Seductions: A Novel of Sensual Terror

Just by the title alone, you know that Seductions is going to be filled with good looking peopke and lots of, um, action of a certain sort.

And because it’s written by Ray Garton, you also know that there’s going to be monsters and lots of fun, well, the kind that’s fun for the reader and not the characters.

The story revolves around Donald Ellis, a high school teacher with latent psychic powers who begins having nightmares, which are triggered by a race of shapeshifting monsters who have begun preying on the local community, starting with people in his life.

The monsters take the form of good-looking people and seduce humans so that they’ll go to bed with them. Once the humans reach climax, they get eaten, and don’t even know it.

The novel, which was published in 1984, is a quick read, with conventions that were far beyond, at the same time very much of its time. What’s interesting is that Garton shows you the monster from the start (so the previous paragraph wasn’t a spoiler).

The Ellis character swings between likeable (he’s a favorite of the students) to creepy (when he gets it on with another, really young, psychic). Garton’s prose is dynamic, continually pushing things forward, yet ending neatly with each chapter so that you can comfortably put the book aside when you have to attend to real life.

The ending was a bit strange for me, but I suspect it’s because times have changed and a similar scenario would have been handled differently now.

This was Garton’s first novel. Not his best, but you can already see the twisted genius that would go on to write Live Girls, etc.

A simple premise spun by expert hands into a good read, the kind you take to the airport, or in my case, to church so that I have something to occupy my mind before service starts. Okay, I didn’t really bring it to church. But it would have been fun if I had.

Reading Seductions made me think of Nine Inch Nails’ “Reptile,” for obvious reasons (Thanks to Erwin Romulo for sending me this souped up version).