Product Description

he first victim, brutally assaulted, literally dies of fright in the ER, and Dr. Julie Charmaine must find out why. Psychiatrist, advocate for battered women and noted sleep researcher, Dr. Charmaine has just two clues to the beautiful young woman's death: she reeks of city sewers, and her last word is the Spanish slang for monkey. Meanwhile, Vicki Zambisi, tormented by twin memories of terror and lost love, begins an odyssey of vengeance. But when her nightmares keep her from destroying her betrayer, she turns to Dr. Charmaine. Eager investors have rewarded Dr. Wesley Kovacs lavishly for his groundbreaking cryonics research. Now, publicly supporting a form of immortality, Dr. Kovacs will let nothing stand between him and the Nobel Prize. Certainly not Vicki Zambisi, who could topple all he's worked to build. Or Julie Charmaine, now Vicki's therapist, who sees her dreams as evidence of a nightmarish plot. For in an experiment gone horribly awry, Kovacs himself holds the key to the 'Sewer Stalker,' the bizarre hybrid creature who lusts insatiably for beautiful women . . . and who now pursues both Julie and her patient. A gripping, edge of your seat thriller by the acclaimed author of Gargoyles.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #2633202 in Books
• Published on: 2003-10-01
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 448 pages

From Publishers Weekly
In pushing the borders of scientific possibility in this creepy medical thriller, his second after Gargoyles (2001), Nayes provides some genuinely chilling suspense. After treating a young woman who then dies seemingly of fright on the operating table, dream specialist Julie Charmaine hears from Vicki Zambisi, a young woman disturbed by dreams of a mysterious monster from her past, who hopes cryogenics expert Dr. Wesley Kovacs can help her. Soon a strange hybrid creature, the "Sewer Stalker," is no dream, but a serial killer roaming beneath Los Angeles and preying primarily on young women, some of them in Dr. Charmaine's own hospital. Before too long, Charmaine and Zambisi are forced by the increasing danger into an alliance with LAPD homicide detective Matt Guardian to take up Zambisi's pursuit of Dr. Kovacs and his experiments in prolonging life by freezing. The tale affords a rather old-fashioned view of women (however professional) as victim, along with some improbable informational dialogue, particularly on the part of Dr. Kovacs. This is a book that only dedicated horror fans will treasure, but a wide variety of readers will thoroughly enjoy reading once.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Booklist
From the moment doomed Irene Inez is dragged kicking and screaming from her car on a rainy Los Angeles night, this latest thriller from the author of Gargoyles (2001) will have you frantically guessing what horrors will await the next victim. When police bring a bloody and incoherent Inez to the California University Medical Center's ER, Dr. Julie Charmaine--a psychiatrist who specializes in battered women--is called in for a consultation. After her patient literally dies of fright the next morning, Dr. Charmaine teams up with LAPD detective Matt Guardian in a search for the vicious attacker. The bodies start piling up, and evidence points to someone or something lurking in the sewers beneath the city. The investigation leads them to the creepy Dr. Kovacs and his Phoenix Life Extension Foundation, which may hold the key to a horrific secret that has been kept hidden for 20 years. Should enthrall fans of the science-gone-awry genre made popular by Robin Cook and Michael Crichton, as well as readers of horror and monster lit. Michael Gannon
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Review
"Finds nasty variations of Rosemary's Baby . . . makes for breathless page-turning."(Kirkus Reviews on Gargoyles)
-- Review

Customer Reviews

Exciting slasher medical thriller
In Los Angeles, the woman barely survived the assault that apparently relates to sewage based on the gook on her when she suddenly screams in horror and dies in the emergency room. As a counselor for battered women, psychiatrist Dr. Julie Charmaine wants to know what was so terrorizing that the woman relived it in her dreams and dropped dead on the replay. While Julie wonders what happened, Vicki Zambisi, who has had several operations to repair her deformed skull, breaks into a boarded-up hotel to retrieve a memento that might disclose the secret illegal experiments conducted by the highly regarded mad cryogenic research scientist Dr. Wesley Kovacs. She is fortunate to elude the sewage slasher.

Vicki meets Julie who has a device that creates visual images of what people are dreaming about that she would like to use on her. Vicki has doubts, but soon other women undergo the horrible assaults in the old abandoned hotel. Could Dr. Kovacs be the killer or is it something sinister beyond what the two women and a LAPD detective can imagine?

This is an exciting slasher medical thriller that is fun to read sort of like a Roger Corman movie. The story line combines the serial killer with a science fiction cautionary tale about the boundaries of medicine. Julie is a delightful, brilliant and energetic heroine while much of the rest of the cast either are victims or enable the audience to understand the protagonist better. Alan Nayes provides readers with an enjoyable tale that hooks the reader from the first page and keeps their interest until all the questions are answered.
Harriet Klausner

real thriller
Nayes has a knack of writing books involving weird human experiments. I guess that stands to reason since he is an MD. Don't know if I'd want him to be my doc, but I certainly enjoy his books. The Unnatural has a similar feel to Relic by Preston and Child. A "monster" emerging from the sewers, ripping people apart, a weird smell, and so on. The identity of the killer is not really kept hidden through the book, so there is no surprise there. Even the nature of the killer is not really hidden, so the "spoiler" on one of the other reviews isn't even that much of a shock. But be forewarned, there are some - yes - stomach turning twists in store for the reader that makes it to the end. Of the two books of Nayes that I have read, Gargoyles and the Unnatural, I think I enjoyed this one the best. The plot is complicated. The science in it is almost far reaching enough to be ridiculous, yet has enough fact in it to be plausible. I can almost see this book becoming a series featuring further adventures of Julie, the main character.

Revolting!
I came across this book at the library. I thought it was a type of medical, sci-fi book. It was not! Spoilers........







Women are being attacked and the police thinks it's someone that's living in the sewer. More like something living in the sewer. Vicki, one of the main characters, works with a crazy doctor that likes to experiment. She helps him with one of his experiments. Ben. She becomes Bens friend, She helps him read and after time they fall in love. Awwwww. They start having sex on a regular basis, while Dr. What-ever-his-name films it. After a short time something happens to Ben and Vicki leaves. She comes back 20 years later to get Ben's body, I guess to bury it, I don't know. If I didn't mention it, When Vicki Returns after 20 years that's when the attacks start. Of course you find out that Ben has been committing the crimes. They eventualy kill him. I read this book feeling sorry for Ben and Vicki.
At least until you realise Ben is a monkey. You read right, a MONKEY, or more accurately an orangutan. I can't even begin to descrbe how revolted I was. The author even described the first time they were intimate. Nice huh. What the author should have done was give the readers a heads-up and let I us Know he was righting a book about beastility, that way anyone who doesn't want to read, or even bring it into their homes can leave it on the shelf!