Jools G King
Chiefly, this page is dedicated to my dystopian sci-fi horror novel, BODYFREEZE, available for sale on Amazon and free on Kindle Unlimited. The story is set a few years from now and revolves around a cryonics company, Scarrax BioCryptz. The protagonist, Stefan Anderson, works there as a sales representative. His life, as well as the lives of the cryonic suspension team, are thrown into jeopardy after a client suffers a terrifying high-speed road accident.
Basically, if you enjoy chilling dystopian sci fi horror books, especially those of a medical nature, Bodyfreeze could prove to be an ideal read for you. Moreover, if you like your sci fi horror to be not only a little weird, but laced with black humour too, I think you’ll enjoy it. With this in mind, I hope you’ll consider ordering BODYFREEZE from Amazon and maybe even let me know what you think.
To sum up, BODYFREEZE is a 62,000 word cryonics novel set in England a few years from now. Moreover, it’s without a doubt one of the scariest novels I’ve written. Check out the Amazon reviews here, and the Goodreads reviews here.
With this in mind, why not check out my other horror books?
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List of Tropes:
Mysterious Things Are Happening; Traumatic Past; Karmic Retribution; Body Horror; Psychological Horror; Hear No Evil; See No Evil; Love Interest; Nonbelievers; Scientist/ Researcher; Psychological Landscape;
Now that you’ve had a taster, here’s the Bodyfreeze blurb:
How cold is cold? How deep is despair? At what temperature does your heart finally… shatter?
Minus. Two. Hundred. Degrees.
Cryonics. The practice of freezing the human body in the hope of bringing it back to life.
It’s a voluntary procedure.
Usually.
Stefan Anderson thought selling immortality for Scarrax BioCryptz would be a scream.
He was right. Just not in the way he expected.
When a client dies after a car crash, the freezing process doesn’t go quite to plan.
Stefan’s about to discover a horrifying truth.
The cold, hard way.
And Stefan Anderson is first in line…
BODYFREEZE invites you on a gripping journey through a frozen landscape of hope and despair, where dreams of immortality collide with the fragility of life. What price would you pay for the hope of eternity?
Presently, you can buy BODYFREEZE from Amazon here. Or read for FREE on Kindle Unlimited.
Also, BODYFREEZE is available in audiobook and paperback formats.
EBOOK ASIN: B0CTHRS14M
PAPERBACK ASIN: B0CWV9M4HJ
AUDIOBOOK ASIN: B0F41C2997
BISAC CATEGORY: FIC015000
Publication date: February 28, 2024 UK (independently published)
- Language: English
- Print length: 276 pages (ebook), 274 pages (paperback)
- Listening length: 6 hours and 51 minutes
- Trim size: 5 x 8in
- Territorial rights: Worldwide
- ISBN-13: 979-8883357502
And for the still undecided, here’s chapter 14 in full:
“You can see, Sue, how the face has wrinkled in places, and become dehydrated,” Sklarz said. “And check out that eye. It’s become dimpled, almost concave.” He peeled back the eyelid, revealing a lustreless eye. “You see how the glycerol has shrunk it?” Hastily, he thumbed the eyelid down again, feeling unaccountably spooked by something — the orb. Its vacant intensity.
Sue Waterton nodded and leaned closer, haloed by the operating lamps. “That colour,” she said, gazing in awe at the blotched amber face and chest, uncovered by drapes. “Does it cover the entire body?”
“Most of it,” said Sklarz, recovering. “I call it Cryonicist’s Gold, Sue. The gold standard for perfusion, and the hallmark of immortality.”
“It’s kind of… ruinous.”
“You’ll get used to it.” Sklarz laughed nervously. “So will he.” Nodding at Rhodes. “It’s the glycerol that does it. It’s unfortunate, but the stuff’s so damned effective at minimising injury to frozen tissue. We’d be jerks not to use it.”
Over three hours, they had flushed about seventy litres of glycerol perfusate through the patient, all the while monitoring glycerol concentration, pressure, and pH.
At the end of perfusion, Sklarz had observed a healthy two-millimetre shrinkage of bleached white brain tissue through both burr holes. Terminal glycerol concentration was in the high teens per cent.
At 09:11, Sklarz closed the chest with stainless steel wire and stapled over the skin. “Temperature and acoustic probes all secure?” he asked. “Outstanding freeze. Let’s take a well-earned timeout for coffee and bagels. Well done, everyone. It’s been a goddamn weird one, but a success.”
The team cheered and applauded themselves.
️ Sklarz’s sixty-third (excluding the cat) suspension was almost complete. A record to be proud; it included thirty-eight in the States and twenty-five over here, in the last three years, for Scarrax BioCryptz. All complete successes apart from — surprise, surprise — his third freeze for these damned dilettante Brits.
How he missed the crisp professionalism of his countrymen. The Philadelphia organisation where he’d learned his craft had been maestros, one and all. They’d also been a bunch of great guys all round. As patient with the honing of his surgical skills as they were impressed with the strength of his pitching arm and the way he coaxed his young wife Maria’s home-cooked beef patties on the griddle. Of course, they’d warned him about the Brits, latecomers to the cryonics scene, though one of the first to operate in Europe. There were rumours that after the UK economy tanked, the Brits took risks, cut corners on their suspensions. Nothing could be proved, but the American companies were always glad of the intervening Atlantic buttressing their own copper-bottomed reputations.
Long before Mike Sklarz had even heard of cryonics, he’d dreamed of becoming a surgeon. The obsession had pre-empted his first skateboard, his first football game. His mother, a hospital doctor, and his father, a nurse, had encouraged him to pursue medicine as a vocation. Yet even as a child growing up in rural Maine, Sklarz had been drawn to surgery by something other than mere professional status. His grandfather’s sudden death from a smoking-induced cardiac arrest had affected him profoundly. He’d been only eight years old, yet he could still recall the funeral vividly. They’d laid his grandfather in a pine box which didn’t even have any windows to peep through and disposed of him in a hole in the ground. A few words had been uttered. ️Sklarz’s mother, fearsome in black, had gripped his hand throughout. Later, she’d confided to him that grandpa’s heart had worn itself out.
What was this thing called death, which made people you’d known all your life disappear underground, never to return—not even for Thanksgiving and birthdays? Sklarz didn’t know, but he was determined to find the answer. Perhaps it lay hidden in the body like a cypher, the humble scalpel the only key.
Sklarz had failed to get into medical school, forced to settle for a place at New York State University, reading Biological Sciences. Here he’d discovered a small group of cryonics visionaries who met to discuss the current theories of life extension. For him, it was a transforming event. Disaffected, nihilistic, he’d taken to cryonics like a diabetic takes to insulin: like his life depended on it.
And he’d soon learn his life really did depend on cryonics, which offered the only legitimate opportunity of defeating death. Far better, he could at last realise his lifelong dreams of becoming a surgeon. Cryosurgery required no formal training; the dead lay beyond the shroud of medical law.
Against advice, Sklarz became infected by an almost missionary zeal to repair British cryonics. Were the stories true? Were British cryonicists mere dilettantes, even those who had received training in the USA? If so, perhaps a little imported American razzle dazzle might lift their game.
And so, Sklarz had offered his services and been snapped up by Scarrax BioCryptz. Maria and their two young kids had joined him after the first year. They’d assimilated to British culture better than expected, and by then Sklarz had given British cryonics protocol a much-needed wax and polish. His expertise had proved invaluable, but far more rewarding to him was the knowledge that he’d been able to deliver his Brit patients into a flawless icy oblivion. They would sleep safe and untroubled until the day they were reanimated. That gave him peace of a kind. So no, absolutely no, he had no regrets about emigrating to Blighty to pursue his first life cycle’s passion.
No regrets yet, anyway (he shivered as the temperature of the room suddenly dipped).
At 09:46, the patient was wrapped in two large plastic bags, strapped to a backboard, and transferred to the cooling room. Here, he was immersed in a coffin-shaped cooling box precooled to a refreshing minus ten degrees Celsius.
Sklarz watched the patient being lowered by chain hoist and massaged his sleep-denied eyes. Eight hours without a break had wiped him out. The stamina problem never got any easier, and he wasn’t sorry the morning’s work was over. His part anyway. Now he could grab a bite and some sleep.
The patient, too, would sleep.
Over the next three hours, relief technicians would inject liquid nitrogen into the cooling box, cooling the patient by gas evaporation to minus one hundred and twenty-five degrees Celsius.
Almost two-thirds the way to the patient’s final dormant temperature.
You can read the rest by purchasing BODYFREEZE on Amazon KDP here or read for FREE on Kindle Unlimited.
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