An SF Gateway eBook: bringing the classics to the future.
His face badly burned in a motor accident, young Robert Struve is horribly disfigured.
Unable to afford corrective surgery, and denied lawful redress against the rich man whose daughter was responsible, Struve wears his scars as a badge of honor, excelling at school and sports. The social pressure is intense however, and he is treated harshly by his peers-young men and women alike. When his frustration boils over, he assaults a girl.
In a correctional institution, as a ward of the state, he undergoes reconstructive surgery.
Years go by. Then one of the girls involved in the incident is murdered, her face mutilated. A second and third are killed in similar fashion; is Robert Struve involved? No one has seen him, since his incarceration...
Written in the late 1940s, The Flesh Mask was Jack Vance's first success as a mystery writer, launching his Edgar-winning career. The story was first published in 1957, as Take My Face, under the pseudonym "Peter Held".
SALES POINTS
* "Only Lord Dunsany could create worlds, names, atmospheres as magical as Jack Vance s; and Vance is a better storyteller." Poul Anderson
* "You can't possibly pass up any book by Jack Vance. He has perfected the trick of creating new worlds so deceptively real that after a while your own home seems imaginary." Jerry Pournelle
* Be warned: reading Vance is addictive. George R.R. Martin
* A modern classic by one of the great fantasy and science fiction writers of the 20th Century. A rare tale of an Earth so far in the future as to be nearly unrecognisable to the contemporary reader. Raymond E. Feist