The Devil's Kisses - Linda Lovecraft

In 1976 Corgi Books in the United Kingdom released The Devil’s Kisses, a paperback collection of erotic horror stories. This proved successful enough that the next year they released a further collection, More Devil’s Kisses, also in paperback, but no further volumes were issued in the series. The nominal editor for both was “Linda Lovecraft”—a pseudonym adopted by horror editor Michel Parry solely for this project.

Parry had achieved success as an anthologist with the Mayflower Book of Black Magic series (6 volumes between 1974 and 1977); these were cheap paperback horror collections which were thematic descendants of the Not at Night series assembled by editor Christine Campbell Thomson. When Pulpmania asked him about the origin of Devil’s Kisses, Parry explained:

The Devil’s Kisses consisted of 11 stories, nine of them reprints—including pulp stories from Weird Tales contemporary with H. P. Lovecraft, such as C. L. Moore’s “Shambleau” (Nov 1933), and Mindret Lord’s “Naked Lady” (Sep 1934). Two original stories were published in the volume for the first time, including Ramsey Campbell’s “The Other Woman.”

None of these are stories of the Cthulhu Mythos, although “Shambleau” certainly falls under the category of “Lovecraftian.” The stories are rarely sexually explicit, being much more suggestive and titillating than pornographic. A solid collection but one with a narrow focus. In the introduction, “Linda Lovecraft” noted, after describing the Devil’s penis: