In a fading old porno theater in a town called Friendship, a mild-mannered young advertising writer watches a movie called Throat Sprockets and is never the same again. As he becomes increasingly obsessed with the film, it infects him with a new erotic aesthetic that finds expression through his advertising work, spreading its vampiric influence on a local, national, and eventually international level. As his old life crumbles and a new one begins to take shape, he sets out on a quest to discover the secrets of the film's creation and the identity of its mysterious creator.
Tim Lucas's genre-defying cult classic was featured in Stephen Jones and Kim Newman's Horror: 100 Best Books series and chosen by Rue Morgue as one of the Best Alt Horror Novels. This special 30th Anniversary Edition includes an introduction by Tananarive Due and a brand-new, novella-length penultimate chapter, filling in the past three decades of the protagonist's misadventure.
"Throat Sprockets, a dark, brilliant crow in the literary sky, is terrifying and euphoric both in its portrayal of obsession. Lucas is a first-rate writer." - Alexander Theroux
"To read Throat Sprockets is to understand that every vampire story before now has missed the mark." - Cosmopolitan
"Genuinely kinky and perverse and smart." - Bret Easton Ellis
"Witty and thoughtful and consistently surprising and above all deeply unsettling." - Ramsey Campbell
"A chic and darkly humorous study of sexual obsession ... a witty reworking of the Dracula myth starched stiff with irony ... a stylish, provocative debut novel." - The Times
"A brilliant novel." - Maxim
"Be warned: this is no ordinary novel. I searched my bookshelves for apt comparisons, and soon realized that I could only invent them: Dracula rewritten by J.G. Ballard, Last Year at Marienbad directed by Mario Bava.... Here, at last, is what readers have been waiting for: a new, and very dark vision ... This is the most original and unnerving first novel that I've read in years. Stunning." - Douglas E. Winter