(Found) Strange Necrophilia / Pain = Good novel?

[Cantiloper]

This novel came out at least 20 to 30 years ago. I had it in white paperback, very little on the cover. I remember being amazed/repulsed by its entire concept at the time. The Necrophilia part was very weird: the society blessed the concept and gvt had three classes of corpses rated by how recently dead they were. VERY strange book. Anyone ever run across it?

 

[Jayaprakash Satyamurthy]

Is it the short story 'Coming Attraction' by Fritz Leiber?

 

[Cantiloper]

Thanks for the response Jaya, but on looking at the plot over on Wiki I'm pretty sure that's not the tale I remember. The thing that stands out most strongly in my memory was the classification of corpses for sexual purposes as being Class A, Class B, C, D I think A was like very very freshly dead, B was after the corpses had been "used" for a day or two, and C and/or D involved corpses that had been moved into cold storage or frozen. As noted, it was *VERY* strange and pretty repulsive. I think I was reading it on a train on my way to visit my family in New York and I threw it out in the trains station to avoid any chance of my family ever even SEEING it! LOL!


:>
Michael

 

[Jayaprakash Satyamurthy]

I don't know why I mixed it up, but the story I meant was 'Tell Me All About Yourself' by FM Busby. Some sort of sailor on shore leave goes to a necro-bordello where corpses are graded by freshness. He falls in love with a corpse and makes away with it to a boat which I think he blows up in the bay, realising she can never tell him all about herself.

 

[Cantiloper]

Jaya, I think you may have it! I looked around a bit at covers for it and found two. Neither is what I remember, although one of them is a pretty weird white one and the other at

fantasticfiction dot co dot uk (I can't post links yet here cuz I'se a noobie!)

is *SO* weird for back in 1973 that my little uptight Catholic-school brain might very well have substituted a plain white cover for it. Heh... I can certainly see why I might have been concerned about my parents seeing it! LOL!

I will have to check out my local bookstore and/or order a copy to be sure, but the story synopsis certainly sounds right, and the weird cover, although different from my memory, could certainly fit!

Thank you! I'll let you know when I actually pin it down!


Michael

 

[Cantiloper]

FOUND IT!

A bit of googling and I turned it up in a different anthology: The Best Science Fiction of the Year #3, edited by Terry Carr.

Heh... when you walk into my house the first room is my library: roughly 5,000 books of genres ranging from sci-fi through fantasy, horror, peace activism, international relations, various new-agey political concerns, smoking-related medical research, and various other things. And sure enough, I had several volumes of BSFY including #3.

It was indeed just a short story, only about 8 pages long, but I guess the absolute weirdness of the concept was what freaked me out and stuck in my head. I don't know if that was the original source where I read it as I still have that strange memory of the other cover, but that's definitely the story: I even remembered where it was going as soon as I started re-reading it: not bad for something I probably read over 35 years ago!

Thank you Jaya!


Michael

 

[Jayaprakash Satyamurthy]

You're welcome, and it certainly is a story that sticks in the mind. Not just for its sensational topic but the way it is handled.