Marie Corelli 11 min read

In the dead midnight, a huge Car comes tearing along the line dividing Darkness from Dawn, its black-clad, fire-crowned driver bat-winged, his face white as bleached bone.

Marie Corelli's 1910 prose-poem is a striking apocalyptic fantasy. Vivid, allegorical, feverishly imagined. Read it for a short, hallucinatory vision by a hugely popular author of her day, the Devil driving his terrible machine across a doomed world, in an eerie fable of the modern age's headlong rush.

In its time

Published in 1910, during the 1910s, lost worlds and interplanetary adventure.

Reading it

11 min read (a short story, a single idea, delivered and gone).

Illustrated by

Arthur Severn