Private Showings by George Hook is a horror novel that depicts the deterioration of the personality of a character through a failure of intimacy. The character, who goes by the first name of X, the middle name of X, and the last name of X, is found at the beginning of the novel roaming the streets of Paris in search of a ghost of a woman on video, who is finally discovered in a phantasmagoric sex emporium and video theater. As the video depicting this object of love making love unreels before the eyes of XXX, another parallel life of private terrors is shown, triggered by scenes on the screen that were designed to elicit pleasure. A chilling early religious education, the violent breakdown of adolescent illusions, the extinguishing of a flicker of spiritual and physical enlightenment, the deadly study of a medieval epic poem, and a printing plant that turns into the last word in horrors all play on the peripheries of the observations of XXX, but are never acknowledged by the character as XXX watches the perfect woman on the screen in the city of love and light. Finally, the conflict within XXX between a night of false pleasure and years of true pain must come to a head in the inviting face and body of death.
