Diabolical Duets. Diabolical Duets, #4

Duet-Four in the "Diabolical Duets" collection brings us another two tales of moody and eerie female-led fantasy, suspense, and possession. First up is Theo Hopcraft's "Destin-Sur-Sarthe", and one travelling English wine-merchant's rendezvous with fate in north-west France. This after he is drawn by a strange compulsion to break off his journey home. Read on as Joshua Bentham finds himself ferried to a village he swears he hasn't visited in his life.
Which does not explain why the village of Destin and the sinister female proprietor of the pensione in which he takes lodgings seems so familiar to him. Or the feline and irresistible niece about to introduce him to his future. A future he decidedly does not want! Rounding off the duet is Sandrine Bessancort's "Luella Miller Revisited", set during the early years of the twentieth-century where the fiction of Edgar Allen Poe is undergoing a renewed popularity.
Explaining why a young and ambitious Baltimore journalist is sent to the provinces by his editor. An editor in search of a story likely to satisfy the need for sensation craved by his newspaper's circulation. What the young journalist discovers is certainly that, but what he also finds is a tale of murder, depravity, and human-bondage. And, in the process, ensure the life he knows and loves is given over to another. 2-Believable and fantasy female-led tales of occult possession and human bondage in the style of the early 20th Century masters of the genre, for the reader who enjoys having the imagination tweaked rather than bludgeoned.