In 1903 Lieutenant Olivier Ferrières of the French army welcomes Captain de Saint-Avit as the new commandant of his post in Algeria. Shunned by his fellow officers, the captain has been accused of the brutal murder of his friend Lieutenant Morhange, when the two were lost alone in the desert. To Ferrières’s horror, Saint-Avit soon confesses to the crime, unveiling a shocking tale of lost worlds, lust, murder, and the enslavement of desire in a forgotten desert kingdom—Atlantis!

 

Antinea, the queen of Atlantis, seeks to destroy and imprison the men in her net through her beauty and cruelty, enshrining their electroplated bodies in a fantastic hall, assigning each doomed lover a number and a plaque in his memory. Caught in this web, Saint-Avit and Morhange attempt to escape until love, passion, and jealousy threaten their friendship and their very lives. For only one man has ever captured the heart of Antinea, and no one escapes the queen of Atlantis.

Pierre Benoit (1886–1962) grew up in Algeria and Tunisia as the son of an officer stationed in North Africa. Queen of Atlantis is the second of his forty-two novels. Hugo Frey is a senior lecturer in contemporary history at University College, Chichester, England, and a specialist in contemporary French cultural history. He is the author of Louis Malle.

“I believe this is the first new edition of a classic novel of Atlantis since the 1960s. . . . A beautiful but cruel queen menaces the men who stumble into her isolated world, where she lives surrounded by a mixture of barbarianism and superscience. This is not the same translation as the Ace edition.”—Science Fiction Chronicle