NIGHTMARE ASYLUM & OTHER DEADLY DELIGHTS
Sonia Kilvington

This collection of stories is shot through with a gothic ambience of darkness, disease and madness in the clinical sense. From its opening story death is always close by, reading to lay a cold hand on someone’s neck. The tales seldom wander far from the haunted corridors of the Asylum — proving you can change the name and the purpose but the horrors that happened there leave echoes that reverberate for a very long time.

Women wronged — and most often the men who wronged them (this is gothic horror after all) — figure prominently in this collection. Kilvington has a good ear for creating the layered tension of stories where the characters are never certain if what they believe they see is real. And yet too often their eyes are not really open at all. Deadly desires are a lot more than skin deep. In the world of Nightmare Asylum people nurse their resentments for years even generations; revenge for wrongs real or imagined consume their blighted lives.

And if they’re looking for a soulmate instead of revenge, you’re really in danger!

You’ll be haunted by these stories long after you close the book. Spectral figures my follow you, or you may have a sudden desire to do your own disappearing act…