9/5/26
Women In Horror Year: Day 119
Dancing With Demons by Lucy Taylor
Out of Print
If you see someone across a crowded room to who you're instantly, overwhelmingly attracted, RUN - in the other direction.Recovering alcoholic Jessie Tauber has heard that advice and chosen to ignore it, allowing a man she just met, the enigmatic Simon, with his penchant for secrecy and bondage games, into her life. By turns sensuous, seductive and brutal, Simon seems conjured up from her most erotic dreams...and most blood curdling nightmares.Soon Jessie is enmeshed in a kind of follie a deux, as she and Simon make a terrifying trip across Colorado, throwing everything and everyone Simon sees as an obstacle to their twisted love into deadly peril.
Originally released in 1999 as a signed limited edition hardcover by the now defunct Obsidian Press, then rereleased in 2019 in trade hardcover, trade paperback, and eBook by the now defunct Necro Publications, Dancing With Demons is to erotic horror what Stephen King’s IT is to novels about scary clowns. Any online listicle of Top Ten Extreme Horror books that doesn’t include this somewhere in the rankings can immediately be disregarded. It is as important to the subgenre as Jack Ketchum’s The Girl Next Door or J. F. Gonzalez’s Survivor.
“Demons,” as one 1999-era review put it, have been “written of exhaustively, and often badly, in supernatural horror yarns and duplicitous comics. But in this brand-new novel by Lucy Taylor, we find a brilliant study of demons of a far more human likeness: weakness, addiction, guilt. Real consequences in a real world propel this very real and terrifying novel. There are no horns on these demons, no evocations, no arcane occult texts, and no monsters rising from flaming pentagrams.” And that sums it up perfectly. The horrors, depravity, and cruelty inflicted here are utterly human, but no less harrowing. Indeed, they’re worse than something supernatural. And the characterization is perfect — a gut-wrenching descent into the disintegration of the human spirit that will leave you shaken.
Sadly, when Necro’s David G. Barnett passed away unexpectedly after being hit by a driver going the wrong way on a Florida highway, his publishing line went with him. Evil Cookie and various other publishers have been rescuing some of the orphaned books. i desperately wish someone would pick this one up, too. The good news, for you the reader, is that copies of all editions of this book are readily available on the secondary market, varying in price anywhere from $35 to $250, depending on the edition. If you can handle the literary equivalent of having a cheese grater scraped across your soul, then I heartily encourage you to track it down.
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I’ll be appearing from October 22 to October 24 at King Con, taking place at the Tropicana Casino and Resort in Atlantic City, NJ. He’ll have books and comics for sale. You can also bring books and comics from home and he’ll sign them for free. For more information on the convention, click here.
But don’t take my word for it. The man himself says:
