I gasped, or tried to. My mouth opened, but I couldn’t draw breath. His lips, pearly wet, parted and he blew into my mouth. My lungs expanded beneath his weight. When I exhaled he sucked my breath in and his weight turned from cold marble into warm living flesh. Since accepting a teaching position at remote Fairwick College in upstate New York, Callie McFay has experienced the same disturbingly sensual dream every night: A mist enters her bedroom, then takes the shape of a virile, seductive stranger who proceeds to ravish her in the most toe-curling, wholly satisfying ways possible. Perhaps these dreams are the result of her having written the bestselling book The Sex Lives of Demon Lovers. Callie’s lifelong passion is the intersection of lurid fairy tales and Gothic literature—which is why she’s found herself at Fairwick’s renowned folklore department, living in a once-stately Victorian house that, at first sight, seemed to call her name. But Callie soon realizes that her dreams are alarmingly real. She has a demon lover—an incubus—and he will seduce her, pleasure her, and eventually suck the very life from her. Then Callie makes another startling discovery: Her incubus is not the only mythical creature in Fairwick. As the tenured witches of the college and the resident fairies in the surrounding woods prepare to cast out the demon, Callie must accomplish something infinitely more difficult—banishing this supernatural lover from her heart. “Vivid and enchanting . . . Dark’s letter-perfect gothic style is a satisfying tribute to previous gothic novels, and the paranormal elements, including incubi, fae, vampires, and witches, make this a stellar romance.”—Booklist (Top 10 SF/Fantasy) “[Juliet] Dark develops a complex, detailed world where magic, reason, and gothic literature enjoyably intersect.”—Publishers Weekly

Ever since moving to Fairwick to take up a teaching past at the local college, Callie has been having vivid, erotic dreams about a man made out of moonlight and shadows.

On September 20, 1587, Walpurga Hausmännin of Dillingen in southern Germany was burned at the stake as a witch. Although she had confessed to committing a long list of maleficia (deeds of harmful magic), including killing forty—one infants and two mothers in labor, her evil career allegedly began with just one heinous act—sex with a demon. Fornication with demons was a major theme of her trial record, which detailed an almost continuous orgy of sexual excess with her diabolical paramour Federlin "in many divers places, . . . even in the street by night." As Walter Stephens demonstrates in Demon Lovers, it was not Hausmännin or other so-called witches who were obsessive about sex with demons—instead, a number of devout Christians, including trained theologians, displayed an uncanny preoccupation with the topic during the centuries of the "witch craze." Why? To find out, Stephens conducts a detailed investigation of the first and most influential treatises on witchcraft (written between 1430 and 1530), including the infamous Malleus Maleficarum (Hammer of Witches). Far from being credulous fools or mindless misogynists, early writers on witchcraft emerge in Stephens's account as rational but reluctant skeptics, trying desperately to resolve contradictions in Christian thought on God, spirits, and sacraments that had bedeviled theologians for centuries. Proof of the physical existence of demons—for instance, through evidence of their intercourse with mortal witches—would provide strong evidence for the reality of the supernatural, the truth of the Bible, and the existence of God. Early modern witchcraft theory reflected a crisis of belief—a crisis that continues to be expressed today in popular debates over angels, Satanic ritual child abuse, and alien abduction.

Autumn isn't supposed to know that the incubus who visits her dreams every night is real. But when she wakes up in the middle of the night to find the demon Irdu in her bed, she surprises them both by inviting him to stay. What starts as an arrangement of convenience soon turns into something much deeper. But loving a demon comes at a steep price. An incubus is bound in service to the Underworld, and the only way for Autumn to free him is to pay with her soul. The deeper she falls in love, the closer she comes to damnation. With the Underworld in turmoil and the fate of their love on the line, Autumn and Irdu might have a chance to be together--or lose each other forever.

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

The hero of the story is a demonic lover—dark, handsome, mysterious, and dangerously seductive. The heroine—beautiful, and innocent—willingly becomes his victim and is destroyed by him. This story of demon-lover and victim, always charged with passion, has been told over and over, from Greek mythology through contemporary fiction and films. Demon-Lovers and Their Victims in British Fiction is the first historical and structural exploration of the demon-lover motif, with emphasis on major works of British fiction from the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries; it will interest those concerned with gender role conflicts in literature and with the mutual influence of oral and written texts of folklore and formal literature.