World of Hurt

Product Description From the author of HELLBOY: ON EARTH AS IT IS ON HELL and WILD HORSES comes WORLD OF HURT, another masterwork that transcends the horror genre.... Nearly half his life ago, Andrei spent 38 minutes as a corpse. It's not a secret that he shares with many people. Especially these last six years, ever since the comforting lie of tunnels and white lights crumbled away to leave him with the memory of what he really found on the other side of death…not Hell, but something worse: a Heaven unlike anything he'd ever been taught to expect. Now, as Heaven seeks to reclaim him, Andrei awakens to the hidden truths of this world and the next, caught between two unequal sides waging a clandestine war for the soul of the world, in which everything he's ever taken for granted about good and evil has just been turned upside down. When death is no escape, what do you do? Andrei has a fierce need to know, as the clock runs out on the most excruciating moral choice of his life. From Publishers Weekly Hodge ( Lies and Ugliness) gives the serial killer a makeover with a daub of metaphysical murk in this intelligent but talky tale of horror. What begins as a tale about an Internet stalker targeting members of a near-death-experience chat group morphs quickly into a farfetched account of a nasty Gnostic avatar that harvests the souls of those who have tasted the afterlife. There's no easy way for the complex principles of Gnosticism to emerge naturally through the actions of the characters, so Hodge provides the reader with a tutorial plopped in chunky blocks of exposition throughout the text. This story has more cerebral ambitions than most supernatural fiction, and they are realized entirely at the expense of any thrills. (Aug.) Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. From the Publisher WORLD OF HURT features a Foreword by World Fantasy Award-winning editor Stephen Jones and an Introduction by Stoker Award-winning author Brian Keene. Dustjacket and signature page art by Robert Sammelin. About the Author Brian Hodge's books number into double digits and have earned him favorable critical comparisons with luminaries as diverse as Clive Barker, Elmore Leonard, Honoré Daumier, David Cronenberg, and even Carl Jung. Recently he was chosen to contribute to the world of comics legend Mike Mignola, with Pocket Books releasing his novel HELLBOY: ON EARTH AS IT IS ON HELL in autumn 2005. Forthcoming works include the crime novel MAD DOGS and his next collection A LOVING LOOK OF AGONY.