This year's Halloween reading list...

... or, in a few cases, ehhhhh, maybe-don't-read-this list.  I know, it's a bit late in the game and you'll never get all of these read by Halloween.  But, you still have a couple of weeks, you can still get at least one in, maybe even three or four if you're dedicated.  And a few of these are definitely worth putting the rest of your life on hold for a while.  So, here we go...

                                                         Have you seen this woman?

Night Film - Marisha Pessl  (Random House, 2013)

Amazing, horrific (though not strictly horror) novel about the search for information on a horror movie director’s strange daughter's last days before she killed herself by jumping down the elevator shaft of an abandoned building.  The director, Stanislaus Cordova (whose films seem patterned on Dario Argento's, but that may be an imposition of mine... but, he does have a strange, beautiful, artistically-talented daughter), is a recluse whose works are so terrifying that the public can't see them anymore; they're screened only in underground tunnels or catacombs, or in high-priced bootleg copies (which parents‘ groups are trying to buy up and destroy because one of them inspired a psycho to murder children).  It’s hard to even find information on the films, because they’re only discussed online in a "black board" website on a hidden part of the internet, accessible only to members who've been given the code by another member.  They’re cult films in the most literal sense of that term.

Reporter Scott McGrath, who was once sued and disgraced for trying to research Cordova, re-opens his investigation when Cordova's daughter Ashley commits suicide; he’s driven partially by thinking he saw her shortly before it happened, during a dreamlike late-night walk through the park.   As he follows leads he picks up a couple of sidekicks who help him, and the more they learn, the crazier and more sinister things get, and the more trouble they get into.  Each lead gives them a new place to look or person to talk to, and most of the people they contact are scared or somehow broken from their contact with Cordova, or his daughter.   Something about her spooked everyone, or obsessed them.  

They talk to a guy who helped her escape a mental hospital, an aging actress who's become a recluse due to a plastic surgery disaster, visit a secret "Hellfire Club" type party-house, and even break into Cordova's estate for a nightmarish trip trough old movie sets full of hidden secrets about the films... which McGrath thinks may be more sinister than anyone could guess.   And they also get mixed up in some pretty heavy black magic that Ashley -- who felt cursed -- was trying to weave.  

This book reads like Laura with the lights out; the prose is brilliant and Pessl does an incredible job making the reader as obsessed with finding out more about Ashley and her father as the protagonists are.  They’re always offscreen, remote either because they’re hiding or dead, but their presence throws a shadow across everything.   I like horror novels dealing with a research process of something dark that only gets darker the more its brought into the light (such as Adam Nevill's brilliant Last Days,  William H. Hallahan's Search for Joseph Tully, William Hjortsberg's Falling Angel, Peter Clines' 14, (see below) etc.), and this one is handled masterfully.  The info is torturously parceled out in bits that keep you hungry for more, feeding you just enough to prolong your starvation.  Even if things take a late turn in another direction (which nevertheless doesn't disappoint), most of the book is pretty intense and unnervingly scary stuff that may mess with your sleep.  It weaves an atmosphere that closes in black and freezing, and I've never read anything else quite like it;  it'll stay in your mind when you're away from the book.   It’s a literary book, but without the pretension that often plagues those; no self-conscious moments here, and the prose never gets in the way of the story.

The design of the book adds to the sense of realism by incorporating reproductions of articles, websites, and photos.  I've seen people complaining that they couldn't see things well in the e-book version; I'm never in favor of e-books to begin with, they're a plague, but even if you're of a different (*cough* wrong *cough*) bent you're going to want to get this one in hardback, both for the picture and article reproductions, but also because this is one damn nice book -- the quality of the paper and binding is top-notch, and it's a book you're definitely going to want to keep and read multiple times.  Also, as the research progresses, you'll probably want to turn back and look at the "primary sources" again; I know I stared at the picture of Ashley on p. 223 dozens of times -- I don't know who the model is who did the Ashley photos but she's hauntingly gorgeous.  Admit it, you wanna know more about that girl.  This is a must-read and gets my highest recommendation.  




Check out Pessl's website and follow her on Twitter.

The Elementals -- Michael McDowell  (Avon, 1981)

This Southern-gothic horror masterpiece starts out bizarre and just keeps on runnin’.  Members of the Savage family stab their mother’s corpse at her funeral, as part of an old family tradition;  the Savages have a history of premature burials, and one woman who’d apparently died in childbirth revived in the tomb and ended up eating her baby’s corpse out of starvation.  It’s just McDowell’s way of letting you know he has no problem with getting nasty and it sets you on edge for what’s going to come.  The family members are all realistically Southern-awful to one degree or another, and anybody raised in the South will feel very familiar with these white-trash-with-money types, although they’re never stereotypical;  McDowell’s characters are realistic, multi-faceted, and have more depth than a lot of real people you know.  

The Savages retire for the summer to their ancestral homes on a peninsula (sometimes island, depending on the tide) on the Alabama coast, where they’re isolated with little electricity.  They have three large houses, but the third is a decaying hulk that’s filling up with sand as a large dune swallows it.  That house is feared and shunned, and for good reasons.   Thirteen year old India (otherwise incredibly mature for her age) gets very intrigued by the house, but while poking around and peeking through the windows she sees an extremely creepy little black girl who’s laughing with a mouth full of sand.  Other sinister figures appear in photos she takes of the place.  The family’s black maid, Odessa Red, warns her that the things in that house are evil spirits that can take any shape, and she works voodoo to protect the family... but that gets limited results.  India will have to do something highly, gruesomely creepy to get them out of the situation when the spirit-things (often made of sand) start attacking the other houses.  

Extremely well-written and disturbingly spooky horror;  that all of McDowell’s work is not kept in print is one of the biggest tragedies in horror literature;  I’m dead serious when I say Library of America should be doing volumes on this guy.  At least someone recently brought The Amulet back into print.  This is one of his best and you are strongly urged to seek it out; he’s in the upper pantheon of horror writers and should not be forgotten.  I’ve read this one a couple of times already and unless a truck hits me within the next few years I’m sure it won’t be my last.

14 - Peter Clines  (Permuted Press, 2012)

I won't tell you much about what happens in this book because it's one of those Lost type stories where the fun comes from discovering weird events and seeing how they fall together to eventually make sense.

 Basically, a guy named  Matt gets a cheap apartment in an old building in L.A. and starts noticing some weird things about it.  He has green mutant cockroaches with an extra leg, and they apparently don't eat anything.  The light in his kitchen puts off black light no matter what kind of bulb goes into the socket.  And some doors in the building are fake, while others (namely the titular 14) are padlocked and painted shut, and have obviously been so for decades.   When he talks to his neighbors he learns they've noticed other strange things, and -- sneaking around behind the landlord's back -- they decide to investigate the building's weirdness further... and it's weirder than they could ever imagine, landing them in a potential Lovecraftian apocalypse. 

The writing is good and the characters are well-drawn and likeable (although maybe a bit too comic-bookish, with the blue-haired artist girl, the computer geek -- the usual misfit-hero-nerd kind of deal) and the plot is good at leading the reader on by keeping the trail of little weirdnesses and discoveries coming, always leading you to another, bigger one.  And they‘re everywhere!  It's not as much of a horror novel as it is sci-fi, though.  But, it's the Lovecraftian type of sci-fi, so there are plenty of scary things going on... but it's more of an adventure than a real scarefest.  It's a bit long but does a good job keeping your interest, and it doesn't disappoint.   Definitely worth checking out.

The Small Hand and Dolly - Susan Hill  (Vintage, 2010, 2012)

Two short ghost-novels from the author of The Woman In Black. 

The first involves a dealer in antiquarian books getting lost in the backwoods of England and ending up at a derelict old house with the overgrown remains of a garden.  While wandering around this ruin he feels a small, cold hand take his, as if some little child wanted to lead him somewhere.  Unnerved by the experience, he becomes rather obsessed with the place, and sometimes the small hand returns and tries to pull him into bodies of water.  Eventually he learns what's causing this, and it's not pretty.

In "Dolly," a well-mannered, very self-effacing little boy and his cousin, a horribly bratty little girl, goe to stay with their aunt for the summer.  The little girl wants a doll but her aunt gets her the wrong kind and the girl smashes it in a tantrum.  The boy can hear it crying so he finally sneaks it into a churchyard and buries it, hoping it will find some peace.   Years later their aunt dies and wills him her house, leaving the girl only the broken doll... which he decides to dig up, and things get profoundly creepy from there out.

Both short novels (about 140 pages each) are very well-written and spooky, with "Dolly" being the darker and more intensely disturbing of the two.  That one will bug me for a while.   “The Small Hand” would probably have been more effective as a short story instead of being novel-length; it runs out of gas a bit, plot-wise, although the strength of either story is the atmosphere and mood.  Well worth picking up if you like old-school horror with a Victorian bent.

Seed - Ania Ahlborn  (47North, 2012)

Jack Winter’s already having a hard time -- he has two daughters to support while being under-employed doing welding jobs, his wife’s getting fed up with him neglecting his family for a band he’s in, their car’s on its last legs -- but things are about to get a lot worse.  Jack gets startled by a pair of animal eyes he sees in the road and wrecks their car.  Everyone’s alright, but six-year-old Charlie starts behaving malevolently, and Jack thinks maybe she’s possessed by the thing with the animal eyes -- a thing he recognized because it used to scare him when he was a kid playing in the cemetery.  Jack tries to confront this demon from his past and learns that it may have caused more tragedy than he realized because he’d blocked some things out of his memory. Meanwhile, little Charlie is having a ball chasing the family dog into traffic and spooking her mother until she’s verging on a nervous breakdown.  And she’ll do worse. 

The writing style isn’t bad, although some flashback scenes are very clumsily handled and feel like they were inserted at the last minute to make this book-length;  they’re so awkward I think I read through a couple before I realized they were supposed to be scenes from the past and adult-Jack wasn’t just behaving childishly.   Ahlborn’s got talent but it’s still in an amateurish stage here -- it’s not bad at all but I’m betting it’ll get better later if she gets a good editor.  Not a must-get but still well worth reading.

The Lurkers -- Kristopher Rufty (Samhain, 2012)

This Richard-Laymon-inspired horror novel lets you know it's probably going to be just a lil' bit dumb right from the start: a woman goes to check out intruders trashing her kitchen in the middle of the night without waking her husband, calling the cops, or taking a weapon.  Just like NOBODY WOULD EVER DO.  They both end up massacred by evil little gnome-people called Haunchies.  Yep.  Haunchies.   I’m not sure you want me to take your monsters seriously when you call them “Haunchies.”   What was wrong with “Lurkers?”  Would anybody buy this book if it was called “The Haunchies”? 

Prologue over, we go into the story of Amy, an abused woman on the run from her psycho boyfriend, Piper, and things smarten up a bit and give me some hope for the rest of the book... for a while.  A male friend, Gary, and his bitchy girlfriend, Wendy, set out to pick up Amy before Piper can track her down, and they meet up with two friendly metalhead couples.  They're characterized pretty well even though it's fairly obvious from the start that they're only introduced into the book so there'll be more kill-scenes later.  This part of the book is interesting even if it's not very horror-novelish, and the book then throws you a pretty amazing curve by getting what you thought was going to be the main character killed exactly halfway through the book.  That's an audacious move and gave me even more hope for the book;  Rufty's tossed some standard-horror-formula out the window and let you know that nobody's safe here, and you wonder what transgressions he's going to hit you with next. 

Unfortunately, after that masterstroke, things get dumb again.  The Haunchies show up, wanting to kill and eat the males and mate with the females, and soon everybody's running everywhere and unpleasant-as-possible things are happening almost constantly, with only the occasional break to find out if two of the girls might be able to form a threesome with one of the guys later, or if Piper will still be able to rape and murder all our heroes while escaping the Haunchies. 

The monsters never come across as anything but silly and cartoonish, despite the mayhem they enact;  I know Rufty wanted them to be pint-sized versions of the cannibal tribe from Off Season or maybe a whole bunch of those Zuni fetish dolls from Matheson's "Prey," but they come off as more like horny Ghoulies or something.   Rape scenes are always repugnant (and Rufty goes there -- he'll go pretty much anywhere) but when the rapists are about two feet tall it gets a little absurd.  And these characters never really grow -- you think they are, for a while, and then in the clinch they abandon their humanity (and survival instincts) to carry out petty vendettas, and it just doesn't ring true.   

There's plenty of gore and nastiness so if that's enough for you to put up with too much dumbness when it comes to the plot, you may be satisfied because Rufty does a good job not holding back on that.   Overall, the writing's not bad, but the style feels borrowed, mostly from Laymon -- it's got the same all-the-way-evil-and-nothing-but bad guys, the same juvenile preoccupation with sex even at inopportune moments (even while crawling through a tunnel escaping a horrible fate, one woman gets turned on almost to the point of orgasm because her breasts are dragging the ground), the same one-line paragraphs to emphasize some dramatic point, overused to the point of awkwardness.  It's not a terrible book by any means, I didn't have a chore getting through it, and I'd consider another Rufty book if the plotline intrigued me, but it is pretty lunk-headed, so be forgiving if you go for it.

                                         The paperback's cover is a reproduction of the original 1898 edition's.



Tenebrae -- Ernest G. Henham (Valancourt Books, 2013)

Originally published in 1898, this weird piece of morbidity reads like a homage to Edgar Allan Poe on ‘shrooms. The gloomy-minded narrator is an independently wealthy (via inheritance) scholar who lives in a decaying mansion with his beloved brother and his drug-addled uncle, who’s so crazy and damaged from drug and alcohol abuse that he thinks he’s the King of the Insects and concocts poisons to drink; he even convinces his nephew to sweeten his coffee with arsenic.  The narrator spends his days translating manuscripts on the mysteries of death and trying to romance a neighbor girl.  When he discovers she’s in love with his brother instead, he starts hating him to the point of madness and eventually murders him.  The neighbor girl then marries the narrator for some strange reason.  He’s still not happy, though, and his paranoia grows until he’s ranting at his wife over a game of chess and screaming at strangers about chrysanthemums.  This stuff is so over the top it’s hilarious, perhaps intentionally so.  He also starts seeing a giant spider, which terrifies him beyond reason since he’s even scared of the small kind. 

The writing is florid -- almost feverish -- and is so drenched in Poe-ism that it almost crushes you with maniacal gloom... but it’s highly readable despite its age.  It’s very much a mood piece and isn’t terrible eventful, so readers looking for a lot of action aren’t going to enjoy this much.  But for students of the macabre it’ll be a fascinating artifact worth seeking out. 

The Black Hope Horror:  The True Story of a Haunting -- Ben Williams, Jean Williams, & John Bruce Shoemaker (William Morrow & Company, 1991)

Nonfiction that’ll make you appreciate lies, because facts are under no obligation to be interesting and I wish this book owed me something.  A not-terribly-interesting old couple have a house built near Houston, Texas, and on moving in almost instantly decide the place is haunted... which makes you wonder for the rest of the book if they're not superstitious, suggestible people who are concentrating on anything that can be interpreted as "ghostly."  

At first it's simple things -- sunken spots in the yard that won't stay filled, ants that show up in the kitchen, shadows that cause asthma attacks, toilets that flush by themselves, and a lot of snakes showing up on the property.   They also have uncommonly bad luck with health in their family;  practically everyone comes down with cancer or some other terrible disease (which unfortunately isn't that uncommon in the south, since our leaders let anybody who gives 'em a dollar dump any kind of toxic sludge anywhere). 

In any case, they have more than their share of tragedy, and so many people die I couldn't keep track of how some of them were related.  Other bad things happen to people who visit the house; their daughters get divorced and one becomes so crazy and hateful they litigate for custody of her daughter.   Any cat they adopt dies (one after giving birth to a litter of inside-out kittens).   The neighbors also have a lot of  bad luck, and when the people next door dig up human bones when they try to build a swimming pool, they learn that the real estate company sold them land that had once been the Black Hope Cemetery, a graveyard for poor black people.  The Williams want to sue but the lawyers set up an impossible paradox, where they'll have to prove graves are on the property, but if they dig them up to prove it they'll be arrested for grave desecration.  They have a lot of nightmares, think they see ghosts, and experience more events they interpret as supernatural attacks (birds attacking the house with acorns, a woodpecker persistently hammering at a window, etc.)  

It's not badly written but it's very bland, and the family is so average there's not much to characterize them or make the reader invest much in them, especially when the terrors they're subjected to are so mundane.  They did have an unpleasant time there and it's sad that they had such bad luck with the health issues, but flushing toilets and aiiiieeeee-mean-birds-pelted-us-with-acorns-for-godsake! just don't make for much of a read.  It's the Amityville Meh. It's fairly short, though, so "true ghost" fanatics might find it worthwhile.

                                           Unsuspecting female swimmer at top heading to the right - check!
                                           Toothy shark approaching from below - check!


Rip Tide - Donald D. Cheatham  (Zebra, 1984)

Rip OFF is more like it.  Amateurish Jaws imitation ups the number of shark attacks and adds a superstrong hurricane to the mix but still fails to distinguish itself. 

This time the predator is a twenty-some foot tiger shark feeding on swimmers, boaters, and even other sharks off the coast of Florida.  A male-female pair of buddy cops, Stark and Sallings, are assigned to deal with the situation, but they never really do so we follow them around through the book for no good reason.  They're both obnoxious assholes, but you get the sense the author doesn't know that.  Stark, the male cop, used to work in St. Louis where he was basically Dirty Harry with a bigger dick, bending a lot of rules to bring in a crazy sniper who'd killed over 100 people (sure, why stop at anything realistic?) and even targeted pregnant women (I guess to get maximum scores per bullet).  Good thing Stark had some success there, because his efforts to bring in the shark are so incompetent that he even manages to lose a severed head he dug up (completely by accident) while visiting a nude beach.  

Stark gets laid a lot, mostly because every woman around him is as big an asshole as he is.  He and Sallings flirt a lot, he screws one of her friends (who promptly kicks him out for being an idiot), and has no trouble bedding a lady shark expert (ya gotta have a Hopper figure) who's really obnoxious and fond of saying "What does this have to do with the price of potatoes in Idaho?" over and over again.  Stark and Sallings swap smartass jokes that are devoid of anything funny. 

Meanwhile, the shark attacks a lot of people and the mayhem is fairly gory, so you get that much, at least.   Then a huge hurricane shows up and you get more mayhem like people being killed by pebbles blowing around, etc.   The shark is almost completely forgotten as this suddenly becomes a hurricane-disaster novel instead of a Jaws variation.

That would all be fine if the writing was competent, but it isn't; there are some interesting facts (Cheatham did his research, at least, or managed to trick me into thinking he did -- I didn't verify it all), but it's written like a third-grader's class project, with laborious sentences, exclamation points used outside of dialogue, clumsy plotting, and some unintentional hilarity (I loved it in chapter 18 when Stark apparently answers the telephone and starts mixing a drink without every getting out of the shower).   Maybe the worst thing is, there's no payoff -- the shark's still in business at the end of the book and never even faces a credible threat.  The chapters are numbered, but since there are 26 of the Cheatham, for some reason, thought it'd also be clever to assign each a letter in the military alphabet.  So, the book pretty much sucks from Alpha to Zulu. 

The Track of the Cat -- Walter Van Tilberg Clark  (Nevada, originally 1949)

I'd wanted to read this one a long time, hearing it was one of the best horror novels ever, but written in the guise of a Western.  I like both genres and am all for some cross-pollenation, so it was pretty disappointing that it turned out to be an excruciating and almost-unreadable chore to get through. 

A ranch family is plagued by a big cat that's killing their cattle.  An old Indian thinks it's the black panther who killed his wife and daughter, and which is not merely a cat but a talisman representing the end of the world.  While the family -- intensely dysfunctional -- squabbles about the youngest brother’s fiancé, the most impetuous brother, Curt -- a brash, bullying asshole who has to impose his will on everyone and everything, including the very land itself  -- becomes obsessed with killing this cat.  At first he’s just fueled by stories from the old Indian (who’s clearly suffering from senile dementia) but then gets really driven when the cat kills his older brother Arthur (who -- the story goes far out of its way to establish for no particular reason - is a “dreamer”).  Curt gets lost in a blizzard and ends up helpless and desperate and nearly insane, out of food, almost out of matches, so lost in the snow-covered landscape he can’t tell if he’s walking toward home or farther from it, and doesn’t even know if it’s morning or dusk. 

This is basically a good short story (Jack London’s “To Build A Fire” in particular) bloated into an insufferably long novel by literary pretense; very little happens and it’s all described in excruciating, pointless detail until you need a crazed will like Curt’s to keep reading.  None of the overly-melodramatic family squabbles add up to anything, they’re uninteresting, and don’t move the plot at all.  We’re kept neurotically up to date on how long the Indian’s gone without eating, how much the drunken father’s been drinking, etc. and it’s all very nicely written but who gives a fuck?  Clark is good with words and can draw vivid pictures, but they’re pictures of mundane events and it results in some very constipated prose.  This is sort of a “Moby Dick in the West,” but a lot more happened in Moby Dick; this could have made the same point with a stronger punch at an eighth of the length.  I really wanted to get into this, given its reputation, but the emperor’s got no clothes.   A good idea, executed awfully.


=====================================

I'm still planning on writing ya'll a horror story before Halloween, but I'm one lazy bastid and am a bit writer's blocked so we'll see how that goes.  I've got a large chunk of it done but I need to finish it and then polish the hell out of it and try to ramp up the octane, because if I can't make a good run at scaring the unholy bejesus out of you and do some serious lasting psychological damage, then I'm not going to be happy.  But, I'll try.  In the meantime, please revisit my Halloween stories of yesteryear:

Scribblebones
Long Tall Sally
Shik-Chuff
The Damp Basements of Heaven
Up The Stairs Where The Windows Are Painted Black
and little descriptions of some real-life nightmares I've had 

and blog-brother KickerOfElves's much-creepy
Men With Knives

 and my buddy Proftbolt's eerie
East of Rulesville.

 And if all those are too long or creepy for ya and you can't deal with more than 140 characters at a time, here are people you can follow on Twitter.

A One And A Two...

Hiya, it's me again with more reviews of action-series (and books that I can logically force into that definition) books.   I know it's a long stretch between me posting these monkeyspanks, but how can ya miss me if I don't go away?  And at least I give you a lot of bang for your buck when I finally get 'round to it... there's eighteen books reviewed here!  That's at least a dozen more than you probably want, even!   You can count them if you're a weirdo.   By fate, not by design, most of these are the first or second (or in the case of the Sonny Barger books, the first and the second) in the series.  Hence the title.   Anyway, enough intro... after all, you've got eighteen of these things to read!  And with all my lil' I-think-I'm-soooooo-funny intrusions, they're long enough as is.

It's the best infomercial for Sharpfinger knives ever!

Dead in 5 Heartbeats - Ralph "Sonny" Barger with Keith & Kent Zimmerman  (Harper Torch, 2003)

"I'm not no peace creep by any sense of the word," president of the Hell's Angels MC, Sonny Barger, once said, and he brings those sensibilities to his sideline as a novelist.  Gritty and kick-ass biker novel about the  problems faced by "Patch" Kinkade, former president of the Infidelz Motorcycle Club, as he tries to relocate to Arizona.  Almost as soon as he moves, a member of the Infidelz is gunned down and a gang war is brewing, so a reluctant Patch is called back to deal with that, as well an Infidel who's about to spill all the club's secrets to the feds.  It all plays like a really good grindhouse movie (and it's just become one - you can pre-order the DVDs now at http://deadin5heartbeats.com/ - I've got mine in), with realistic action scenes and plenty of fighin' 'n' ridin'.  Patch is a well-drawn character; he's a world-weary guy who'd like to settle down to a peaceful life, but circumstances don't make that feasible, and, being a stand-up fella, he does what (and who) he's gotta do.  

If you ever read the kind of short stories they had in Easyriders magazine (back before it turned "motorcycle enthusiast" instead of "biker") and wished they'd write something longer, this will make you really happy.  Who knew Sonny had it in him?  I hope he's got plenty more, but so far we've only gotten one other novel.  Hopefully the movie will be a hit and inspire him to write some more.  But, I'll forgive him if he's busy making more Sons of Anarchy episodes  (if you're not watching that show, go pick up the DVDs immediately - Breaking Bad and Walking Dead are the only things even giving it a contest for the best show on TV).

6 Chambers, 1 Bullet - Ralph "Sonny" Barger, with Keith & Kent Zimmerman (William Morrow, 2006)

After being burned on a gun deal where they're paid with counterfeit money, four members of the Infidelz MC are found in a meat locker, dead and frozen on their bikes.   Even though he's alienated from his club, Patch Kincaid teams up with a guy named Redbeard -- brother of one of the dead 'Delz -- to find out who did it so payback can be dealt.   They discover a Russian mob connection, and Patch and Redbeard get the snot walloped out of them by twin Russian boxers and their crime crew.  Patch is a hard guy to deter, though, and decides that the best way to get at the killer is to get himself sent to prison.  After a contempt-of-court charge he's sent up, and he works the system to ferret out the killer.  He knows the guy's supposed to have a panther tattoo so he equips himself with a jailhouse tat of a panther trap and a shank made out of a piece of a plastic bucket, and he goes hunting.   But there's a lot going on that Patch doesn't know.   Good thing he's a resourceful dude....  Good, tough biker action novel with a few slightly-far-fetched plot twists but a good sense of pacing and style.  Never gets boring, and Patch remains an interesting character.  Now, how 'bout another one?

Hellrider #2:  Blood Run - Dan Killerman (Dan Schmidt?)    (Pinnacle, 1985)

Jesse Heller (The Man Called Hell... who nobody ever gets around to calling Hell) is still a little banged up from the events of volume one (which was not, but should have been, called Barren Anus Of Suffering - don't be scared, you can click it!) when he picks up a hitchhiker named Lisa.   You'd think she'd find a more effective means of transportation since she's on the run from a motorcycle gang who want her dead.  Her old man was a member of the Sinners MC, and she witnessed them kill some college kids over a drug deal, so they want her out of the picture.   Heller has a vendetta against outlaw MC's, anyway, so he doesn't mind getting mixed up in this too much, even though he's on the run himself because cops want him for the massacre that ended the first book.  

The Sinners are an evil bunch, with foul bad-guy names like Turd, Pisser, and Cheese Nuts.  How tough can these guys really be if they allowed such names to stick?  Anyway, as in the first book, Heller takes almost more of a beating than he can dish out.  Every other page there's some new injury from a fight or a bike wreck, but he still manages to get a few shots off and brutally chain-whips a guy.  He also loses his guns a helluva lot, but manages to find one when he needs one (after taking another pounding, of course).   The Sinners aren't his only problem, either -- he's also got a crazy sheriff on his case.  This all results in a barrage of action that's pretty much constant after a point, but it turns into one big numbing blur. 

It's copyright by Dan Schmidt, so that's probably who actually wrote it, but, hey, "Killerman" is a cooler name, yeah?  A third, The Guns of Hell, must have been written because it was announced on the last page as coming out in just two more months, but it never surfaced.  Oddly, the back of the book says the gang is called The Grim Reapers, but they're the Sinners.  Maybe the existence of a real Grim Reapers MC made Killerman think twice?  I know I wouldn't write a book about killing off guys in a club who might come play kickball with my head. Okay and not badly written, but pretty average.  I still wish they'd made more, but Pinnacle was kinda on the ropes in those days.

 Attention mutants!  Bill O'Reilly has had enough of your shit! And he'd like a kitty to pet!


The Outrider #1  - Richard Harding  (Pinnacle, 1984)

I love the idea of post-apocalypse series (hell, I used to write ‘em) but they always seemed to get goofy on me.   This one starts with the cover.  What were they thinking, having Andrew-Dice-Down’s-Syndrome as the hero?   Then again, he looks a little like Bill O’Reilly, but that’s not really much kinder.  By the fourth book they had a different guy, but the damage may have been done because that dude was set in reader's minds. 

Anyway, that’s Bonner, a guy who used to be an “outrider” when the U.S. was destroyed in a nuclear war.   He, and others like him, drove all over the wrecked country, finding out where people and resources were and trying to unite it in some way.  Some of the outriders turned evil and set up little kingdoms, like the Hotstates, The Snowstates, and the Slavestates.  Bonner has an old enemy named Leather, who runs the Slavestates (in what used to be Washington D.C.), and he has a $10,000 bounty on Bonner’s head.  One of the fools who tries to collect it tells Bonner that Dara -- a female outrider who was Bonner’s girlfriend -- is still alive and being held hostage by Leather (who she was crazed with hate to kill because he’d slaughtered her village).  Bonner loads up his car (basically pipework welded around a engine) and drives out to get her back.  On the way he assembles a motley crew of helpers, including an outrider buddy who uses the ever-popular exploding arrows that captivated the world in the 80’s, a flame-thrower-wielding “gas-hound” named Cooker, a couple of 7-foot-tall mute giants called The Mean Brothers, and a lesbian biker gang.   They have to take on Leather’s squads of “radiation leper” bikers (guys who are eager to die in battle since it’ll save them from rotting away with radiation poisoning) and an 8-foot-tall tracker named Beck. 

There’s lots of gunfights and explosions and Bonner throwing knives into people, and some colorful post-nuke things like subway tunnels full of “rat people” and a trip through the Firelands (the coal belt, which got ignited and perpetually burns).  Past the halfway point it’s pretty much constant fighting, which actually gets kind of numbing even though it’s not badly written.   Bonner cuts off Leather’s hands, which he’ll replace (rather hilariously) with blocks of wood with knives in them -- they’ll fight it out about that in the following books.   A bit goofy, but the writing’s okay and it reads quickly, so you could do worse.

 Attention, heretics!  Marcel Marceau has had enough of your shit!
 (Remember, posing for this cover is on a couple of people's resumes.  I don't advise you to look too hard at the woman... there's something horrifyingly spooky about the look on her face.  And... a crocheted dress?  Ah, the 70's!)



The Inquisitor #2:  The Last Time I Saw Hell - Simon Quinn (Martin Cruz Smith)   (Dell, 1974)

Our hero, Francis Xavier Killy, enforcer for the Catholic Church, is already in deep shit as the book opens.  And I mean that in the most literal sense -- he's been rendered nearly comatose by a dart full of drugs and a couple of goons have tossed him into the fetid slime of the Paris sewer.  The flow carries him through underground pipes toward blades that grind the sewage into liquid mulch.  To find out how he gets out of that stinky situation you're going to have to be a stupid as I am and pay the ridiculously high price these books are fetching on the used market.   And even though I ponied up my dough for this, I still had to wait a hundred pages because it goes into a flashback right before Killy's about to go into the blades.  Gotta admit, Cruz knows how to hook a reader. 

Killy is the son of a Boston cop and worked for the CIA before his Catholicism led him to the church's Militia Christi, a part of the Holy Office of the Inquisition that takes care of church business by any means necessary.   And a guy named Sully, a former priest who collaborated with the Nazis, is now threatening the church and the entire French government.  He's pretty much forsaken Christ to worship Napoleon and has been using Action, the assassination squad of the French Intelligence services, to gather info on their own citizens and plan a coup on the French president.   Killy is dispatched after him... but Action is after Killy, too.   A girl he slept with (vows of celibacy would make for a boring book, so Killy's not burdened with those) almost shoots him with a gun disguised as a pen, they put a bomb in his car, and even blow up half a hotel where he's staying.  There's also a car chase and a shoot-out, all of which are well-written action scenes that make you wish there were more of them, but the book is mostly complicated (but intelligent) espionage and intrigue instead, which is nicely done but a bit slow.  

Killy is tough but not bloodthirsty at all;  in fact, he has to do fifteen days of penance for any man he kills, so he doesn't even carry a gun since that'd only make him more quick to cause deaths.   And that also makes the final confrontation with Sully pretty inventive (and a bit far-fetched) as Killy tries to take him to Hell... as literally as he can arrange.   It's good but not the holy grail or anything;  they should re-publish these in collections and drop the price.

 Yeah, my cover has a price sticker on it, but considering that yeah-who-gives-a-shit cover art I figured it wasn't worth trying to peel off...



Hardball #1  - William Sanders  (Diamond Books, 1992)

As the book opens, agent Dane is locked up and tortured in an African prison, awaiting execution.  He'd been caught while looking for a friend of his to help him on a mission.  Dane  (who's also your first person narrator) is former CIA, now free-lance (or trying to be -- the CIA has a way of pulling him back in) and he's getting a little burned out at 40 years old, weary from years of killing and in rough shape from getting shot, beaten, and diseased in trouble spots all over the world.   The CIA gets him out of his predicament and sends him to an island for rest and recovery, and to keep an eye on a congressman who'll be shacking up there with his mistress.  Dane gets back in shape quickly and has to fend off some partying jerks with a skeet gun.  When the jerks come back and shoot up his trailer in a speedboat-drive-by, he tries to buy a gun but can't get around the gun laws and ends up with shotgun slugs and an old cap-and-ball .44 Dragoon pistol that kills fine but is slow and tedious to load.   He pals around with an 80-year-old Indian and screws the congressman's mistress, and it's a pretty nice vacation... until an Arab hit team lands on the island and Dane has to fend them off with the few weapons he has.  Capturing AK-47s helps, and at one point he improvises a single-use shotgun out of an old bicycle pump.  

It takes a while to get violent (which I didn't mind because the day-to-day life won the island was interesting even if no one was getting killed), but when it kicks into gear it stays there a long time, and Dan racks up quite a body count and gets out of some tough scrapes.   The writing is better than usual for an action series (Sanders was supposedly in Army Security in Turkey and Laos, so he knows his stuff) and it keeps you engaged, giving Dane plenty of personality and making him tough but not superhuman.  He's definitely in the Matt Helm school of badass.  Why they gave the series a dumb name like "Hardball" is beyond me, and all three books had the blandest covers in the genre, with those featureless, modified silhouettes.   That can’t have helped sales, which is too bad because this was pretty good stuff. 

 Attention absurdly-huge clams!  Mike Nelson has had enough of your shit!


Sea Trap - Nick Carter (Jon Messman)   (Award, 1969)

Judas, an evil mastermind with a metal hand (and a gun built into one of the fingers) and a horribly-scarred face, is an old enemy of Nick’s, having appeared in a couple of previous volumes.  In this one he’s come up with a bizarre giant man-made clam to trap submarines (stop laughing!  it could happen!), and he’s holding one of them hostage and threatening to sell it, with all its tech secrets, to an enemy country if the U.S. doesn’t pay him a hundred million dollars.   The “hundred million dollars” makes this sound even more like a plot dreamed up by an eight-year-old than the giant clam does.  Helping him design the clam is a demented marine biologist who’s pathologically attracted to women, but he’s impotent so his frustration leads him torture and mutilate them and have them raped by a huge Mongolian.  

All these bad guys are so monstrous I pictured them drawn by Jack Kirby, and the things they do to women are horror novel stuff, torturing them ‘til they’re insane freaks, sticking sea lampreys and leeches on them, etc.   Nick goes undercover with an oceanographer who thinks he’s working for the Navy.  The oceanographer turns out to be a beautiful, intelligent, self-assured woman, so Nick decides it’ll be fun to “tame” her, which he’s sure he can do by acting like a chauvinist pig asshole.  He arrogantly bets her she’ll fall in love with him, then tries to flirt by rubbing his knee in her crotch!   On the side, Nick lays two other girls almost as soon as he meets them;  as luck would have it, they both end up as victims of the mad professor, giving Nick a revenge motive on top of the rest of his assignment.  Don’t worry, there’s plenty of mayhem, too, with Nick getting in gunfights, a battle to the death with the Mongol, and stuck in one hell of a fix when he calls an airstrike on the island while Judas pumps a couple tons of chum into the surrounding water to attract sharks in a huge feeding frenzy!  Pretty crazy written-in-third-person actionfest that never stops moving and keeps Nick in constant trouble while letting him be a more diabolical asshole than usual; the way he treats the feminist oceanographer (and the fact that he gets away with it -- I don’t think I’m really spoiling anything to tell you he wins his bet) had to be pretty Neanderthal even for the swinging ‘60’s.  A scene with the two of them stuck in a malfunctioning submarine had me laughing pretty hard;  Nick has to repair something under her seat and keeps smiling up at her from between her legs.  The gore and depravity level is pretty high here, with one guy even getting eaten alive by a mob of psychotics.  Kinda loonie but it’s a good one, even if it’s less plausible than some.  Then again, who doesn't love a good hey-let's-get-in-the-sandbox-and-play-armymen wheeee! plot once in a while?  I don't mind clams big enough to swallow nuclear subs as long as they don't abuse it by having them show up in every book.

Pale Horse Coming - Stephen Hunter (Pocket Star Books, 2001)


This extremely kick-ass book belongs with these action-series reviews even though it trods mainstream bestseller turf and has an elevated (more literary than pulp) level of writing, because you can put chrome on something and shine it up and give it a leather interior and full options package, but when you step on the gas and it rumbles and bitches rubber there's no mistaking a hot-rod.  And though it does it in style and goes a little smoother and a little farther, it's taking you to the same place as any Executioner or Death Merchant type of book. 

When a lawyer is sent to investigate the disappearance of a black man on an isolated all-black prison farm in Thebes, Mississippi, he tells his double-tough friend Earl Swagger (father of super-sniper Bob Lee Swagger, who stars in most of Hunter's other books) to come get him if he doesn't return soon.  Good move on his part, because it's 1951, Thebes is accessible only by the river, and in its isolation there are things going on that make Parchman look like Six Flags... and its minders aren't going to want a white lawyer with liberal leanings get back to tell anybody what he's seen.  

Earl goes in and rescues him but gets caught in the attempt, and since the prison guards (led by a huge, musclebound albino sadist named Bigboy, who considers himself an artist with a bullwhip) don't believe who he is, they subject Earl to the torments of the damned.   Hunter really makes Thebes sound like a circle of the Inferno and it's a miracle that even Earl is able to withstand the level of constant punishment he has to endure, working hard labor in incredible heat with little food or water, injured and lacking sleep from brawling with his fellow prisoners, who hate him because he's white.  Eventually -- though it seems impossible -- Earl escapes... but he's going back to settle things, bringing with him five old men (and one young one who's so blatantly supposed to be Audie Murphy that I don't know why Hunter even bothered changing his last name to "Ryan") who are the top gunfighters alive;  they're all based on real-life gunmen.   Rather strangely for a big gun advocate like Hunter, he portrays them all as mainly being motivated by a chance to kill people; even more than seeing justice done, these dudes just want to use their guns to kill people for the thrill of it.  They're damn near supernatural in their shooting abilities but they'll still have quite a fight on their hands.  

The dialogue is a wee bit stiff and treads (and sometimes crosses) a line between archaically poetic and hoo-rah fucking cornball;  if you can, imagine the dialogue from Deadwood, but without all the cussing.   But it gets the job done, and with style, and this book is all kinds of epic badass.  It'll blow you away, guaranteed.   Recommended and damn-near required. 

 That's the last time you'll criticize my taste in neckties, fucker!


Agent For COMINSEC #1:  The Bloody Monday Conspiracy - Ralph Hayes (Belmont Tower, 1974)

A group of Arab terrorists known as Bloody Monday kidnap a chairman of China.  They hope to provoke nuclear war between China and the United States, if not from the act itself then because his successor would be more of a radical.   Top secret agency COMINSEC (Committee for International Security) gets wind of the plot and send in their top agent, Taggart, to stop it.   Taggart is a violent asshole who used to be a Mafia hit man, and he works not out of patriotism (he doesn't really give a damn about national security or world peace) but for the money, and because he flat-out loves killing and working for COMINSEC gives him the chance to do a lot of it.   Violence is his first solution to any situation -- if he wants info he finds out who has it and then beats it out of them.  

He tries joining Bloody Monday to infiltrate it;  the pretty much beats his way into that, too, but takes a whole lot of pounding himself along the way, since he ends up captured, tied up, and nibbled by rats.   But he doesn't mind all that so much since it gives him a chance to drown a guy in a kettle of boiling sheep fat after a knife-and-hammer fight.   Another guy even ends up killed with a steam shovel, and I don't even know how many he shoots or blows up.  Then, when a pretty bizarre setback happens, his mission takes an extreme turn... right into more violence.  

The book still manages to have a complex (but far-fetched) plot even though it's throwing nonstop fights in your face as hard as it can.  They get numbing after a while;  Hayes' writing isn't bad at all but it's very meat-and-potatoes, without a lot of flash.   He's not afraid to make the hero not particularly likeable (Taggart is basically a shark -- he finds something to kill and then tears through it while feeling nothing) or to give him a good whacking (I don't know how he's in good enough shape to finish the mission after all the abuse he endures), and his main motivation seems to be body count... and isn't that what you read this stuff for?   Pretty plain but it moves and it doesn't take a lot of your reading time, so if it doesn't offer major rewards that's fair enough.

 Attention, Muppies!  The Punisher, oops, I mean Jake, has had enough of your shit!



Jake Strait #2:  The Devil Knocks -- Frank Rich  (Gold Eagle, 1993)
Jake Strait, a "boogeyman" or private enforcer of the very Blade Runnerish year 2031 is contacted to cause  revolution in the police state of Denver.  Political coups are not his kind of gig, but then a pimp pisses him off enough for Jake to blow his head off, and he suddenly needs a ticket out of town before the pimp-protection-agency's hired guns overwhelm him.  So, with his bank account tapped of credits and few other options, Jake takes the job, recruiting an old skimmer-pilot who's become a "squeeze" junkie to get him to Denver, because he (wisely) doesn't fully trust his employers. 


Then the book makes a misstep into some doggie doo and turns the road trip into kind of a comic saga, where characters get a bit goofy and broad, and things lose their focus.  I'm okay with Jake being a smartass, but there's a thing I have about books or movies: when situations get too absurd I feel like the book's not taking things seriously so neither do I.  That's why I just get pissed off at "horror comedy" movies like Sean of the Dead or whacky horror-goof books like John Dies At The End.   I know that's a "me" thing and some people (*coughgeekscough*) love that shit... but I just can't deal with that, it makes me feel stupid. 

So, I got mad at the book at that point, even though I admit the parody is kind of clever, with rebels fighting "muppies" (Militant Urban Professionals) in designer armor, and they aren't allowed to use armor-piercing bullets or they'll get sued.  And the Muppies fight back with rubber bullets so they won't damage buildings, since what they're fighting for is better apartments.  And it is funny to see Jake's reaction to the absurdity;  they've sent in a cynic to do an idealist's job. 

There's a ton of action but since I'd already decided I was dealing with satire it didn't have much impact for me, and in the final stretch it tires to pull heavy drama out of characters previously established as buffoons, and that doesn't work for me, either.  I still think it's a smart, badass series with writing that's far better than the usual, and there are some great hard-boiled badass lines in this thing, but I just hope the remaining two are more like the first one, or, preferably, even darker and grimmer.  Recommended for some, but with a caveat for guys like me.

Hawker #2: L.A. Wars -- Carl Ramm (Randy Wayne White)   (Dell, 1984)

Frustrated-cop-turned-vigilante Hawker goes to tinseltown to take on the Bloods and Crips... or, as they're known here (because gangs can sue you for copyright infringement for all I know) the Satanas and the Panthers, respectively.  The Satanas are Hispanic and the Panthers are Black, but they're all violent degenerates and superstitious, so Hawker plays a Batman card and does things to scare them, like painting hawk pictures (sometimes in flammable explosive that makes them think he can piss fire), disappearing in smoke bombs, and calling himself the devil.   He gets in numerous gunfights with each gang, killing many and, in one case, blasting a rapist's dick off.  

Meanwhile, he sports with a famous actress, Melanie St. John, who he meets on the beach when he helps her with a sting from a stingray.   She's captivated by Hawker's lack of interest (he's another of those complicated men, and no one can understand him but his woman) and invites him to a party.  There he learns that she's not shallow and drug-addled like the rest of her friends.   Hawker passes up a chance for sex with a thinly-veiled version of Suzanne Sommers and gets in a brawl with a thinly-veiled version of John Travolta ("Johnny Barberino," who "started out a teenager in television dramas and then gone on to become America's heartthrob by doing a series of discoteque rock operas").   Randy Wayne White must've really been fed up with Travolta at the time 'cuz "Johnny Barberino" gets plastered with just about every type of villainy you can think of.  

Anyway, Hawker is so badass he even gets into gunfights while bedding the actress, and even though the cops figure out almost instantly that he's a vigilante (turns out painting a hawk on crime scenes when your name is Hawker isn't just unimaginative, it's the least-neato way to be incog), but they're so frustrated by the legal system's inability to solve the gang problem that they give him a wink-wink nod-nod say-no-more.   As you'd expect, Hawker takes on the leaders of both gangs, reveals a surprise bad guy, AND eventually gets to lay the Suzanne Sommers figure as the end credits roll.  

It's a little pat (okay, a LOT pat) but ya gotta love it because it just delivers and delivers -- if most action novels try to fit in a fight every twenty pages, Hawker goes for more like eight, and still has enough of a plot to keep it from being a cartoon.  There's a wee bit of cornball moralizing here and there, but when the guy cuts loose with a MAC-10 several times in a book, you can forgive him.  Writing's simple, clean, and works well for this kind of mayhem-tale. 

 If only this book were actually about this girl...


Room 59 #3:  Aim And Fire -- Cliff Ryder   (Gold Eagle, 2008)

A big-shot terrorist everyone had believed dead smuggles a suitcase nuke over the Mexican border, massacring a couple dozen illegal immigrants to keep the secret safe.   Another Al-Queda operative working very deep cover has gotten into a government position where they build rockets, and the two plan to work together to send up the bomb on a rocket and cause an EMP that'll destroy electronics across half the U.S., and millions will die in the resulting riots, and if you're reading this on a Kindle you'll never find out how it ends.  

Clandestine anti-terror group Room 59 gets wind of the plot from the suspicions of Nate Spencer, a border security guard who's notorious for not sticking to the book and being a loose cannon.  They pair him up with Tracy Wentworth, a Homeland Security analyst who also bucks the system and has been longing for field work.  They send the two into Mexico to trace the trail of the nuke and find out where it's going.  ON the way they get in a good car chase/ gunfight with some zetas and snatch a gang leader for info, before pulling a full-scale assault on the rocket compound at the last minute.  

This is well-written and very cinematic (I'm wondering if the "59" isn't supposed to make you think "24"), and stays on a realistic scale even if that hampers the action a little bit.   One annoying thing is the need to make the "Room 59" part relevant; to do so they have to stay in contact with the home base a lot, which results in people yammering a lot of jargon on cell phones during fire fights (I lost count of how many times people said something, then said "I repeat" and said it again), and one car chase is even watched on some remote Skype-type program on a Room 59 director's laptop instead of putting the reader with the agents in the truck.  And maybe it's just because I hate technology, but I think it's impossible to write or film computer hacking so it looks like "action"  -- it's always just going to be some nerd typing fast.  I know people are in love with the little gadgets that have taken the place of their brains -- and, for the most part, their lives -- but can we minimize their presence in an action novel for fucksake?   I want to watch the agents dealing death in a firefight, not watch them live-Tweet it. 

Also, the people giving the orders are never as interesting as the people carrying them out, so less focus on Kate, the director of Room 59, would also be welcome.   Also, I wanted the leather-clad badass chick on the cover to show up in the book;  Tracy kicks a fair amount of ass but the closest she gets is black sweatpants, and kinky as I am, that's not eeeeeeeeven on my fetish-radar.  Minor quibble, and a personal one, but hey, it's what sold me the book.   Overall it's a good read and the writing is smart,  I'd just shift more focus away from the control center.  Fuck the brass, the grunts are the interesting ones.

The Liquidator #1 -- R. L. Brent (Award, 1974)

Jake Brand's father was a cop who got murdered by a junkie.  Jake's brother Roy decided the best way to avenge him was to shut down the Mafia that supplied the junkie, so he passed up a football career to become a prosecutor.   He caused such trouble for the mob that they had a hit man with a sawed-off shotgun take him out.  Jake became a cop to carry on the war, and was using his contacts to pin down a mob boss named Hester.  Jake's efforts get the mob so rattled they cease operations for a few days and bring in a hit man.  Brand thinks the torpedo is after him, but instead the guy disguises himself as Brand and guns someone down in front of witnesses.  A betrayal by Brand's girlfriend completes the frame, and Brand spends five years in prison.   He's pardoned for saving the lives of guards on two separate occasions and once he gets out he immediately resumes his war on the mob, even though he's no longer a cop.   He icepicks one guy, clogs another's shotgun, and gets in car chases and gunfights, keeping the novel moving at a fast clip.   The writing is very good and elevates this above the standard Executioner variation.

The Black Berets #2: Cold Vengeance -- Mike McCray  (Dell, 1984)

Picking up where the first volume left off, a hit team hired by Parkes, the CIA agent who tried to backstab the team on their first mission, gets sent to the Black Berets' compound.   They burn it down but are killed by Tsali, the orphan kid the Black Berets rescued and are raising.  They rebuild the compound better than before, adding a lot of computer surveillance stuff.  Then they start answering ads in mercenary magazines as a way to get a line on Parkes so they can give him the payback he's got coming.  Rosie, Harry, and Applebaum get hired by one of Parkes' groups to do some work for Quadaffi... which, of course, they don't do.   Instead they turn on the troops they've infiltrated and manage to take out a large number of them by attacking their helicopters with LAW rockets, making it look like an enemy attack that they alone survived.   While those three try to figure out a way to take down the rest of the army, Beeker, Cowboy, and Tsali fight off more attacks on the compound and try to track down Parkes.   There's a pretty harrowing scene where, to keep from blowing their cover, Rosie has to torture a good guy to death -- including ripping nipples off with pliers.  So far these books all seem to include at least one scene that will make you squirm. There are still plenty of well-done action scenes and the characterization is top-notch, but the slam-bang stuff takes a bit of a backseat to the intrigue here, slowing things down just a little.  Not enough where it's a problem, though, and McCray's writing is still a standout for action series books.

This series turns out to have an interesting history to it, as Glorious Trash's Joe Kenney (for my money, THE authority on adventure-series books) told me last time I reviewed one of these.  Turns out Mike McCray was actually John Preston, a gay writer who wrote a lot of gay fiction.  The Black Berets are all straight, but once you have this knowledge it's almost impossible not to look for subtext.  And you can kind of find it, just in the camaraderie the team feel for each other, but honestly, it’s no more than you’d find from a military-team book you’d get from a hetero author, so it shouldn‘t distract you.  Preston also wrote an action series that was gay-oriented, The Mission of Alex Kane.  Haven’t seen any of those and won’t likely be seeking them out because I’m not the target audience, but if I’m no phobe, either, so if I ran across any in a used bookstore I’d probably give one a try, anyway, just on the strength of writing he shows in the Black Berets books. According to Wikipedia (which is not a source I take as gospel at all), several Black Berets novels were written by Michael McDowell, who was a frickin’ genius in the horror field.  He apparently collaborated with Preston on some things.  And then things get confusing... because McDowell is also credited with writing books by “Preston MacAdam” (such as the Michael Sheriff: The Shield series).  But, John Preston is also credited on the web as being “Preston MacAdam,” and is also rumored to have written some of the S.O.B.s (Soldiers of Barrabas) series.  So, I don’t know if Michael McDowell actually wrote any Black Berets books, or who wrote the Michael Sheriff books.   But, if you’re interested,  that may be a pseudonym plot worth investigating.  Unfortunately it’s a cold trail, since both John Preston and Michael McDowell died of AIDs in the ‘90’s.  Anyway, if there are other Michael McDowell works out there, I’d be doubly interested because I’m a huge fan of that guy; you can look for a review of The Elementals by him next time I do a horror-novel-review post.  Or you can find a copy and read it yourself, because I promise you that's what I'm going to tell you to do, anyway.

 This is one of those fancypants books that you open up and there's a double-page picture..

 ...which I find oddly hilarious.  Attention, Viet Cong!  Kappa Delta Sig has had enough of your shit, bro!


The Hard Corps #1 - Chuck Bainbridge  (Jove, 1986)

This reads like Jove wanted their own version of Dell’s Black Berets or Gold Eagle’s Phoenix Force team, but a variation on those isn’t a bad thing.   Five guys with unique talents for killing meet in Vietnam and once the war’s over they don’t feel suited for much else, so they reform their team and become mercenaries known as The Hard Corps (which is a silly-as-a-fish-with-titties name to me, but luckily the book ended up being a lot better than the title). 

The five guys include an Italian hood turned explosives expert, a ninja-type (‘cept white) guy who kills with a Rambo-type survival knife, bow and arrow, and other silent-death methods.  Another favors Japanese swords, one’s a Green Beret captain, and an older dude serves as a mechanic, cook, doctor, and gunsmith.   They have a big compound in Washington state, complete with helicopters, bunkers, and all kinds of military gear.  

After a first chapter where they rescue some kidnapped kids from Mexican terrorists (their fee:  a million dollars -- so that’s how they afford the helicopters and other goodies), they come home and a chopper full of Vietnamese resistance fighters lands on their base.  Among them is Trang Nih, a rebel leader who’s being sought by Viet Cong Communists.   Rather improbably (but essential for the action) a small army led by Vietcong commander Captain Vinh promptly invades the Hard Corps compound, trying to kill Trang Nih and his men.   Of course, our heroes can’t be allowing that and soon the Vietnam war is on again, on a smaller scale and without government interference (which means the good guys win). 

It’s a pretty ridiculous premise, with around a hundred Vietcong soldiers showing up in Washington to get taken out by a five man team, but what the hell, right?  That’s why we read these things, and when it comes to action, this thing delivers -- without much plot to get in the way there’s almost constant gunfights, mortar attacks, ninja sneakin’ ‘n’ stabbin’, all that good stuff.  And for characterization purposes (which aren’t bad -- they don’t seem quite real, but they’re far from cardboard characters, either) each guy on the team gets his own flashback chapter... which are also geared toward action sequences from back in ‘Nam or during their rough childhoods.   I’ll admit I wasn’t expecting much out of this but ended up pleasantly surprised; there’s more premise than plot, but that’s enough for the purpose, and Bainbridge does a good job giving them individual identities so they don’t blur together, and his action scenes are solid and keep the book moving without getting too ridiculous.  Not bad a’tall, I’m glad there are seven more. 

 Yeah, it's got housepaint on it, but it saved me thirty bucks, so viva le housepaint.



Operation Hang Ten #4: Cute And Deadly Surf Twins - Patrick Morgan  (Macfadden-Bartell, 1970)

Considering this series tried to combine spying and surfing, and had a title like Cute And Deadly Surf Twins, I was expecting it to be pretty light and goofy, so I was pretty surprised when it started with such a bang.  After a brief surfing interlude, beach bum turned beach-Bond Bill Cartwright gets the shit kicked out of him by the Diablos motorcycle gang.  He gives a good account of himself in the brawl and even bites a dude’s finger off, but one badass versus a dozen just isn’t good math and he ends up stomped, pissed on, and thrown off a cliff... all because he was looking for a guy named Moon.  

After two months in the hospital, Cartwright gets out and keeps trying to track down Moon, who’s working with Chinese commies who are counterfeiting money and smuggling it in surfboards with secret compartments.   Thanks to some fancy driving and good ol’ fashioned brutality, he gets some payback on the Diablos and kidnaps one of their women, who he hangs naked by her wrists and terrorizes until she gives him information. 

Then he goes after a biker (the resulting fight is so brutal the guy’s upper lip gets chopped off by the edge of a board) and rescues a girl who’s been starved and almost raped to death by Moon.  Closing in on him leads to more brawls with the gang, and Cartwright takes another beating with a bike chain, but dishes out more mayhem with a surfboard and a rotary sander.  He still ends up caught, but escapes even though he has to swim five miles with his hands tied and a bullet in his shoulder.  

This is surprisingly gritty and violent stuff, and the only goofiness is the strange choice of having Cartwright’s trailer run by a computer that makes all his food and mixes drinks; that’s weird, unnecessary, and I’m not sure why it’s in the book.   Also superfluous is a novice female agent named Pat Parrot who he reluctantly has to work with;  he’s a little put out with her at first because when she shows up she’s disguised as a hippie!   At times the book seems to be trying a little too hard to maintain its “surfing” connections, since espionage doesn’t really fit in well with goofing around on the beach, but it’s still a lot better book thatn just a novelty piece.  The writing’s pretty solid.   And that’s kind of unfortunate for me, since this series is price-prohibitive; used copies are going for around twenty bucks each, minimum, and I’m just not paying that.  I got lucky and found two of them at a used bookstore that didn’t know what they had, and they were thirty-eight cents each.   They’re worth way more than that, but thirty-eight dollars... not so much.

 Attention, fertility drug companies!   Mitt Romney has had enough of your shit!  (Just kidding!  He's all for unregulated capitalism!  This Yard madman must be stopped!)

The Hunter #1: Scavenger Kill - Ralph Hayes  (Leisure Books, 1975)

It’s our ol’ buddy Ralph again.  I was tempted to read a Stoner book for this batch, too, and go for the trifecta, but, good as he is, I was worried about getting Ralphed out.  After Vietnam, Col. John Yard tried finding peace by hunting big game in Africa, but finds it hard to put up with the obnoxious tourists he has to take on safaris.  Into this discontent comes an old war buddy whose wife has killed herself and their deformed, brainless baby because a bad fertility drug caused her to give birth to the monster.  Yard decides that Marice Lavelle, who owns the pharmaceutical company than markets the drug, needs to pay for his crimes.  Lavelle doesn’t care if his products cause abominations as long as they remain profitable, and he wants to start selling the drug in Africa and Asia.   Since he can’t talk yard out of this vengeance quest (even after a brawl), Yard’s friend Moses Ngala decides to join him on it.  Moses is Black and Hayes is preoccupied with never letting you forget that, awkwardly referring to Moses “shaking his black head” or “putting a black hand on Yard’s shoulder,” and also getting him in brutal bar fights with racists.   Yard also tangles with thugs as they try to track down the elusive Lavelle, who usually stays hidden on the top floor of a hotel surrounded by bodyguards (including one with a metal hand).  The action scenes are pretty workmanlike but Yard takes his share of punishment.  He also gets away with putting a silencer on a revolver;  you’d think a gun expert would know that doesn’t work.  Anyway, not bad but not outstanding.

 Attention, Brian Dennehy!  Sylvester Stallone is tired of your shit!
(What, you didn't think I wasn't gonna do that, did you?) 


First Blood - David Morrell  (Fawcett Crest, 1972)
Of course this is the basis for Sylvester Stallone’s action franchise classic, but it differs from the movie adaptation quite a bit.  Rambo is more of a “kid” and he’s a bit more disturbed and not quite as reasonable;  he’s perfectly willing to kill the deputies who chase him into the woods when he gets fed up by being pushed around by Sheriff Teasle.  Also, he spends more time just trying to hide and survive than he does being the super-powered aggressor that Stallone’s version was; early on he’s hampered by badly broken ribs that keep him from doing a lot of fighting.   And, most importantly, the outcome is very different.  Morrell’s writing is simple without a lot of flash, but he handles outdoor things well and maintains an interesting, convoluted conflict between Rambo and Teasle;  both know the whole thing’s a big, stupid mistake that’s causing great harm, but after a point they’re committed to it and have to ride it out even if it’s going to end badly.   Good stuff.  For a better, more in-depth review of this book, check out Glorious Trash, where all three of the trilogy (and the circumstances under which the last two were written) are discussed.


Now, if you're so inclined, here's how you can follow me and a bunch of people cooler than me on Twitter.

Triumph Bonneville of Death, or The Last Days of the Penpal Next Door

 Okay, let's all just agree that I suck at coming up with blog-post titles, forgive me, and move on, shall we?

Here be another batch o' horror novels to add to your summer reading list (or not), just in time to be a month late or so.   I've had very good reading luck lately and managed to get walloped with some amazing new ones that impressed me way more than usual and are sure to end up on my all-time best list (NOS4A2, Last Days, and Penpal) and re-visited a couple I'd read years ago that impressed me all over again (House Next Door and Deliverance).  Read on for details...

NOS4A2 - Joe Hill   (William Morrow, 2013)

Victoria "The Brat" McQueen has a special ability; she can find missing things by riding her bicycle over a rickety, bat-filled covered bridge that used to span a river near her house.  The bridge itself is a lost thing; it  fell in years before but reappears when she needs to get somewhere, and always opens onto the place she's looking for. She learns from another supernaturally-gifted person - a weird librarian girl named Maggie whose Scrabble tiles tell her things - that they have these abilities because they're unusually creative.  But being unusually creative has some downsides; for one, Vic gets bad headaches when she rides over her bridge, and playing with the Scrabble tiles has left Maggie with a bad stutter. 

But the really bad thing is that sometimes evil people are unusually creative, too, and one of those is Charlie Manx, a dapper psychopath who can drive his vintage Rolls Royce to an amusement park in his imagination, which he calls Christmasland.  He kidnaps children and takes them there, where they become gleefully-evil demon-things as Manx absorbs their innocent life-force like a psychic vampire.   Vic escapes an encounter with Manx but grows up troubled, ending up as a neurotic but artistically-talented fuck-up who has a kid (named Bruce Wayne) with an overweight comic-book nerd named Lou.  Lou is a hapless good guy who proves unable to deal with Vic's craziness, although he always tries.  And Vic is a mess but her heart's in the right place... which is something she'll unfortunately get to prove when Manx rises from the dead and kidnaps her son to take him to Christmasland.  Trading her bicycle for a Triumph motorcycle she's rebuilt, Vic will stop at nothing to rescue Wayne from Christmasland, even if she has to fight the FBI and Manx's psychotic henchman, The Gasmask Man.  

This is surreal horror with a lot of fantasy elements, reminiscent of Neil Gaiman's Neverwhere and King & Straub's The Talisman, with a lot of travel back and forth between the real world and places in the imagination (which, in this solipsistic scenario, are as real as anything else... the book slyly makes a point that since all of this is a work of fiction, anyway, the "real" world parts are no more reality than the Christmasland that Manx has built in his head  - it's all the product of creativity, and the craziness can be as solid as any of the rest of it).  This is extremely well-written and symbol-rich (Hill keeps surprising you with the depth of things), and since there's so much going on it could get tangled up pretty easily, but Hill is a master craftsman (and unusually creative) so it never gets out of control.  Even the fantastic stuff rings true.   I can sometimes get irritated by horror novels that veer too much into magical-fantasy stuff, and I'm not a big fan of Christmas in general so I worried about an overload as I was going into this thing, but Hill's so good at this I was glad to play along, and there's enough grit and rough stuff to keep it from getting too sappy, even though he does have a sentimental streak.   It flirts with schmaltz at times but never marries it.  This is a thick sucker but it's immersive; you get lost in it and don't really mind the length, and it moves fast and never quits.   I'll admit I figured out the trick that was going to end the good vs. evil battle a couple dozen pages in, but I didn't mind when it happened; even if it was no surprise, it felt right, and inevitable.

Basically, I couldn't put this down, and I doubt you'll be able to, either.  Very much recommended.

And even if you usually buy e-books (and if you do, I kinda hate you just the least lil’ bit -- those things are a plague)  you're going to want to pick this one up in hardback to get the most out of it.  The illustrations and end-papers by Hill's comics collaborator Gabriel Rodriguez add greatly to the book, and they're best appreciated on paper.  Also, I'm a sucker for deckle-edging, even if it does confuse a few Amazon patrons who think their book's "defective" because the edges are "unfinished" (are paper books really that antiquated already, or are people just becoming so sheltered from everything cool than they don't know what deckle-edging is?).  There’s also a neat little riff Hill did on the “Note On The Type” section that’s only in the hardback, because it wouldn’t make much sense on an e-book. The future belongs to the paper loyalists!

Follow Joe Hill on Twitter  (a lot of author's Twitter feeds are just promos for books, but I'd follow Joe even if I wasn't into his books, just because his feed's so good - dude's funny, smart, and likeable, and has a weird love of posting pictures of his fans strangling or otherwise attacking him).






Joe Hill's earlier book, Horns (which I own in hardback, paperback, and audio book yet still haven't gotten around to yet for some reason (which is probably somethin' to do with me bein' stupid), but most assuredly shall, since I loved this book and Heart-Shaped Box) has been reviewed here by Mighty Blowhole blog-brother, KickerOfElves, so go check that out here).

 

Last Days - Adam Nevill   (St. Martin's Griffin, 2012)


The writer of one of my favorite books of the decade, The Ritual, (which I reviewed here)  is back with more brilliant, must-read horror.  Kyle, a director of indie documentaries, is contacted by a weird new-age company to quickly shoot a documentary about a 1970's suicide cult, The Temple of the Last Days.  He's not crazy about the assignment at first -- he has less than a week to prepare for it and not much more than that to shoot it, but he's behind on his bills so he enlists his team -- cameraman Dan and a computer-loser editor known as "Finger Mouse" - to put it all together.  They start in London, interviewing former cult members who got out before the final massacre.   From the beginning they realize something weird and scary is happening; they hear weird noises at one cult site and see a skinny naked thing in the dark that terrifies them... but things are about to get much, much worse.  Skeletal-shaped stains are scorch-marked into walls of former cult sites (and then the filmmakers' own houses) and the former cultists they interview keep ending up maimed or dead.   Some unseen visitors leave disturbing artifacts behind, like blackened bones and scraps of ancient clothing.  

Things become more sinister when they learn some of the dead cultists had been bitten by things with aged, rotten teeth.  Kyle and Dan become horrified and paranoid, certain they've been set up by the cult, but there seems to be little way out of the situation.  Mummy people break through the walls into rooms left in darkness... as Kyle finds out when a circuit breaker shorts out.  What happens in pages 329 through 333 might make you afraid of the dark for a while, because it's one of the scariest written horror scenes since Danny Torrence went into room 217.    Kyle finds out another filmmaker who originally started this project is completely unhinged now, and he confronts the man bankrolling it and gets sent to Belgium to view an ancient group of Bruegel's-"Triumph Of Death"-esque paintings that will explain the history of what's happening, and may predict the horrible fate in store for them all.  

Nevill is a master at holding things back an parceling them out to the reader in a way that makes you actually dread learning them, and there's some very dark, creepy imagery here.  I don't know if it tops The Ritual, but it equals it and that should be enough to ask of any book.  Any serious reader of horror needs to familiarize yourself with this writer now.  He's skilled and he gets it. 

Now, you get it.



 

Penpal - Dathan Auerbach  (1000 Vultures, 2012)

Short stories presented as childhood memories (often overlapping) fit together brilliantly and build to one episodic horror novel of amazing eeriness.  Our nameless first person narrator recounts strange events where he woke up in the middle of the night deep in the woods by his house, wondering how he got there and barely able to find his way out. 

Then he talks about a kindergarten project where the kids sent out letters on helium balloons, hoping to get letters back from whoever found them; instead of letters he got dozens of weird Polaroids back from some very strange stranger... and realizes later that he appears in a lot of them. 

He and his mother move away from his old neighborhood and he and his friend Josh sneak back to his old abandoned house, thinking his missing cat may have gone back there; the result of that escapade is one of the most incredibly creepy things I've read in a long life of reading horror -- it's chilling and will definitely bug you.  

Next, he and Josh try to map out a stream through the woods near a crazy old lady's house... and she ends up being even crazier than they'd thought.  

Next, the narrator goes on a movie date with a girl that turns into a tragedy of horrible creepiness, which will also get under your skin and lodge there, freezing. 

Then the last bit brings it all together and makes one hell of an impact.  It's all simply but compellingly written, and Aurbach's imaginative powers and skill at plotting are very strong and impressive.  It's a fast read, both because it's short (around 240 large-print pages) and because you're not going to want to put it down until you find out what happened.  The old-lady story is a bit of a digression from the main flow and fits a little clumsy with the rest, but that's easy to forgive; it may be a flaw but not a fatal one.  Vivid, emotional, and super-disturbing in a quiet, hard-hitting way.   You won't be shaking this one off quickly.  Very, very highly recommended.

 
Infinity House - Shane McKenzie  (Gallows Press, 2012)

A couple of weed-dealing ghetto kids get ripped off by one of their would-be customers, and since they're left with no money or product to sell, they're pretty desperate.  One of the brothers finds money in the yard of a creepy old house they've been warned never to visit, and need (and greed) overtake fear so they go looking for more.  The place was the site of child murders committed by a crazy man and I guess that left it haunted because the brothers get trapped inside and the walls are thick with flies, the floors are deep in maggots, and wicked little zombie children are everywhere, eating -- and being eaten by -- maggots.  There appears to be no escape from this vermiculated hell, and McKenzie doesn‘t balk at giving you the nasty details. 

There's nothing clever about this, and it's not very intriguing because it never comes together as a story, just a lot of gruesome descriptions of everything being eaten by maggots.  It's got a certain nightmare quality to it, so if spectacle is all you're looking for then there's plenty of that and it's not badly written, but if you want any kind of narrative progression or a conclusion to be led to, you'll be out of luck there.  There's another story, "I Didn't Mean To Hurt You," in which a little girl sneaks out to a fair her bigoted mother wouldn't let her go to, and it ends up being a prequel to "Infinity House," and, similarly, is more spectacle than story.  Trying to make this 138-page large-print pamphlet seem more like a book, they also include an interview with the author.  It's interesting and Shane sounds like a guy I'd like, I just wish his descriptive skills were matched by stories instead of scenarios.  Still, there's promise for the future here and if all you're after is some fast-reading gory weirdness, it's pretty good at supplying that.

 Vintage paperback - it's so old that Jon Voight wasn't even a lunatic asshole yet when it came out!

Cover for Dickey's screenplay.

Deliverance - James Dickey  (Dell, 1970)
It's almost impossible to top the movie version, which is about as close to perfect as movies get, but this book manages to edge it out by a wee bit.  Following the lead of their rugged outdoorsman friend Lewis, businessmen Bobby, Drew, and our narrator Ed head out into the backwoods for a canoe trip down a river that's soon to be dammed and turned into a lake.  Just dealing with the rapids would be challenge enough, but they run into a couple of degenerate mountain men who have strange ideas about how to have fun with city folk, and the trip becomes a nightmarish fight for survival, one that will severely test them all... especially Ed.  Poets are usually awful novelists, but Dickey shows a lot of restraint and knows the story is more important than how it's being told.  By all accounts (and I've heard personal ones from people who had to deal with him) Dickey was a totally insane out-of-control drunken hell-raiser, so it's doubly amazing that he keeps such phenomenal control of a story that could so easily become complete chaos.  The descriptive power is amazing and he knows when to play it nuanced and when to hammer you with brutality.  Reading this is essential, and it gets better with repeats, just like the film.  Also worth looking for is Dickey's screenplay.  He wrote it in such detail that Boorman demanded a re-write because Dickey's version didn't leave a director much to do.  It's a good deal different from the filmed version, and I thumbed through it once in a library over twenty years ago and things stuck with me so much I recently tracked down a used copy.

 Hardback cover.

 Evocative paperback cover, although I couldn't tell you what that "X" business is about.

The House Next Door - Anne Rivers Siddons  (Simon & Schuster, 1978)

Dark and highly-sinister haunted house classic that's a must-read for fans of books like The Haunting of Hill House.   Our narrator, Colquit Kennedy, is vexed when a new house starts being built in the lot next door.  At first she and her husband Walter are just bummed by a little loss of privacy and being deprived of a view of the woods, but their neat little Atlanta-suburban lives are about to be intruded upon much more than that, and they'll have much worse things to be upset about.  The novel is basically divided into three novellas, each covering a different ill-fated family that moves into the house.

First there's rather-insufferable yuppie couple Buddy and Pie Harralson, who are building the house under the bold plans of an up-and-coming young architect named Kim Dougherty.  Things start going wrong for the Harrelsons before the house is even finished;  Kim falls and has a bloody miscarriage, and then some unseen animal starts mangling local animals, including the Harralson's puppy. 

But at the housewarming party, worse life-ruining things are in store, and the Harralsons are soon out of the picture and the Sheehans move in -- fragile, tragic Anita, who's recovering from a series of nervous breakdowns (the most recent due to the death of their son in Vietnam) and her husband Buck, a flawed good guy who's devoted to helping Anita back to stability.  But the malevolent house isn't going to help; it shows Anita a war movie with a guy burning in a helicopter crash in 'Nam, just like her son did (and no TV station was airing any such movie), and phone calls start coming, apparently from the dead son.  What eventually happens with the Sheehans is almost unbearably dark, and the Kennedys realize that something, somehow, is very malignant about that new house... and it's getting worse.

Into this atmosphere of dread comes the family perhaps least suited for dealing with it -- the Greenes, a nice but brow-beaten wife, her militant asshole husband (one of the most realistically despicable humans ever captured on paper) and a little girl who's immediately struck with a terrible and humiliating intestinal disease.  The Kennedys try to step in and stave them from the house but only make themselves pariahs in the effort, and doom awaits all connected with the place. 

This is a novel approach to horror because the house isn't haunted because of some explicable event -- it's just born bad.  And it doesn't just pile up bodies; worse, it ruins lives.  The house finds out whatever's important to the people around it, then destroys that forever and basks in the misery.  Very creepy with a really nasty tone to the fates of the occupants; who'd've thought that Siddons, who's mostly a romance-type author, would have it in her?  The writing is very good and the characters are masterfully drawn (although a bit genteel and sometimes a little silly... but, I know people like that, so it's not really a misstep) and you actually start feeling some dread at what's going to happen to them.  I read this when it first came out and I liked it, but it got even better with the re-read.  Stephen King was impressed enough with this to devote a large chunk of Danse Macabre (do I have to tell you how essential that book is?  DO I?!?)  to it, so if my recommendation isn't strong enough for you, take his.




 

Cool American cover art on the left, meh what-the-hell? British cover on the right.

The Night Boat - Robert R. McCammon (Avon / Sphere, 1980)

One of McCammon's early works, this is a little like the movie Shock Waves.   A diver sets off a vintage depth charge that causes a buried Nazi U-boat to surface and sail into the harbor.  Inside are the mummified crewmen, who've been put under a voodoo curse to keep on living in agony unless their bodies are completely destroyed.  The pain of being dried out drives them to kill people to drink their blood, and they also plan to resume their mission of sinking other ships.  The fungus-covered zombies are pretty creepy and there's some good gory scenes, but overall it's just too slow, and McCammon's writing is always competent but it's not compelling enough to carry things in this case.  I remember not really being crazy about this book when I read it 20-some years ago, but I liked the idea of Nazi-zombie-submariners enough to try giving it a second chance.  Second time around got similar results.  It's okay, just nothing special.

A young Alanis Morissette tells Orville Redenbacher what she wants for Christmas (anything but popcorn).

An Evil Streak - Andrea Newman  (Pocket, 1977)


Uncle Alex (our first-person narrator) is a prissy, somewhat-deformed man who's obsessed with his niece, Gemma... or at least he's obsessed with manipulating those around him, and Gemma is a means of doing that.  When she comes of age he steers her into marriage with a young doctor, but the doctor is soon at odds with control-freak Alex, and then he's just something in Alex's way.   So Alex hires a handsome young actor, David, as a housekeeper.  Alex has homosexual tendencies (but, like all of his sexual appetites, they're inactive and a bit warped) but that doesn't play out with David, so Alex goes for the next best thing -- he engineers an affair between David and Gemma, so he can have them both vicariously.  He provides his house to do it in, secretly intercepts and reads all their letters, and even has a secret room with a two-way mirror installed so he can watch them have sex (and take pictures, make sound recordings, and afterward go in and savor the smells).   He sees the whole thing as a play he's director/producing, based on the Troilus and Criseyde story, and meddles so much he even befriends David's wife (who knows about her husband's affairs but seems amused by them).   When things get in a rut, Alex decides David should get Gemma pregnant... and that's a big mistake.  Not really much of a horror novel, just a story of a real creep playing a game with a lot of lesser creeps, and it's not badly written prose-wise but remains very uninvolving somehow.  It’s drawn out and the affair is not nearly as interesting as Alex thinks it is... and nor is he.   Since he’s repugnant and vapid it’s not a lot of fun to hang out with him for 240 dense pages; after a while it starts reading like a long e-mail from a materialistic social-butterfly aunt telling you all the doings of her friends who you’ve never met.  It doesn't deliver the kind of pedo-sickness the cover art implies, but I wouldn't have really wanted it to, anyway... I just wish it had delivered more of something than the blandness that it does.  I almost gave up on reading it about ten times but I knew I’d never pick it up again if I did, so I stubbornly mucked through; the decent prose kept that from being too painful, but I’m still not certain it was worthwhile. 


If you're so disposed, you can follow me and a bunch of other people on Twitter - details of how to do that are here.