Time travel with the best Retros out now: BLACK MAGIC by Marjorie Bowen, AFTER MIDNIGHT
BLACK MAGIC by Marjorie Bowen (Vintage Classics £9.99, 368pp)
YOU won’t sleep for nightmares after immersing yourself in this occult drama set in the Middle Ages …
In Antwerp, young Dirk Renswoude, carver of religious statues, worships the Devil. One night, two men appear at this door, asking questions, but elusive Dirk suspects that handsome Theirry shares his fascination with Black Arts and so shares his diabolic skills.
From then on, the two travel across Europe as Dirk’s obsession with power leads them to crime and murder.
But there’s something he hides from even Theirry, – something that drives his desire for cruel revenge, especially when Theirry falls in love. You may guess the final twist but, even so, it’s a thrilling trip.
AFTER MIDNIGHT by Daphne du Maurier (Virago £25, 624pp)
THIS superb collection of du Maurier’s darkest short stories, with an incisive new introduction by Stephen King, is menacing, moody and mendacious on every page.
Film favourites such as The Birds or Don’t Look Now are much more terrifying when pared back to the original words, while the brutal breakdown of a man who can no longer face a suffocating domestic life and decides to commit murder chills with its twisted ending (The Alibi).
The reproach of a spurned, neglected dead wife haunts a widower in the shape of a sickly apple tree, its branches spread ‘in martyred resignation’ as her spirit exacts revenge (The Apple Tree).
Roll on autumn evenings to curl up with this.
OTHER PEOPLE by Celia Dale (Daunt Books £10.99, 336pp)
TEENAGE June has lived happily with her devoted mother in a small seaside town ever since June’s father, Ray, went to Australia 12 years earlier.
Now, unexpectedly, he has returned and they move house and town but June, jealous of his claim on her mother, is surly and suspicious of him.
When she meets the neighbour’s visiting middle-aged son, ex-RAF officer Tony, who lives in London and boasts of a glamorous life, she uncovers Ray’s past and runs away to find Tony in the city – with devastating results.
This murky, coming-of-age tragicomedy pulls back the net curtains of 1960s suburban secrets and lies with Dale’s pitch-perfect psychological accuracy.