Expanding on a story first published in Omni in 1981 (‘A Cage for Death’), Deathhunter is a science fiction novel set in a future where a non-violent, non-warring society allows everyone to choose the moment of their own death. People ready to die go to a Death House, where a guide takes them through the slow, easeful process of bidding farewell to life and embracing oblivion. (This is also a world free of any sort of religious ideas of an afterlife). Jim Todhunter is just such a guide, given care of a rarity: a murderer, Nathan Weinberger, who killed in protest at this society’s beliefs. Because, Weinberger believes not only that death isn’t the end, but that in promoting easy deaths, society is in fact providing easy prey to a creature that feeds off human death, a creature he believes can be lured by the ‘death pheromone’ he’s succeeded in synthesising, and that captured in an electrical cage. As it’s Jim’s job, as a guide, to lead his client into an acceptance of death, Jim humours Weinberger by going through with the trap experiment — only to see the little red imp-creature Weinberger's been describing…