Liz Williams is a wonderful writer who can turn her pen to anything, be it hard SF, fantasy, detective fiction, or esoteric non-fiction. This particular story was one that we published in Visionary Tongue two decades ago, and it really appealed to me because of the protagonist, Thomas De Quincey, who was an early 19th century memoirist, whose work I had studied at university. Most people who read Thomas de Quincy’s Confessions of an English Opium-Eater focus on the sections about the “pleasures” and “pains” of taking opium, but I liked how London is also seen as an enabling and corrupting city, almost personified – its malevolence indicated early on when it seems to swallow whole the young prostitute who first befriended Thomas on his arrival.
In this story, London is given a human-like physical presence that, like the city itself, is both beguiling and debilitating to De Quincey – that of a succubus. The demon latches onto the young man and forces him to lie with her. Knowing that the demon will wreak revenge on those he loves if he does not, the young man submits. The drug becomes the prop de Quincey clings to in order to get through each repeated encounter. This is an imaginative retelling of the memoir and I love it.
First published in Visionary Tongue
A Personal Anthology 