The first volume in the "Retro Tales" collection brings us four works from Rafe Linnell and Rafael Mention describing the commanding women of the occult.
Our first tale is Mr Linnell's "Madame Solange" and his description of the lives of two friends in a sleepy English village between the wars. Lives that are turned on their heads when one of them confesses to a murder he committed while living in Paris A murder committed at the behest of an evil and mesmeric landlady whose clutches he subsequently escaped by returning to England A demonic and sexually controlling landlady who seems to have found her former slave once again.
Rafael Menton follows with "La Voile de Soie", in which an affluent 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 strange little village will find him equally as perfect Though not as the kind of man he either believes or wants himself to be.
Next up is Mr Menton's "A Past Submission", in which a financially secure London bachelor in his forties, enjoying his carefree life to the full, finds himself suddenly transported to a strange bookshop to be confronted by a large and even more strange Latina woman. A large and feline woman he swears he has not seen until now but who also looks alarmingly familiar and triggers within him certain discomfiting and terrifying flashbacks. Flashbacks that include the sensuous and equally feline daughter who seems to alarm him even more than her mother A feline daughter who is about to reclaim what was once hers and destroy his carefree life forever!
The third adventure from Mr Menton, and the final tale of the volume, is "Revisiting Tanisha the Sorceress", as three friends travel to India in pursuit of the tomb said to belong to a mythical and unrepentantly evil and deviant - peasant queen An evil and sexually warped queen and her gorgeous but equally sadistic Dalit handmaiden who are about to show the three mature and learned men that she is a long way from being a myth.