Piranha to Scurfy Read Online Free

interventions, demonic possession, ghosts, as well as a great deal of unnatural or perverted sex, cannibalism, and torture. Occult manifestations occurred side by side with rational, if unedifying, events. Innocent people were caught up in the magical dabblings, frequently going wrong, of so-called adepts. Ribbon had learned this from the reviews he had read of Marle’s books, most of which, surprisingly to him, received good notices in periodicals of repute. That is, the serious and reputable critics engaged by literary editors to comment on his work praised the quality of the prose as vastly superior to the general run of thriller writing. His characters, they said, convinced, and he induced in the reader a very real sense of terror, while a deep vein of moral theology underlay his plot. They also said that his serious approach to mumbo jumbo and such nonsense as evil spirits and necromancy was ridiculous, but they said it en passant and without much enthusiasm. Ribbon read the blurb inside the front cover and turned to chapter 1.
    Almost the first thing he spotted was an error on page 2. He made a note of it. Another occurred on page 7.Whether Marle’s prose was beautiful or not he scarcely noticed; he was too incensed by errors of fact, spelling mistakes, and grammatical howlers. For a while, that is. The first part of the novel concerned a man living alone in London, a man in his own situation whose mother had died not long before.There was another parallel: the man’s name was Charles Ambrose. Well, it was common enough as a surname, much less so as a baptismal name, and only a paranoid person would think any connection was intended.
    Charles Ambrose was rich and powerful, with a house in London, a mansion in the country, and a flat in Paris. All these places seemed to be haunted in various ways by something or other, but the odd thing was that Ribbon could see what that reviewer meant by readers fainting with terror before page 10. He wasn’t going to faint, but he could feel himself growing increasingly alarmed.
Frightened
would be too strong a word. Every few minutes he found himself glancing up toward the closed door or looking into the dim and shadowy corners of the room. He was such a reader, so exceptionally well-read, that he had thought himself proof against this sort of thing. Why, he had read hundreds of ghost stories in his time. As a boy he had inured himself by reading first Dennis Wheatley, then Stephen King, not to mention M. R. James. And this
Demogorgon
was so absurd, the supernatural activity the reader was supposed to accept so pathetic, that he wouldn’t have gone on with it but for the mistakes he kept finding on almost every page.
    After a while he got up, opened the door, and put the hall light on. He had never been even mildly alarmed by Selma Gunn’s
A Dish of Snakes,
nor touched with disquiet by any effusions of Joy Anne Fortune’s. What was the matter with him? He came back into the living room and put on the central light and an extra table lamp, the one with the shade Mummy had decorated with pressed flowers. That was better. Anyone passing could see in now, something he usually disliked, but for some reason he didn’t feel like drawing the curtains. Before sitting down again he fetched himself some more whiskey.
    This passage about the mummy Charles Ambrose brought back with him after the excavations he had carried out in Egypt was very unpleasant. Why had he never noticed before that the diminutive by which he had always addressed his mother was the same word as that applied to embalmed bodies? Especially nasty was the paragraph where Ambrose’s girlfriend, Kayra, reaches in semidarkness for a garment in her wardrobe and her wrist is grasped by a scaly paw. This was so upsetting that Ribbon almost missed noticing that Marle spelled the adjective “scaley.” He had a sense of the room being less light than a few moments before, as if the bulbs in the lamps were weakening before