A Chinese Horror

The 2025 edition of Rafael Mentons tale of occult psychological horror and female supremacy opens in post-Suez London.

Read on as a highly-regarded heart surgeon at a party makes a fateful visual acquaintance with a woman of an, initially, indeterminate ethnic background.

A woman the single and reclusive surgeon finds strangely compelling but puts to one side after leaving the party early. Only to find an image of her will not leave his head and begins to monopolise more and more of his thoughts. This monopoly coinciding with a letter from a professor and old friend recently returned from mainland China after one of his frequent trips to acquire both knowledge and antiquities.

The letter on pleasing scented notepaper invites the doctor to dinner at a Hampstead address. But, when he accepts and presents himself at his friends door, his inability to remove the woman from the party becomes clearer… And will lead to the end of his life as both a doctor and a man!

Believable female-led fantasy fiction for those readers who prefer to use the darker sides of their imaginations with the help of character-driven plotlines.

Rafael Menton is a Professor of English Literature with a retro passion for the early to mid-twentieth-century fiction of mystery, crime, suspense, and horror with erotic undertones; ranging from Doyle and Blackwood and on to Rohmer – as well as sometimes indulging in a more contemporary take of his own on the work of those masters.