Wicked Delights [Kindle Edition]

John Llewellyn Probert (Author)

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Starred Review. Prolific horror writer Probert (The Faculty of Terror) offers up 18 gruesome, unsettling, and often unnervingly funny tales in his wide-ranging fifth short story collection. In At Midnight, I Will Steal Your Soul, a terrifying choir rehearsal in a haunted asylum leads an anxiety-plagued woman to a profound realization. Two for Dinner is a heart-pounding tribute to revenge horror films with a gleefully disturbing punch line. The Mirror of Tears is a haunting family drama about childhood terror and the sometimes damaging power of love. Vividly creepy images—the pages of a cookbook sucking on a child like leeches, an entire company being reduced to a sculpture of body parts as part of a corporate takeover—are all the more compelling when rendered in Probert's breezy style. An illuminating and frequently hilarious afterword ends the collection on a gentle note. (Apr.)
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From Booklist

When he’s not penning gruesomely amusing horror tales, Probert writes essays online reviewing some of his favorite slasher flicks, both obscure and famous. In his fifth story collection, his cinematic appetite often manifests in stray movie references and crisp, screenplay-ready narration laced with vivid imagery. The opening story, “At Midnight I Will Steal Your Soul,” for instance, shares its title with a little-known 1964 Brazilian movie and follows a fearful woman’s visit to a psychiatric hospital, where an evil presence waits to claim her soul and body. “Ophelia” recounts the fate of a young woman kidnapped expressly to become a model corpse for a group of unprincipled artists bent on reproducing great paintings. In “Your Help Needed Urgently!,” a deceitful businessman is forced to watch video clips of torture scenes to avoid being exposed. More than once Probert goes absurdly over the top with his story arcs, but his penchant for wily humor and odd narrative twists just as often yields a genre gem. --Carl Hays

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Product Details

• Format: Kindle Edition
• File Size: 512 KB
• Print Length: 354 pages
• Page Numbers Source ISBN: 0981159729
• Simultaneous Device Usage: Unlimited
• Publisher: Atomic Fez Publishing; 1 edition (April 2, 2010)
• Sold by: Amazon Digital Services
• Language: English
• ASIN: B003R0LP7M
• Text-to-Speech: Enabled
• Lending: Enabled
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #201,311 Paid in Kindle Store (See Top 100 Paid in Kindle Store)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Delightfully horrific!, September 6, 2011

By 

RIJU GANGULY "perceptive reader" (India) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Wicked Delights (Hardcover)

Readers of John Llewellyn Probert (those who are yet to encounter his work are strongly recommended towards his earlier writings, namely: The Faculty of Terror, The Catacombs of Fear, Against The Darkness) know that his fiction is of a unique variety. It has an adequate quantity of horror (worldly or supernatural) mixed with judicious amounts of humour & cruelty (for ready reference: consult the stories in the Pan Book of Horror series), served with a flourish & liveliness that we never expect in horror stories. This book is quintessential Probert, as his style is displayed in the 18 stories with abundance, leaving you gasping for breath, since you had been suspending that process because you were unable to decide whether to laugh or to cry or to grimace. The contents are: -

(*) Introduction

1. At Midnight, I Will Steal Your Soul: what happens when a perpetually scared person decides to face the ultimate horror?
2. Special Offer: viewing the world of tele-shopping in an imaginary light, but what if it gets 'real'?
3. Daughter of the City: a haunting story, that began like Simon Kurt Unsworth's famous "The Church on the Island", but ended in a very-very different note.
4. The Iconostasis of Imperfections: a classic (Lovecraftian?) horror story, located in Siberia(!!).
5. Ophelia: this story could have regally marched into the very best of Pan Book of Horror, with its unspoken & unfair cruelty and hapless protagonist.
6. Size Matters: superb mixture of humour, grotesque, and 'gross', told with panache.
7. Recipe for Disaster: a superb piece of "a book gone wrong", composed for inclusion in "Bound for Evil" anthology.
8. Best Man's Speech: a poignant ghost story, with a twist that was truly unusual.
9. The Mirror of Tears: another poignant ghost story, revisiting a long-held belief and legend.
10. The Comeback Kid: in my humble opinion, this is one of the funniest pieces that I have read in recent times, one that the reader is bound to enjoy irrespective of the state of mind at the time of reading.
11. Last Christmas: another proper, no-frills, horror story.
12. In Sickness and...: what happens if a person with responsibility & power becomes criminally insane?
13. Two for Dinner: a tribute to all the stories (and different styles of sadistic 'pleasure') described in the Pan Book of Horror series, and one fully worthy of getting included in the same series.
14. De Vermis Infestis: worms that devour intelligent literature (NOT those created by Dan Brown), and intelligence!
15. The Dispossessed: what happens when we start losing the cover for hiding all that nastiness below?
16. Your Help Needed Urgently!: charity, with a shocking difference!
17. The Volkendorf Exhibition: does art imitate life, or IS IT life?
18. Some Must Suffer: a tribute to the 1970-s British Horror Cinema.

(*) An Afterword: candid sharing of the genesis of the stories.

Overall, a solid collection of 'Probertian' stories which should be compulsory reading for lovers of horror, who like their stories to have a contemporary setting, and yet, told with a minimum of 'f-words' and maximum of atmosphere-building sharp sentences.