Evil at Monteine

by Brian Ball

Richard Ulrome worked for billionaire recluse Simon Miaolo. At first, Anne Blackwell was pleased for her fiance's career but then it seemed that Richard was a prisoner at Monteine Castle, Miaolo's headquarters. Anne soon realizes that a master of evil in a satanic ritual is manipulating Richard and herself."

171 pages, Paperback

Published May 12, 1977

About the author

UK author (Also writes as Brian N. Ball.), until 1965 a teacher and lecturer, subsequently freelance, who began publishing sf with "The Pioneer" for New Worlds in February 1962, soon after editing a juvenile anthology, Tales of Science Fiction (anth 1964). His first novel, Sundog (1965), is one of his better books, in which – though restricted by incomprehensible and uncomprehending Aliens to the solar system and by itself to a rigidly policed Dystopia, – mankind transcends its limitations. The trigger factor is the simple-seeming Spaceship pilot Dod, who slowly discovers himself to be a rather more formidable Scientist who was subjected to "blocking" (see Memory Edit) when his researches frightened the regime.
There followed a projected five-book sequence involving an ancient Galactic Federation, its relics, Time Travel, and rebirth: Timepiece (1968), Timepivot (1970) and Timepit (1971). A second series, The Probability Man (1972) and Planet Probability (1973), follows the exploits of Frame-Director Spingarn in his heterodox construction of reality-spaces (frames) for the delectation (and voluntary destruction) of billions of bored citizens. Singletons include Night of the Robots (April 1965 Science Fantasy #71 as "The Excursion"; exp rev 1972; vt The Regiments of Night 1972), in which assorted visitors to a Ruined Earth inadvertently waken an ancient AI-controlled military installation. Though he sometimes aspires to the more metaphysical side of the sf tropes he utilizes, Ball's style tends to reduce these implications to routine action-adventure plots, competently executed.