Wetbones: The Authorized Edition Book

"WETBONES, the acclaimed and viscerally powerful work by John Shirley, is being released for the first time in a new, improved

form.

*Fully revised and updated edition.

*First fully-author-approved text ever released.

*INCLUDES a Brand-New companion story. Never before

published.

Down -on-his-luck screenwriter Tom Prentice is called to the morgue to identify the body of his ex-wife Amy. She's recognizable--but her body is also 50 pounds underweight, and mutilated. Disturbed, but trying to go on with his life, Prentice pitches a cop-show to studio head Arthwright and is surprised when the exec is interested in the run-of-the-mill idea. Arthwright's real motives will emerge into hideous view, along with soul-consuming astral creatures camouflaging themselves behind greed, the seduction of Hollywood power—and pleasure. The secret of the Akishra writhes in the background...until it squirms into plain, horrific view.

Meanwhile, Reverend Garner, a recovering addict who runs a ministry in Oakland, discovers that his teenage daughter Constance is missing. She has been kidnapped by Ephram Pixie, a ghoulish serial murderer with connections to the cult of the Akishra—Pixie uses psychic pressure to turn Constance into a pleasure addict of the sickest sort. And Mitch Teitelbaum, the missing brother of Tom Prentice's roommate Jeff, ends up in a hospital after deliberately and gruesomely mutilating himself...under the influence of the Akishra.

Much of the action spins out from a mysterious, on-going, underground party, which goes on, apparently endlessly, at the fenced-in residence of The More Man and his Malibu film folk, legendary Hollywood Babylon-type partiers, connected with Arthwright, living for

decades as psychic vampires feeding on pleasure and the gradual destruction of the human soul. Wetbones is a streetname for victims of their former ally, Ephram Pixie—the residue of his latest sensuous atrocity with Constance, they're skinless package of freshly bloodied bones...

All the storylines come devastatingly together, like wet bones lashed together, in the apocalyptic climax...

A contemporary horror tale with Lovecraftian overtones, a subtle message about the horrors of addiction (which may all be

inspired and directed by entities from a higher and very nasty plane of existence) and a look at the dark underside of Hollywood written by someone who knows...WETBONES is wrapped in a speed-charged action tale with enough gruesome violence and horrific action to remind readers that John Shirley was recognized from early on as one of the mainsprings of the Splatterpunk movement. The content is very graphic and not for the faint of heart, a glimpse into the abyss only to discover the abyss looking hungrily back."