Forever Malign... Plus-2

3-Works of science and the supernatural combine with fantasy and the female-led in these three misadventures for the male of the species.

Read on, as we open with an eerie and chilling tale of female-led vengeance from the grave. It's 1932, and Julian Westerhuis, a cynical Londoner and womaniser, escapes retribution from an angry husband to visit a female cousin in the North Devon fishing village of Combe Lynton. A village in which she, an investigator of the paranormal, has acquired keys to a house with a gruesome past… What they uncover between the two of them is a tale of tragic love and violent death that has led to the spirit of a beautiful Romany woman occupying the house in spectral form. A form burning with hatred for the married man who toyed with her affections… A married man who looks very much like Julian Westerhuis!

Following this we have a tale of Victorian times as a doctor and scientist - obsessed with discovering and isolating the gene from which springs good and evil in an individual; develops a compound he believes will by-pass the less wholesome of the two traits… And doing so while leaving its polar-positive intact… And achieves the direct opposite… Leaving only sadism and a desire to torment and control in the female housekeeper he chose to unknowingly be the first recipient of his concoction.

The last of the triad takes us to late-nineteenth-century Paris as a carefree and financially secure  Parisian bachelor takes lodgings with the widow of a man recently fished from the Seine and pronounced a suicide… That widow being a buxom Parisian landlady fully intent on showing her new lodger the reasons behind her husband's departure… And in a commanding way that will ensure the once carefree man will soon come to understand why her former partner chose to terminate his association with existence!

Inside you will find:

"Forever Malign" by Theo Hopcraft; "The Shaming of Purbeck"; from Sandrine D'Honfleur"; and Sandrine Bessancort's "The Horla Revisited.

Believable fantasy and female-led fiction for those readers with a desire to have a light shone on the more… outré …corners of the imagination.