David Langford & John Grant - Guts

[dem bones]

Not technically a rivals of the rats, but this seems the most appropriate place for it.

David Langford & John Grant - Guts: A Comedy of Manners (Wildside/ Cosmos, 2001).

Juha Lindroos

Blurb: (via Ansible)
Guts: A Comedy of Manners by David Langford and John Grant is a raucously tasteless spoof of horror novels, first written in the late 1980s and accepted and paid for by a major UK publisher (Grafton) which later changed its mind, because what the editor loved the marketing department could not stomach. Can readers display greater intestinal fortitude than miserable old Grafton?

"The first horror novel I don't even dare to read!" — Ramsey Campbell
"I have seen the bowels of horror fiction, and their names are David Langford and John Grant!" — Graham Masterton
"In the great tradition of Harry Adam Knight!" — Simon Ian Childer
"Makes Night of the Crabs look like Beatrix Potter!"— Guy N. Smith

"Dead she might be, but that didn't mean that she was no longer living."

David Whitlow, 33 year old assistant to the renowned Professor Hank G. Eschar, maintains that is our duty to find a means of establishing contact with the alien intelligence at work within each and every one of us - the stomach. David has not long finished attempted to explain this in words dishy but dim Miranda Eschar can understand than her father, Prof. Hank G. Eschar, is on the phone. "I've done it ! I've discovered the secret of telepathy. I've just discovered a machine that can be used to read a human mind!" David's superior brain goes to work; What if .... what if this micro-machine could be fed into the human digestive tract?

Using Miranda as bait, the boffins persuade Malacia Furuncle to act as guinea pig in their ground-breaking research, "the girl with the Charles Bronson moustache" having long lusted after her old school chum. What they fail to take into consideration is that Malacia's stomach might hates mankind's guts. Resentful and panicked at being spied upon, the digestive tract effects an escape mid-experiment via the nearest available orifice ....

The enemy within is without! The sentient intestine wages a campaign of man-flesh-eating terror worse even than those so recently perpetuated by crabs, slugs, maggots, lamprey, cockroaches, moths, flies ...

Contemporaneous with above events, Kurt Salpinx and L. Ron Meloma, press officer of the Neo-Nazi movement, are plotting a Fourth Reich from a Paris restaurant. And I should make mention of Eschar's "loveable" robot, Basil-Duane, a tin-man with Christian fundamentalist principles.

P. 41 of 173.

[humgoo]

So that's how you got back to reading novels! Please continue!

[dem bones]

Finding it a struggle — just don't have the stamina these days.

"Hot ziggety, let the cock-proud sons of Adam fear my .... spigot!"

Miraculously, the Professor successfully grafts the still living remains of Malacia to the Holy Roller robot, so no real harm done, although the tin man is bitterly upset by the merger. Come to that, Malacia is less than thrilled at having a "dustbin with a spout" stuffed into her stomach cavity, but we all have our crosses to bear.

Whitlow gets to wondering if - incredible as it may seem - a prolific entrails thief cutting a bloody swathe across New York and Malacia's absconded oesophagus may be one and the same entity.

An audience of eight million witness showbiz mumbo jumboist Gell Urethra endure an out of bowel experience live on the Letterman Show.

Erythrotsia, the celebrated Greek Nazi mad scientist, develops a Gastric Utility Targeted System with a frequency capable of destroying the enemy within while leaving the rest of the body standing ....

[helrunar]

Oh Dear.

H.