Title: The Mask on a Wanton's Torso*
Author: John Reade
Cover artist: a photographer in the anteroom of hell
Condition: 9/10
Estimated value: $20-ish
[newest addition to the Doug Peterson Collection]
- Looking at this cover is about as close to watching a snuff film as I'll ever come. It's horrifying. I feel like the cameraman murdered her like five seconds after this shot was taken. Or else she was paid in heroin and sent back out into the snow dressed just like that. Most of my sleaze paperbacks are campy fun to look at. This one, no, not.
- If you burn that couch, hundreds of damned souls are unleashed into the world, to torture and haunt the living.
- "Here, put this on"—the world's most negligent art director
- Ah, the world of erotic nonsense phrases—so delicious. Lust game! Sin secret! Wanton's torso!?!?
- *You see how I put an asterisk by the title (up top)? That's because ... well, how to describe it? This book is unique, in my experience, in having a title on the cover that Does Not Match The Title On The Spine (which reads "The Mask *OF* the Wanton's Torso"(!?)). But it's uniqueness doesn't stop there. Forget two titles—this book .... Has Two Authors: WHO IS PHIL BOTNER?!
And the back cover:
- Stud Hunter! I think I own one of those.
- Shame event! Passion fling! FLESH GAIETY!!! Beat that ... every other back cover sleaze copywriter.
- That's not how en dashes work.
- Yikes, even the line spacing on this is disgusting.
Page 123~ (brace yourself)
There was a door there. She could not remember how she had come upstairs. Frantically she opened it. There was only a tiny passageway, leading to another door. Frantically she thought it might be a back way down, down and out of this house.
Torn between laughing at Double Frantically and crying at the attempted poetry of that second "down,."
~RP
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