By Harry Adam Knight
1992 Gollancz
Paperback, 215 pages
When thinking of John Brosnan’s (with
Leroy Kettle sometimes) books written as Harry Adam Knight, I tend to look at
the Big Three; The Fungus (1985), Slimer (1983) and Carnosaur
(1984). This one was unknown to me for a while until I stumbled upon it on a
certain auction site. I grabbed it and I’m glad I did. While it isn’t a
nature-runs-amok tale like the others, there is plenty of gruesome goodness on
tap.
Marc Gilmour is a serial killer
known as The Bone Man. He is very clever, very cruel and completely twisted.
The police in London finally catch him and put him away forever. He winds up in
Dr. Stephanie Lyell’s care. She and her crew have a drug they want to try on
him to try to make him... saner? To test its safeness, she even tries it on
herself, noting nothing out of the ordinary in her physiology. But the people
in the building that she lives in all have the same dream as she does,
sometimes with catastrophic results!
After she dreams of her sister
burning in a fire (which happened during her teens), a guy catches fire and
leaps to his death. No fire in his apartment, though. This brings Detective
Seargent Terry Hamilton into her life, for better or worse, and they try to
unravel the mysteries that keep piling up. Hamilton had a run-in with the Bone
Man in his past; Gilmour was responsible for his wife and kid’s deaths. He
can’t believe that anyone would try to reform that psycho.
That is the set-up and, of
course, once he starts getting his drugs, The Bone Man can pretty much take
over the entire town. Except for Lyell and Hamilton, who are now both taking
the drug. Still, he makes their world a surreal, alternate reality filled with
confusion and terror, playing their greatest fears against them. Hamilton’s
dead wife is back, as well as Lyell’s burnt neighbor who assaults her in a particularly
disgusting scene. There’s also a rain of living fetuses that will please the
gore-hounds. Yes, this is different from the other HAK books, but it has a lot
of merit of its own. I really enjoyed it (>splat<) and highly
recommend it if you can find it. The
Gollancz paperback has a nice cover by Tom Stimpson.
Added bonus, “Knight” mentions a
textbook written by Professor Simon Ian Childer, another of Brosnan’s
pseudonyms!
