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The Happy Man
- A Tale of Horror
- Narrated by: Matt Godfrey
- Length: 5 hrs and 20 mins
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The Happy Man
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Summary
Charles Ripley has a good job as an engineer, a pretty wife, and an expensive house in a fashionable San Diego suburb. But it isn't until Ruskin Marsh moves in next door that Ripley realizes how passionless his life really is. Marsh, a connoisseur of the arts, high-powered lawyer, model husband and father, and effortless seducer of women, is so supremely alive that Ripley finds himself irresistibly drawn to him.
But after Marsh's arrival, local girls begin to vanish, marriages end violently, nights are split with endless, desperate screams, and horribly mutilated corpses are found. Soon, Ripley becomes caught up in an accelerating maelstrom of sex, drugs, violence, and ghastly, unimaginable rites...and begins to see the beauty of life.
From its profoundly unsettling first pages, Eric C. Higgs's The Happy Man (1985) reveals the nightmare underside of the American dream and brilliantly echoes the Gothic horror tradition of Edgar Allan Poe and Roald Dahl.
"The Happy Man is an essential '80s horror read: smart, sharp, unforgiving, unlike anything else in the genre." - Too Much Horror Fiction
"[A] grisly shocker, understated for the most part but carrying the impact of a fist to the stomach...a most promising debut." - San Diego Union
"A thoroughly engrossing Gothic horror story." - South Bend Tribune
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Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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Overall4 out of 5 stars
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Performance5 out of 5 stars
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Story3 out of 5 stars
- Francis
- 19-01-20
Ennui and intensity in Suburbia
A decent short novel about ennui, the death of the soul in modern, mechanised society and suburbia, and the pursuit of intense experience which seems further away than it once was; about mid-life crisis of sorts, and finally a tale of redemption and regaining one's decency, perhaps.
Not Virginia Woolf or Nabokov, but an engaging read with some thoughtful themes running along in the background.
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Overall5 out of 5 stars
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Performance5 out of 5 stars
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Story4 out of 5 stars
- Jasper Bark
- 14-10-20
Dark Satire That's Lost None of its Bite
This novel is one of only two ascribed to Eric C. Higgs and the world is a lesser place for not having more of his fiction in it. This is a dark and insightful satire of the material, upper-middle-class lifestyle that was so celebrated, in the west, in the nineteen eighties. Engineer Charles Ripley has a pretty wife, a good job, a great home and a huge hole at the centre of his life. A hole that he hopes to fill through his friendship with the new neighbour, Ruskin Marsh. But Marsh has dark secrets and even darker appetites.
The fact that the book is over forty years old, is of no significance, it has only become more relevant in the intervening years. It is literate, well observed and excoriating in its dissection of the emptiness of modern life and the extremes to which we'll go to fill it with some meaning.
Credit should also go to Matt Godfrey's carefully judged performance, which brings Ripley's laconic voice to life and fleshes out every other character he portrays.
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