Satyricon

Is Elmer Grant a satyr, a mythic beast unable to contain his own insatiable hungers, or merely a mortal man who brings infatuation, corruption and blood into the gossiping, fussy world of a well-known London department store.

Whatever his origins, Grant's entry into the staid halls of Smith & Wainright, manufacturers of fine fabrics to the Queen, is a match that ignites a powder-keg of sexual frenzy in this dark and animalistic fairy tale from Chancery Stone, the creator of The DANNY Quadrilogy.

Lean, mean and supremely erotic, it offers a sensual nightmare in a modern world, peopled with other-worldly creatures and a primeval hunger for more.


There were lots of things that alienated Elmer Grant from his peers, not least of which was the way he looked. Tall, dark and possessed of odd vacuous blue eyes, one piercing, one with a caul; a milky white dead thing, tissuey, transparent, still eerily showing the blue beneath, as if you could tear it away, like some wilful obscuring and have a perfectly good eye beneath. But you couldn’t, the eye was dead, completely unseeing. And yet the feeling persisted when he looked at you that he was seeing you with that eye, seeing you better.
The blind eye was on his left side and everything on that side seemed to follow its perverse direction. The brow that grew above it was sleeker, fuller, darker. The musculature of his left arm was heavier, more defined. His mouth turned up the tiniest flick at that side, giving him a look too old for his years, too knowing, like he understood things about you he shouldn’t and that you didn’t. His left foot dragged slightly when he walked, giving him a slightly loping look. In fact, there was something vaguely wolverine about him altogether, like some human caught mid change on a moonlit night, some Jekyll and Hyde eternally frozen in the sweep between good and evil. And all this at fourteen, what then was he like at twenty-five?
Scary.
That was the verdict at Smith & Wainright, manufacturer of fine fabrics to the Queen. It was something of a mystery to the staff how he had got a job there at all looking, as he did, so obviously deformed.