The 120 Days of Sodom is the most extreme book in the history of literature. The Marquis de Sade narrates the escalating sexcrimes of four libertines who barricade themselves in a remote castle with both male and female victims and accomplices for a fourmonth precipitous orgy of sodomy coprophagia and rape leading inexorably towards torture and human decimation. A masterpiece of black humour pornographic to a point of excess and aberration never reached by any other writer and required reading