The 120 Days of Sodom — The Book That Shouldn’t Exist

Content warning: This piece discusses themes of violence and depravity found in historical literature.

I read The 120 Days of Sodom a few years back, and it still rattles around my head like bad news. It’s the filthiest, maddest, most perverted book I’ve ever come across. You don’t read it for pleasure. You read it because you can’t look away. It’s like watching a car crash and realising the driver’s smiling.

The bloke behind it, the Marquis de Sade, wrote it in 1785 while locked in the Bastille. Picture the scene. Paris ready to blow, the stink of the gutters rising, and this aristocrat in a rotting cell scratching away by candlelight. He’d smuggled scraps of paper in and stitched them together into a scroll more than thirty feet long. That’s obsession, not inspiration. He didn’t write to entertain. He wrote to survive.

When the Bastille finally fell, Sade wasn’t there. They’d moved him out a few days before to an asylum for being too loud, too wild. He used to shout through the bars to the crowd, claiming people were being murdered inside. So they dragged him off, and he thought the mob destroyed his work. The madman actually cried for it. But the scroll lived on. Hidden. Passed hand to hand, across generations, through wars and borders, until it resurfaced more than a century later, still breathing corruption.

A Castle Built on Rot

The story’s set in some remote fortress in the Black Forest. Four men of power — a duke, a bishop, a judge, and a banker — lock themselves inside with a bunch of servants and victims. Kids, women, the poor. The kind of souls the rich use and forget.

They spend four months doing whatever they want. Every day, four old prostitutes tell filthy stories, and the men act them out. It starts bad and gets worse. There’s no heart, no guilt, no mercy. Just power eating itself alive.

But here’s what most people miss. Sade wasn’t really writing about sex. He was writing about control — about what happens when those at the top answer to no one. The Church, the courts, the banks, the nobles — all of them monsters once you lock the doors and let the masks slip.

The Birth of a Word

That’s where the word sadist comes from. Straight out of his name. Not many writers end up in the dictionary for inventing a type of cruelty. Shakespeare gave us beauty. Dickens gave us sentiment. Sade gave us trauma and a new psychological disorder.

And he’d have loved that. The man adored scandal more than sanity.

The Book That Refused to Stay Buried

For over a hundred years that scroll moved through Europe like cursed treasure. Banned, burned, hidden, sold, stolen. It just wouldn’t die. Every generation found it again and pretended they’d discovered something new, something dangerous.

When I finished it, I didn’t feel clever. I felt scraped out. Like I’d looked at a part of human nature most people pretend doesn’t exist. That’s why the book matters. It’s not porn. It’s not shock value. It’s the mirror no one wants to look in.

The Madman Who Told the Truth

Sade died in an asylum in 1814. No headstone, no sermon. He wanted the earth to swallow him quietly, but his words wouldn’t stay buried. They crawl back up every few decades just to remind us what we are when the lights go out.

That’s the power of writing. It can come from the filthiest corners and still outlive its maker.

The Writers Who Set Me Off

After I read Sade, I needed something real to wash it down. That’s when I found Patrick Hamilton. I tore through Twenty Thousand Streets Under the Sky and Hangover Square. Hamilton wrote like the city was bleeding through him. You could smell the gin, the heartbreak, the smog.

Sade gave me the chaos and the cruelty. Hamilton gave me the loneliness and the humanity. Between them, I found my rhythm. That’s when I started writing El Peculiar — my own beast. A story that walks through the same dark alleys, from the Caribbean to London, full of humour, pain, and people trying to survive their own nature.

I didn’t copy them. I let them light the fuse.

In the End

The 120 Days of Sodom isn’t a book. It’s a scar that still stings. It’s the proof that writing can come from madness and still make sense of the world.

And when I think about what got me writing — Sade with his filth, Hamilton with his heartbreak — I realise it’s all the same thing. Stories about people who won’t behave. People who stare into the dark and write down what they see.

By Tommy Kennedy IV
Writer of noir, grit, and human contradiction.
www.tommykennedyiv.com