Customer Reviews

The Gas

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Readers of science fiction, or Mr. Platt's columns, will be surprised by this foray. The gas of the title is an accidental release from a laboratory in England that strips people of all their inhibitions, revealing their darkest, taboo desires. The author is extremely passionate and explicit in his descriptions. I would rank this as one of the best, and dirtiest, rants on the nature of our subconscious. It will offend or disturb many readers, as the author freely admits. This is a paean to a time (the late 60's), when writers often challenged themselves to purge their psyches. So now you are properly informed. Dare you read this?

I read this on the recommendation of an aquaintance. The author's idea is to explore what might happen if everyone's sexual inhibitions were eliminated by "the gas". I didn't find it very interesting. Mostly it's just porno. I wasn't offended, just bored. Platt has matured since he wrote this - his later stuff is much better.

Very few books are truly worth the adjective `notorious', but Charles Platt's The Gas might just be one of them. Originally written in the late 1960s for an imprint owned by Maurice Girodias - the publisher behind such classics as Tropic of Cancer and Lolita - it would be easy to dismiss it as a work of extreme pornography, and it is this reputation which led to copies of its 1980 reprinting initially being seized in the UK on grounds of obscenity, but there is, I think, something more to it than that. I'm not going to claim that it's in the same ranking as the two works I mentioned above, but the events described are, in places, so extreme as to defy definition as mundane means of arousal.

The plot is flimsy affair involving the escape of the mysterious gas of the title escaping from a secret laboratory somewhere in the south of England. Prevailing winds mean that it contaminates much of the southern half of the UK, sending everyone's sex hormones into overdrive while simultaneously lowering any inhibitions people might have preventing them from acting on their urges, and not surprisingly, civilisation implodes under the effects into orgy of perversion and violence. We witness these events through the eyes of Vincent, a scientist from the laboratory, seeking to escape to the relative safety of Scotland with his family. The scene is thus set for the description of a quite extraordinary gamut of sexualities: from commonplace heterosexual intercourse, through homosexuality, to incest and bestiality; and perversions ranging from coprophilia and cannibalism to ritual murder.

There is no doubting the extremity of the events and scenes described, but Platt lifts his work out of the realm of simplistic debauchery through careful choices of the characters with whom Vincent interacts: a priest, a young female hitchhiker, a science student; and by setting the climactic events of the novel in Cambridge, in and around the university. This enables him to inject a strong element of social satire into the novel, as each character reacts to the gas according to his, or her, type: the hitchhiker with the murderous fury of the oppressed, the scientist with a cold sadism worthy of Dr Mengele, and so forth. Through it all, Vincent just tries to survive, and avoid being dehumanised by the events he witnesses, and the acts he is forced to commit to get himself, and his family, to safety. Whether or not he succeeds is left open at the work's strikingly ambiguous conclusion, which challenges readers to make their own judgement.

Overall, then, The Gas is definitely not for the timid, or easily offended, but nor will it do much for those simply seeking a quick thrill - and a careful reading can be thought provoking.

i first read this book when i was working at a popular bookstore in a mall. the store did not stock this book so my coworkers and i had to special order it. we all bought a copy and within the first chapter we were gripping our stomachs. we were laughing so hard that it hurt, but at the same time, we were totally nauseated! this book is very graphic, so if you are offended by extreme sexual situations (including taboo/illegal ones to boot), you don't want to pick up this novel. the book actually came with a plain, brown wrapper to hide the pornographic images on the front cover. i read the entire book, wasn't turned on at all, but at the same time wasn't turned off. this book just made me laugh out loud. i wish i still had it, but I gave it to a college friend so he could read it on his trip back to Chicago. I heard it was banned in much of Europe and was an underground sensation in the 70's here in the US. Buy it for the novelty, not for the story...

I somehow managed to get hold of this book thru a friend, and was intrigued that a book like this could be banned in the UK but not in the US...I also cannot believe that it's considered Sci-Fi.It's the most disgusting and completely unbelievable cult trash-yet somehow compelling because it's so yucky.It's the sort of book that when reading makes ya cringe, put down, then look at with furtive glances and pick up again just to get even more grossed out! It was also the sort of book I couldn't have in the house, so I gave it to a friend who loves this genre of "literature", asking never to see it again.. Just don't take it seriously! But be prepared to lose your appetite...