Necromancy of the Demon Maiden

In the late 17th-century, in Turkish-occupied southern Poland, a kabbalist faces vicious persecution from his fellow Jews because of his secret adherence to the teachings and practices of the disgraced false messiah, Sabbatai Zevi. Forced to take refuge with a dreamy and unstable Polish count in a nearby castle, the Jewish mystic is soon forced to summon a demon maiden to fulfill the aristocrat’s yearnings for a woman with whom to live out his fantasies of walking amongst the goddesses and queens of the ancient world. But the noble lord and his reluctant necromancer quickly lose control of the demon bride–with horrific and bloody consequences.

Blending themes from heretical and messianic strains of Jewish mysticism and Gothic fiction of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, Necromancy of the Demon Maiden: A Gothic Tale of Podolia is a meditation upon the temptations of fantasy and magic and the longing to find vestiges of divine goodness scattered and trapped in places of darkness.