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The Gas
Charles Platt
Savoy Books paperback, 166 pages, £3.95
ISBN 0861300238
Review by Steven Blake (1996)

Judge a book by its cover, why don’t we: a splendidly lurid affair by Harry Douthwaite, screaming ‛Early 1970s!’ into your face. It also says ‛smut’ and ‛porn’ and ‛weird’, and it’s all of those, big time, crossed with the end of the world disaster epic in one paperback school of SF made most popular by John Wyndham, and later utilised by J.G. Ballard. The disaster here is that some kind of nasty gas gets loose, turning everyone either sex mad (mad for sex of every kind) or just plain violent. Or both. Everyone acts out. There may also be a cynical sneer involved: ‛Life’s a gas!’ 

Charles Platt wrote and edited for Michael Moorcock’s New Worlds. He also put together Who Writes Science Fiction? for Savoy at a later date. The Gas hails from 1970, when it was published as a porn paperback. This Savoy edition is from 1980, but I’ve been asked to review it anyway, as it’s still available and there are no reviews online. (Mail order is your best bet: my copy came in a plain brown envelope and the postman gave me an iffy look. Although that was via the editor.)

The Gas is set in England. The England of privilege and nausea, of snob central Cambridge University and the lovely English village, full of English virgins, trusty yeomen, gentle vicars and all the other hypocrites. The Gas is about repression and English hypocrisy. Platt probably doesn’t like England. Everything that bubbles underneath England comes out in The Gas. Necrophilia, incest, anal, you name it. Platt also gives good blasphemy, and is very, very funny as well as serious: repression, compromise, hypocrisy; the very glue of English society. Platt allows no escape. Savoy's dodgy comics are a good match for this.

An interesting point here: the publication of The Gas, along with Samuel R. Delany’s The Tides of Lust, is what led to Savoy publisher and madcap author David Britton’s first imprisonment. This happened years before Savoy’s ‛moral ambiguity phase’, featuring Lord Horror and its accompanying comics! it doesn’t say ‛porn’ that loudly! It’s only words!* The book had been on sale (in Savoy’s edition and the original) in various places for many years.

File with Re/Search, Savoy, New Worlds, William S. Burroughs, Ballard, Moorcock, beatniks, psychedelia, the surrealists, those ugly underground comics so beloved of old hippies, and weird old stuff in general. The Gas might even be called the definitive punk novel, if it were by someone from a different generation. Foreword by Philip Jose Farmer. •

*Editor’s note (2010): Full details on Savoy’s website:

Savoy’s page on The Gas

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