Toplin
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- $9.99
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
“A cause for great rejoicing ... a first-person account of one man’s psychological nightmare ... succeed[s] so well in its atmosphere of profound alienation.” — Fangoria
DEATH IN THE FAMILY
BUT COME BACK SOON, the sign said. Obviously it was a lie. The people in the grocery store just wanted to make sure he couldn’t buy the spice he needed to make the recipe he’d selected for that night (recipes must be followed exactly). Obviously they wanted him to eat out ... to meet the waitress, Marta, ... to see her horrible, unspeakable, unbearable ugliness. It was obvious to him: her maimed, twisted face was the living desire to be dead. He had to help Marta be dead.
His teeth are perfectly white. He can’t see colors. He keeps a combination lock on his door and has twelve shelves of cookbooks. His walls bleed blood. His suits each have a number, S-1 through S-6. And life goes on.
Life goes on, if you can stand it. Life goes on, for the brave and the damned. Life goes on, but come back soon . . .
“An ambitious novel of psychological horror.”— Publishers Weekly
“Compelling—a tour-de-force of storytelling and style . . . recalls the anonymous dereliction of David Lynch’s Eraserhead ... McDowell tells Toplin’s story with considerable artistry, marvelous pacing, and a welcome dose of macabre humor. His prose is clear, precise, and tightly controlled ... and his imagery ... startling and vivid ... McDowell has populated his underworld with as bizarre a cast of grotesques as you are likely to find outside a Fellini film ... In its power to transport the reader into a wholly insane mind, Toplin ranks with Stephen Gilbert’s Ratman’s Notebooks and Ramsey Campbell’s The Face That Must Die— distinguished company indeed.” — Fantasy Review
“One of the best writers of horror in this country.” — Peter Straub
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
McDowell is a well known author of occult tales (The Amulet, The Elementals) who now offers an ambitious novel of psychological horror. The unnamed narrator relates his twisted view of life so transparently that we can see through his demented thoughts to the reality beneath. He thinks that everything happening in his decaying urban neighborhood holds a personal message for him and when he decides his destiny is to kill a hideously ugly woman, it is clear that only he sees any deformity. In the details of his madness (an obsession with numbers, a fascination with and repugnance for the flesh, his pathetic fallacy, etc.), the book vaguely recalls such great works of monomania and solipsism as Samuel Beckett's Three Novels, but any other comparison is invidious. Like the surrealist illustrations that objectify the narrator's visions, this novel is occasionally distasteful but mostly unmoving. December 15
