The Unnatural

by Alan Nayes

Overview

The first victim, brutally assaulted, literally dies of fright in the emergency room, and Dr. Julie Charmaine must find out why. A psychiatrist, advocate for battered women, and a noted sleep researcher, Dr. Charmaine has only two clues to the beautiful young woman’s death: she reeks of the city’s sewers and her last word was the Spanish slang for monkey.
Vicki Zampisi, tormented by twin memories of terror and lost love, begins an odyssey of vengeance. But when she is attacked in the run-down hotel where she was once betrayed, she is put under the care of Dr. Julie Charmaine, and the terrified woman’s dreams reveal there is more to this cold-blooded serial killer the L.A. press have dubbed the “Sewer Stalker” than Vicki is letting on.
Eager investors have rewarded Dr. Wesley Kovacs lavishly for his groundbreaking cryonics research and he will let nothing stand between him and the Nobel Prize—not even an experiment that has gone horribly awry.
THE UNNATURAL is a twisted tale of cryonics, sex, revenge, murder and the bizarre hybrid creature that leaves an entire city cowering in fear.

Product Details

BN ID:	2940011461972
Publisher:	Alan Nayes
Publication date:	08/11/2011
Sold by:	Smashwords
Format:	eBook
File size:	497 KB
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Alan Nayes is the author of numerous novels and short stories. He resides in Southern California. Please visit www.anayes.com for a complete list of his novels. Thank you.

Editorial Reviews

In pushing the borders of scientific possibility in this creepy medical thriller, his second after Gargoyles (2001), Nayes provides some genuinely chilling suspense. After treating a young woman who then dies seemingly of fright on the operating table, dream specialist Julie Charmaine hears from Vicki Zambisi, a young woman disturbed by dreams of a mysterious monster from her past, who hopes cryogenics expert Dr. Wesley Kovacs can help her. Soon a strange hybrid creature, the "Sewer Stalker," is no dream, but a serial killer roaming beneath Los Angeles and preying primarily on young women, some of them in Dr. Charmaine's own hospital. Before too long, Charmaine and Zambisi are forced by the increasing danger into an alliance with LAPD homicide detective Matt Guardian to take up Zambisi's pursuit of Dr. Kovacs and his experiments in prolonging life by freezing. The tale affords a rather old-fashioned view of women (however professional) as victim, along with some improbable informational dialogue, particularly on the part of Dr. Kovacs. This is a book that only dedicated horror fans will treasure, but a wide variety of readers will thoroughly enjoy reading once. (Oct. 6) Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.

Publishers Weekly

Second medical thriller from Nayes (Gargoyles, 2001): a gross-out horror tale admirable for its detailed medical procedures and conspicuous tweaking of slasher-genre clichés. A lonely woman who survives a brutally disgusting assault (she’s found covered with yucky stuff from a sewer) in a bad part of Los Angeles emits a genuine "bloodcurdling scream" in a hospital emergency room and drops dead when she relives the incident in her dreams. Then, Vicki Zambisi, who’s undergone several surgical operations to repair her deformed skull, breaks into an old creepy boarded-up hotel in the same lousy neighborhood to retrieve a memento that just might reveal the dark secret about the awful experiments conducted by the brilliant, respected, but oh-so-mad cryogenic research scientist Dr. Wesley Kovacs. Inside the hotel, she barely escapes from the sewage-encrusted slasher. In the same hospital where the slasher’s first victim died, Zambisi meets Dr. Julie Charmaine, a young, quietly competent part-time counselor for assaulted women who’s also a full-time scientist studying dreams. Charmaine has a machine that uses a supercomputer to create visual images of what people are dreaming. Simmering romance (for Charmaine: the identity of the subject of Zambisi’s former affections is a key to the plot) comes from former boxer and now devastatingly handsome Homicide Detective Matt Guardian. More women must suffer inhumanly horrible assaults in and around the creepy old hotel before the trio can retrieve a nightmarish image of the assailant and thus unmask Dr. Kovacs’s insane scheme and discover that the not-quite-human monster is only looking for love. Despite his gratingly earnest introduction about the valueof cautionary tales, Nayes doesn’t so much take on science gone amok as grotesquely revisit classic B-movie shocker scenes.

Kirkus Reviews

"Finds nasty variations of Rosemary's Baby . . . makes for breathless page-turning."(Kirkus Reviews on Gargoyles)

From the Publisher