45 Pounds of Flesh

Hot sex meets cold-blooded murder in Forty-Five Pounds of Flesh, where compulsive love leads an aspiring screenwriter to bring a twisted script to life in a crime reminiscent of the murder mystery of the century.

Damon was born of rape; a bastard whose adoptive father hanged himself upon learning he’d been duped. Guided by Mom, and her shrink, through the pain of learning about his real father, underachiever Damon eventually falls into obsessive love with Kammy. A nursing student who’d rather be an actress, she had the allure of Brigitte Bardot in his Come Dance With Me bedroom poster, but proved more elusive. Sadly, la petite mort orgasms, and Damon’s dreams of making her a star in an imagined screenplay he’d soon write, weren’t enough for barely-legal Kammy, who drifts back into secretive rendezvous with J.R., a millionaire more than twice her age, who’d promised her an easier path to glamour—after he leaves his beauty queen wife.

But one snowy night in Shreveport, Damon’s fight for Kammy ends with a miracle conception, and soon they marry, forever free to pursue their shared dream. Damon works construction and writes by night, while Kammy fills out acting-school applications—when she isn’t changing diapers. But Damon’s scripts aren’t selling, and one disillusioned girl’s night out, he discovers his wife and J.R. together again. By the next day his family had vanished.

After getting fired from his job and settling back in with Mom, Damon’s pain rises to ‘la douleur exquise.’ Saved from suicide only by the movie version of Presumed Innocent, Damon one-ups Scott Turow to write his own Eye for an Eye revenge script, in which he brilliantly frames J.R. for the brutal murder of the man’s pint-sized daughter.

But the pageant princess is spared, for the moment, by another miracle—Kammy wants Damon back. Reunited in a Santa Fe film-school dream life, the family now funded by Kammy’s inheritance from a mystery aunt in England, Damon applies his studies, and works to cash in on his independent blockbuster script—until a new question of paternity arises.