Daughters of the Devil – Charles LeFebure

Daughters of the Devil – Charles LeFebure
1971 – Ace Books

The blurb on the back of this book describes its contents as “true stories of unparalleled sadistic erotica”. The front cover claims that it contains “Chilling accounts of fourteen women who used their terrifying powers of Darkness and Evil to inflict Pain for Pleasure!” It’s called Daughters of the Devil, for Christ’s sake. Can you imagine my delight when I found a copy of it for 5 dollars?

I mean, realistically, the book was shit, and I had known exactly what to expect. A few years ago, I read a book called The Devil’s Own by Peter Robson, and I had the feeling that this would be very similar. I just checked my copy of that book, and unsurprisingly, it was put out by the same publisher, Ace Books. After rereading my review of that book, I’m surprised at how similar it is to Daughters of the Devil. Charles LeFebure wrote two other books for Ace, Blood Cults and Witness to Witchcraft, and I reckon it’s safe to assume they’re the same kind of crap.

The chilling accounts in here are very sensational, and rarely convincing. Some of them are about real people, but I can’t find any evidence for the others. (This was my same complaint when I read The Devil’s Own.) When I googled some of the names in here, the only result I found was somebody else who had read this book complaining about the same lack of evidence.

I’m going to briefly describe each of the accounts in here in case anyone is interested.

1. A girl gets involved in a Satanic cult. They have orgies and sacrifice a fetus during a black mass. This account references Crowley, H.T.F. Rhodes and the Abbé Guiborg’s Black Mass. It wasn’t believable, but it was a pretty good start to the book.
2. Carletta Pantucci and her Daughters of Isis were a weird cult of lesbians that bred babies that they intended to raise as virgin cultists. They told the future by bloodletting women’s groins.
3. There was a weird convent where nuns were crucified and whipped by a perverted priest and made to watch him fuck their Mother Superior. This was all done in the name of Christ.
4. Caroline Langley, a one time friend of Aleister Crowley, commits acts of black magic, sometimes to kill people. I can find no evidence of Crowley ever knowing a Caroline Langley.
5. A six month old curséd baby poisons a boy with witchcraft and the boy’s hand is amputated.
6. Obango, the “Ga witch” from Ghana, bled ate and killed victims, 15 of whom were related to her. Ga witches have sex with animals.
7. Annie Palmer, the rich voodoo priestess decapitated some of her slaves and raped others with snakes. (This one has some basis in fact.)
8. Gdoma, an ugly Asian witch, coerces young people into sexing each-other up. LeFebure claims she’s very evil, but she doesn’t sound that bad really.
9. Some Mexican woman ran a sex school for children in her house. She killed two abusive husbands.
10. Caterina Sforza, a real Renaissance woman, is here described as ,’the most wicked woman of all time’.
11. A Chinese child sex-slave grows up to start her own brothel in which random johns are taken to the secret rooms downstairs and tortured to death. The events in this story allow for no possible way that anyone could ever discover what had happened – there could be no evidence – but somehow the author is able to tell the tale. The lady died without any trial or case against her. It’s a cool story even if it’s completely fabricated.
12. I got a bit into this one before I realised that I had actually heard it, or at least a version of it, before. It’s the story of Edward Arthur Wilson, the mysterious Brother XII, and his Madame Zee. Plenty of the details listed here are entirely false, but Lefebure’s fabrications don’t actually make the story any more interesting than it really is. I have another book on Brother XII that I have been meaning to read for a long time. I’ll definitely come back to Lefebure’s account when I get around to that one.
13. Charlotte Gilbert leads a cult that worships cats and ritually sacrifices dogs because they are cat’s natural enemies. Her cult is a breakaway of the Glastonbury Essenes, a real order that supposedly worships aliens.
14. The last account is of Catherine Deshayes (La Voisin), the abortionist and satanist involved in the Affair of the Poisons. This is the sensational account you’d expect.

Most of these stories contain little truth, and none of them are erotic. There is a fair bit of sadism though. This book is made up of descriptions of horrible women that probably never existed. The titles of this author’s other books sound very good, but they’re surely of the same quality. I’ll buy them if I ever see them for very cheap, but I wouldn’t be bothered hunting them down.