“Live selfishly. Everybody does, but those who admit it get the most fun.” So says Jake Perry, artist, bohemian, supreme egotist and a man with more than his fair share of personal demons. Jake seems to have it all: a successful career as a comic strip artist, a swank New York apartment, and a faithful wife who puts up with his compulsion to play sadistic games with beautiful women. But will Jake’s self-destructive streak bring it all crashing down? First published in 1930, Ride the Nightmare was the second of eight novels by Ward Greene, who also worked as a journalist and comic strip editor. He based the character of Jake Perry on his friend, William Seabrook, whose sensational accounts of his adventures in Arabia, Africa and Haiti made him one of the best-selling authors of his day. (He was also a friend of the notorious occultist Aleister Crowley, who makes a memorable appearance in Ride the Nightmare as Bellerophon Cawdor.) Chris Mikul tells the story of Greene and Seabrook in a new introduction for this Ramble House edition, the first in many years.