...And now read on! This is real Grand Guignol, a blood-and-thunder gothic novel that comes roaring out of the past and back onto our bookshelves once more. Will it start a retro fashion for gothics? I doubt it, but this is a lot of fun nonetheless. Bloody murders, history repeating itself, lesbianism, lunacy and a touch of the supernatural all combine together in a heady cocktail that seems all the more potent if, like this reviewer, you have a taste for this sort of thing and have been starved of it for a long time. The whole tale might have had even more menace, and deserved its classification as a crime novel, if the perpetrators had not been revealed so early in the book. As it is, the enjoyment lies in the inevitability of it all and a classification of horror is perhaps more deserved, possessing, as it does in spades, a fine feeling of a pretty, rural place and the hell that lurks within, in the best horror tradition. Great fun, and very readable.