In Friendship, Ohio a young adverting man jaded by the Hollywood equation money-into-light-into-money - ‘By the time you reach thirty ... you’re either just learning to appreciate the anaesthetic value of escapism or growing sick of the vapours’ - searches for more primary stimulation in a local X-rated movie house. There, amongst the throbbing hard bodies, he encounters something unprecedented: Throat Sprockets is a hardcore film of an exceptional kind, narrating as it does the erotic possibilities of women’s throats. Fascinated by the filmmaker’s technique and infatuation - close-ups, voice-overs, constant obvious splicing - the man’s marriage dies, and thus he begins a journey into a very dark heart of sexual chance and cinematic discovery.

It wouldn’t take the uninitiated long to recognise where Lucas is coming from; there is a scholarly edge to the detail in these pages. He appreciates the allure of films, their ability to seize the unconscious, and thus the struggle to convince us of Throat Sprockets’ own fetishistic potential is hardly strained. The search for what he calls ‘the emotion of emulsion’ shines off the page. And what as an author he is particularly good at is tapping into the collective memory - the film itself comes across like some perverse first-cousin to Resnais’ modernist classic Last Year At Marienbad (itself either a masterpiece or elaborate art-wank). The focused description of scenes, of the medical exactness of throat architecture recalls nothing so much as Ballard’s Atrocity Exhibition. It is frighteningly easy to visualise his film. (Parts were also originally published as a graphic novel.)

The reference to Ballard is interesting. The decaying militarism of this book’s coda is straight out of Ballard’s work, while the climax seems torn from much the same vein of doomed inevitability that David Cronenberg has mined so well; the final image would have to burn out in the gate like Monte Hellman’s Two-Lane Blacktop. Which is not to say that what Lucas has achieved here is simply some magpie patchwork. On the contrary, Throat Sprockets plays on our knowledge, manipulating expectations every step of the way. He only comes close to losing it once, when the former underground film pokes its head into the light of a domestic video release and throat sprocketing becomes a perverse, vampiric pastime across the world. But cautious of extending his story too far, Lucas sensibly reins back.

The most obvious comparison in all this is surely Theodore Roszak’s marvellous Flicker, with its sly blend of mystery and analytical Sight & Sound film theory. But where Roszak elects to deconstruct the very physicality of what film is, Lucas endeavours to decode the process of filmmaking itself. (The final revelation of how the film came into being is as telling as it is absurd.) This bleak, melancholic, occasionally witty tale is an assured example of the very best of modern horror writing - disquieting, even menacing, and most defiantly adult.