In Jean Cocteau's The Holy Terrors, siblings Paul and Elisabeth inhabit a private world governed by elaborate games, emotional manipulation and a fierce resistance to adulthood.

Following Paul's injury in a schoolyard incident, the pair retreat into their shared bedroom. When other people enter their lives, they are drawn into a psychological arrangement whose rules only the siblings seem to understand.

First published in 1929, the novel is a study of adolescent intimacy at its most possessive and destructive. Cocteau approaches childhood imagination as something considerably more dangerous than innocence: a force capable of reorganising reality around desire, jealousy and the refusal of separation. His prose combines theatrical intensity with a strangely detached observation of his characters' behaviour.

This edition includes Cocteau's own line illustrations, which extend the novel's preoccupation with bodies, gestures and the uncomfortable intimacy of its enclosed world. A short, unsettling work about what happens when private fantasy becomes a system of power.

Edition / Condition: New Directions Paperbook 212, originally issued 1966. Twenty-eighth printing. Translated by Rosamond Lehmann, with twenty original illustrations by Jean Cocteau. Paperback in very good apparent condition, with minor surface wear.