"The Horla Revisited", "The Interruption Revisited" and "The Salon of Madame Feng" from Sandrine Bessancort comprise the first volume in the "Hostile Salons" collection.

Read on, as a bachelor and solvent man-about-town in nineteenth-century Paris takes lodgings with a woman whose husband, he discovers, has only recently drowned himself in the Seine... It not taking our solvent bachelor long to realise that woman, widow, and landlady in question was the driving force behind that suicide... A widow and landlady in possession of occult powers she decides to focus on our once healthy and carefree hero... And in the most lasting of ways!

The poisoner of his wealthy and older wife has his dream of becoming a man-about-town snatched from him by the low born-and common London woman who served as his murdered wife's maid and housekeeper... A low-born and common woman who has cast-iron evidence of her master's guilt... And uses it to ensure he will NEVER be her master again!

On a visit to Paris with his fiancé to see a cousin, a stuffy and correct Englishman is taken to see the Chinese mystic, Madame Feng, along with his hosts and his fiancé herself. Told to expect great and surprising things; our cynical and dismissive Londoner is surprised to encounter just that from the strangely and disturbingly compelling Chinese woman... Not to mention her unnaturally powerful and exceptionally loyal Parisian housekeeper!

3-Works of believable fantasy and female-led fiction, for those readers who prefer to use the darker sides of their imaginations with the help of character-driven plotlines.

Ms Bessancort is a legal professional working out of Honfleur and is the author of "The Servant Revisited" and "Ancient Sorceries Revisited"; along with a number of other re-imagined and female-led stories of classic provenance.