A vampire who calls himself Maldureve comes out of the shadowy borderlands of existence in response to the unvoiced desires of philosophy student Anne Charet. By choosing to see him she gives him substance; after feeding him, she too begins to hunger for blood. Maldureve becomes Anne's lover and mentor but he cannot protect her against his own enemies, mysterious creatures of light who call themselves owls because they believe that theirs is the highest wisdom of all. Anne's boyfriend, psychologist Gil Molari, worries about her health and state of mind, although he knows nothing about his supernatural rival. His anxiety is magnified when he becomes convinced that one of the mind-altering viruses with which he works has escaped from the laboratory. Gil refuses to believe in Maldureve but his refusal to believe cannot save him from becoming the victim of a fierce hunger that he cannot satisfy, which drives him in the end to an unendurable extreme. Anne believes that her...

This is a pulp science-fiction novel that was apparently written in about two weeks, but there's an unusually good McGuffin. It's one of those books where a Mad Scientist comes up with an invention that's going to destroy the human race. Usually, the invention is something prosaic, like a virus or a breed of killer robots or a transdimensional wormhole to a planet of evil demons, but Stableford had a better idea.

Harker Lee is a survivor. His mind withstands the threat of insanity and the pressure of imprisonment. His lifelong struggle to keep mind and body together in the face of the hostile environment of the maximum-security block is struggle against the society of his fellow men. But that society can still find a need for him a need for the ability to survive which it is testing to the full. He was taken from his cell once to be used in experiments in reading minds. Now he is brought forth again, to endure the ultimate test: to fly a Titan spaceship through hyperspace to the stars. Starflight destroys the minds of sane men. But Harker Lee is not sane and his mind has strength which sane men lack. In Harker Lee, the man whom society is caging for his crimes, now lies the hope that man might break out of the greatest of all cages the void of empty darkness which enfolds the Earth. In this chilling, enthralling novel of psychology and science fiction, one final escape must be made, for a...