As he often did, Brown adds many eccentric and unexpected elements, including a warped sense of humor and a pointed political angle, as well as quite a few experimental touches that place HERE COMES A CANDLE in a category of its own.
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.
Of the thirty-some novels by Ramsey Campbell, this is only the second to be written in the first person.
An insane asylum set South African horror-sexploitation oddity from 1988 that was heavily informed by FAREWELL JOHNNY, the granddaddy of South African horror/cult films. Taken on its own terms THE SHADOWED MIND is agreeably bizarre, though not nearly as deep as it purports to be.
CONSUMED is the better-late-than-never debut novel 71-year-old David Cronenberg. It has a thoroughly unique and individual voice that falls somewhere between those of William Gibson and Don DeLillo in its concentration on technological minutiae and elegant perversity. It’s also fully in keeping with the obsessions and subject matter of Cronenberg’s films.
The premiere work of fiction by an author who seems destined to be known forevermore as a “friend of Oscar Wilde.”
Eccentric, humorous and decadent: all those things adequately sum up BEREAVEMENTS, with its perversely humorous depiction of grief-born insanity.
A “hider in the house” tale in the mold of the 1989 film of the same name and THE PEOPLE UNDER THE STAIRS, but it actually predated them by several decades.