(pb; 1982)
From the back cover
“Flesh for Satan.
“In a deserted subway tunnel far below the city, a young woman is ritually slashed to pieces. . . In an apartment building across town, a little boy, seething with demonic urges, lures a friend down into the sub-basement. . . On shadowed streets, hordes of shrieking children are stalking human sacrifices for him.
“Horror beneath the city.
“Evil has erupted from the pits of Hell, its blessed minions hungering for the flesh and blood of terrified millions. A city is clutched in the dripping talons of unspeakable horror, devoured in the nightmare battle between the forces of good. . . and the invincible armies of eternal darkness.”
Review
Cellar is an Old School/1980s horror novel that harkens back to the time when visiting Times Square could be a dangerous, overtly grimy and thrilling experience. In it, writer and researcher Carl Lanyard, is hired by his morally dubious and mysterious publisher (Trismegestes) to be an “occult consultant” to the police to help them solve a string of bizarre, especially nasty murders that hide deeper, darker and more ancient secrets. Like many novels of this period, Cellar is thick-vivid with New York-centric description, detailing its slime and charms, human and beyond.
If you’re familiar with this era of genre writing, you may well see where this cinematic, entertaining and well-written B-flick (and character-impelled) story is going, but it’s a joyously, unrepentantly gory, smutty, and hallucination-riddled ride with a darkly hilarious vibe, one worth checking out, especially if you’re a fan of William Hjortsberg’s 1978 novel Falling Angel (and its resulting 1987 movie Angel Heart), Clive Barker’s 1984 Books of Blood Vol. 1 story “The Midnight Meat Train” (and its 2008 media-leap spawn film of the same name), and the Jack Cardiff-helmed The Mutations (1974; aka The Freakmaker).
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