'Two small green-silver spots, almost like small fragments of reflected moonlight, shone up at them, not more than three yards away. Then, as they watched, the two points moved, trailing after them a smear of black...'

When the aspiring Canon Throcton is passed up for promotion to Dean of the Cathedral in favour of his rival Canon Simpkins, a faint knell of disorder rings out over the Close. Believing that suspicions over his scholarly work on Hebrew and Arabian mysticism led to his snubbing, Throcton nurses his pride with an experiment the invocation of a simple curse, popular in the East in ancient times, but surely no more than an antiquated trifle in the reign of Victoria? And yet a dark force answers the call something bestial and immortal, dragging pestilential vengeance and corruption to the very heart of the Cathedral.

First published in 1950, Heard's classic novel of occult horror and religious turmoil exudes a tense atmosphere of encroaching dread, its chills underpinned by Heard's expertise in world theology.

Gerald Heard was one of the pennames of Henry Fitzgerald Heard (1899-1971), an author, mystic, BBC science broadcaster and scholar of religion and philosophy. Heard was born to Anglo-Irish parents in London, and moved to California with his partner Christopher Wood, and friend Aldous Huxley, in 1937. His popular strange short stories were collected in The Grey Fog and The Lost Cavern, and he also wrote well-regarded crime novels such as A Taste for Honey, starring Mr. Mycroft as detective.