John Llewellyn Probert's latest short story collection - containing 18 delicious selections across 352 delectable pages - mixes the cruel with the carnal, the sadistic with the sexual, the erotic with the outrageous, to bring you tales of a cuckolded husband's terrible revenge, the television channel where you can pay off your debts but at the worst price imaginable, the man willing to do anything to improve his chances of success with the ladies, a marriage guidance counsellor who goes to bloody extremes to prove her point, the woman who will do anything to keep her family, and a city made entirely from human bone. All of this, and the last Christmas ever, just to make things even more cheery.Praise for Wicked Delights: * Prolific horror writer Probert (The Faculty of Terror) offers up 18 gruesome, unsettling, and often unnervingly funny tales in his wide-​​ranging fifth short story collection. In "At Midnight, I Will Steal Your Soul," a terrifying choir rehearsal in a haunted asylum leads an anxiety-​​plagued woman to a profound realization. "Two for Dinner" is a heart-​​pounding tribute to revenge horror films with a gleefully disturbing punch line. "The Mirror of Tears" is a haunting family drama about childhood terror and the sometimes damaging power of love. Vividly creepy images   the pages of a cookbook sucking on a child like leeches, an entire company being reduced to a sculpture of body parts as part of a corporate takeover   are all the more compelling when rendered in Probert's breezy style. An illuminating and frequently hilarious afterword ends the collection on a gentle note. Publishers Weekly (February 8th 2010) When he's not penning gruesomely amusing horror tales, Probert writes essays online reviewing some of his favorite slasher flicks, both obscure and famous. In his fifth story collection, his cinematic appetite often manifests in stray movie references and crisp, screenplay-​​ready narration laced with vivid imagery. The opening story, "At Midnight I Will Steal Your Soul," for instance, shares its title with a little-​​known 1964 Brazilian movie and follows a fearful woman's visit to a psychiatric hospital, where an evil presence waits to claim her soul and body. "Ophelia" recounts the fate of a young woman kidnapped expressly to become a model corpse for a group of unprincipled artists bent on reproducing great paintings. In "Your Help Needed Urgently!," a deceitful businessman is forced to watch video clips of torture scenes to avoid being exposed. More than once Probert goes absurdly over the top with his story arcs, but his penchant for wily humor and odd narrative twists just as often yields a genre gem. Carl Hays, Booklist