Sometime after his eighteenth birthday, Starsmore’s band lands a recording contract with a small Independent label. The deal owes much to his lover Gayle’s nepotic connections and it is out of gratitude that he proposes to her. They marry in black leather and scandalise the media with their outrageous rock ‘n’ roll lifestyle. Her conservative father disinherits her but neither of them care; they think they’re in love and love conquers all. Besides, Starsmore’s band is rapidly clambering over the perimeter wall of cult popularity into the wealthy pastures of mainstream success.

But there’s trouble in paradise. Starsmore’s always fancied himself and now the music magazines are splashing his face over their covers and nubile teen groupies are hurling themselves at his mercy, his already swollen ego becomes a rampaging monster. He starts having affairs. Gayle finds out and dumps him in a blaze of publicity. He retaliates by sleeping with a host of celebrities: glamour models, soap actresses, girlie group members - anyone who’ll ensure him a place in the gossip columns. Gayle threatens to go to the papers and sell her story. He threatens to sue her. Desperate for revenge, Gayle kills herself. She makes sure everyone knows who is responsible for her actions.

So there it is - his Nemesis entangled in her spiteful obituary. Starsmore’s world disintegrates into destructive splinters of self-hatred as he embarks on a quest to ease his pain. He searches for comfort in meaningless, empty sex, seeks Nirvana at the bottom of a bottle but nothing, nothing takes away the agony, not even the heroin he bangs into his veins. Eventually, his antisocial habits cause the band to split and he fades into obscurity - a washed-up, burned-out old has-been scrabbling in the transient glory of the past.

They find his body lying on top of Gayle’s overgrown grave. Unable to feel anything but insatiable self-loathing, he has taken a shot gun and blown his head off. In his pocket they find a suicide note, the ink smudged by tears. He blames Gayle for everything, even his affairs.

He is twenty-six years old when he dies, forgotten by all but a few staunch fans. After death, he becomes something of a tragic icon for hundreds of angst-ridden teens, all too eaten alive by nihilism to taste the wonder that is life.

Before all this transpires and a continent away, a young man kisses his mother goodbye. Angelo Espinosa is a good kid but he’s easily led, especially when the one doing the leading is his gang-banger girlfriend, Tores. Espinosa will do anything to keep her sweet.

On this fateful day, he meets up with Tores’ posse and gets into her car. He’s sitting in the back next to Lupo, a youth whose intimidating persona prevents Espinosa from saying anything when he catches sight of the gun handle protruding from his belt. Espinosa can see the near-future written on Lupo’s psychotic smile. He wants to get out of that car before they’re all damned to Hell but Tores is laughing with her homies. She’s so hot when she’s smiling and he wants her so badly ... .

The car enters a rival gang’s territory. Espinosa knows what’s going to happen even before the first enemy arrives on the scene. He’s yelling at Lupo to put the gun away ... there’s an explosion of sound as a chamber empties ... a boyish scream as hot metal penetrates soft flesh ... More deafening roars of thunder follow. The windscreen shatters and suddenly, Espinosa’s wearing Gordo’s brains.

Tores goes for the door, shrieking like the little girl she is. The game’s turned sour and she doesn’t want to play anymore but no one’s told the gang outside the car. Peering out from behind his humid mask of mashed cerebellum and CSF, Espinosa can only watch in numb horror as his girl is cut to shreds by a hail of bullets. Lupo takes down two of her killers before he, too, is executed by a shot to the throat.

Only Angelo is left now. He panics, tries to sink down in the seat and hide as the remaining gang members approach the abattoir-car. He’s begging and praying and wondering what might have been even as a projectile tears through his right lung. They laugh and move away to tend to their own dead and dying.

He has five years to go before he can legally buy liquor yet, here he is, drowning in his own blood. Never given the chance to fulfil his potential, never allowed to show the world the hero deep inside of him. For what seems forever, Espinosa wrestles against death. Before he finally succumbs to the inevitable, he is aware of a vagrant stealing his wallet from his pocket. This, Espinosa thinks as his last, pain-racked breath rattles free of his convulsing body, is the true face of humanity.

Not too far removed from the crumbling barrios, Jubilation Lee lives to entertain her fellow mall rats. Since her parents’ murder the girl has been searching for love, for acceptance, for a family that will protect her and never leave her - all the things she thinks she has found amongst this rag-bag mix of dropouts and rebels. She’ll do anything to keep in with them, even if it means going one step further than her conscience would like.

She steals the CD for Cynjen’s birthday. Usually, she’s too quick for the fat-ass security guards but this one’s got the drop on her. As he grabs hold of her arm, she reacts automatically and slams her fist into his face.

The Juvenile detention centre is a far cry from the luxuries of the mall but even here, she’s determined to maintain her all-important popularity. After all, it’s all she’s got now. Her attitude doesn’t endear her to the guards but it does win her the confidence of an older girl. They are released almost simultaneously and are quick to re-establish their friendship on the outside. It’s this new friend who first convinces Jubilation that the oldest trade is the only possible option left open for a hungry, homeless young offender with no formal qualifications.

And so Lee finds herself caught up in a vortex of self-destruction. She feels cheap and unclean so she turns to crack to purify her. The habit makes her feel good but it leeches away the money she’s saving to go back to school. She needs money and there’s only one way for a girl like her to make it ... . She hates herself, cannot bear to look at that haggard, hollow face that stares out at her from the cracked mirror in the bathroom. If it wasn’t for her friend, there’d be no point any more.

Her friend overdoses less than two years later. Jubilation thinks it could be murder (the girl had been forced by the police to grass on their dealer only a week before) but nobody wants to listen to her. Just one less diseased ‘ho’ to mess up the streets - what do they care?

Eventually, Lee marries one of her clients, an alcoholic who beats her every day. She’s pregnant with his baby when he assaults her so badly, she miscarries. Jubilation doesn’t press charges; it’s love, right? Nothing else matters but love. Deep down, she thinks she deserves the pain - deserves it because of who she is and what she’s become. His fists are just another aspect of the noose she’s been tightening around her neck since she first sold her innocence.

She dies alone in a seedy motel aged thirty-nine, killed by an embolus lodged in her lung. If only she hadn’t mainlined those crushed temazepam ... . Her three children, all in care homes, do not mourn her passing, nor does her estranged husband. As her body is taken away, the motel owner comments on how lifeless her eyes had been when she’d booked in. No spark, he tells the police, no animation. But then, all those things had been eradicated long ago in the wake of her childhood’s violent death-throes.

Time moves backwards to accommodate another story, this time unfurling amidst the beautiful, serene scenery of America’s East coast. She may not possess the gift of telepathy in this alter-universe but Emma Frost has other - less supernatural - attributes with which to manipulate weak men. With her pristine looks and her well-cultivated aura of innocence, she works her way through some of the most powerful and influential businessmen in the country, brutally exploiting their shallow fantasies of what a proper woman should be.

By the time she’s twenty-one, her cynical, calculating nature has started to erode the soft and fluffy edges of her disguise. Terrified that she will no longer be unable to live in the luxurious world her looks have procured for her, Frost ensnares an elderly millionaire. After ensuring he alters his will in her favour, she has him murdered. She takes over his various companies and quickly establishes a reputation as a ruthless, cold businesswoman.

Her notoriety leads her into the inner circle of the infamous Hellfire Club and she rapidly back-stabs her way into the confidence of the equally power-hungry Sebastian Shaw. In him she sees a kindred spirit and wastes no time in eliminating Tessa, her main rival for Shaw’s affection. Their first act as a couple is to gather together a cadre of young assassins to act as both spies and bodyguards. Many of them die in the course of duty but Shaw and Frost never seem to be short of cannon fodder all-too willing to fill the vacancies.

For the next forty years, the couple’s legitimate and criminal empires grow to gargantuan proportions. Their two sons take over the family business on Shaw’s eightieth birthday and he and Emma retire to their luxury chateau in France’s Bordeaux region. Less than five months later, Frost discovers she has an inoperable tumour on her brain.

She deteriorates rapidly. As she undergoes chemotherapy, she experiences violent hallucinations. The victims of her rapacious greed haunt her fitful dreams, bay for her blood until she’s no longer sure whether she’s already dead and in Hell. All those murdered people on her conscience - the drug addicts, the casualties of war mutilated by the weaponry she and Shaw had sold to tin-pot armies, the business rivals ... even her long-dead husband and the sobbing, angry children from the stable homes she had destroyed. Never a religious woman, she now turns to her God and prays for deliverance and forgiveness.

Hers is a dignified physical death but her mind screams in fear.

Far removed from a life of crime, Everett Thomas grows up to be the intelligent, caring young man his parents always knew he’d be. He trains to be a doctor and passes his exams with flying colours. Thomas could get a job in any hospital he wants but there’s no challenge in making money. After five years experience working in an inner city clinic, he joins the Red Cross.

He returns to America eight years later, engaged to a beautiful nurse he met in Thailand during the brief but bloody war there. She has a great love for children but is unable to have any of her own. They adopt five children in all and foster many more throughout their married life.

Thomas works as a medical registrar in an upmarket hospital but ploughs much of his money into the small, charity-run clinic where his wife works as a councillor. It specialises in helping drug-abusing mothers and their families, offering them a safe house whilst they kick the habit. After he retires, he and his wife continue to raise money for this and other human development projects. No wonder, then, that when he eventually dies at the ripe old age of ninety-two, there are over two hundred mourners at his funeral.

Popularity is something Paige Guthrie knows all about. After her father dies, her brother Sam feels compelled to work down the mines and provide for the family. Although she is an extremely intelligent girl, she, too, passes up a scholarship and leaves for a relatively mundane clerical job in the city. Half of her salary she sends to her mother - she’s that sort of a gal.

She marries at nineteen but it doesn’t last any longer than eleven months. Within a fortnight of her divorce, she weds a man who’s twenty years older than her and goes with him to Las Vegas. He works as a croupier in one of the smaller casinos and manages to get her a job as a waitress. Paige looks good in a bunny girl costume - so good, a wealthy oil baron takes rather a shine to her. So, she divorces her second husband, marries this new man and moves off to Texas.

This marriage lasts substantially longer, mainly because her husband spends weeks away from home and is very generous with his cash; Paige can not only send her mother large sums of money but can also finance herself through college, where she majors in English Literature. Indeed, the good times only dry up when the old man brings home a younger, fitter bunny girl.

The divorce settlement is large enough to ensure she never has to work again. Paige moves back home , falls in love with a boy fifteen years her junior and lives a life of luxury amidst the spectacular landscape she adores so much. She writes a plethora of romance novels, three of which are turned into fairly successful mini-series, and even tries her hand at script-writing (although the film bombs and no one in Hollywood will touch her thereafter). One day, she hears an old song on the radio by some Englishman who blew himself away and she is struck by sadness that someone could so abuse the gift of life. Paige tells everyone that his story inspired her to write her critically-acclaimed best-seller, ‘Gravelands’.