The Succubus of Elder Lane

This is a slow-burn supernatural horror romance about a man being consumed by a woman who almost, but not quite, loves him back. It is about the way a body fails when something is feeding on it. It is about the legal architecture that lets a creature older than the country sign a 1998 cohabitation rider and live in a suburban Virginia split-level for twenty-five years without anyone in the neighborhood noticing. It is about the cost of being chosen, and the longer cost of choosing back.Mara is not the succubus of pulp paperbacks.She does not visit men in their sleep. She does not have horns or wings. She wears cardigans. She bakes bread on Saturday mornings. She washes her hands at the kitchen sink with lemon soap. She is patient, she is intelligent, and she is what she is , a creature on a twenty-five-year reproductive cycle who cannot bear a child with an infertile man and who has been waiting, in this house, for a long time. When Nigel walks through her door with a notice in his briefcase, the wait is over.The book follows their seven autumn weeks together. Nigel’s body diminishes; the house grows warm. His colleagues notice. His firm’s senior partner makes a single visit and comes home a different man. Brenda, the firm’s twenty-year office manager, watches both men collapse and tries to save the one she can still reach. The eviction never gets served. The cycle runs its course. By the first week of December, Nigel has stopped going to work.For readers who love paranormal romance with weight, Anne Rice’s older work, the restraint of Sarah Waters, the slow domestic dread of Shirley Jackson, the explicit register of contemporary dark romance - The Succubus of Elder Lane is for you. The book sits in the space between literary horror and adult paranormal fiction. It is patient. It is intimate. It is explicit where it needs to be, and quiet where it needs to be quieter. The sex scenes do not flinch.Readers searching for slow burn paranormal romance, supernatural horror novels, dark paranormal fiction, succubus stories, demon romance books, occult fiction with strong female characters, haunted house novels with adult themes, or paranormal erotic horror will find what they came for. The book will appeal to fans of Crescent City, A Discovery of Witches, The Haunting of Hill House, Mexican Gothic, The Vampire tradition, modern witch fiction, and the literary edge of contemporary dark romance.There is no detective. No exorcist. No rescue. The contract is binding. The cycle is biological. The ending is the ending you can already feel from the first chapter, but you will keep reading because the question is not what happens. The question is what Mara is, and whether she means any of it, and what she says to Nigel on the night he stops being able to walk.She says: I cared about you. As much as I am able to.He says: Stay.She doesContent warning: explicit sexual content, supernatural predation and seduction, depictions of sexual contact, a slow on-page death. For adult readers only.