The Demon Lover

A secretary finds herself psychically bound to her boss in this supernatural thriller from one of the leading luminaries of twenieth-century esoteric thought. The Demon Lover was first published in 1927, the same year as H.P. Lovecraft's The Call of Cthulhu. Dion Fortune was among a generation of occult horror writers that formed popular culture's obsession with secret societies, vampires, demons, ritual magic, and dark powers lurking in the shadows. What sets Fortune apart from so many of her contemporaries is her deep knowledge of the inner workings of magical orders, rites, and practices, and her own freethinking on occult subjects, demonstrated in the classic Psychic Self-Defense and The Mystical Qabalah. When young Veronica Mainwaring is hired by Justin Lucas as his secretary, she has no idea that she will soon find herself being used as his own personal trance medium. With an invisible collar keeping her bound to Lucas, her every attempt at escape is foiled by a yank on the unseen chain. Veronica soon finds herself trapped in Lucas' quest for power and knowledge beyond the earthly plane as a story of past lives, hidden evils, and a twisted love affair come to life in this occult thriller. "A convincingly unsettling book. Fortune evokes a world of powers that can threaten you; that are both part of a coherent moral mythology, and also cloaked in mystery. Things are unpredictable, though there is an order to them . . . It's not a book for every taste, maybe. But it's worth a look, for a distinctive handling of magic and its overlap with the everyday world." --Black Gate