John Stockholm - Succubus

[andydecker]

John Stockholm - Succubus (Sphere 1985, 184 pages)

Succubus: n. a fiend or devil who assumes female form and in such guise consorts wickedly with the souls of sleeping men

Uncanny things begann to happen to Peter Conway almost as soon as he set foot in the romte Cornish village of Penthor. First there was the shipwreck, those two rotting corpses alongside the perfectly preserved body of the sea´s thrid victim. Then there was the beautiful, mauve-eyed Woman whom he had greedily watched making love on the cliff-top, her aura of erotic energy seemingly reaching out to flicker all around him. And there was the reunion with his old friend Andrew, long devoted to other-worldly pursuits, who in the few shprt years since he had last seen him had aged by a quarter-century or more.

Yes, he thought with a shudder, there was in penthor an unmistakingly sense of evil, spiced with the heady, musky scent of forbidden lusts and passions. And even as he pondered on what he had seen, Penthor´s macabre miasma was sucking him in, enticing him deeper and deeper into the a dark und fearsome mystery enshrouded in necromancy, terror and death ...

Found this cheap on Ebay. Never heard of the writer before, and the cover is strangly subdued for a book like that, more of a Gothic than a genuine horror. I hope the cover copy is at least half true about the necromancy, terror and death ... not to mention the forbidden lusts

[dem bones]

a new one on me too, andy, and i must say it looks promising. the GR artwork is unusual for sphere who usually liked to lay their horrors on with a slab (that guy who's had his lips sewn together and his face made up by a mortuary beautician on front of Ronald Patrick's Beyond The Threshold three years earlier is genuinely disturbing (sadly, the novel doesn't quite live up to it)

[dem bones]

Did you get around to this one yet, andy? i struck lucky with a copy from my friend at the market yesterday, and the early signs are that it might even live up to the blurb. Peter Conway, professional photographer, travels down from London to the remote Cornish village of Penthor at the request of Andrew deSalla, who he's not seen since their Oxford Uni days. As expected, the Cornish folk are either nosey parkers (Flynn, the co-proprietor of The Blue Boar Hotel) or stand-offish to the point of surliness (everyone else). Conway doesn't let it bother him and gets down to his favourite game, namely fantasising that every woman over 30 he meets is a bored, sexually-frustrated housewife waiting for some sophisticated city hunk to whisk her away to the bright lights, etc. Flynn's sister, glamorous Gabrielle Danton, is of particular stimulation to him in this regard. Anyhow, before the first chapter is out, the ship alluded to in the blurb has already washed up in a storm, and the rescue party are making no secret that they don't like having Conway snooping around with his camera. Undeterred, he grabs a close-up of a particularly revolting corpse - the crabs are still dancing in and out of it's exposed chest cavity - which should look good on the cover of the local rag. The strangest thing: the second body is in much the same, half-eaten condition - it transpires the victims were a young couple - but the third, identified as that of locally notorious Peter Palmer, is immaculately preserved, albeit the face is frozen in a silent scream of terror!

The mummified remains of Peter Palmer are zipped inside a body-bag and taken away by the local priest, a man of even less friendly disposition than his parishioners. Now it's Conway's turn to go poking his nose into other people's business. He watches agog from the window as the clergyman performs some kind of ritual over the corpse which, when lightly sprinkled by holy water, actually trembles. It's at this moment the Priest spots Conway prying at the window and angrily draws the curtains ....

[andydecker]

Nah, still have it on the shelf. Other golden trinkets lured me away.