Tempter
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- £6.99
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- £6.99
Publisher Description
A has-been rock star looks to revive his career and is tricked into helping an evil spirit imprisoned in an abandoned mansion deep in the Louisiana bayous
New Orleans has long been famous for good food, good times, good music—and voodoo. When troubled musician Alex Rossiter relocates to the Big Easy, he soon finds his rock star mojo working again. Not only is his new band attracting notice, he’s also having affairs with two gorgeous women: the sexy voodoo queen Ti Alice, and beautiful businesswoman Charlotte “Charlie” Calder. But when Rossiter stumbles across a long-lost book of ancient spells, he unwittingly invites the evil spirit known as Tempter into his dreams—and, soon, his waking hours as well. Tempter is eager to escape his other-dimensional prison so he can once more slake his perverted lusts on the flesh of the living, starting with Charlie. It’s up to Jerry Sloan—Rossiter’s boyhood friend and Charlie’s not-so-secret admirer—and the one-eyed hoodoo woman known as Mad Aggie to stop Tempter’s evil plans before he destroys not Charlie but the descendants of the voodoo priestess who imprisoned him over a century ago. Together this unlikely duo must travel to the abandoned plantation deep in Louisiana’s haunted bayou country, and face the dark secret that lies waiting for them, locked inside its rotting heart.
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As Collins explains in her introduction to this deluxe edition voodoo hair-raiser, first published in 1991 as a paperback original, her editor demanded that she recast it as a vampire novel to follow up on her Stoker-winning debut, Sunglasses After Dark (1989). She was living in San Francisco, about to wed her first husband, and when the 1989 earthquake struck, it proved "an apt omen for the fate of both my marriage and my book." Dissatisfied with the mediocre result, Collins has now wholly rewritten her troublesome offspring, excising every last trace of vampirism and restoring the voodoo magic. Despite a few signs of age (e.g., "Bush/Noriega" bumper stickers), this is the far superior version, with a compelling cast of New Orleans characters: Alex Rossiter, a burnt-out rock star; Ti-Alice, a beautiful witch who possesses an ancient book of runes, The Aegrisomnia; "mad" Aggie, a likable potion-peddling crone, who refers to the aforementioned tome as "some weird-ass Lovecraft-like shit"; and the evil Il-Qui-Tente (aka "He-Who-Tempts"), who has apparently been dead for more than a century within his decaying and abandoned antebellum mansion, but awaits a suitable living victim to revive him. Particularly engrossing is the historical background of Il-Qui-Tente's origin as Donatien Legendre, a dissolute, wealthy French-Creole planter, in the Civil War era. The book doesn't overdo the Big Easy's steamy ambience, though the fastidious should beware that it contains a lot of sex, much of it graphic.
