Andrew Laurance - The Embryo

[dem bones]

Andrew Laurance - The Embryo (Star, 1980)

The Dark Prophesies of centuries past converge in a mind-blistering onslaught of terror

THE EMBRYO

From the author of the nerve-wrenching Premonitions Of An Inherited Mind and The Link

Picked this up on Sunday and, despite having way too many novels on the go, that remarkable cover grabbed me so that i had to sample the opening chapter. It's not bad at all!

Celina receives an alarming letter at her Highbury flat, signed by a "well-wisher and friend", alerting her that, within the next 24 hours she will experience psychic phenomena. She won't come to harm, but she may find the episode extremely unpleasant.

The message troubles Celina more than she cares to admit. With her girly flatmates off gallivanting for the weekend, she visits a local pub and, not caring to spend the night alone, picks up a nervous young man. No sooner has she got him home than Celina realises Hugh is far too bashful to make a move on her so she settles him on the sofa and retires to bed. Maybe London life is getting to her. She likes her job, probably the more-so as it pisses off her domineering mother so (Celina works in a Kings Road boutique, "selling jeans to punk rockers"), but she's Mensa material, not making the most of her intelligence, and perhaps a little homesick for Taunton.

Footsteps on the stairs. Her door opens. Maybe Hugh's not such a drip after all.

Now he's slipped into bed with her, hot hands busy under her nightgown and, she has to admit, those hands are doing a pretty good job. But what's that jelly like lump against her back? She doesn't remember the kid having a pot belly! She turns to face him and ... that isn't Hugh! The corpse-like, wispy haired wreck with soft, gentle eyes isn't even male! Celina falls into a dead faint.

The next morning, Hugh has already left and no sign of the frisky phantom (Celina has already decided the thing was a ghost). No sign that she's been molested either, just that pleasant sensation she's left with after a night of satisfying sex.

Celina makes her mind up to pay her parents a visit. On the train down to Somerset she can't help but stare at the woman opposite, an American, who seems awful familiar. There's this almost gelatinous look about her, and those sad, gentle eyes. The woman looks up.

"My name is Melanie Forbes. We met in your room last night."

(to be very continued after The Cross Of Frankenstein, Diagnosis Murder #1, Harvest Home, The Residence At Whitminster, et all)

[pulphack]

good god, many years ago i read 'The Hiss' and one that i think was called 'The Catacombs' (i can find nothing about him on a quick google to try and ascertain the correct title. one was Star, the other was a US p/b house like Pinnacle or Zebra (hang on, i should check on here...), which republished him about seven or eight years after the UK.

my remaining impression of both is that they had some good moments, but petered out into anti-climax. they also weren't terribly gory but were ok for a train journey in terms of ease of reading and length.

i'd forgotten about them until seeing this. does anyone know anything about this man? real or pseudonym, for instance?

[dem bones]

i've no idea whether Andrew Laurance was his real name, but he was fairly prolific from the end of the seventies through the eighties. Embryo may or not be part of something called the Blood Of Nostradamus series, and along with The Hiss (AKA Catacomb), Ouija and Black Hotel (all published by Star), he also knocked out the non-fiction The Other You: How to Develop Your Psychic Potentialfor Javelin.

apologies for answering one question with another but here's a thing. in the same crate as The Embryo, i found this.

Richard Salem - New Blood (Futura, 1981)

Blurb:
Theirs was a hideous secret. To keep it they needed new blood. Without it they would be lost. All of them. And so they set the trap.
The place was called Credence. A pleasant country town, set well away from, anyywhere. For Clay and Holly Ryan, in search of a new home away from the city, it was a dream come true. But then the stranger came with the haunting memories of black rivers of violent death. And for Clay and Holly, Credence suddenly becomes a whirlwind of blood and terror as the hunt is on - FOR NEW BLOOD.

Now 'Richard Salem' is definitely a psuedonymn, that of a "successful author of historical fiction" who "lives with his wife in France where they are in the process of rennovating a derelict farmhouse" - i guess they should be finished by now - and New Blood, his first (only?) foray into horror fiction was simultaneously published by Signet in the US. Don't suppose anyone knows who he was?

[noose]

It's been reviewed on here Dem...

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