Stephen’s novel Tokyo Slaughterhouse was published in 2007.

This is the first chapter.

It was a hard life, for the boys in the black mountain city of Magadan, at the eastern extreme of Siberia. They had all started work at the city's slaughterhouse at the age of seven. They spent their lives burning up, yearning, lost. Survival was a power denied to them, a thousand times over. When their hunger poured out of them, it hit a brick wall at maximum velocity. At night, the sleepless boys twisted into themselves, the darkness violent and painful around them. That exposed mountain terrain was freezing already at summer's end. In September, starving monkeys would start to come down from the surrounding mountains to plead for food from the godforsaken people of that city. The people always killed and ate the monkeys.

    Those boys were the final descendants of the last survivors of Stalin’s vast extermination camp-city of Magadan, which had been abandoned and left to rot decades ago, after the dictator’s death. Over fifteen million people had been brutally eradicated and then incinerated there in the middle decades of the twentieth century, on Stalin’s orders, and the mountains surrounding the city had accumulated from endless tons of congealed human ashes. The Slaughterhouse Boys were obsessed, and hallucinated constantly about escaping to the city of Tokyo, far over the ocean to the south-east. It was said that life was perfect there, and that the girls’ mouths and anuses could incite terminal white-hot ecstasy in even the most deadened boys. The Slaughterhouse Boys worked from before dawn to make money to buy gasoline, in order to be able to power their unworkable, home-constructed motorcycles to the port of Okhotsk, from where a monthly, rusted ferry left for Tokyo. But gasoline was harder to obtain than any precious metal. And whenever they did manage to buy a little, and siphoned it via their mouths into the fissured fuel tanks of their motorcycles, it always seemed to leak out immediately onto the ground.

    Josef was a boy who worked night shifts in the slaughterhouse, from the fall of dark until dawn, collecting up bones. He dressed in the thick black overalls and big boots of all those Slaughterhouse Boys, greasing his hair back with fish oil and fat. He was the wretchedest boy in the city. Each dawn after work, he walked through the city, past the long-abandoned train station, the free-entrance Headkick Discothèque, and the luxurious Mach Hotel. Like every other Slaughterhouse Boy, he dreamed of the ocean, and of Tokyo. He watched his feet walking, making sure that he didn't fall.

    The teenaged sex-worker girls who operated out of the cheapest rooms of the Mach Hotel detested the inhabitants of that city, without exception. They were the last descendants of the final survivors of the prostitutes dispatched by Stalin to Magadan to service the extermination camp’s guards. Holding stilettos in their hands, they watched the Slaughterhouse Boys drunkenly riot in the square outside the hotel every Sunday night. Just like the Slaugherhouse Boys, those girls wondered how they could ever escape the city. They hated everything and they wanted to die, right now. Most of all, they hated the horrific noise that grated out from the slaughterhouse when it was working at maximum efficiency and capacity. The girls lived a fast life at night. But it seemed to them that every story of ecstasy or escape always ended up as just another broken episode, in the stormlight at dawn. Sometimes, in that miserable dawn light, they caught a glimpse of Josef passing by, exhausted after his night shift, going to the wasteground at the city's edge to sleep. The girl’s leader, Larissa, said to her sidekick, Modesta, 'Now there's a cute boy. We could eat him up alive, cock first. Let's hope he can leave this city before he falls apart in front of our eyes.'

    That dawn, on the wasteground, Josef's skin burned as he dreamed. Inside his skin, his body was a big furnace, the blood shooting through his arteries. And the sky above his head was itself one great misfiring cranial envelope, a sensorium in implosion. His eyes moved under their lids. In his dream, he caught sight of a figure dancing wildly, while his own body was suffocatingly constricted. He had to break out of the dream in order to stand up and breathe. And in that moment, the wretchedness he had felt from birth was suddenly broken. He breathed-in the freezing air, aware that his life was unknotted. He started walking, moving his arms and legs in response to a sensation of liberation, as he walked out on the black mountain city.

    When the Slaughterhouse Boys heard that Josef had left - heading on a due course for the ferry-port of Okhotsk, by all accounts - they went into an overdrive of jealousy. They did their work that day with snappingly gritted teeth. During the midday vodka break, one boy struck his skull in rage against another boy's head with such force that they both cracked apart and the noise was heard for miles around. At the moment their shift ended, the boys headed for the discothèques of the city to curse all night. At dawn, they gathered in the city square to riot and then attack the Mach Hotel. They held their killing equipment in their hands. A bad deluge of rain and hailstones was falling from the red-streaked sky.

    Inside the hotel, the girls were ready to crush any assault. They had their own weapons ready. Larissa came to the window to taunt the Slaughterhouse Boys, shouting: 'You limp-cocked suckers!' Her diamante earrings shook and shimmered in the convulsions of her rage. As the dawn came up, the Slaughterhouse Boys grew dispirited. The exhilaration of their failure soon exhausted them, and they collapsed in hordes on the cracked tarmac of the city square. But soon, a tanker entered the square, carrying a leaking consignment of low-grade gasoline, and the boys rushed to hijack it. They forgot their despair about Josef's escape instantly, as they grappled with one another. Two boys, Stiepan and Kolya, jumped into the tanker’s cab and clubbed-in the driver’s skull. The other boys surrounded the tanker. As they stamped their boots in impatience, desperate to kill, the metal studs on the boots’ soles shot up sparks from the tarmac. The sparks set fire to the leaking gasoline, and the tanker exploded, propelling the flaming bodies of Stiepan and Kolya through the windscreen and halfway across the square. In the coming days, the inhabitants of Magadan found some rare amusement by viewing the carbonized remains of the two boys. Orchid haemorrhages of rust slowly ran across the burnt-out tanker's surfaces. For the surviving Slaughterhouse Boys, that tortuously slow speed of decay was unbearable. They turned their heads away, in the direction of Tokyo.