From publisher blurb:
“There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written, or badly written. That is all.”
It is January 1895, and in London’s famous West End theatre district preparations are underway for a most singular production. Oscar Wilde – that most scurrilous and scandalous of writers – has a new play titled Salomé, a piece that until recent weeks was on the Lord Chamberlain’s list of banned works. What extraordinary persuasion might have allowed for the censor’s prohibition to be lifted to permit the troupe of St James’ Theatre to stage it?
Tongues have been wagging all over town about the exceptional lengths to which Wilde’s morally bankrupt friends – the so-called Aesthetes – have gone to arrange for this controversial production. But, for every tale of decadent artistic manipulation there is another that tells of dire troubles that have beset the production at the St. James. Sullen crew have been seen coming and going among the endless stream of well-known aesthete “collaborators” whose art forms part of the new show. And tales tell how Oscar Wilde himself – normally among the most gregarious of souls – has strikingly become withdrawn even as his new play hurtles towards its opening night.
Could there be something amiss at the St. James … something that would warrant the ceaseless gossip surrounding Salomé, its cast and crew? Or is the whole thing another one of Wilde’s shameless attempts to tilt public opinion in favour of his questionable morals? Time will tell when the curtain rises, and both the critics and the degenerate followers of the Aesthete movement greedily devour this new dramatic work … surely one or the other group must depart from opening night in disgrace.
"Starlight on the Gutter" is a substantial investigative scenario which embroils a group of Protagonists -- who can be either well-to-do society types or everyday theatre workers or actors, or a mix of both -- in a terrifying Mythos machination. Amid the glamour, decadence and squalor of London's West End, a terrible plan is rapidly coming to fruition …