Just in time to underscore the dread in your soul during the darkest time of the year, New Pulp Press has released the first of their planned classic reprints, Flight to Darkness by Gil Brewer.
Eric Garth is a wounded Korea veteran whose body is recuperating stateside while his mind deteriorates inside. He's seduced and even become engaged to his nurse Leda, while he fantasizes about killing his brother Frank every time he closes his eyes. Eric is released from the hospital and takes his fiance with him back to the family in Florida, but nothing goes smoothly for him. He goes back and forth between guilt over his fratricidal fantasies and paranoia regarding the way he keeps on getting detained and arrested at the same whiplash pace as his desire for and suspicion of his woman. Or make that women, seems there's an old flame, not quite gone, never far from his thoughts and still waiting for him back home.
The story is told in the quasi-reliable first person and anybody whose read similar stuff from the last sixty years could probably spot the plot points and twists coming, but that shouldn't detract from the pleasure of reading as skilled and confident a genre-master as Brewer who says everything plainly and precisely, unassuming and unapologetic.
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