Degeneracy for Pleasure and Profit by Acheron Hades
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| Thanks to Daily Mail |
Author: Acheron Hades
Publisher: Not known
Source Book: The Eyre Affair by Jasper Fforde
Acheron Hades keeps a pile of press cuttings about himself: Hades 74 Weeks at Top of Most-Wanted List, or Readers Vote Hades ‘Least Favourite Person’. He has the amazing ability to change his appearance at will (he’s very good at impersonating old ladies), he can hear if anyone speaks his name aloud and is invisible to cameras and video, and can’t be seen in mirrors. He is also an accomplished criminal; a kidnapper, an extortionist, and a blackmailer. And 42 times a murderer.
In his book Degeneracy for Pleasure and Profit, Hades says: “The best reason for committing loathsome and detestable acts - and let’s face it, I am considered something of an expert in this field - is purely for their own sake. Monetary gain is all very well, but it dilutes the taste of wickedness to a lower level that is obtainable by anyone with an overdeveloped sense of avarice. True and baseless evil is as rare as the purest good - and we all know how rare that is....
“The finest criminal mind requires the finest accomplices to accompany him. Otherwise, what’s the pint? I always found that I could never apply my most deranged plans without someone to share and appreciate them. I’m like that. Very generous.....
“I had hoped that I would find a manuscript by Austen, Thackeray, Fielding or Swift. Maybe Johnson, Wells or Conan-Doyle. Defoe would have been fun. Imagine my delight when I discovered that Charlotte Brontë’s masterpiece Jane Eyre was on display at her old home. How can fate be more fortuitous....?”
Hades lists slow murder, torture and flower arranging as his hobbies in Which Criminal (I’m not sure if this is a book or a magazine, but I’ll go for book). He is a genuinely nasty person who never hesitates to use force to get what he wants. At one point he kidnaps Jane Eyre from her own book.
Hades was shot 6 times in ‘77 without ill effects and it doesn’t appear to affect him when Thursday Next shoots him 3 times with expanded ammunition. And shoots him twice more, and then again. He is still alive after faking his death at least twice. Finally, when Hades and Thursday are living within the pages of Jane Eyre, Thursday sees mad Mrs Rochester stab him painfully with silver scissors, and shoots him fatally with a silver bullet.
Thursday Next writes a book about Acheron Hades and his siblings; Styx, Phlegethon, Cocytus, Lethe and Aornis. It’s called Hades: Family from Hell. In it we learn that Vlad the Impaler, for it is he, describes the family as “unspeakably repellent “.
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| Thanks to Kuriositas |
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