With Collection-One, showcasing the female-led fictions of Sandrine Bessancort, we open with "The Salon of Madame Feng", her tale of a straitlaced and pompous Englishman, visiting his married Parisienne cousin with his fiancé and taken against his better judgment to the salon of the mystic and spiritual Madame Feng for a night his cousin assures him will live long in his memory... A prophecy that proves entirely correct as the meeting of Ralph Eastcliffe with the eponymous Madame Feng Tang and her monstrous housekeeper, Mathilde, not only dismantles his upcoming marriage and everything else in his life but reveals to him who he truly is as a man.
Ms Bessancort's second tale is "The Servant Revisited", a re-imagining of a tale from the end of the nineteenth-century in which a handsome and down-on-his-luck man, the promise of his golden-boy youth a memory, finds his search for both a job and a roof above his head answered by a young woman who grew up in the same small village with him before he left to find his fortune in Moscow... A young woman who was once smitten with him and is now the wealthy widow of a successful trader and on the lookout for an obedient manservant... Or at least the kind of desperate man she can train to be one!
We finish with "Luella Miller Revisited" and a return to the early years of the twentieth-century at a time when Edgar Allen Poe is undergoing a renewed popularity; explaining why a young and ambitious Baltimore journalist is sent to the provinces by his editor in search of a story likely to satisfy the need for sensation craved by his newspaper's circulation... What he uncovers is a tale of murder, depravity, sadism and perversion on the Eastern Seaboard that will not only require sanitizing to be made palatable for his editors readers, but will impact upon his life in a way that will leave the charge of it in the hands of another... That other being an extremely depraved female steeped in the perversities of her great-aunt and a dominant woman from his native Baltimore he has yet to even meet, let alone desire... A desire, when he does get to meet her, that will end his life as he knows it.
Sandrine Bessancort is a Honfleur career-woman and is the author of a number of female-led tales from posterity including: "The Parasite Revisited", and "Ancient Sorceries Revisited".
