkshire landscape, which rapidly transforms into a site of unnerving occult activity. He is quickly rescued from this maddening isolation when he receives an invitation to tour alongside a mysterious and charismatic musician-cum-magnus named Tiberius Red. Whisked away to Europe, he becomes romantically and sexually entangled with Tiberius Red’s alluring companion Pinky Capote, a spellbindingly enigmatic chanteuse who seems to possess a strange yet seductive power over Leonard. Seemingly against his own will and feelings of impending danger, Leonard agrees to reunite with Pinky in Los Angeles and accompany her on an artistic retreat hosted by Tiberius in Big Sur, California. Finding himself trapped in Pinky and Tiberius’s bizarre esoteric world, Leonard forcefully undergoes a number of Dionysian rites and rituals, where sex and death, art and magic, the divine and the carnal, merge in terrifying and otherworldly ecstasies, causing Leonard’s reality to fantastically warp and shatter.


Narrated entirely from Leonard’s perspective, the novel is saturated with sumptuous and erotically charged descriptions. Throughout A Muse, the corporeal textures and organic details of Leonard’s numerous surroundings are relayed with a bewitching vividness and intensity, imbuing the novel’s revolving sceneries with a forceful and beguiling sensuality. The lyrical and palpitating cadences of Leonard’s narration, along with the surprisingly propulsive nature of the plot of itself, subtly adds a dynamic momentum to these material descriptions, instilling them with a fevered and orgiastic sense of motion and activity. Coupled together, the effect is both voluptuous and disorientating, manifesting as an intoxicating air of mutant and throbbing sensation, infusing the novel’s various locations and landscapes with a darkly feminine spirit - which, as the story unfolds, comes to wholly subsume our narrator.


A Muse metafictionally acknowledges this in the form of a conversation between Tiberius Red and Leonard, wherein Tiberius - who is holding court on the topic of Edward Munch’s The Scream – describes “Mother Nature” as “the multiplicity of particulars unified into a totality of organic suggestion … ripe with feminine overtones” which, Tiberius eerily suggests, “is close to absorbing, or assimilating the entire goddamn scene, the entire fucking world”. In accordance with Tiberius’s characterisation, the novel portrays Nature (in all in its forms and guises) as an “unstoppable unifying force”, in which the individual is inevitably consumed by the metamorphic currents of energy which constitute the feminine nature of our material reality. Much like Munch’s lone and pitiful squaller, Leonard repeatedly finds himself overwhelmed by Mother Nature’s fierce and all-encompassing plasticity, causing his ordered sense of reality to distort and dissipate into a gyrating swarm of aesthetic details and sensory fragments.


At the core of this heated, womb-like maelstrom is Leonard’s spectral lover and muse Pinky Capote. Meeting her backstage on Tiberius’s tour, she strikes Leonard immediately as a Lilith-like vampire: a demonic and sexualised embodiment of the primeval forces which dwell within the chthonic bowels of earthly existence. The reader first encounters Pinky Capote in a “swift, violent movement”, which Leonard elliptically describes as a “perceptible shift of both the physical and psychic climate of the room.” He first comes across her “reclining on a capacious velvet chaise lounge. Her carmine red halter dress contrasting sharply the reptilian green of her eyes, an unignorable sensual threat reared its arrestingly beautiful head, veiled in the auric shroud of the room’s golden gloom.” Despite (or perhaps because of) the cold and menacing air she exudes, Leonard gives in to Pinky’s sexual magnetism and entirely yields to her mantis-like grip. However, in succumbing to Pinky’s whims and desires, Leonard’s consciousness is awakened to a transcendent and mythical spirit of alien origins, which, he comes to understand, is ineluctably drawing himself and Pinky towards a violent yet mutually transformative end. In this respect, A Muse suggests that the celestial and the carnal are forever intertwined, in the sense that the brief ego-death one experiences during sexual climax can induce spiritual insight, allowing one to fleetingly glimpse the numinous workings of the divine.


This ethereal spirit comes to be known as theurgy, and its haunting presence is announced via a recurring cast of occult signs and symbols which circulate hypnotically throughout the narrative. Satanic pentagrams, Blakean archetypes, icons from the Tarot, classical myths and other theological esoterica are repeatedly referenced throughout A Muse, acting as makers of Leonard’s fate being twisted and shaped by the cosmic hand of theurgy. Collectively, however, these mystical indicators form a richly detailed spiritual tapestry, which not only affirms the novel’s tragic sense of fatalism but, additionally, reflects Leonard’s atavistic worldview, which appears staunchly opposed to the rationalist sensibilities and technological optimism of secular modernity. In this regard, Leonard is reminiscent of Durtal, the central protagonist of J.K. Huysmans’s superb novel Là-Bas, a similarly love-drunk occult enthusiast whose “disgust for the everyday” breeds within him a vague religious longing to experience “a dreamy rapture of mystical ideas.”


However, this constellation of otherworldly signs and esoteric signals are at their most compelling when they are wedded to descriptions of arousal or sexual intercourse. In doing so, these free-flowing occult signifiers acquire a commanding physical presence that is both intensely sensuous yet deeply threatening. In one particularly stirring scene, Leonard describes a naked Pinky as “imperial and filthy erotic, as if she had been called forth out of the stygian, mythical night. She was Aphrodite, she was Athena, she was Artemis. She stepped towards me, a sephirot of some truly potent supernatural power emanating from her glowing body.” By marrying these arcane signs and symbols to scenes of lust or sex, they no longer appear as mere abstractions or decorative allusions, but rather as visceral expressions of an obstinate and primeval irrationality inherent to human desire. Within the context of A Muse, this dogged and miraculous irrationality is the black stain of our pagan ancestry - a bloodied, cum-soaked marker of a pre-modern mysticism - which the cleansing powers of the Enlightenment failed to scour from our collective imagination.


In the hallucinatory final act, however, the ominous threat nested within this erotic circulation of ancient symbols aggressively erupts, wherein Leonard is subjected to a terrifying procession of supernatural entities and mystical visions unleashed upon him by a sadistic Pinky. Despite the damage and torment this inflicts upon him, it nevertheless becomes a source of spiritual and artistic renewal for Leonard, spurring him on to write what is ostensibly A Muse. Here, the novel proposes that the creative spirit arises out of acquiescence and subjugation, of totally surrendering oneself to the cosmic flows and patterns which undulate darkly in our collective unconscious, no matter how wounding or perilous. The novel gestures to this when Leonard desperately confesses to the reader, “I hadn’t been playing at magic, magic had been playing at me.” The muse, in this instance, is recast as a dominatrix - a seductive yet punishing femme fatal - who wields the harsh and unforgiving whip of artistic inspiration, which the artist must taste and endure in order to create. In this regard, A Muse portrays the artist-muse relationship as an exhilarating yet destabilising form of BDSM, in which the artist is possessed, flayed and ultimately brutalised by the source of their inspiration.


Perhaps the most publicised element of A Muse is the intermingling of the author’s own biography with the Gothic genre. According to literature scholar Fred Bottling, the aesthetic power of the Gothic lays in its concentrated negativity, which the genre expresses through “the absence, exclusion of knowledge, facts or things; and excess, an overflow of words, feelings, ideas, imaginings.” Whether through excess or absence, the Gothic aesthetic is centred on shrouding or occulting its objects, of casting its narratives, landscapes and characters in darkness and shadow, so as to generate a palpable sense of the uncanny and the unknown. Within the framework of A Muse, this acts as a thrilling counterpoint to the confessional modality of the memoir, where the author attempts to candidly illuminate and reflect upon the contents of their own life. The Gothic, in this instance, provides the memoirist’s introspective spotlight with a dramatic backdrop of darkness, which either totally obscures the autobiographical or monstrously theatricalises it. The juxtaposition between these two conflicting aesthetic modes is what generates the novel’s shadowy poetic texture, where fact and fiction, reality and unreality, are eerily suspended in a fantastical, liminal space. Moreover, the ostensibly real events of the novel are rendered uncanny and spectral, whilst the more outlandishly weird occurrences are imbued with an identifiably realistic quality, leading the reader to question where reality ends and fiction begins. Indeed, like any great Gothic text, the discontinuous and paranoid tone of A Muse engenders an unsettling yet magical air of uncertainty, in which the reader is never quite sure whether our narrator has achieved some kind of visionary insight into the metaphysical nature of reality or spiralled into complete and unrecoverable insanity.


Even though A Muse subscribes to the Schopenhauerian conceit that sexual love is an impish demon heralding from the Great Beyond, it doesn’t do so in manner that suggests one should grimly adopt asceticism or abstinence as a response (as Schopenhauer infamously prescribed). On the contrary, the novel actively affirms its devilish nature, asserting that desire itself, in all its varied manifestations, is a shadow realm teeming with monstrous forces and ghoulish excitations which one must face rather than deny. Indeed, it perhaps an artist’s duty - bestowed upon them by an ancient rite that cannot be named but only felt – to act as a conduit for these primordial urges and transgressive energies, to allow Nature to express itself in all its strange and wicked beauty through them and their art. A Muse implicitly understands this as the fundamental condition of the creative act, which is both maddening and electrifying, risky yet rewarding. Indeed, the exquisite thrill and terror of A Muse resides in its acknowledgement of this profoundly disquieting truth: in order to be an artist, one must be prepared to sleep with demons.