Valentine Penrose, The Bloody Countess: The Atrocities of Erzsebet Bathory

The true story of a 17th century Hungarian Countess who bathed in the blood of girls... Descended from one of the most ancient aristocratic families of Europe, Erzsébet Báthory bore the psychotic aberrations of centuries of intermarriage. From adolescence she indulged in sadistic lesbian fantasies, where only the spilling of a woman's blood could satisfy her urges. By middle age, she had regressed to a mirror-fixated state of pathalogical necro-sadism involving witchcraft, torture, blood-drinking, cannibalism and, inevitably wholescale slaughter. These years witnessed a reign of cruelty, unsurpassed in the annals of mass' murder, with the Countess' depredations on the virgin girls of the Carpathians leading to some 650 deaths. Her many castles were equipped with chambers where she would hideously torture and mutilate her victims, becoming a murder factory where hundreds of girls were killed and processed for the ultimate, youth-giving ritual: the bath of blood. The Bloody Countess is Valentine Penrose's disturbing case history of a female psychopath, a chillingly lyrical account beautifully translated by Alexander Trocchi, which has an unequalled power to evoke the decadent melancholy of doomed, delinquent aristocracy in a dark age of superstition.