Customer Reviews

The Night Visitor (Thorndike Large Print Popular Series)

5 star:		(0)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

The Night Visitor was published in March 1979 as a paperback original by Pinnacle Books, Los Angeles, California. The author credited on the front cover, spine, and title page is Laura Wylie. Copyright, however, is held by the Pyewacket Corporation. The book was re-published in 1988 in hardcover in the U.S.A. and Great Britain by Severn House Publishers. Authorship second-time around changed to Patricia Matthews (from Laura Wylie). The novel is a modest 238 pages in length and is written in easy-to-read prose.

The Night Visitor is a horror novel about tenants of New York apartment building, the Barkley Plaza, that suddenly comes under sexual seize each night by a demon/incubus who assumes human form in order to have sexual relations with primarily women. The demon, known as Dion while in male form (Lily while in female form), follows a former lover and her family to the Barkley Plaza after they flee Rome, Italy for fear of someone/something far worse than Dion! Other tenants begin to fall victim to the demon's sexual advances starting the very first night the new family moves in. It doesn't take long before marital strife among the tenants erupts into domestic murder. Can the tenants of the Barkley Plaza act quick enough to save themselves?

I found the novel to be a quick read, never meant to be great literature, but entertaining none the less along the lines of Gary Brandner's The Howling (1981), Hellborn (1981), Walkers (1982), etc. I especially liked the ensemble cast of characters residing at the Barkley Plaza where people truly care about other people like family, quite the exact opposite of another literary New York apartment building featured in John Lutz's bestselling novel Single White Female (SWF) Seeks Same (1990).

Perhaps the best thing about the novel is a throwaway character, the lonely, cruel Contessa de Fiore, the two hundred year old plus women who conjured up the incubus Dion as her pet, who plans on living several hundred more years by staving off old age by borrowing/stealing a few hours here and there from the youth she surrounds herself with. She is the last of her line, promising centuries of life in exchange for companionship.