Book-One in the "Capitulations" collection contains two illustrated and female-led works from Rafael Menton describing certain women of colour and the power they come to wield over their white male subjects.

Our first tale is "True Drama", in which an ageing actor, touring the UK in an Alan Ayckbourn production, comes face to face with a drama that is as unbelievable as it is real at his lodgings in Guildford. A two-week stay for the duration of the play that is going to prove far more enduring and far more… demanding… Especially if the two strangely compelling Indian women, who are housekeeper and mistress at his lodgings, have their perverse and life-changing way.

Next up is "A Woman of Haiti". It is 1911, and a respected Professor and most keenly felt man-of-learning is invited to a gathering at a friend's in order to witness the "gift" of a young woman visiting from the Caribbean. The prospect does not sit well with him, but he agrees to put in an appearance after being informed his fiancé will also be attending to witness their friend's latest star-turn and practitioner of mesmerism. Made cynical by his insistence upon empirical evidence and a thoroughgoing incredulity when it comes to the mystical and magical beliefs, he accepts the challenge of the young island woman and allows her to try and put him under her mesmeric spell… A decision he will regret until his dying day, as his privileged life is dismantled about his head in the most ignominious of ways.

If you like tales of assertive women who are both erotic and believable, without being too obvious, you are likely to enjoy this collection of stories from a female-led perspective on the subject of crime, horror, the occult and the bondage of man to woman.

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.

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