This book always felt like it should have been adapted by the BBC (apparently, it was based on a screenplay - see link below).
A copy can be purchased here - mine cost £0.45 back in the day but expect to pay £95 now!! Shall we blame the price increase on Brexit? ;)
"In the Fairfield Institute of Genetic Research patient Thomas Barker is having a restless night. So he decides to work off some steam by ripping Drs. Swinton & Forrester into bloody pieces, and then tear his way out of his cell. Barker is a convict that is infected with a "plasmid"; a bit of genetic material that can transfer some characteristic of one animal to another. Barker's plasmid has been irradiated and transplanted to him by Professor Fraser, your typical cold-fish, very mad-scientist, and professional all-around a-hole for whom which all people's lives but his own have no value. And because his grant is coming up for renewal, he has gone rogue by recklessly veering from his own planned scientific protocol.
Meanwhile, rising star, an ambitious investigative reporter Paula Scott of the radio station Metropole Radio 199 is in a tiff with her boss and future lover Stephen Sharp over a published story. That is until she proves her point, and that her facts are right and can't be refuted"
The book was kind of a proto Harry Adam-Knight novel and very very pulp horror in the kind of way only the Brits can do.
I first read this when I was about 13 after engaging with my obsessions concerning post apocalyptic societies. It was *very* Day of the Triffids and also linked into the British paranoia of not trusting the Government that was in power at that time.
Alongside a healthy dose of social breakdown, lack of press freedom and a spunky female lead character, the book also fed into a type of Cronenbergian take on body horror that was, shall we say, quite nasty.
It's not the best book in the world but something that was a product of its era. Fun, dumb and a blast to read, in equal measures.
Alongside a healthy dose of social breakdown, lack of press freedom and a spunky female lead character, the book also fed into a type of Cronenbergian take on body horror that was, shall we say, quite nasty.
It's not the best book in the world but something that was a product of its era. Fun, dumb and a blast to read, in equal measures.
A copy can be purchased here - mine cost £0.45 back in the day but expect to pay £95 now!! Shall we blame the price increase on Brexit? ;)
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