Rob Price
Gutbrain Records
rob + gutbrain.com = email

2025 November 21 • Friday

And here's another Gold Medal paperback, John McPartland's I'll See You in Hell!

It's a short, intense blast of sex and violence that doesn’t match its title as well as it does the first half of the front cover blurb: “Hell was a small town”.

Lee Farr drives from California to a tiny and isolated backwoods town when his old friend and partner calls him and says he urgently needs Lee’s help.

When Farr gets there he finds his friend tortured to death. His parents and dog have also been killed. When he returns to the house later, with the town’s deputy sheriff, the whole place and the bodies have been destroyed by fire and the dog’s body is gone, presumably to be eaten.

The deputy sheriff is a rapist, a vicious sadist and a strong, violent bully with a badge and a gun and the whole town under his control.

Pretty soon Farr is clashing violently with this brute, manages to escape only to discover that he’s trapped in the town with no real allies.

A few deus ex machina-type events have to intrude here to direct our protagonist to a climax and denouement in which everything is eventually sorted out, but first there will be more death, more sex and more violence, with Farr using his Korean War experience to do some torturing himself.

This one flew by and was startlingly nasty and racy. McPartland is quite good at creating a nightmarish scenario of feverish fatality and throwing exploitation elements at the reader. It’s classic Gold Medal.

The first line is “He found the bodies one by one”.