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Beyond the Threshold
An electrifying novel that invades the secret netherworld of a corrupt funeral empire, and follows its rise and downfall…to the very limits of unspeakable horror.
- GenresHorror
282 pages, Mass Market Paperback
First published January 1, 1978
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
January 29, 2018
2.0 And I feel that is generous for this "horror". A sleazy mortician bribes some people to get a military contract and you find out in the end they were smuggling drugs. He also hired this kid who sleeps with his wife and then sleeps with his male co worker (who also slept with the morticians wife?) then the kid dies. So many details skipped to be brought up later in a round about way, but other things are over detailed and in the end felt like no real point to the book. Not even close to a horror book. What was the scary part, some people started to go a little crazy near the end of the book, but in today's world sounded more like weird Tue in CA.
June 9, 2020
Not a great horror novel, but one which has enough points of interest to keep you glued to it until the end, Beyond the Threshold starts off by having a cover which is both ugly and gruesome. I love it. It is also a misleading cover, not because of the drawing but by invoking comparisons to Coma and Night of the Living Dead.... it has little in common with Coma and nothing at all with NotLD.
What the story is, is a story about a mortician, his wife, his co-workers, a new kid working at the mortician for the summer, and his mother in law. A lot of the characters are pretty despicable and we end up focusing on three of them. The young Granger who being 17 is going through his sexual awakening while learning how to deal with corpses, Anderson, the kind of head embalmer and an openly gay man who is also one of the few good characters in the story and Shawn, the head-mortitican's wife who is bored and trying to have sex with everything that moves, including Granger and Anderson.
The book is as much about horrific mortician proceedings, which is where all the horror is really focused, as it is about sexual escapades, of the straight and gay kind. In fact the book is surprisingly frank about gay sex and gay lives for 1978, even about bisexuality as Granger's sexual awakening is not just straight and Anderson who is a great character in thetale and one of the few survivors at the end is never judged by his gayness or punished by it. Not a great book but still an interesting read.
What the story is, is a story about a mortician, his wife, his co-workers, a new kid working at the mortician for the summer, and his mother in law. A lot of the characters are pretty despicable and we end up focusing on three of them. The young Granger who being 17 is going through his sexual awakening while learning how to deal with corpses, Anderson, the kind of head embalmer and an openly gay man who is also one of the few good characters in the story and Shawn, the head-mortitican's wife who is bored and trying to have sex with everything that moves, including Granger and Anderson.
The book is as much about horrific mortician proceedings, which is where all the horror is really focused, as it is about sexual escapades, of the straight and gay kind. In fact the book is surprisingly frank about gay sex and gay lives for 1978, even about bisexuality as Granger's sexual awakening is not just straight and Anderson who is a great character in thetale and one of the few survivors at the end is never judged by his gayness or punished by it. Not a great book but still an interesting read.
August 2, 2025
Not horror at all, just sleezy nonsense
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews