Ronald Patrick - Beyond The Threshold

[dem bones]

Ronald Patrick - Beyond The Threshold (Sphere, 1982)

Blurb:
There’s money in death. And for a young, ambitious mortician like Robert Carlisle it’s more than a way of life, it’s a fortune. San Fransicso needed a fast efficient and dignified service like Carlisle’s. It needed someone to deal with the grisly cargo of Vietnam body bags.

But Carlisle didn’t need a way out sicko like Steve Anderson, the dandy of the icebox, on his staff. Nor did he need refugee surfer Chris Granger, straight out of high school and into the death trade. They want more than a decent living, they want the living body of his wife.

As the manic city heat swelters outside his chilly kingdom of death, Carlisle feels blind fear seep into his veins. He has lived like a vampire on the dead, now he will pay the price…

To get straight down to business, page one, paragraph six (Mr. Patrick's dots).

"Now, standing before the hardwood casket that contained the shell of what had been a living, breathing man .... lost in a morbid but exhilarating fascination that drove the pulse faster, faster, until he thought his heart would burst from his chest ..... alone with a corpse in a place where the living and the dead come together for one last sojourn .... Succumbing to the irresistible urge to touch it, he curved the pads of his fingertips into the orbital sockets, and his stomach went wild. He ran the back off his hand across one cheek, and thought he would faint."

Oceanview, California. High School student Chris Granger, seventeen, lands a summer job as a maintenance man at Carlisle Mortuary. This thriving institution was founded five years ago by Robert Emerson Carlisle, 34, with an initial cash-injection from his 29 year old trophy wife, Shawn. Carlise, an unprincipled hardnut, is ostracised by his competitors, who abhor his business malpractice, but even they can't detest him as much as Shawn does. For his part, he regards her as a poor little rich b*tch who's somehow got it into her head that she's a "businesswoman". Carlisle considers it his duty to "rid her of ridiculous ideas about participating in a man's world."

Chris's other colleague at the funeral home is Steve Anderson, 32, master embalmer, mortuary beautician, Carlisles right-hand man and a closet homosexual who frequents a seedy San Francisco Transvestite bar.

While we patiently await catastrophe, the author keeps us entertained with some nifty decomposing corpse action and a crash course in such ugly phenomena as skin slip, gas gangrene and "rot face", the latter occasioned by a bodged embalming which sees to it that, whatever her cantankerous husband demands, old Mrs. Potter will not be receiving an open casket funeral.

And then, of course, there are the sordid sex scenes.

Through with suffocating in a loveless marriage, Shawn brings the big guns into play, or to be more specific, her "magnificent, voluptuous white mounds" which she's soon rubbing in the faces of all and sundry. A bad sex interlude with Steve Anderson in the mortuary is ultimately unfulfilling - for her: it temporarily turns him straight - but not to worry, plenty more fish, etc. Her psychiatrist, Dr. Frank Cohen, hasn't had a go yet, but you feel it's only a matter of time now he's booked her in for a hypnosis session. As for Chris, its only a matter of weeks before both Shawn and Anderson can strike him from their to do lists. Carlisle settles for jerking himself off out of choice on account of there's no-one else can match his all-round superbness.

Unknown to all of them, Carlise has hired a private detective to keep tabs on his promiscuous wife and he's soon in possession of incriminating photographs of Shawn getting down to business with Chris who is still a minor under Californian state law. Either she agrees to an uncontested divorce on the grounds of adultery or he'll drag her through a nice juicy court case. There's just one fly in the ointment: The blackmail demands of 'Dave', a greasy haired, smelly tramp of a man in filthy army fatigues, fast-dying of leukemia, who knows more than Carlisle would wish about his shady "military contract". This is much alluded to in the text, though we've yet to discover exactly what heinous activity Carlisle got up to during the Vietnam war.

Well! After that downright creepy drooling-over-a-corpse moment on page one, my one concern was that the author couldn't possibly keep it up for an entire novel, but having just passed the halfway mark, he's sure made a good fist of it so far.

To be continued ....

[dem bones]

All finished. Not quite the masterpiece it might have been - it's uneven, probably overlong by 50 pages and some characters don't die horribly - but Beyond The Threshold can't be accused of lacking in morbid titillation, and the grisly torture episode which inspired the cover painting isn't one to forget in a hurry. The revelation concerning the military contract is a shocker.

you have to wonder if Ronald Patrick's relationship with his mother-in-law was a little fraught at the time as he subjects Carlisle’s, Katrina Andros, to all manner of indignities. The first time we meet her we learn that Mrs. Andros is frigid (she's not had sex for decades since her late husband shoved it in her mouth), her looks are shot to pieces and she's a martyr to constipation ("and Raisin Bran was slow"). With regard to the latter, the author sees fit to provide regular news flashes, culminating in a blow-by-blow account of her violent mugging, mid-crap, in an airport toilet cubicle. Convalescing in hospital, she makes a confidante of a bowl of rice pudding and eventually becomes a voluntarily patient at a private mental hospital.

thanks to Steve for alerting me to this ghoulish gem and to David Riley - HAPPY BIRTHDAY, Mr. R! - for coming up with a copy.