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. 


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Where you been?

Hi all...

Sorry for the extended absence; luckily, zwolf's still posting some excellent and entertaining reviews of pulps and such.

Meanwhile, on the homefront, my wife has beaten breast cancer and is well on her way to feeling fully healthy again, giving me a chance to use my blues song-a-month run here last year as demo fodder while seeking a new band with whom I can play locally.



And around the time that we got the good news on her cancer, I met up with local band Alamantra... they are some good guys who play well, though sadly, the stars did not align as hoped, and I'm no longer with them now, though our two gigs were quite fun and fairly rocked.

We played Friday night at the Nick in Birmingham, along with the High Fidelics, Asteroid Shop, and  Looksy... (Thanks to super-soundman and all-around super-guy Victor E. Wilson for making everyone sound so damn good and for providing these photos!!!)

...and then Saturday night in Florence, with Planet Ink and, once again, the High Fidelics. Gotta say, everyone was very cool and all of the bands rocked. The High Fidelics were the real stand-out band for me... They play straight-ahead surf-rock, with the bassist splitting his time cleverly between a guitar slung as a Fender-6 and a regular Fender bass, and the guitar and organ workout all night during the set (which one night included a killer Henry Mancini medley of Peter Gunn and Baby Elephant Walk), but the real star of the band, for my money, is their bad-ass drummer, whose fills get more and more complex and over-the-top throughout the set, nicely staying away from the silliness of Tommy Lee by using humor as a musical weapon. Hard to explain, but amazing to behold... check 'em out!

So, that's where I've been... and now I'm looking to build another local band to slog the clubs here in town, playing blues and funk, rock and soul... looking for a drummer first and foremost, so hit me up if you are that drummer or if you know him... 

Butcher's Dozen

Yep, it's been a while since I did one of these, but I'm about to make it up to ya in sheer volume.  If a baker's dozen is thirteen, then a butcher's dozen is fifteen.  And if that's too goofy for you (and if it ain't you're no son o' mine), there's a Butcher book in here to use as an excuse.  Basically, I had to call the post something, alright?  Anyway, I take on some heavyweights here.  Wanna see me swing on James Bond?  How 'bout Jack Reacher (just a lil' 'cuz I really do like the dude)?  And you can just call me the Death-Merchant-Death-Merchant!  Read on...

Swampmaster #1 - Jake Spencer  (Diamond, 1992)
First a three-book series has a Seminole Indian named Johnny Firecloud (as far as I can tell he’s no relation to the 70’s exploitation movie character of the same name) trying to survive a post-nuke future and lead a resistance against the National Front, which is occupying twenty states.  The National Front started when a bunch of right-wing hate groups (the KKK, Neo-Nazis, etc.) banded together and seceded from the union (now known as the Free States).  In the ensuing civil war nukes were exchanged, so there are lots of mutants running around, and the National Front are a bunch of crazy perverts running torture camps.  For some reason that’ll be inexplicable to anyone in the South, Georgia is a free state and Atlanta is the capital of all the Free States (Texas also didn’t go with the Neo-Nazis -- I’d’ve thought they’d be the first to secede).  Anyway, a meeting to unite all Free territories against the National Front is supposed to take place in Atlanta, so the National Front sends in spies to plant “bio-nukes” in the city.   Firecloud and his wacky crew of freedom fighters (including an Asian woman and her acrobatic twin midget sidekicks, Marcus One and Marcus Two) have to try to stop it, but Firecloud gets caught up in fighting some “White Trash” mutants who are covered in tumors and fungus; he almost ends up the sex slave of an eczema-covered White Trash woman named Itchin’ Peg.  Then, to get a pilot for a helicopter Firecloud’s captured, they have to attack a circus train full of freaks and slaves who are forced to work in a traveling carnival.  (The National Front apparently loves carnivals as much as it does Hitler -- one of their leaders, who’s known as “Clam Mouth” because he has overactive salivary glands and drools all the time, is obsessed with a carnival he’s building on his desk).  The book is too long at 232 small-print pages, and there aren’t enough fight scenes.  What are there aren’t bad, but they’re so bogged down in detail that they move too slowly.  Firecloud’s an expert with a compound bow but ends up not using it very much, and, despite the title, not much happens in the swampland, either.  He does use his bow and arrows to fight off some sharks, though, which is a little crazy.  It’s not badly-written at all but the characters aren’t all that interesting and my interest in what they were doing tended to lag, especially when things got too wacky to maintain much sense of realism.  Still, not the worst you could find or anything.

(The weapon Justin Perry uses most often is not pictured)





Justin Perry: The Assassin #1 - John D. Revere (Pinnacle, 1983)
What a weird, perverse book.  Roger Johnson, a Colonel in the USAF, signs on to be a killer for the CIA when is wife is killed because she uncovered a Communist plot.  In his new identity as Justin Perry, he’s a murderous pervert who’s so obsessed with sex that he can barely pay attention while being briefed on his missions if there’s a woman in the room.   He’s sent to kill a German who was supposedly killed in Belsen, but that was apparently faked because he’s reappeared.  While following up on this (pretty incidentally, since a woman he picked up in a bar coincidentally is in on it) he gets attacked during sex and has to kill a knifeman while ejaculating all over the poor woman’s couch.  That doesn’t matter for long, though, because the knifeman kills the girl instead, but she enjoys it because she’s a masochist and being murdered heightens her orgasm.  Justin ends up being captured by the German (who’s gay and has a slave-boy for a chauffer) and Justin and his friend Bob Dante are tied down, given bull-breeding drugs, and are going to be sexed to death by a bunch of gross old women and the gay chauffer.   Perry escapes and learns that it’s all a plot by a right-wing secret society called SADIF (Sons And Daughters In Freedom), which has infiltrated the Catholic church (Joseph Mengele is the Pope’s gardener!) and Perry’s own parents belong to it.  The SADIF agents kidnap Justin’s son as a bargaining chip (and he almost becomes the German’s catamite) to make Justin deliver a secret list.  It’s not badly written, style-wise, but it’s light on action and preoccupied with sex to a degree that it doesn’t even feel healthy anymore; it’s not even a turn-on, it’s just disturbing and has a dark, queasy sleaze to it.  Justin seems to be sleeping with women mostly to combat some latent homosexuality that comes out when he gets aroused by killing men at close quarters.  One gay guy he kills by stabbing him up the ass with a bayonet.  And almost every woman he finds is a masochist who want to be beaten up during sex.  Perry’s so preoccupied with it it’s almost pathological, and his mentality is so unbalanced that the book feels surreal (for a while I wondered if Bob Dante might be some other personality of Justin’s or something, because they’re both described as looking kind of demonic and satyr-like; Justin Perry’s the only action hero I know of with a unibrow).   It’s overlong and the action scenes are pretty scant, and just seem to be something the author wanted to dispense with so Justin could have more sex.  Kinda disturbing one-fisted action.

Death of a Citizen - Donald Hamilton  (Titan Books, originally 1960)
In the first novel of the Matt Helm series, Matt is retired from doing secret government wet work and has been a husband, father, and writer of Western novels for fifteen years (from which you could make a good case that Hamilton may have viewed him as an idealized alter-ego).  But then he runs into Tina, a girl he used to work with back in the day, at a party.  She’s apparently still an agent and wants his help to stop an assassination; a top scientist has been targeted by Commies because his death would cause a big setback in technological research.   After finding a dead woman in his bathtub, Matt’s back in the game and quickly reverts to his old ways, spotting people dogging their train and, when necessary, neutralizing them.  But Matt -- or Eric, as he’s known in secret service mode -- figures out that this web is a whole hell of a lot more tangled than it appeared.  They take his daughter hostage to try to force him to kill for them.  Oh yeah, he’ll kill all right...   Tough, gritty, but always realistic and believable.  It’s amazing that they could ever make anything as silly and stupid as those Dean Martin movies out of a character as hard-as-nails as this badass.  It’s like somebody tried to turn Dirty Harry into Maxwell Smart.  Pretend those movies don’t even exist and check out these books, there’s no way you’ll regret it.

 Wulff's so badass his point-thirty-eight can blow up entire ships!

The Lone Wolf #2:  Bay Prowler - Mike Barry (Berkley Medallion, 1973)
Second in the strange series by sci-fi author Barry Malzberg has Burt Wulff (he’s still Burt at this stage, although - oddly - he gets called “Conlan” on page 170)  is in San Francisco, carrying out his war against the international drug trade.  While attacking a drug den Wulff finds an overdosed meth-head named tamara and, after killing her drug-dealer boyfriend, he takes her along, trying to help her.  She doesn’t know who he is or what he’s doing (she’s pretty much an imbecile) but calls him “Avenger.”   They have sex, which makes Wulff feel “alive” again and gives him a new reason to try to survive.  He’s still a psycho, though, so after getting Tamara to safety (it’s a strange move in an action-series book, but this time the hero’s love-interest doesn’t die) Wulff goes after a half-million dollar drug shipment that’s coming in on a boat (originally it was a million dollar shipment but Barry apparently forgot the original figure by the time he got to writing about it).  The mob’s frustrated by Wulff so they keep sending hitters after him, but he gets them first (partially by luck, because he’s not much of a tactician) and when he has to go through their 100-man army it’s so easy for him that he literally worries more about catching bronchitis from the cold air than getting shot.  It moves fast enough but the writing is strange, a semi-poetic stream of consciousness, and it’s the opposite of gun-porn; Malzberg apparently has no knowledge of weapons at all, referring to guns as “point-thirty-eights” and “point-forty-fives” and thinking grenades are a whole lot more powerful than they are.  It’s obviously fast, sloppy, and not a labor of love, but you could do worse.

 This cover photo is an important part of two people’s resumes.


Butcher #3: Keepers of Death -- Stuart Jason  (Pinnacle, 1972)
Ex-mafioso-turned-agent-for-White-Hat Bucher is sent to Memphis for a “Cone Pone Hoedown Festival” (I am not making that up and god only knows why anybody else thought they should) to infiltrate a hippie commune and learn what they know about the disappearance of an East German scientist who defected to the U.S. with plans for a gravity-drive spaceship.  Bucher poses as a hit man (who he killed in the traditional opening chapter scene where Bucher always takes out a hit team trying for the $100,000 bounty on his head).  He’s suspicious of the hippies, though; even though they grow pot and have nonstop random sex, they don’t have long hair or weird clothes (except for one girl who wears a gunny sack).  Bucher follows the trail to Sweden, then Rome.  Along the way he brings a few more colorful hit-men’s careers to an end; they’re always weirdoes in these books, like the goon who’s constantly doing a gorilla imitation because he thinks it’s more intimidating than hilarious.  Not all of them get “kooshed” with Bucher’s silenced P-38; he also gets to showcase his brass knuckles in a fist-fight with a giant, and he uses his switchblade to knife-fight a guy covered with warts (seems like somebody in these books always has warts).    During all this killing Bucher learns that the whole thing’s a wild goose chase and the real problem is a revolution’s about to be triggered by a nuclear  strike on Washington, D.C.  It feels strangely like the writer (James Dockery in this case, using the Stuart Jason psuedo) decided his original plot lacked some oomph and decided, screw it, let’s scrap it mid-book and substitute something bigger.  Bucher’s quest to save America is made all the more difficult when the syndicate ups the “dead only” bounty on his head to a quarter million.  For an ex-Mafia thug, Bucher’s pretty puritanical about all the rampant sex going on (he seems to find it distasteful even when he engages in it) and though he kills a lot of people, he feels bad about it and is disgusted that the world has to be so violent and evil.  Good thing it is, though, or there wouldn’t be another thirty-some of these books.  Pretty average but the average for a Butcher book ain’t bad.

Coolest cover you've ever seen in your life?  Probably!  I want a van with that painted on the side of it!

Chopper Cop #2:  The Hitchhike Killer - Paul Ross  (Popular Library, 1972)
Motorcycle-riding hipster cop Terry Bunker is called in to track down a serial killer on a motorcycle who's picking up hitchhiking hippie girls, driving them out to the desert, then running them over on his bike.  The brass hate to put Terry on a case because he bends the rules a lot, rides a Harley chopper, has longish hair and sideburns instead of the regulation crew-cut, and says "Peace!" a lot, but he's the best when it comes to dealing with younger people who usually hate cops.   Terry's not crazy about other cops, either; he terrorizes them and leads them on a high-speed chase just for the hell of it as he's going in to get his assignment.  And all the kids aren't always crazy about Terry, either; a gang of them beat him up when they find out he's a "pig."  Terry has smarts, though, and he deduces from the time-frame and the distance between a couple of the killings that the psycho's making trips on a small airline.  (Did you know airlines in the early 70's handed out small packs of cigarettes along with the tiny bottles of booze?  Apparently so.)  Checking this out mixes Terry up with a couple of pretty stewardesses and a co-pilot he suspects of being the killer.  While smoking grass with them Terry makes some mistakes and another girl ends up dead while Terry sends the cops chasing a wrong lead.  There are a few other slip-ups before he closes in on the truth.  Good, fast-moving plot with only a few action scenes, but they're well-timed and punchy.  Terry's smart but not infallible, which keeps things realistic and interesting.   I could easily picture this as an old grindhouse movie... sometimes I even saw film-scratches in my head.  A quick read, well worth checking out.

Yes, the headband does appear in the book.

Traveler #1: First, You Fight - D. B. Drumm  (Dell, 1984)
A nuclear holocaust happens in 1989 (they must not have expected this to be a long-running series:  the 13th and final volume came out in 1987, just in time) during the presidency of an ex-cowboy-movie-star named Andrew Frayling (middle name probably Ronaldwilsonreagan).  Special forces soldier Kiel Paxton loses his wife and infant son to the bombs, and he's also suffering from a dose of nerve gas he picked up on a mission in Central America.  It's left him with heightened senses (and a sixth kind of "spidey sense" that helps warn him of trouble), but it makes it difficult for him to be around people because their energy keys him up.  He has a minivan called the "Meat Wagon" (with a Wankel engine that'll run on most any combustible fluid) and a bunch of weapons, so he drives around taking mercenary jobs for gas, food, and ammo.   While escaping an army of roadrats he goes into a city in Utah and finds himself in the middle of a Fistful of Dollars situation, with two competing warlords both wanting to hire him... or kill him to stop him from working for the other.   Both of them want him to capture a weapons shipment from an army of vicious "Glory Boys" - former military types gone bandit - and they send him to scout that out... but Traveler decides the townspeople would be better off if all three warring factions were laid to rest.  But while doing that he also has to battle his own seizures and freak-outs from all the stress being put on his wrecked nerves.  This Road Warrior-inspired series grew more sci-fi-ish (and silly) as it went along... if I remember correctly by the third or fourth book a guy riding a giant mutant housecat shows up. I know sci-fi (and Specialist series) author John Shirley was "D. B. Drumm" for at least a few of these books, but I don't think this was one of them; he's probably responsible for the sci-fi element being upped. But this one's pretty straightforward and the writing's good and the story keeps moving at a fast clip.

ATTENTION, TERRORISTS:  Jeff Foxworthy has had enough of your shit!

The Peacemaker #1:  The Zaharan Pursuit - Adam Hamilton (Berkley Medallion, 1974)
Barrington Hewes-Bradford (don’tcha just hate him already?) - or Barry to his friends and people who don’t have time for all that shit -- is a wealthy corporate magnate who, in addition to running oil, shipping, and airline businesses is also devoted to stamping out any evil forces that threaten world peace.  While partying on his yacht a crewman is bludgeoned with a flashlight and dumped overboard by someone who he caught sending signals.  Soon afterward a bigger boat does a hit-and-run with the yacht.  It all strikes Barry as strange so he has his helper, Lobo, investigate.  They find the boat that hit them had been smuggling military ordinance and has a connection to a supposed Latin American revolutionary named Zaharan.  One of Barry’s invesitgators ends up with a couple of bullets in the head and a Z carved in him -- a sure sign they’re tangling with Zaharan (unless it’s Zorro - I think he’s got copyright on that).  While attending frou-frou cocktail parties with his silly twit friends (people call each other “darling” a lot -- they’re that kind of assholes) , Barry learns of more cover-ups; the guy who owns the boat that hit his yacht is hiding something, and one of the jet-setters is killed with a shotgun, then his girlfriend is sniped at in her hospital bed.  Going after the shooter requires a car and boat chase, and Barry also scuba-dives for reconnaissance and has one of his men try to blow up a plane carrying an arms shipment bound for Zaharan’s revolutionaries.  There’s a twist at the end that’s pretty implausible but I cut it some slack for trying.   This is kind of like an attempt to combine Dynasty with The A Team before either was on the air, and while rather-cardboard Barry is fairly rough-and-tumble for a rich boy, it still made me want to go read a Gannon novel for an antidote.  Even the cover gets things out of whack; who thought putting a picture of our hero talking on the phone would be badass?  Look out, troublemakers, or Barry will make a few calls!  “Peacemaker” is also an odd choice of monikers for a vigilante hero series to be built around.  Not terrible, but no great shakes.  There were three more.

The Katmandu Contract - Nick Carter (Award 1975) 
Revolutionaries kidnap a senator’s kids and take them to Nepal, demanding a billion (or a million - the book flubs a little at keeping the number straight) dollars in diamonds.  Nick Carter is sent to deliver the diamonds... and ensure they don’t get to keep them after he gets the kids back, since governments could topple if the revolution is that well-funded.  Sent to stop Nick is Kunwar, a top assassin who’s filed his teeth to vampire fangs.  Kunwar first puts a bullet in Nick’s Eurasian girlfriend, which adds a vengeance-hunt dimension to the espionage.  This one’s really well-done and heavy on the action scenes, with Nick surviving being pushed in front of a train, going through a big car chase, and having numerous karate fights which get really brutal; the author (James Fritzhand in this case) seems to have knowledge of (or at least a fascination for) the martial arts, because Nick’s like Sonny Chiba in this book, destroying people with his hands.  He also makes use of all his other weapons, too (you get the infamous gas grenade twice!), and this book lets Nick truly live up to his “Killmaster” title.  There’s an unusual bit of added intrigue where Nick has to smuggle the diamonds in his stomach (tied to a tooth with fishing line!) and has a problem eating enough to hold back the nausea.   Smart, fast-paced, and not too far-fetched to stay plausible.  This is a good one.

ATTENTION TERRORISTS!  John Kerry has had enough of your shit!

Death Merchant #54: Apocalypse U.S.A.! - Joseph Rosenberger (Pinnacle, 1982)
Quadafi is plotting to have a deadly nerve gas sprayed over the east coast, which would kill around 20 million Americans.  Richard Camellion - the Death Merchant - isn’t really all that concerned about that ‘cuz he’s full of wacky beliefs that the U.S. will be destroyed by nukes within the next seventeen years and that Nostradamus is right that the Earth and moon would switch orbits and people would evolve into energy-beings, etc.  But, it’s an excuse to kill a bunch of people so he and his team (who seem as skilled as he is and just as full of horseshit conspiracy theories) stage big firefights in an ice-cream factory, a junkyard, a brick factory, and a ship... all explained in excruciating detail but none of which have much point, because there’s not really a plot so much as a premise.  The fights get very dull because every character -- including our “heroes” -- are total cardboard.  I only kept reading because Rosenberger is so obviously an insane idiot, and his prose is like a cut on your lip; it’s irritating, it’s painful, but the masochist in you can’t resist picking away at it.  Usually action-series books are short but this is 200 pages of small, dense print because highly-self-indulgent educated-idiot Rosenberger can’t oh-my-god-PLEASE-shut-the-fuck-up about all the trivia he knows and tell the freakin' story.  There’s at least a season’s worth of In Search of... episodes about conspiracy theories involving Israel, the Mafia, the Kennedy assassination, the arms race, what the government spends money on, etc., and all if it alarmingly simpleminded; Rosenberger has a tiresome trove of facts he likes to show off (hey, wanna learn how bricks are made in the middle of a gunfight?) but he puts them together like a moron.  And I don’t think I’ve ever read a writer who had NO evidence of understanding humor, at all;  Camellion is utterly witless, yet tries to make pained jokes that actually made me feel embarrassed for Rosenberger.  And the footnotes about everything reminded me of Vladimir Nabokov’s Pale Fire, where the notes are a separate, unaware story of fantasies of madness.  There’s also a lot of prognostication clumsily forced into the story, every bit of which has since been proven wrong.  This is lousy as an action novel (despite the ridiculous body count and fashion-show of firearms), but it’s kind of perversely fascinating as an artifact of idiotic insanity.  Really, it’s like listening to somebody tripping on ‘shrooms try to tell you what happened in a Chuck Norris movie they saw.  You can almost feel Rosenberger gripping your sleeve and babbling this stuff at you. Awful, awful stuff, but entertaining in a way for all the wrong reasons.  And, for our sins, there were seventy-one of these goddamn things.

Jack Reacher #1: The Killing Floor - Lee Child  (Jove, 1997)
Please don't misunderstand the bulk of the criticism that will follow:  I very much liked this book and plan to buy the rest of them (already ordered the next ten)... but hooboy are there some flaws!  The story's compelling enough to make forgiving them a pretty easy thing to do, but you should start reading these with some idea of what you're getting into.  This is pretty much the written equivalent of a BDAM (Big Dumb Action Movie) and it's got all the lovable boneheadedness of any one of them.  Child is just good at throwing enough cleverness and convincing-sounding horseshit into the narrative to distract you and make this wackiness seem in some way viable. 

First off, much has been made of how original a character Jack Reacher is.  He's a former military policeman who got out of the army and now just drifts around the U.S. like a hobo.   He's bigger, stronger, smarter, tougher, and more resourceful than anyone he comes into contact with.  My main question is... does no one remember John Rambo and Mike Hammer?   Because that's essentially what Reacher is -- a blend of these two action icons.  He's got Rambo's background and lifestyle and Hammer's giant-among-dwarfs toughness/smartness/size.  Throw in a bit of Sherlock Holmes intuition, maybe a little MacGuyver resourcefulness, and a hint of The Punisher for attitude, and that's Reacher.  And this isn't a complaint -- I love Mike Hammer and Rambo and the rest so making a combo of them all gets a big hell-yeah-buddy from me -- I'm just not going to say it's original when it's clearly derivative.  But since the sources are so well-chosen, who cares, right?  More power to 'im!

Reacher's name is well-chosen because when it comes to suspension of disbelief, he's really reaching.  Okay, see if you can buy this:  while riding a bus to nowhere in particular, he makes an impulsive, unscheduled stop in an obscure small town in Georgia for no reason other than a blues guitarist he likes was killed there some sixty-odd years ago, so it seems as good a place to sight-see as any.  He's promptly arrested because he's seen walking away from the site of a murder that happened a couple of hours before he got off the bus.   So far, okay, but here's the Jesus-rose-from-the-dead part: the guy who got murdered turns out to be Reacher's brother, who he hasn't heard from in seven years!   You buyin' this?  I hope so, because your powers of accepting coincidences are going to be called on again and again and again;  you won't only have to suspend your disbelief, you're going to have to levitate it.   Seriously, this is one of the craziest plot points I've ever been asked to swallow since Edgar Rice Burroughs' The Return of Tarzan, where Tarzan is sailing around the entire coast of Africa and gets very-luckily shipwrecked a mile from his childhood cabin... and then Jane, while making a separate voyage to search for him, ends up shipwrecked a mile from that!   (Note: I also enjoyed The Return of Tarzan despite that - I'm just tellin' ya what's involved here).

Anyway, Reacher's brother was working for the Treasury Department to track down the-most-evil-counterfeiters-ever.  They have an incredibly ingenious (although utterly preposterous to anyone knowing the basics of the process described) method of faking money, and they're utterly ruthless about protecting it: anyone who gets in their way is torture-murdered along with their whole family.  Reacher and a few allies (a spunky female cop, a black police detective everybody underestimates, etc.) set out to finish what Reacher's brother started, and then some.  Along the way Reacher has to kill maybe a dozen people, and never so much as faces any charges for it -- the only killing he ever gets in any trouble for is the one he had nothing to do with.  He's extremely tough and highly skilled... maybe a little TOO highly skilled, because he makes some wild educated guesses and they ALWAYS work out.   Fer instance, the bad guys are after some info in his late brother's things, so they steal them.  Reacher bets they'd only save his brother's briefcase and throw the rest away, and he bets a guy like his brother would be tricky and have hidden the info in some less-obvious luggage.   And lo and behold, this is so, and Reacher even guesses exactly which dumpster on the interstate the luggage was thrown into!  It's a small world after all!

Or, when a deceased cop hides a key they need, Reacher deduces (A) that there is some kind of key hidden, (B) exactly where the key is (even though it was crazy well-hidden), AND (C) figures out exactly where the thing it unlocks will be hidden, too!   I want this mofo pickin' my lottery numbers for me!  This kind of thing happens over and over again.  Reacher guesses on the first try what fake name a guy will be using to hide out at motels.   A woman is torture-killed in an airport Reacher's running through like O. J. Simpson in a Hertz commercial -- how'd the killer have time to do it and hide the body when Reacher was in such hot pursuit?  Magic!   Every trick works out.

    But even though it sounds like I'm complaining, I'm not, really -- I'm just trying to give it some perspective because these books are so highly-praised;  I'm just telling you they're really the modern equivalent of the Penetrator/Executioner/Death Merchant style action-fest rather than any kind of high-brow-at-all lit;  don't let the high-end design (it really is nice) and thickness of the books fool you.  But, also, don't be fooled into thinking there's anything wrong with reading those old-school-style action-fests, either; of course there's not, which is why a good chunk of this blog is devoted to them. 

    I would say that at 524 pages this was overlong for an action novel, but since it never really got boring I can't complain about that much.  The action scenes are really well done (about as good as any I've ever read, and I've read a lot) and there's some snappy dialogue.  And Reacher (who's in first person here but that changes to third in most of the other books)  is interesting and well-suited for the conflicts he gets into.  And even though he's a super-tough guy, the bad guys are scary enough that there's still a real sense of menace in the situations he gets into.  So, like I said, even though there's a lot about the plotting of this book that's so preposterous you've got to marvel at Child's panache for thinking he can get away with it (even while you’re happily letting him do exactly that), it’s a fast-moving and engaging read and I’ll gladly go again, even if the other books turn out to be just as ridiculous.  So, I say check it out, most definitely.  Be prepared to give what’s going to be asked of you and you’ll probably enjoy it.

By the way, I haven't seen the movie yet, but Reacher's nothing like Tom Cruise.  They should've cast Dolph Lundgren.  That would've been perfect.   For some high-praise for Reacher, check out the always-excellent Spy Guys & Gals, which inspired me to check him out.

Thick-witted git doesn’t even know how to hold a gun!  Whatcha gonna do, knit us a sweater with that thing?  Nice bow-tie, Skippy!


Casino Royale - Ian Fleming  (Signet, 1953)
Here's where I make me a Big Mac out of a sacred cow.

I don’t know how the movies made a badass out of this simpering, self-pampering daffodil.  I had heard that Fleming started writing these books because he wanted Britain to have a bad mamajama like Mickey Spillane’s Mike Hammer.  I dunno, maybe that guy shows up in later books, but the James Bond here is a huge wimp who does very little and all of it badly.  Sent to Royale to out-gamble an enemy agent at baccarat and break his bank, Bond fails and is saved only when someone gives him another stake so he can try again.  While trying to stop him a bomb goes off and almost kills him -- he’s so shaken that he calls for a massage (even though he knows people are trying to kill him).   Then there’s a car chase and he promptly wrecks and is knocked out (his car is 25 horsepower!  I kept picturing him tear-assing around on a riding lawnmower) and is captured.  His defense is to try kicking a guy in the shins and run away, but they push him down and he’s helpless again.  Then the enemy hits him in the balls a bunch of times with a rug-beater until Bond is rescued by an enemy agent who only doesn’t kill him because he hasn’t been ordered to.  And that’s really about it; Bond is basically an ineffectual victim who only survives by the kindness of his enemies and gets fooled by double agents.  There’s no real action and Fleming’s writing is prim and prissy, all manners and no grit.  This was the first Bond novel and I hope the others get better, because a hero that does nothing but get his balls paddled isn’t very awe-inspiring.

That's not a perspective shot, people... after reading this book I'm pretty sure Brett Wallace's fist really is three times the size of his head!

Ninja Master#2 : Mountain of Fear - Wade Barker  (Warner Books, 1981)
Ric Meyers steps in and turns the series into hyper-violent lunacy as ninja master Brett Wallace shows up in the backwoods burg of Tylertown, where everybody’s incredibly, cartoonishly evil.  First he deals with the racist cops who gang-raped a couple of black girls who were passing through, and then he takes on the henchmen of a Nazi doing medical experiments on orphans.  There’s not much of a plot, just a set-up for action scenes which are damn near constant, and they’re great even though they’re completely impossible.  Brett’s more of a superhero than just a highly trained fighter, and he’s even able to throw playing cards through people or fling throwing stars through the crack under a door.  He’s never in a whole lot of danger because he’s Superman fighting mere mortals, but there’s tons of entertaining mayhem, with guys getting their testicles kicked through their intestines and such.  Meyers does have a disturbing tendency to like writing sick scenes where women get raped and brutalized, so you will have that to contend with before the cartoon starts.  Pretty ridiculous but you’re not gonna be bored, guaranteed.   For more info, Glorious Trash did a great review (which inspired me to take my copy out and read it)

Secret Mission: Prague - Don Smith  (Award, 1968)
Spy Phil Sherman is sent to Czechoslovakia to trace shipments of machine guns to rioting Black militants in American cities, which could erupt in a war within America.  (This loses a little bite since there are now well-armed Black gangs in most cities and what they mostly do is shoot each other, but in 1968 this must have seemed nightmarish).  Phil’s contact promptly ends up dead in his hotel room with a knife in his back, and Phil has to dispose of the body without getting the attention of the authorities.  Then, investigating the flight on which the guns were being carried, his car gets blown up and he luckily avoids going with it.  He teams up with a girl named Zanya who survived the Hungarian revolution and was left a bit skittish by it.  Phil doesn’t even carry a gun until he takes one off a dead agent, who he’s almost killed with in a car wreck.  He plants his ID on the dead man (whose face was torn off in the wreck) and tries passing himself off as dead to take the heat off of him.  There’s a lot of chasing around as Phil and Zanya try to get out of the country, but it’s more intrigue than action, so much so that it becomes a little tedious.  The writing is good but the story’s a bit dry and could stand a few more fights and shoot-outs.  Phil’s the kind of guy who tries to avoid trouble as much as he can while accomplishing his mission, and that’s wise in real life, but this is a book so it creates a bit of a drag in the pacing and makes me wish Phil were more of a troublemaker like Nick Carter.  It’s realistic, though, and even if it’s not the most slam-bang book out there, it’s far from dumb.

Raker #1 - Don Scott   (Pinnacle, 1982)
The ad copy for this series (reproduced above so you can marvel at it) had me expecting something hilarious, or possibly infuriating.  I was expecting some bonehead right-wing Archie Bunker-with-a-gun kind of deal... and that's more or less what this is, but it doesn't go far enough with it to be fun, and since the story itself is too much of a bore to make up for that, the whole thing's a fizzle.  Raker is an agent for a "company" (apparently with the government?) which sends him out to see what's up with some cop-killings in Black neighborhoods.  The same incidents are happening in city after city, always with the same m.o. -- pairs of white cops get called to check on false domestic disturbances and get ambushed with shotguns.  Raker thinks the B.L.A.  (Black Liberation Army) is trying to kick off a nationwide race war.  Most of the book is spent with Raker trying to talk to contacts and find leads to trace the thing, and there's not a lot of action.  What action there is seems incidental and briefly inserted in hopes of shutting up guys like me who'd complain that there were no fights.  Sorry that didn't work!  A few people get splattered with shotguns, but there's not much impact in the way these scenes are written, and all the characters are so cardboard that you just can't care about it much.  And that's one of the problems -- even Raker himself is very cardboard and boring.  There's only one half-hearted attempt to give him any background at all, a flashback scene where he's infiltrating a group of protesting hippies while his brother's being killed in 'Nam.  Raker tends to think every guy he meets is a "fruit," and while he's not blatantly racist he does do a stereotypical "Black accent" on the phone that Stepin Fetchit would find over the top.   A big point is made that the Black guy on Raker's team "acts white."  More of that kind of assholish stuff could have made Raker an antihero to laugh at, at least, but the dude's not really well-drawn or interesting enough to feel anything about one way or the other.  I can see why this series stopped at two volumes.



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The Good, The Bad, and the Meh - some horror book reviews

Greetings, whoever's still here!

No, I'm not dead... just lazy and distracted by other stuff.  The blog's overdue for some book reviews, I guess, so here we go.  Read a lot of not-all-that-great stuff, and some of it is very familiar to everybody by now so a review may not be all that useful, but there are a couple of obscurities in here that you might welcome some information about.

The Parasite - Ramsey Campbell (Pocket Books, 1980)
Ramsey Campbell is a master short story writer, turning out some classically creepy, nightmarish works,  but his  hallucinogenic style doesn't translate well to novels... and this is a long novel, which seems even longer than it is.  As a child, Rose is invaded by some soft, horrible thing in an abandoned house, while she and her friends are playing a séance game.  As an adult, she starts exhibiting psychic powers, such as getting glimpses of the future and being able to leave her body and fly around.  She struggles to maintain a normal life with Bill, her husband and writing partner (they’re film critics), but the attacks of paranormal powers become more pervasive, and she begins to research them, finding out things about Adolph Hitler, Aleister Crowley, and an evil man named Peter Grace who mastered powers like the ones she’s exhibiting.  Grace had apparently achieved some sort of immortality through rebirths, which scares Rose.  She soon realizes she’s been possessed and the intruder within her is growing stronger and demanding more control.  There’s some very creepy stuff here and a lot of it is really effective, but there’s an awful lot that feels like padding, too.   And Campbell’s prose is too much of a good thing;  he comes up with brilliant, hallucinatory images, but at 372 pages it gets overwhelming and drowns the narrative flow; it’s a good style for small bites but a feast of it will make you sick, and the book becomes tedious and reading it soon feels like a chore.  The opening bit is great and the last 50 pages or so are a strong payoff, but the middle -- though undeniably well-written -- feels like torture.  I attempted this book five or six times because I believed it was important to the horror genre, and finally only made it through out of sheer determination.  I’m an admirer of Campbell’s short stories and will give his other novels a try because I’ve read a couple that weren’t bad (Face That Must Die is great, and Ancient Images was good), but this one... agh, I gotta say pass on it.

Dark Inspiration - Russell James (Samhain Publishing, 2011)
A couple who were suffering some estrangement after the miscarriage of their twin girls move to a small town in Tennessee, setting up a new life in an old house with a bad reputation.  The wife starts interacting with the ghosts of some twin girls who drowned in a nearby pond, while the husband starts writing a Southern gothic novel and discovers an attic full of taxidermied animals and an ancient book on Egyptian magic.  Driven by some malefic spirit, he starts experimenting with taxidermy himself, and that hobby soon gets out of hand...   It’s an entertaining horror novel, although the writing feels a bit amateurish (not bad, just rather unskilled) and some of the ghost stuff gets pretty corny and makes it feel like a young-adult novel at times.  Flawed, but not boring.

Dagon - Fred Chappell (St. Martin’s Press, originally 1968)
Strange Lovecratian horror mixed with Southern gothic, written in an almost-hallucinatory style that reminded me a bit of Faulkner’s Sanctuary.   Peter is a priest interested in pagan gods, and he plans to write a book on Dagon, a maimed sea-monster deity, while he and his wife stay at the farm he inherited from his grandparents.  It turns out the farm had a connection to a cult worshipping Dagon and other ancient gods, and staying in the area has a bad effect on Peter.  Going through his granparents’ correspondence he finds references to Lovecraftian deities, and he’s both seduced and repulsed by Mina, the daughter of a moonshiner who squats on his land.  Mina is noseless and vaguely fish-like but has a strange control over him.  Peter almost gets trapped in his attic with the same chains that imprisoned his father when Peter was a young boy, and under the farm’s evil influence he ends up a degraded, addicted, maimed thing who’s being prepared for a dark purpose.   The story falters a lot and often doesn’t make a lot of sense, and most of it deals with Peter becoming a pathetic alcoholic dependent rather than having much to do with ancient gods.  Some of the writing is brilliantly poetic but it adds up to something that’s a bit too murky and obscure to pack the impact it could have had.  The pretenses at “literature” get in the way, but it’s still a worthwhile though not particularly compelling read.  A lot of people consider this an important work in the genre, but I’d say it was dispensable.

Where the Chill Waits - T. Chris Martindale  (Warner Books - 1991)
A gung-ho asshole boss with major daddy issues drags three apple polishing employees into the deep Canadian woods for a deer-hunting trip.  The city boys have enough trouble roughing it, but things soon get worse when they waken an evil Windigo spirit.   A huge deer they shoot turns out to have been rotting for months, and their Indian guide wants to turn back, getting very bad vibes.  But it’s too late and the Windigo curses them all.  Two of the men come back semi-conscious and frozen to the core, and growing taller as they start transforming into cannibalistic ice-monsters.  The wife of one of the men seeks help from the Indian guide and his old grandfather, and they try exorcising the Windigo... but that’s not an easy thing to do, especially for people who don’t really know the old rituals.  The writing is good and Martindale tries hard to pack in logs of scares, but after a while it comes across as an overlong B-movie with too many climaxes, and none of them especially powerful.  It’s not bad and it’s well-crafted, but not particularly special.

Exorcism - Eth Natas  (Lexington House, 1972)
Reading like a rush job to cash in on The Exorcist, this pretty-badly-written obscurity deals with a guy named Bentley (our first-person narrator) who takes in his 19-year-old niece, Melanie, after her parents are killed in a mountain-climbing accident.  Almost immediately upon arrival, Melanie starts acting strangely, displaying knowledge of her new town’s past, limping for no reason, and having weird fits.   Things quickly get worse as her face changes, her body twists, she starts calling Bentley “Daddy,” and says her name is Lotte.  She somehow manages to get across town (despite being so crippled she can barely shuffle around) and murders Bentley’s snooty girlfriend.  It becomes clear (to the reader, at least -- our narrator’s not quite as quick on the uptake) that she’s possessed by the spirit of some diseased little girl who burned to death in the house.  Very conveniently, Bentley’s eccentric neighbor is a warlock who performs exorcisms (or at least tries to).  The prose is pretty clumsy and odd (any sex scene that uses the word “phallus” is a sign of writer’s-discomfort) and there are few things that seem put in just to spice the book up, like a dream where Bentley’s almost forced to blow a hooded cultist, or an LSD trip during which he has sex with Melanie/Lotte.  It’s nothing special story-wise but it’s short (190 large-print pages, with frequent blank space) and it’s interesting as an artifact -- the publisher’s obscure, the cover art looks like a badly-doctored photo from a ‘60’s J.C. Penney catalog, and the backwards-Satan author name is a strange choice of pseudonyms (especially since the book’s about a different sort of possession and has no Satanic activity).  Junky weirdness whose main charm is its obscurity.

This Dark Earth - John Hornor Jacobs (Gallery Books, 2012)
Zombie apocalypse stories are, almost by necessity, derivative, and this one’s no exception; it (probably accidentally, since I think he wrote it a while back) almost exactly parallels a certain storyline in The Walking Dead comics.  But, Jacobs (as with Southern Gods) is such a good writer that you’ll forgive him the limitations of the genre, and the story’s so great you won’t mind if you’ve heard this one before.  An outbreak of a zombie virus is followed by nuclear bombs in an apparent containment effort.  The resultant EMP knocks out all electronics, shutting down everything mankind has become so over-reliant upon.  A doctor trying to escape the carnage and get back to her son teams up with a big, good-natured trucker named Knock-Out.  They survive to set up a community, and the son eventually becomes its leader because he’s smart at finding ways to deal with the undead.  They herd them into pens and bash their heads in, as sort of a slaughterhouse operation.  While sent on a mission to herd zombies away from the settlement by slowly riding motorcycles and having them chase the sound, our protagonists run into a group of well-equipped slavers who are capturing women to rape and forcing men into doing very nasty work.   The slavers are extremely cruel and ruthless and equipped with military vehicles, so it’s not good at all that they’ve become aware of our heroes’ settlement...   Well-written and fast-moving zombie horror that doesn’t break new ground (seriously, the deja-vu you’ll feel if you’ve read those Walking Dead comics will be almost overwhelming), but leads the pack as far as the quality of storytelling goes.

Elizabeth - Jessica Hamilton (pen name for Ken Greenhall)  (Popular Library, 1977)
Our narrator, Elizabeth, is a very unusual 14-year-old girl.  Wise beyond her years and emotionally-dead beyond life itself, she’s learning -- through the instruction of Frances, a woman who appears in her mirror -- that she’s a witch.  Elizabeth first uses her powers to kill off her parents, then goes to live with her grandmother and uncle, with whom she has an incestuous relationship.  When her grandmother proves bothersome, Elizabeth has her vanish.  She manipulates her tutor, Miss Barton, and pretty much everyone else around her.  This book is remarkable not so much for its plot (which is pretty standard witchcraft stuff) but for the power of the writing; Elizabeth’s narrative voice is like sociopathic poetry, wise and cold and matter-of-fact about darkness.  The writing’s so great I immediately went out and ordered used copies of the author’s other horror novels, knowing I’d spotted a heavyweight who’s somehow gone overlooked.  (Thanks to the great horror-fiction blog, Too Much Horror Fiction, for pointing this out -- I’d had a copy I bought at a library sale sitting around my house for years and hadn’t gotten the impetus to read it until I read Will’s excellent review).

The Hippy Cult Murders - Ray Stanley (Macfadden-Bartell, 1970)
Pure Manson-sploitation in which a charismatic hippie named Waco gets a vision that fear is the greatest power, and the god of fear is Zember.  Along with his friend Whitey he plans to gather a family of hippies and impregnate a “pure” girl with the son of Zember.  They head off to L.A. where Waco brains a couple of girls with a meat-tenderizing hammer that Zember compelled him to buy, then he carves Z’s on their bodies (for Zember -- I had nothing to do with it, I swear).   Waco slowly starts gathering a group together, targeting homeless teens (mostly girls, who all become group sex objects) and it gets too large to keep living in his bus and tent, so he decides he needs to rent some land.  He finances this by murdering some wealthy couples during a wife-swapping orgy, raping and terrorizing them before stabbing them all to death.  It all gets to be too much for Whitey, who also resents playing second fiddle to Waco all the time and thinks the “Zember” business is bullshit, so he starts causing trouble.  Whitey’s disposition only gets worse when Waco cuts one of his fingers off and gangrene sets in.  As cops follow the really-sloppy trail Waco’s leaving (he’s too crazy to have much sense about covering his tracks and even does his crimes in a VW bus with flowers painted all over it), Waco’s planning an orgy where he’ll marry a young girl who’s “pure” enough... but Whitey’s fed up and planning to spoil things.  There’s plenty of sex, violence, drugs, and weirdness, and it’s lurid enough not to be disappointing even though  it’s still pretty restrained and not nearly as graphic as it could have been.  The writing is solid, matter-of-fact stuff without a lot of flash to the style but plenty of detail, and it keeps the story compelling.  It’s a very hard-to-find book (I got lucky and snagged a copy for 35 cents off the bargain wall-o’-trash at Hawsey’s Book Index in Pensacola back in the 80’s, before that store went from being one of the best used book stores ever to the total useless shit it turned it into around 2000 or so - the change-over of that store made me sadder than any bookstore-experience has ever made me I'd gladly fist-fight whoever came up with that "business plan").  I wouldn’t say it’s worth the crazy prices people are asking for it now (nothing is), but if you find an affordable copy then it’s well-worth the read.

Baxter (aka Hell Hound)  - Jessica Hamilton (pen name for Ken Greenhall)   (Sphere, 1977)
Very strange (and brilliant) tale of a sociopathic pit bull (who narrates some of the chapters in first person).  Baxter the pit bull seeks to find an owner worthy of him; most people are too foolish and weak and their ways make little sense to him.  His search for the proper owner requires him to eliminate a few people, not by dog attacks that would implicate him as dangerous -- Baxter causes “accidents.”  He pushes the old lady who owns him down stairs so he can go live with the neighbors.  But then they have a baby, which takes their attention from him, so he has to make other arrangements.  He ends up with a troubled 12-year-old boy named Carl, who has sexual hang-ups about Hitler, among other dangerous perversions, and he recognizes a kindred spirit in Baxter.  But this boy may be too sick for even Baxter to deal with.   Very well-written, obscure little masterpiece that’s fetching insane money used now and, like this writer’s Elizabeth, deserves to be put back into print.  I was going to hold this review off 'til the next time I did a "critter book" set, (did you miss those?  Shame on you - here and here and here ) but who knows when that'll be - I figured I better put the review up while you can still maybe find a copy that won't break your bank (I got this one for 'bout $10 but I was damn lucky).

There are a million covers for this book (I re-read it in the Barnes & Noble Robert Louis Stevenson hardback collection - love those) but this is my favorite 'cuz it's the one my mom read to me when I was four years old.



The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde - Robert Louis Stevenson 
One of the ultimate classic (short) horror novels, I re-read this one every few years because it’s almost perfectly constructed.  I don’t think I need to describe the plot because it’s so ingrained into the human consciousness by now that it’s one of those stories you’re familiar with even if you never read it or saw any of the movies.  But if you haven’t, you should change that.

Labyrinth - Eric Mackenzie-Lamb (Signet, 1979)
A college professor leads a group of students into the Okefenokee swamp to study nature.  While taking a soil sample one of the students digs up a couple of old coins, and when the professor takes them to an expert he learns they’re probably part of a lost treasure worth a hell of a lot of money.  Unfortunately the coin expert’s also a crook and soon some violent (and homosexual, I guess to remind you of Deliverance) killers are also looking for it.  Things get busy but also confusing... possibly because the book’s not all that enthralling after a point.  The writing’s not bad or anything, and some subplots (such as the teacher getting framed for seducing a student) are interesting, but it doesn’t really add up to much, and when the action really kicked in I didn’t care much anymore.  Not really a horror novel,  more of an adventure-thing, but since they kind of tried to market it as one I’ll include it with the horror book reviews.

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