The Curse of the Fleers

Note! This description is taken from the new edition (PS Publishing, 2012, cover art by Stephen E. Fabian).

When Captain Guy Hammond, on convalescent leave from his regiment, is contacted by his old friend Cedric Fleer, he finds himself plunged into a treacherous web of deadly intrigue and unimaginable horror surrounding a noble Dorset family. Cedric’s father, Sir John Fleer, is being driven to the brink of madness by the ghoulish apparition of the ‘Creeping Man of Fleers’ which haunts the battlements of Fleer Manor. Is the bloodied and dying figure the fulfilment of the gruesome ancestral curse laid on the family, or is there a yet more sinister explanation for the horrifying deaths that follow Hammond’s arrival at the ancient mansion?

As the mysterious deaths mount up, Hammond must unravel the family feud that has raged down the centuries between the Fleers and the Darnleys, born of appalling crimes in the bloody past. Is Sir Jeffrey Darnley, the Fleers’ hated neighbour, responsible for these terrible events? Or could The Great Waldo, a celebrated actor who is also a master of disguise, also be implicated? Then there is the grotesque menagerie at Fleer Manor containing Konga, a huge ape that is capable of tearing a human being apart, and the sinister catacombs beneath the house which hide an ancient and deadly secret. But with time fast running out, can Captain Hammond brave death and danger long enough to discover what that terrifying secret is?

Published for the first time anywhere in the version the author originally intended, The Curse of the Fleers is a ‘lost’ Victorian Gothic novel by one of Britain’s acknowledged masters of the macabre.