Jack Martin – Videodrome

Jack Martin – Videodrome  (NEL, July 1983)

Blurb:
In the world that lies ahead of us all, reality and hallucination will merge and interchange.

So when Max Renn saw the flesh of his stomach swell and redden as though a giant worm was moving beneath the skin, was that imagination – or reality?

And when the skin split and the flesh parted like giant lips, soft and bloodied. When he could sink his fingers, his whole hand, deep inside, feeling and probing through the wall of his own stomach. As the juices, thick and warm, clung and sucked gently at his finger-tips, drawing him in. As the bile rose, hot with revulsion in his throat…. Was that a nightmare – or reality?

Michael Slade – Shrink

Michael Slade – Shrink  (NEL, 1998)

 Chris Moore

Blurb:

Once your head’s cut off, that’s the worst that can happen to it, right?

Wrong…

Over a decade ago, Michael Slade exploded onto the international psychohorror thriller scene with Headhunter. Now comes SHRINK, his latest soul-searing exploration of the most chilling reaches of perverted lust and multiple murder.

The Special X unit is mailed a shrunken human head by a crazed killer out to taunt them. A grisly campaign of terror in which male victims are hunted down and viciously brutalised before being beheaded is underway. And as the slaughter continues, it becomes apparent that more than one psycho is at work.

Robert DeClereq, Zinc Chandler and other members of the Special X team find themselves embroiled in a complex case of nightmare horror come to dreadful life – a case with its twisted roots in a dark past of obscene, sadistic ritual where the screams of the damned echo eternally through the most labyrinthine dungeon of all; the human mind ….

Kenneth Rayner Johnson – The Succubus

Kenneth Rayner Johnson – The Succubus (Nel 1980, originally Blond & Briggs, 1979)

Blurb:

WHAT THE HELL IS HAPPENING TO ME?

In a London flat a young man has gone to ground. Hiding out until the storm of public interest in a bizarre sex-and-kidnap court case blows over.

But in the night, he is visited by something at once irresistible and terrifying.

In the night comes a creature in the form of the most desirable of women to possess him until the very last pang of lust is slaked. Panic-stricken friends, brilliant psychiatrists, and one dead-end psychic researcher hold the ring as modern medicine confronts the essence of evil.

Stephen Laws – Spectre

Stephen Laws – Spectre  (NEL, 1994, originally Souvenir, 1986)

Jon Blake

Blurb:
They’d called themselves the Byker Chapter ….

They were inseparable:  six boys and one girl who’d grown up together in the back streets of Newcastle. Now the terraces are long gone, but Richard Eden has his memories – and one special photograph. All that is left of their joy – and betrayal …

Suddenly, impossibly, one by one the images begin to fade, as if his friends had never existed.

Something is stalking the Chapter – closing in for the kill. With each hideous death, another image fades from the photograph. Some spectre from the past, some horror they have unwittingly released, is out there on the darkened streets.Hunting them down.
They can run, but this time there is nowhere they can hide .. .

 

Cyril Donson – Draco The Dragon Man

Cyril Donson – Draco The Dragon Man   (NEL, Oct. 1974)

Blurb:
Damon Draycot had won world renown as a historian and archeologist. He made many television appearances and his athletic exploits were no less eagerly followed. He was well-known and respected on all sides.

His latest nine-month expedition was potholing in Texas. There were many miles of underground passages to explore for mineralogical, medical and historical facts — and simply to conquer. This proposed feat captures the public imagination, and many are there to wish Draycot luck.

What happens to him underground would not be wished on any other man. Thereafter his life was never to be the same; dogged by an unfathomable curse that led him to shun his fellow creatures, this innocent expedi­tion brought a nightmare of horror and evil into the light of day.

See also Draco the Dragonman thread on the Vault forum