CHARLES PLATT

 Burt was dead broke and desperate when he drove across the desert with a head full of deviant fantasies. Suzanne saw him as a free ride to Las Vegas with some perverse pleasures on the side - but her game of temptation led them into a killing spree from which there was no way back to normality. This newly revised classic of splatter-porn is the ultimate noir road trip of the early 1970s - a frighteningly realistic study of two sexually obsessed psychos who run amok without conscience, compassion or regret. 

 An accident at a secret germ warfare laboratory allows a deadly vapour to infect all of Southern England. The vapour is an aphrodisiac that releases every pent-up human urge. Within twenty-four hours society self-destructs in a vast orgy of lust, aggression, and psychosis, as men and women everywhere act out their deepest, weirdest obsessions. ‘The Gas’ is a work of vicious satire and blackest humour, offering little comfort from the relentless horror, other than very bleak laughter at its absurdism. A serious, although hysterically funny, work that deserves to sit next to ‘Naked Lunch’, ‘Clockwork Orange’ and ‘The Kindly Ones’ in its merciless exploration of our darkest impulses, and what humans are capable of under the right – or wrong - circumstances.  Incunabula is reprinting this book now as we feel that in the current climate of rampant unreason, it’s more relevant than ever before.