Medusa's Coil by Zealia B. Bishop

A lone traveler racing to Cape Girardeau is lured off a lonely Missouri road to a decaying plantation house whose overgrown gate, collapsing porch, and haunted silence promise trouble before he ever steps inside. There he finds not an empty ruin but the frail, refined owner, Antoine de Russy, whose uneasy hospitality and grim warnings draw the stranger into a storm-bound night of confession, family history, and buried dread. As rain lashes the old estate of Riverside, Antoine recounts the rise and fall of his Louisiana planter family and the troubled life of his son Denis, a Harvard-trained doctor who drifted from Parisian artists and mystics into the orbit of the alluring Marceline Bedard. Their marriage brings Marceline to Riverside, where her beauty, exotic mystery, and uncanny presence unsettle the household, especially as Denis grows devoted and the servants respond with fear and reverence. The arrival of Frank Marsh, a decadent artist spiritually exhausted by ordinary life, intensifies the atmosphere. Drawn to Marceline as a source of creative renewal, he persuades Denis to allow him to paint her, but the sessions expose a charged triangle of jealousy, fascination, and occult memory. As Antoine tries to protect his son, he discovers that the true danger lies in the dark rites and secret desires Marceline and Marsh awaken. In this gothic tale of obsession, decay, and ancestral ruin, the house itself seems to wait for a final, terrible reckoning. This edition has been fully restored with modern typesetting, custom cover design.