Book excerpt: The modern classic of sadism and sexual extremes. When a young streetwalker is picked up by an enigmatic older woman, she finds herself launched upon an odyssey of pleasure and pain beyond measure. Lost in a night world, and thrown to the lusts of her anonymous captors, she must submit to their increasingly bizarre rituals of pain and degradation in order to embrace salvation. House Of Pain is an inferno of scorched earth erotica, a glimpse of living Hell as a young woman is abandoned to the throes of rage, violence and cruelty which feed the sexual impulse. It remains probably the most extreme evocation of sadism and pornographic intensity since the writings of de Sade himself.