Road From Hell [Paperback]

Gerard Houarner (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: November 1, 2007

Max the Assassin is back! What started in the pages of Painfreak, continued in the books The Beast That Was Max and Road To Hell now comes to an explosive conclusion. Offered in a VERY limited edition hardcover which contains bonus material including an all new short story with introduction showing us just where Max came from and how he got started on his cursed and tragic journey through a life of murder and sex. Also offfered in an affordable unlimited trade paperback signed by the author.

Max the Assassin is in Hell.

Tormented by vengeful spirits and his secret self, the demonic Beast, Max suffers for the pain he caused when he lived, and for losing his chance at redemption through love.

Angel, Max's son, is devastated by his father's death and wanders the desert between the worlds in which he saw his father die, searching for a way home. Then he encounters the Caravan of the Dead, who promise him salvation, and Apocalypse.

Both their fates depend on Eartha, a young woman from Brooklyn, her circle of outsider friends, the soul of her dead father, a sex club called Painfreak, the Palace of the Djinn, and the ancient spirit of an Egyptian sacrificial cat.

Can Hell be broken? Can the dead return to life?

Can love conquer pain, vengeance, and death?

The answers are on The Road From Hell

Editorial Reviews

Review

A non-stop rampage of exquisite horror. Houarner sets off a powder keg of awl-sharp imagery, occult intellect, and bad-to-the-bone super- naturalism to further evolve one of the most terrifying character-lines the genre has seen. An irresistible thriller, horror, and fantasy novel wrapped up as one, by an author who writes like Thomas Pynchon possessed by demons. --Edward Lee, author of House Infernal and Flesh Gothic

A fascinating and thought- provoking dark fantasy that displays Gerard Houarner s top of the line literary craftsmanship, Road From Hell is the perfect finale to the Max trilogy. Steeped in mythology and the bizarre wonders of the supernatural, the novel crosses genre borders as Max battles ghosts and demons from the very pit of oblivion. Houarner s prose is tight, the imagery shocking, and the scenes haunting and diabolically terrifying. --Tom Piccirilli, author of The Midnight Road and The Dead Letters

With his latest opus in the Max saga, Gerard Houarner conjures up some of the most exotic, ferocious depictions of evil and retribution you re ever likely to encounter. There s a genuine sense of malice and bad intentions here, yet it s unleashed in the service of a tale of love, sacrifice, and even something like redemption. The Road From Hell not only brings Max s current path to a fitting sense of closure, but also resets the stage for something fresh and new ... whenever Houarner chooses to go down that road. --Brian Hodge, author of Mad Dogs and World of Hurt

About the Author

Gerard Houarner fell to Earth in the fifties and is a product of the NYC school system and the City College of New York, where he studied writing under Joseph Heller and Joel Oppenheimer and crashed hallucinogenic William Burroughs seminars back in the day. He went on to earn a couple of Masters degrees in psychology from Columbia University so he could earn a living. He s worked in Hells Kitchen, on the Lower East Side at the beginning of the AIDS epidemic, and in the Bronx at the start of the crack epidemic before settling into a quiet, contemplative and genteel career as an uncivil servant at a state psychiatric center. Married in a New Orleans Voodoo Temple, he and his wife, writer and poet Linda Addison, reside in a house decorated in Nouveau African Native French Goth Tribal Fantastic atop a hill in the Bronx. His publishing career includes three novels The Bard of Sorcery, The Beast That Was Max, Road to Hell and over 240 short stories published in a variety of magazines and anthologies including Cemetery Dance, Weird Tales, Midnight Premiere, Brutarian, City Slab, Flesh and Blood, Deathrealm, Borderlands, Damned: An Anthology of the Lost; Mojo: Conjure Stories;Dark Acts, and others. Story collections include Painfreak, I Love You And There Is Nothing You Can Do About It, Black Orchids from Aum, and Visions Through a Shattered Lens. He has also edited or co-edited three anthologies: Going Postal, Dead Cats Bouncing and Dead Cat's Traveling Circus of Wonders and Miracle Medicine Show (both with the artist GAK). In addition, he serves as Fiction Editor for Space and Time magazine. People seem to talk most often about his continuing character, Max, a supernaturally endowed assassin, as well as Dead Cat a series of collaborations with the artist GAK about, like, you know...a dead cat. Fifty-plus years into life, he has come to believe he is the kind of person who wandered away from the village at a tender age, spent too much time in the wilderness, and these days is allowed to return only on ceremonial occasions or to scare the little children. He also believes, on cold and rainy days, that his purpose in life is to serve as an example for others, much like the crucified humans at the edge of the desert in the original Planet of the Apes, or rebel gladiator slaves along the Via Appia. On better days, he sees himself standing at the crossroads of the psychological and the supernatural; the real and the surreal; the past, present and future; waiting for some thing to come along, take his soul and leave him with the voice to tell anybody who will listen the story of how it all happened. He continues to write whenever he can, mostly at night, about the dark. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Product Details

• Paperback: 292 pages
• Publisher: Necro Publications (November 1, 2007)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1889186724
• ISBN-13: 978-1889186726
• Product Dimensions: 8.3 x 5.4 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 12.8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,950,638 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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