Novels
Lucas has also enjoyed critical success as a novelist. Throat Sprockets (1994, ISBN 0-385-31290-3), the fulfillment of an uncompleted graphic novel serialized in Taboo, is about a man whose life is altered by a chance encounter with an erotic and disturbing film of mysterious origin. It was singled out as the year's best first novel in Terri Windling and Ellen Datlow's The Year's Best Fantasy and Horror, and was chosen by novelist Tananarive Due for inclusion in Horror: Another 100 Best Books (2005, ISBN 0-7867-1577-4). In October 2006, Rue Morgue magazine included Throat Sprockets on a list of 50 essential alternative horror novels. A film adaptation is presently in the works as the author's directorial debut.
After completing work on his Bava magnum opus, Lucas ended his decade-long hiatus from fiction with The Book of Renfield: A Gospel of Dracula (2005, ISBN 0-7432-4354-4), a complement to Bram Stoker's Dracula that focuses on the character of Renfield and how the circumstances of his tragic past predisposed him to become the ideal pawn for the Lord of the Undead. The novel was generally overlooked upon publication but can be seen in hindsight as the point of origin for the "mash-up" horror novels that rose to commercial prominence at the end of the decade, for its incorporation of approximately 50 pages of Stoker's novel into the weave of its original narrative.
Lucas has since written a third novel, The Only Criminal, another "graphic novel idea written in classic novel form," but it remains unpublished.
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Famous quotes containing the word novels:
“Society is the stage on which manners are shown; novels are the literature. Novels are the journal or record of manners; and the new importance of these books derives from the fact, that the novelist begins to penetrate the surface, and treat this part of life more worthily.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“An art whose limits depend on a moving image, mass audience, and industrial production is bound to differ from an art whose limits depend on language, a limited audience, and individual creation. In short, the filmed novel, in spite of certain resemblances, will inevitably become a different artistic entity from the novel on which it is based.”
—George Bluestone, U.S. educator, critic. “The Limits of the Novel and the Limits of the Film,” Novels Into Film, Johns Hopkins Press (1957)
“The point is, that the function of the novel seems to be changing; it has become an outpost of journalism; we read novels for information about areas of life we don’t know—Nigeria, South Africa, the American army, a coal-mining village, coteries in Chelsea, etc. We read to find out what is going on. One novel in five hundred or a thousand has the quality a novel should have to make it a novel—the quality of philosophy.”
—Doris Lessing (b. 1919)