The Ritual

I just finished reading 'The ritual' by Graham Masterton. Going by my previous post you could well imagine I read it on my mobile. It is the most gruesome book I have read till now. It is a good read and the theme of cannibalism only makes it more unputdownable provided the reader has the guts to handle the gruesomeness. The very idea of eating one's own body, deliberately and litlle by little, is enough to give one the creep.

Number of images, of mutilation and flesh and blood, still lay embedded in my mind. There was a girl who had cut and eaten all her limbs and only had a head and a torso wrapped in white bandges, left. The climax scene was exceptionally gory. There in the kitchen while the devotees butchered their own body or what was left of them chefs took the flesh and turned them into delicacies for others to eat.

However,the book has a dissapointing ending. Jesus himself and a somesort of devil appear in the end. That particular developement destroys , to some extent, whatever plausabilty the story line held.

If you can get hold of the book and read it though I should warn you it is not for everyone.

Here is an excerpt:

"At the first table, a young naked girl with long brown hair was sitting up, supported by two blue-shirted Guides, and she was sawing through her own arm at the elbow. Her eyes were fixed and wild-looking. Her teeth were clenched on a hard rubber wedge, to prevent her from biting her tongue. She had cut through the skin and muscle of her upper forearm with a surgical scalpel, and now she was rasping her way through the bones, radius and ulna, bone dust mushing white into her bright leaking blood.
At the next table, a one-armed boy of about twenty was grimacing in concentration as he cut long deep slices of flesh from his calves and his thighs. One leg had already been reduced to the bare bone, and the raw meat of his upper thigh was bound around with a rubber tourniquet to prevent the boy from bleeding to death before he had finished stripping the meat from his other leg. Blood ran along the gutters around the table, and poured darkly down the drains.
One hideous spectacle followed another, eleven of them, and M. Musette tugged Charlie past all eleven. Velma was there, or what was left of Velma. She had sliced off both her breasts, and then cut open her own stomach in an attempt to drag out her liver and her kidneys. "

If you wish you can download it from here

http://rapidshare.com/files/219464388/Graham_Masterton_-_Ritual.rtf.html

http://www.esnips.com/doc/ddba9787-f705-43d6-82fb-f43aa0851544/Graham-Masterton---Ritual

(Open the downloaded file with wordpad)