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The Five Gates of Hell

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The Five Gates of Hell

Paperback(1st Vintage Contemporaries ed)

$17.00

Paperback(1st Vintage Contemporaries ed)
$17.00

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Overview

Moon Beach--place of the dead--where once a year the city observes the Day of the Dead. During one such celebration, two young men from different worlds become the fascinated servants of an entrepreneur of death, whose private passions are intimately entwined with his vocation. "Ghoulish and imaginative . . . ingenious, sardonic and seductive".--New York Times Times Book Review.

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About the Author

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780679735717
Publisher:	Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Publication date:	09/29/1992
Series:	Vintage Contemporaries
Edition description:	1st Vintage Contemporaries ed
Pages:	384
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.50(h) x 0.88(d)

About the Author

Rupert Thomson was born in Eastbourne, East Sussex, England, and studied Medieval History and Political Thought at the University of Cambridge. His highly acclaimed works include novels Secrecy, The Five Gates of Hell, Death of a Murderer, The Book of Revelation, Soft!, and The Insult, and a memoir, This Party's Got to Stop. In 2015, Thomson was named a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. He lives in London.

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Editorial Reviews

A runaway gets tangled up with a funeral parlor director who murders for the fun of it in British novelist Thomson's incandescent coming-of-age thriller. (Oct.)

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

Jed and Nathan live in Moon Beach, a bizarre resort where funerals are the principal industry, and the owners of mortuaries are the civic powers. Neither has a home life, so they join Vasco Gorelli's gang of very weird arsonists. Jed becomes involved with the most powerful of the funeral directors, Creed, who hires Jed as a driver and suborns him into killing Vasco's brother, then uses Nathan to destroy Jed. The story starts slowly and never speeds up, but the picture of an obsessive town where every civic feature is calmly dedicated to the commercialization of death is just odd enough to be both humorous and frightening. Recommended for spooky, imagistic prose, but may have limited appeal. Thomson's first novel was Dreams of Leaving ( LJ 4/15/88).-- Edwin B. Burgess, U.S. Army TRALINET Ctr., Fort Monroe, Va.

Library Journal

From the author of the widely acclaimed Dreams of Leaving (1988), an assured follow-up that further strengthens Thomson's position as an emerging talent to be reckoned with. Set on the West Coast of the near-future, the novel presents a world that has the look and feel of L.A. under the influence. Nathan, an introverted kid from a good neighborhood, lives with his disabled father and the memory of a deceased mother. Meanwhile, over on the wrong side of the tracks, Jed, a neglected and notoriously ugly youth, develops an early knack for blackmail and revenge, running away to join the Womb (War on Moon Beach) Boys, a gang formed with the general aim of destroying funeral parlors located on Moon Beach. Through a run-in with the Womb Boys, Nathan meets Jed, who turns up working with the biggest funeral parlor of them all—the Paradise Corporation—under the gaze of its ghoulish director, Neville Creed. Later, Jed and Nathan's histories intersect again when Nathan is carrying on an affair with Creed, and Jed, double-crossed by Creed, returns for revenge. As in Dreams of Living, Thomson here combines stark 20th-century realism with elements of fantasy. He gets away with it by working within a spectrum—beginning with naturalism and ending somewhere out near William Burroughs territory—and by carrying every scene within a consistent, honed prose style. Maybe it's the preoccupation with death that forces the story to an occasional crawl, but Thomson redeems this one through deft handling of real and fantastic elements, sharp prose, and vivid glimpses into the charred circuitry of his youthful characters.

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