A best-seller in its day, Quaker City is a violent and surreal look at the life of the citizens of Philadelphia in the 1840s. Anyone who likes Edgar Allen Poe or the Marquis de Sade will find this an interesting read; written off by critics as blatantly pulp, before such a term existed, they considered its mass appeal a sign of weakness, and by 1900, it had vanished from most lists of important American novels. I'm glad that critics are reconsidering its position, and I look forward to more of Lippard's novels coming back to print. Devil-bug, the mastermind of evil, is a great villain, and he looks ahead to Jarry's Pere Ubu, Faulkner's Popeye and many of the great surreal or superreal villains of the twentieth century.