“Highly enjoyable mainstream horror fare from a genre veteran…” Booklist
Thorn
A dark re-telling of the Sleeping Beauty legend.
For several hundred years the Ingram family has lived under a curse – the taint of homicidal madness which manifests itself in the females every 80 or 90 years – and now it seems as if the madness has struck again in the beautiful Imogen.
Dan Tudor, a writer commissioned to produce a feature on the family, is not convinced. But he has no suspicions that his investigations will lead him to a macabre horror beyond imagining.
Thornacre had been a bad place; it had been the worst place Quincy had ever been. But Briar House had a great many very lovely things, and the loveliest of them all was Imogen Ingram. The first time Quincy saw Imogen she could not stop staring.
Imogen had a lot of visitors. They brought flowers and fruit and they drove smart cars. You would expect Imogen to have family like this. Quincy was pleased for her.
And then, four days after Imogen’s arrival, Mrs Caudle came, and the minute Quincy saw her she stopped being pleased and began to feel cold and shivery. Mrs Caudle was not here to be nice. She hated Imogen.
The impression that Imogen was being slowly drawn towards something terrible and something threatening began to form.
Leo Sterne set up Imogen’s first treatment very carefully. He was conscious that several layers below his ordered thoughts there was a strong current of anticipation. This one’s different. This one’s special.
It afforded him a faint, ironic amusement to discover that he was going about the preparations like a priest preparing the high temple for some act of worship, or a medieval squire undergoing fasting and purification on the evening before his knighting. The hypodermic syringes lay ready, and near to them was the remote control for the video player. Medical science and media science hand in hand. Or on the same table, at any rate.
He was going to play the videos to her, but first there would be a single preliminary dose of amphetamine for stimulation. Later he would inject methadrine. If I can trigger an abreaction and released the suppressed terror, he thought. If I can once get her to hear me… Leo admitted that what he really wanted was to call Imogen out of her dark sleep unaided. And play Pygmalion, breathing life into the statue? jeered his mind. Once you cross that line, you really will be entering the shadowlands of improper conduct. But he was conscious of rising excitement, and the sudden needto be alone with Imogen was so strong that it was almost sexual arousal. Which was a very dangerous way to feel indeed.