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Post by dem bones on Jun 11, 2011 22:25:54 GMT
'James Blackstone' (John Brosnan & John Baxter) - Torched (Grafton, 1986) Alun Hood Blurb SPONTANEOUS HUMAN COMBUSTION ...
First, you feel uncomfortably hot. But it's no use turning up the air conditioning or reaching for a long, cool drink. Whatever you do, the temperature inside you keeps rising. And rising. Soon you're in agony beyond your wildest nightmares as your whole body is engulfed in searing, unbearable heat. You go mad briefly with the pain. Then, with luck, you black out. If your luck holds, you're dead soon after. Very dead. But your involuntary cremation continues. Your blood boils in your veins for a few seconds-before it bursts them. As your tortured corpse dries out from the horror-heat inside it, your skin blisters, pops, bursts-and then flares into scorching flame fuelled by your own melting body-fat. Clouds of choking, greasy smoke join the searing blaze consuming what's left of you. You have become your own funeral pyre ...
TORCHED!
is a devastating horror novel that goes beyond anything you've read before. Here is terror that grips you with fierce fingers of fire - and won't let go ...Another great Aussie Horror author, the late, very great John Brosnan (1947-2005: AKA Harry Adam Knight, Simon Ian Childer, James Blackstone, etc), the man responsible for Slimer , The Fungus (AKA Death Spore), Tendrils, Worm, Bedlam, Carnosaur and other revolting stuff. We've threads for HAK & co all over the board! and now this, the typically revolting Torched!. Many thanks to Mr. Saucecraft for providing me with a copy! Torched is what happens when you pair a weak-willed mad biochemist with a hugely successful porn baron. It begins in New York when a terrified young woman bursts into a businessman's hotel room demanding to stay the night. I'll pay you, of course, she intimates, stripping starkers before the bewildered gent has time to believe his luck. In less time than it takes to hang a 'do not disturb' sign, they're engaged in a terrific clinch. She moans ... and bursts into flames. The chambermaid finds their charred corpses welded together, but why so little damage to the room? Terminally cantankerous Richard Grierson, forty-three, is employed by the London branch of the Insill Insurance company to investigate suspicious fires. Having lost his wife and kids to an arson attack on his home, Grierson knows the game inside out and it is not the best idea to sneak a crafty fag on a jumbo jet when he's sat next to you. A spate of multi-million dollar claims have left Insill facing financial ruin unless they can prove the fires were caused deliberately. It's a business of such magnitude that, following a blaze which wipes out a significant proportion of the Universal Studios back lot, Grierson is packed off to New York to assist his US counterpart, Jack Lattimer. The prospect of working alongside another party so pisses Grierson, you worry that it is him who is about to ignite but, initially united in mutual loathing, the unlikely pair hit it off to the point where they make a formidable team, though their superior is none too impressed when they blame assisted spontaneous human combustion as the cause of Insill's near bankruptcy. Through leftover hippie Solomon Kurtz, drug-addled author of the vanity published Living Fireballs, Grierson and Lattimer learn of Dr. Isaac E. Glassbaum, late of Biotech and, to the best of his embittered wife's knowledge, late, period. With little of his wealth remaining to squander on his obsession, Glassbaum turned to Mantegna for assistance. Mantegra had already turned his back on the loser industrial film market and amassed a fortune via his private video club, but he saw potential in Glassbaum's experiment (essentially, tinkering with the pituitary gland until it was permanently switched to on). Could this guy really artificially induce SHC with just a tiny dart and a radio transmitter? According to Kurtz, he not only could, he did. Dental records have established that the girl barbecued in that NY apartment was Karen Woollcott, a model and 'actress' in some very specialist films, hard core porn being among the tamest. Karen's identical twin sister, Carol, is persevering with her own investigation into the circumstances surrounding her appalling death. Through Karen's oh-so-helpful best friend Gina, Carol learns that her sister mostly worked for Tony Mantegna, a sadistic sleaze who'll stop at nothing to protect his porno empire and even less to save his own skin. According to Gina, Karen, having learned something she shouldn't about Mantenga's involvement in a series of towering inferno's, plane crashes and plain old assassinations, wisely skipped town, but Mantegna has tentacles everywhere and for several months her incineration was always only a microscopic pellet away .... Carol decides to infiltrate Mantegna's entourage, even if it means she'll have to participate in an orgy or several to do so. Unbeknown to Grierson and Lattimer, Mantegra has kept them under surveillance since Grierson first stepped off the plane and they're getting far too close for his liking. Now they're about to board another flight and, if he has his way, there's not a single passenger will embark as anything other than a lump of charred meat .... An exploding peacenik conspiracy theorist, a bizarre death in the shower, wall-to-wall sexual violence (much of it involving Mantegna's star performer 'Sledge', a man whose improbably huge penis would make a cucumber batch feel inadequate) - there's even an entirely gratuitous nude whipping scene straight out of the shudder pulps. Stone me, but if you like your horror novels "ripe with the stink of decomposition", Torched! should hit the spot.
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