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Post by dem bones on Apr 29, 2011 10:16:22 GMT
Raymond Hawkey - It (Nel, 1984)  Cover designed by Raymond Hawkey: Photograph of death-mask by Peter Williamsi love a novel that begins with a good old fashioned WARNING to the reader: "This book contains descriptions of procedures for contacting so-called discarnate entities. Since such procedures are potentially hazardous, the reader is warned that they should only be carried out under the supervision of an experienced parapsychologist"! A team of paranormal researchers led by young Scottish parapsychologist Dr. Sarah Stuart are attempting to entice the ghost from the body of the brain-dead Russian Defence Minister, Marshall Andrei Illich Itzhevnikov, shot in the head while being smuggled through Germany. Despite his apparent attempted defection, Itzhevnikov has no love for the USA - the CIA blackmailed him over his insatiable appetite for perpetrating Jack the Ripper style atrocities on prostitutes - but he'd come to detest his Politburo comrades as entirely treacherous, power-hungry despots and knew that, were the CIA to release their video footage, his colleagues would be only too happy to liquidate him. Much to the embarrassment of his confidants, the US President has taken a keen interest in the paranormal and, after watching her on TV, insists Dr. Stuart is given every assistance by the security forces to conduct 'The Endor program', essentially an experiment in techno necromancy. Sarah insists there's not a hope in hell of establishing contact with the zombified 'It', but she's in no position to refuse a Presidential 'request' (more blackmail). So Itzhevnikov's body is flown to Maine, wired up to various defibulators or something, and kept 'alive' for debriefing. At first it seems as though the operation might even succeed when former Viet-Vet Jack Adams, experimenting with Electronic Voice Phenomenon, gets into an extended dialogue with a disembodied spirit who is clearly learned on the inner workings of the Kremlin, but Dr. Stuart is sceptical. It all seems too good to be true. The comrade, in life the epitome of evil, takes exception to having his fast decomposing corpse kept going just so a bunch of parapsychologists can conduct their mumbo jumbo, but he'll suffer anything to achieve revenge on the USSR. in the meantime, he's taken a ghastly shine to Sarah. Such a shine in fact that, following a nasty spectral rape featuring a hideous cameo from a Coke bottle, 'It' takes possession of her until his number one target arrives for an update on the project. The affable Mr. President leaves the laboratory a very changed man indeed .... Following the deaths of Joan Lansdale, an innocent young nurse, and the exceptionally gifted medium Mrs. Mitchell, Sarah's suspicions get the better of her. If Adams - as she strongly believes - is indulging his 'nam rage versus the CIA, are the rest of her team in on his convoluted 'joke'? and to what deadly end? The psi jargon can get a little heavy going but stick with It because it is truly nasty and pretty much has the lot, including the most horrific depiction of spontaneous human combustion i've ever read, a gratuitous (or so it seems to me) bondage scene, and a supremely creepy ending. Hawley also makes very clever use of W. B. Yeats' The Second Coming ("And what rough beast, its hour come round at last/ slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?"). For all that the cover boasts "the first truly modern ghost story", this has so many of the familiar trappings - Itzhevnikov's blood lust, his aversion to Holy Water and the Crucifix - i can't help but think of it as "a truly modern vampire story", and a very effective one at that.
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Post by Dr Strange on Apr 29, 2011 10:30:35 GMT
Sounds like a cracker so I thought I'd try to track down a copy, and it turns out Hawkey was much better known for designing book covers than writing them (including Penguin Len Deightons and Pan James Bonds). Also It was also published by Sphere as End Stage.
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Post by dem bones on Apr 29, 2011 11:01:05 GMT
ooops! thanks Dr S - i'm still rusty! here's the blurb, btw. Barely four months after the first hardback publication of It, the former head of the US Defense Intelligence Agency was forced to make the unprecedented public admission that - as revealed in It - his government was funding a multi-million dollar research program into the paranormal.
Already, as with his earlier, eerily prophetic bestsellers Wild Card and Side-Effect, Raymond Hawkey’s long researches among the labyrinths of the paranormal had touched on a flinching nerve of truth carefully hidden from an unsuspecting world.
It is the story of Dr Sarah Stuart, a coolly beautiful Scots parapsychologist who, while working in America, is made an offer she dare not refuse -for a Presidential request, carefully conveyed by a senior figure in Naval Intelligence, is an order.
Operation Endor, she is told, concerns the urgent debriefing of a mind of great evil and depravity, but with unequalled access to secret, globally important information.
Operation Endor needs her. Her orders are to raise the ghost of a dead Russian defector. i've a copy of the above-mentioned Side Effect, and that will surely get a look in soon. i managed to complete It in two sittings and, for once, 262 pages seemed too short! Raymond Hawkey – Side Effect (New English Library, 1980) |
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Post by franklinmarsh on May 3, 2011 9:17:21 GMT
[ a gratuitous (or so it seems to me) bondage scene They are never gratuitous, you know. Some good stuff popping up here recently. Oh, and by the way, that scandalous photo you put up purporting to be me on the train, as any fule kno I always kept my Times Literary Supplement inside my copy of Fiesta usually between the striptease feature and Reader's Wives, not the other way round, to facilitate the hip, swingin' perve image. |
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Post by doomovertheworld on Dec 27, 2011 16:08:23 GMT
i've a copy of the above-mentioned Side Effect, and that will surely get a look in soon. i managed to complete It in two sittings and, for once, 262 pages seemed too short! Raymond Hawkey – Side Effect (New English Library, 1980) i remember reading side effect when i was about 12/13. from what i recall i remember thinking it was a good with a particularly nasty twist in the tail. i also thought the front cover was ace particularly when my mother ended up confiscating it from me as being unsuitable |
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