Cautionary Tales: Voices from the Edges

‘Funny, brutal, and irreverent’ – Bustle.com

“We are the voices in the shadows …”

Inspired by Eastern European and Russian superstitions and folklore, here are twelve tales; darkly delicious imaginings for the adult connoisseur of bedtime stories.

“Listen,
Listen with your eyes,
and your lips”

Be drawn into a world where the boundaries between the everyday and the unearthly are snakeskin-thin, where the trees have eyes and the night has talons, where demons, drawn by the perfume of human vice and wickedness, lurk with intents malicious and capricious.

“Listen with your skin
and your blood”

Here, the touching of your coat button as you pass through a graveyard can mean the difference between great fortune or eternal misfortune.

“We’re here,
at the edges.”

Tread carefully, for here the dark things best left behind in the forest may seep under your door and sup with you; the lover at your window or in your bed may have the scent of your death already on their breath.

“We are the shiver on your uneasy flesh,
The creep of the unknown on your skin.”

Whispered to you from the edges, from the haunted mouths of those who see more than you or I, here are twelve tales of lust and rivalry, of envy and deceit, and of secrets gouged from the darkest depths of the human heart.

Is your shadow on the wall,
really yours, after all?

From the vivid imagination of Emmanuelle de Maupassant, here are her Cautionary Tales – eerie, bawdy, horrific and erotic.

They’re watching.




“I didn't so much read it, I absorbed it. Your work is like the richest of tiramisu, it has to be savoured.”
- Peter Timbrell - ‘Eros Publishing’



'Your stories are still running through my mind. It’s as if you've created a living thing with a heartbeat. Quite extraordinary.”
- Helen Bach