Selección Terror: Las mujeres gato

About this issue

This issue of Selección Terror (no. 375, May 1980) contains "Las Mujeres Gato" by Curtis Garland, a horror tale set in 1974 London. The narrative opens with Horace Stowefield, a young man who has quarreled with his fiancée Lilian, taking a nighttime walk near the Thames to clear his head. While seeking a taxi near Parliament and the Big Ben, he becomes uneasily aware of being watched and glimpses a cat with glowing eyes in the darkness. Suddenly attacked by something horrific, he is brutally killed, his body left mutilated by the river. The second section introduces Jarvis Normand, a seducer who brings home an alluring woman named Kristy from a nightclub in Piccadilly. His white Angora cat reacts with terror to her presence, its fur bristling. As Jarvis attempts to seduce the passive but inviting Kristy on his apartment sofa, the narrative leaves ambiguous what she truly is—the title's "cat women" suggesting something supernatural or inhuman beneath her beautiful human form.