Theo Hopcraft's "Destiny Never Sleeps" brings us three of his tales of female-led fantasy and occult fiction, written in the classic style of de Maupassant, Blackwood, and Jacobs.
We open with "Destin-Sur-Sarthe" and one travelling English wine-merchant's rendezvous with fate in north-west France after he is drawn by a strange compulsion to break off his journey home. Read on as Joshua Bentham finds himself ferried to a village he swears he hasn't visited in his life... Which does not explain why the village of Destin and the sinister female proprietor of the pensione in which he takes lodgings seems so familiar to him... Or the feline and irresistible niece about to introduce him to his future... A future he decidedly does not want!
This is followed by "The Pawnbroker", Mr Hopcraft's occult tale with homo-erotic overtones that tells of what happens after a sailor sells a valuable and much sought-after diamond to a dealer trading on the Liverpool dock... Only after the sale supplying a warning to the pawnbroker which, in his greed, he neglects to heed... Neglect that will see both his assistant and senior partner die in the most inexplicable of ways... And see the pawnbroker come face to face with the Subcontinent man to whom the diamond belongs... A man who insists he has no intention of killing him... Though, like the man who came before him. The broker will come to wish that he had!
Our final tale, "Infatuation", introduces two married women of the French aristocracy, this as the women take advantage of their correct and powerful husband's evening away at their club to partake of the Absinthe and break free of the societal inhibitions placed upon them by life in mid-nineteenth-century Paris... Revealing in the process a decadent and obsessional sexual secret that could be the ruination of one of them... And, thanks to the thought-scrambling power of the Absinthe, maybe both!
A collection of Mr Hopcraft's longer short stories of female-led and occult fantasy, for those readers who prefer to use the darker sides of their imaginations with the help of character-driven plotlines.
