Road From Hell

Painfreak #4

by Gerard Houarner, Andera Cavaletto (Illustrator)

LIMITED to 100 SIGNED & NUMBERED HARDBACKS ~ Max the Assassin is back! What started in the pages of Painfreak, continued in the books The Beast That Was Max and Road To Hell now comes to an explosive conclusion. A non-stop rampage of exquisite horror. Houarner sets off a powder keg of awl-sharp imagery, occult intellect, and bad-to-the-bone super- naturalism to further evolve one of the most terrifying character-lines the genre has seen. An irresistible thriller, horror, and fantasy novel wrapped up as one, by an author who writes like Thomas Pynchon possessed by demons. Edward Lee, author of House Infernal and Flesh Gothic. Max the Assassin is in Hell. Tormented by vengeful spirits and his secret self, the demonic Beast, Max suffers for the pain he caused when he lived, and for losing his chance at redemption through love. Angel, Max's son, is devastated by his father's death and wanders the desert between the worlds in which he saw his father die, searching for a way home. Then he encounters the Caravan of the Dead, who promise him salvation, and Apocalypse. Both their fates depend on Eartha, a young woman from Brooklyn, her circle of outsider friends, the soul of her dead father, a sex club called Painfreak, the Palace of the Djinn, and the ancient spirit of an Egyptian sacrificial cat. Can Hell be broken? Can the dead return to life? Can love conquer pain, vengeance, and death? the answers are on The Road From Hell. A fascinating and thought- provoking dark fantasy that displays Gerard Houarner’s top of the line literary craftsmanship, Road From Hell is the perfect finale to the Max trilogy. Steeped in mythology and the bizarre wonders of the supernatural, the novel crosses genre borders as Max battles ghosts and demons from the very pit of oblivion. Houarner’s prose is tight, the imagery shocking, and the scenes haunting and diabolically terrifying. Tom Piccirill, author of The Midnight Road and The Dead Letters.

Genres: Horror

361 pages, Hardcover

First published November 1, 2007

About the author

“Houarner is a smart, intelligent talent who has a gift for writing with serene beauty about the most atrocious things.” Ed Bryant, Locus

He is also the author of 5 novels and over 300 short stories and novellas, some gathered in 6 collections.

He fell to Earth in the fifties and is a product of the NYC school system and the City College of New York, where he studied writing under Joseph Heller and Joel Oppenheimer and crashed hallucinogenic William Burroughs seminars back in the day.

The mental health field has provided a living as well as inspiration for the past 34 years. His current position might be described as Director of Recovery and Recreation at Arkham Asylum.

Since 1998, he has served as Fiction Editor for Space and Time magazine.

He continues to write whenever he can, mostly at night, about the dark.