Pencil Neck

He ran and ran down a road to damnation

With each mile marker, handsome, muscle-bound drifter Gray Boakes escapes further from the pathetic Pencil Neck he once was. Thrown off the train in a deadbeat town, it doesn't take long for him to be surrounded by willing women.

But new squeeze Barbara wants to tame him and trap him in a world of loveless sex and cheap booze, just as his devoted parents wanted to trap him in the 9-to-5 world of money and power.

Now his time on the road is quickly reaching its inevitable dead end, and an increasingly desperate Gray commits one final act of rebellion - a perversion from which there might be no salvation.

Pencil Neck is a work of noir fiction in the classic paperback mould, with lean, terse prose and a black and cynical heart. Part pulp fiction thriller and part dark psychological character study, anti-hero Gray Boakes' doom-laden descent into hell is unflinching, twisted and gloriously, unapologetically amoral.