It doesn’t exactly break new ground (naughty nuns are hardly a novelty in erotic fiction), and I’m not entirely sure the “classic” tag is appropriate, but HOUSE OF PAIN does nonetheless deserve credit for the very real sense of anguish that emanates from its pages.
The idea of a man-made drug causing people to lose their sexual inhibitions had been done before THE GAS saw print and after, but no other novel took the concept as far as Platt did.
This is my favorite novel by the late Hubert Selby Jr., who’s best known for LAST EXIT TO BROOKLYN and REQUIEM FOR A DREAM. THE DEMON occupies a unique place in Selby’s oeuvre, being (I think) his most interesting book but also his most problematic.
There’s never been another novel like this one, and that includes those of its author, the brilliant James Graham Ballard. CRASH was adapted from a short piece that initially appeared in Ballard’s ATROCITY EXHIBITION (1969).
Joe Egan is a desperate man on the run from a mysterious blonde woman who is in fact the Angel of Death.
The notorious Donatien Alphonse Francois, a.k.a. Marquis de Sade (1740-1814), is many things to many people
The video underground of the early 1990s produced its share of groundbreaking horror films.
France’s Roland Topor (1938-1997) was a veritable genius of perverse and surreal literature
The genesis of the following piece occurred upon seeing PREDATOR for the first time. That was back in 1987, and I, naïve though I was back then, couldn’t help but flash back to two then-recent hits: RAMBO from 1985 and the following year’s ALIENS
If you know of the late Michael Blodgett (1939-2007) it’s most likely as a beefcake actor, yet in my view Blodgett’s most enduring work was done in the three unjustly forgotten novels he published in the late seventies and early eighties