A RAFAEL MENTON OMNIBUS: 5-Tales of Women Gone Bad

This volume, contains a selection of Rafael Menton’s fiction including 5-five tales of wayward women; ranging from tragic romance, wifely dominance, and erotic mind control to occult possession. First up is, “Why?”. All marriage, in common with life itself, is a tragedy waiting to happen, they say. That many of those partnerships result mostly in joy, and others in nothing more sinister than Shaw’s banal simulated achievement, doesn’t invalidate the possibility of heartbreak and calamity… Such was the case for Grace and John, partners and parents in a union that’s the envy of family and friends alike… Until the wife finds herself at a car-wash and those two harbingers of imminent misery arrive in the form of a vague acquaintance from her gym. A Latino fitness-instructor who is nowhere near as physically attractive or as personable as the father of her two girls… But… Our second story is “A Shock To His System”. The bequest of a house and a sizable annuity from a deceased aunt effects huge changes in the mindset of a previously loving wife. Especially when she takes receipt of a document in her aunt’s hand that details her relationship with the man she had always called “Uncle” and thought so distinguished and masculine. At first she is shocked by the discovery of how completely her aunt had dominated the man’s life… then repulsed… and then aroused at the possibility of having such a relationship with her own husband who, as fate would have it, has just seen his business go into receivership and is now dependent upon her and her aunt’s legacy for the food he eats and the roof above his head. A roof, the born-again dominant that is his wife has decreed will be below stairs in the specially designed basement that had once been the home of her uncle… A basement in which she has carried out certain… modifications! Next comes, “An Abject Fixation”. In this Mr Menton asks the question: “Can the scent of a woman overpower a man with such force he will be unable to refuse her any demand?” For, according to the late-aunty of a young expat Indian woman named Hemani Jayashankar, this is certainly the case. If that young woman, like Hemani, is blessed with a certain family gift handed down over the centuries… A gift that is about to fixate and enslave the happily married Englishman who just happens to be her boss. Following this, we have “Bad Move” A good cop with sexual demons, who is about to go bad, comes face to face with a woman who has been in that condition for a long time. A wealthy Arab woman with secrets of the most repellent kind he is about to try and blackmail. Only to find he will be the one who finds himself at her mercy and that of her two female assistants… And in a far more permanent way. Our final tale is “La Voile de Soie”. A single-man in his forties, ready to escape the rat-race of London’s financial markets, begins checking out the Suffolk coastal region for suitably quiet and picturesque locations that suit his naturally reclusive nature. What he finds will be a perfect Suffolk village on the very edge of the North Sea. Unfortunately for him, however, the women of the village will find him equally as perfect… Though not as the kind of man he either believes or wants himself to be. If you enjoy stories that, without being unnecessarily explicit, trigger those more stygian and erotic areas of the imagination, as well as invoking the spirit of assertive women who are believable as well as dark, it’s more than probable you’ll delight in Mr Menton's stories from a female-led perspective on the subject of crime, horror, the occult and the bondage of man to woman.

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