A dark, brutally savage, noir classic, back in print for the first time in over 90 years…a stunning thriller that the Louisville Courier called unforgettable.
Norris Haldorn will inherit his family’s vast fortune…but only after running through a gauntlet of arduous conditions meant to thwart his own ambitions. Under the terms of his father’s peculiar will, he must travel for four years, and never within 1000 miles of New York City, while always accompanied by a chaperoned, unmarried woman.
For his first trip, he must journey by boat with a strange woman named Night Gambier to a village in Burma, where he finds himself pitted him against a grotesque racketeer who has replaced his amputed legs with marble ones. And that’s only the beginning of Haldorn’s wild and violent adventures. Before it’s over, Haldorn will find himself savagely beaten and hideously deformed…and forced into the incredible position of having to find his own murderer…or die trying.
“Written with imaginative zest…a combination of horror, violence, savagery and beauty. A strange, absorbing tale, decidedly out of the ordinary.” Miami News
“Rumbles with mocking menace. It is an unpleasant belch from the earth’s bloated belly. It smells of rank vegetation, of over-ripe bananas, of a fecund imagination. Throughout, the author’s voice cackles with derision for the snarling human destinies that twist and turn out of reach of mankind’s free will. ” Brooklyn Citizen
“Hauser will madden you at times, horrify and terrify you at others, dazzle you with his brilliancy, all while you wonder if he has not lost his own way in the maze, but he delivers the goods neatly in the last chapter. It is above all a terrific mental drama, presided over by ironic fates.” San Francisco News
“His characters are never etched. He paints a man, a woman, and a place so vividly that no reader is apt to ever forget.” Louisville Courier-Journal
“Lurid but entertaining…terrible things happen, one of them being about as gruesome an event as is to be found in recent fiction. Houser can be credited with talent as well as a taste for the horrible and the bizarre.” New York Times
Lionel Houser (1908-1949) was the literary editor of the San Francisco News when he wrote Lake of Fire, his first novel. He later came a prolific screenwriter, whose work included They Made Her a Spy, Christmas in Connecticut and Sabotage.
Lionel Houser /
Crime Fiction, Thriller
