Сепсис

by Graham Masterton, Артем Агеев (Translator), Николай Кобзев (Narrator)

There's a phrase for it — "all-consuming passion." And that's what David and Melanie had for each other. They loved each other so much that they wanted to share everything, body and soul. If they could have done, they would have breathed the same air. Their family and friends thought that their hunger for each other was unhealthy. But they were blind to what anybody else thought about them. They shut themselves away from the world and their only companion was Echo — the cat which David gave to Melanie as a living token of their obsessive love. But then Echo went missing. And that’s when David and Melanie’s all-consuming passion went far beyond the bounds of love, and into the realms of indescribable greed... Sepsis by Graham Masterton was published as a Limited Edition Chapbook of 500 signed softcover copies, a Limited Signed Hardcover of 200 numbered signed copies, and a Traycased Hardcover Lettered Edition of 26 signed and lettered copies.

Genres: Horror

Audiobook

First published October 1, 2003

About the author

Graham Masterton was born in Edinburgh in 1946. His grandfather was Thomas Thorne Baker, the eminent scientist who invented DayGlo and was the first man to transmit news photographs by wireless. After training as a newspaper reporter, Graham went on to edit the new British men's magazine Mayfair, where he encouraged William Burroughs to develop a series of scientific and philosophical articles which eventually became Burroughs' novel The Wild Boys.

At the age of 24, Graham was appointed executive editor of both Penthouse and Penthouse Forum magazines. At this time he started to write a bestselling series of sex 'how-to' books including How To Drive Your Man Wild In Bed which has sold over 3 million copies worldwide. His latest, Wild Sex For New Lovers is published by Penguin Putnam in January, 2001. He is a regular contributor to Cosmopolitan, Men's Health, Woman, Woman's Own and other mass-market self-improvement magazines.

Graham Masterton's debut as a horror author began with The Manitou in 1976, a chilling tale of a Native American medicine man reborn in the present day to exact his revenge on the white man. It became an instant bestseller and was filmed with Tony Curtis, Susan Strasberg, Burgess Meredith, Michael Ansara, Stella Stevens and Ann Sothern.

Altogether Graham has written more than a hundred novels ranging from thrillers (The Sweetman Curve, Ikon) to disaster novels (Plague, Famine) to historical sagas (Rich and Maiden Voyage - both appeared in the New York Times bestseller list). He has published four collections of short stories, Fortnight of Fear, Flights of Fear, Faces of Fear and Feelings of Fear.

He has also written horror novels for children (House of Bones, Hair-Raiser) and has just finished the fifth volume in a very popular series for young adults, Rook, based on the adventures of an idiosyncratic remedial English teacher in a Los Angeles community college who has the facility to see ghosts.

Since then Graham has published more than 35 horror novels, including Charnel House, which was awarded a Special Edgar by Mystery Writers of America; Mirror, which was awarded a Silver Medal by West Coast Review of Books; and Family Portrait, an update of Oscar Wilde's tale, The Picture of Dorian Gray, which was the only non-French winner of the prestigious Prix Julia Verlanger in France.

He and his wife Wiescka live in a Gothic Victorian mansion high above the River Lee in Cork, Ireland.

Reviews

[Jakob J. 🎃 · Rating 4 out of 5]

“I’m frightened of us.”

A fine line, is it not, between codependency and true love? If you feel yourself becoming one with another person, your individual personhood is forfeit, and I find that as terrifying a prospect as anything within these brief pages of this story.

Two young lovers are stricken and smitten. Melanie and David are mutually obsessed with every inch and spiritual particle of one another; sniffing and licking and absorbing each other in every way. They talk to each other like they’re in Casablanca. Their ravenous desire is almost cannibalistic. They are not afraid to incorporate some natural blood-flow into their lascivious endeavors. They share their food (and I don’t mean eating off the same plate).
In a foreshadowing outburst in response to her mother’s concern, Melanie admonishes her, “…you make it sound like a disease, not a relationship.” Oh, how we subconsciously manifest our own misery.

As they become increasingly symbiotically enmeshed, they begin to forsake all other aspects of their separate lives. There is neither passion nor interest in anything outside themselves, and the symbolic synthesis of them as one, a kitten named Echo who David got for Melanie to represent their unity and love. Inevitably, their Echo goes missing. They search for the cat as if the fragile bond between them would go to pieces without its presence. Nothing else mattered. They must find their love again.

If you’ll forgive the metaphorical intrusion, I couldn’t help thinking of the missing cat encompassing their love as the waning feelings that two formerly star-crossed lovers can experience in the post-infatuation phase of a relationship. If you attach your very identity to someone else, and it falls apart, you feel that you no longer exist, and so you desperately try to reclaim it, by any means necessary. You force it, regurgitate it. It is all consuming. It is toxic.

“This as a ritual of transubstantiation, in which love had become flesh, and flesh was being devoured so that it could become love again.”

Never demand someone cross their heart and hope to die, and expect to live.

[Dan · Rating 4 out of 5]

When I bought this chapbook, nearly seventeen years ago (!!! Yes, I have a massive backlog of books...), word on the street was that it was the most shocking. offensive, transgressive, horrifying story ever written. It probably says a lot about me that I was neither shocked nor horrified by this tale of a young couple who becomes a little TOO close...it was extremely well-written, though, and Masterton ended the short story with a last little kick in the groin that I wasn't expecting. Good, sick fun.

[Mark Alexander · Rating 5 out of 5]

Gross and...weird, very sweet?

[Bandit · Rating 5 out of 5]

I won this chapbook signed. Such great story and SIGNED.