Moon-Madness, and Other Fantasies

Aimée Crocker Gouraud wrote these tales with the blood of a woman who actually lived them. Born into Gilded Age wealth, she abandoned society for adventures across Asia, marrying princes and dodging death in ways that sound invented but aren't. This collection channels that same reckless energy into stories where desire doesn't just break hearts - it shatters everything around it. In Monte Carlo, Howard Leslie falls for the enigmatic Elise Du Barry, also known as Our Lady of Red Lips, and their romance spirals toward catastrophe. A woman obsessed with pearls finds her way to an Indian Rajah andFACES consequences no one predicted. Lotus Flower, the dancer whose beauty is lethal, learns that being desired by everyone means being destroyed by everyone. These are gothic romances with teeth, proto-pulp tales where passion and madness are indistinguishable, where exoticism isn't aesthetic decoration but genuine danger. The writing crackles with a delicious excess that modern literature forgot how to do.