The Lash of Power

Summary

A provincial nobody named John Rand, intoxicated on the perfume of megalomania, hears the cadaverous whisper of Napoleon Bonaparte crackling through his cracked radio of a soul; he obeys, storms Manhattan’s canyons, and transmutes immigrant hunger into gilded tyranny—buying senators, vaporizing rivals, weaponizing chemistry itself—until an anarchist’s bullet rewinds the reel and dumps him back in his mildewed cottage, cradled by a mother’s lullaby and a banker’s daughter’s chaste kiss, the whole empire revealed as a 78-minute fever dream.

Synopsis

John Rand, having lived in a small town his entire life, dreams of possessing wealth and power in New York. Napoleon Bonaparte has long been his ideal, and one day he feels a message from the departed general urging him to take up the fight for world supremacy. He goes to the city ready to begin the battle, and there, aided by his Napoleonic visions, John amasses a great fortune, ruthlessly destroying everyone who presents an obstacle to his lust for power. His ambitions satiated, John becomes the enemy of democracy when he sells a secret formula to an enemy power. He is later killed by an anarchist. John then awakens to find himself in his cottage, secure in his mother's devotion and the love of Marion Sherwood, the banker's daughter.