Richard Calder
Frenzetta

"Brilliant." —Washington Post Book World

Fresh brains, anyone?
Technology from a past age litters the decaying streets, and the old world fragments. But only one thing matters to the man-monster Duane Duarte: his love for the 17-year-old half-rat half-human, the murderous Frenzetta.

Our narrator, Duane Duarte, is a revenant, or reanimated corpse, a seven-foot tall Frankenstein fighting machine engineered from the body parts of fallen soldiers. His companion, Princess Frenzetta von Thurn und Taxis-Hohenlohe (otherwise known as "Frenzy") is a chimera, a half-rat, half-human, doomed to enjoy the horribly ecstatic fate of all her kind: to die during her first experience of orgasm. Together, this delightful couple cut a swathe of sex and violence across the four continents of a far-future Earth, spurred on by the rumor of sanctuary on the Moon.

Frenzetta goes far beyond the conventions of splatter and cyberpunk, merging dreamy, poetic imagery with scenes of breathtaking violence. Calder recognizes the intimate, indissoluble link between sex and savagery — more than that, between sex and death. Blood-drenched violence goes hand-in-hand with erotic acrobatics: opulence and decadence, decay and fertility are Calder's themes. Calder is squarely in the Four Walls SF/fantasy tradition, which stems from the literary/science fiction crossovers pioneered by writers as varied as J.G. Ballard, William Burroughs, Thomas Pynchon, Doris Lessing, and Michael Moorcock.

Richard Calder was born in London in 1956. He spent many years in Thailand, where he lived in Nongkhai, a border town overlooking Laos. He currently lives in the Philippines. His short stories and reviews have been published in Interzone, Science Fiction Eye, and Omni. He is the author of Dead Girls, Dead Boys, Dead Things (St. Martin's). His work has been translated into several languages and he is generally regarded as one of the most startlingly original voices in contemporary SF. Calder is published in the U.K. by Earthlight, an imprint of Simon & Schuster. Four Walls Eight Windows will release Calder's The Twist in 2003.

"Calder's penchant for allusive wordplay redolent with references to B-movies and other SF stories produces scintillating dialogue … a fine stylist, a writer of undeniable talent." —Publishers Weekly

Order this featured book online at a discount