Trauma
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- $8.99
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- $8.99
Publisher Description
Bonnie's job – cleaning up after violent homicides – is not for the faint hearted. But for Bonnie it's a business she has built from the ground up; a service that she can be proud of. By day she sells make-up under her rather too amorous boss, a strange but necessary contrast to her gruesome night job. Working two jobs isn't easy, but with a husband like Duke, an unemployed drunk, she needs the money.
Blood soaked carpets and bullet holed plaster work might have become the norm, but when she notices a connection between a spate of senseless murders in which people inexplicably kill their loved ones, her tough exterior starts to crack. The links she sees sound crazy even to her, and can only be explained by the supernatural.
Winner of the Mystery Writers of America Edgar Allan Poe award 2003
"One of the few true masters of the horror genre." -James Herbert
"Masterton is a crowd pleaser, filling his pages with sparky, appealing dialogue and visceral grue."-Time Out,London
"Masterton's novels are charming, dangerous, and frightening...but all based on enormous erudition." - L'Express
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Within the span of a couple hundred pages, prolific horror writer Masterton (Spirit; The Manitou, etc.) successfully spins an entertaining, fast and disturbing read packed with dramatic tension, tightly drawn characters and realistic dialogue. Bonnie Winter sells cosmetics for Glamorex of Hollywood Inc. and runs her own business cleaning up domestic crime scenes. The creepy task becomes even worse after she discovers infestations of maggot-like, black caterpillars at her clean-up sites. A local entomologist confirms that the caterpillars grow into Clouded Apollos large butterflies with white, black-veined wings. In Aztec culture, the insect is considered the daytime disguise of a demon named Itzpapalotl, who drives people to kill their loved ones. Indeed, each of the scenes at which Bonnie finds the insects involves family members killing each other. Masterton's descriptions of the grim crime scenes are intoxicating (a man's blown-off head had "fallen backward so that, juglike, it had emptied its blood all over the floor") yet never gratuitous, and he neatly intertwines the Clouded Apollo story line with the saga of Bonnie's lackluster home life and budding affair with her Glamorex boss. As the novel draws to a close, the two plot threads converge, triggering a sequence of events that is both chilling and tragic.
