Paper Beasts On The Rampage

Not to be confused with Nick Sharman's THE CATS, this is Berton Roueche's first person account of cats gone wild on Long Island. Very brief at 126 pages, it moves at a quick clip and dishes up some vivid grue.

I've always liked the bloody-faced kitty on the cover.

Roueche's effort was the first cat novel out the gate, and though it is copyrighted 1974, the same year Herbert's THE RATS appeared in the UK,  I can't find an American copy to confirm whether it was published that year. It was first published in the UK in 1975.

Published in '79 when mad animals, insects, and reptiles were all the rage (thanks to James Herbert and Guy N. Smith), this Hamlyn paperback original focused on the building of a resort on top of a snake colony. No points for predicting some resistance from the creepy crawlies.  

A new copy of the American/Signet paperback of this book is rushing out the door for $193 this week at Amazon. 

More killer cats in D. Gunther Wilde's CLAWS (Leisure; 1978), a novel that came after  Roueche's THE CATS, but before Nick Sharman's attempt to demonize the little fluffs in the early 80's.

Quite a fun read.

If you're looking for the best in killer mantis fiction, you've hit the mother lode, old chap.

I fail to find another novel in existence that I can compare to Nace's EAT THEM ALIVE. 

As the cover blurb screams, it really is A NEW PEAK IN HORROR.

One of the best reads ever. Much better than ULYSSES.

Wonderful Guy N. Smith-style horror about a mad fungus infecting, mutating, and ugly-fying all and sundry.

Lots of funny stuff, too.

Harry Adam Knight was Aussie writer/film critic/novelist John Brosnan, who died in 2005.

The first of his non-fiction books I read was THE HORROR PEOPLE ('76), then FUTURE TENSE - THE CINEMA OF SCIENCE FICTION ('78).

THE FUNGUS is also known as DEATH SPORE.

Very Heavy Number

 A book that keeps on keeping on.

Part of my collection for some years, this fine tale of a jailbait slut and the boys who do her bidding, sports a stunning cover that is typical of Thomas's other books. These include the excellent Reds and Turn Me On.

  

I picked this book up soon after publication and read it while also consuming Guy N. Smith's Night of the Crabs at the same time. Ironically, Smith's sex scenes were more explicit, but Thomas's sleaze quotient was higher and the crime aspects were very solid.

I love that the book opens with Shannon, the "heroine", getting high, and informs us that she started "blasting" at fourteen (!) God bless that gal.

 

You don't hear much about Thomas these days, which is a crying shame, because he was a true original.

Horror Paperback Infestation

 

I was an instant fan of Beth Holmes' The Whipping Boy (Jove Publications, '78), a strange and sometimes mind-boggling tale of child abuse. If you can wrangle a copy, you won't be disappointed.

The cover art is striking but strangely underwhelming, too. I often look at it and contemplate the thinking behind it.The interior of the sleeve is the actual face of the man whose profile is seen on the cover. 

 

Pretty decent rabies novel from Walter Harris, who preferred to be known as W. Harris. Definitely a product of the success of James Herbert's The Rats, it had a similar structure and got a little too preachy about the sexually active. You know who you are!

Cover art is great, and makes it looks like a war novel. There's a war against rabies, sure, but nothing terribly military. I'd say Star Distributors were probably trying to snag readers of Martin Cruz Smith's Nightwing ('77), the 'Bats Attack' hit of the year. Guy N. Smith's Bats Out of Hell was released a year later to further capitialize on Cruz's success. It was clearly a good time for plagues, infestations, and bats.

 

Did Victor Mullen quit the book trade after writing The Toy Tree (Paperjacks, '88)? Must have. I can't find anything else by him. I did look. Oh, yes, I looked hard because I loved The Toy Tree.  The language is awkward at times (a few too many adjectives), but Mullen captured the madness of a crazy kid very nicely. He pushed the envelope, too, with plenty of nastiness directed at kids and some juvenile games that would not have been out of place in Serrador's film Who Could Kill A Child? 

 

The book's art is very special. Probably much too subtle for the random paperback buyer, it  conveys the book's nihilism with skilled strokes of the brush.

 

The Toy Tree was another interesting release from the Ontario-based Paperjacks, the same publisher of the masterpiece The Happy Man (reviewed on this blog long ago).

Where Michael McDowell Lies...

I had a dream last night about Michael McDowell, the author of Cold Moon Over Babylon, a book long out of print and virtually forgotten.

Right now, Mr. McDowell lies in the cold, cold ground. He's been there for more than a decade.

Thirty years ago, he was on a roll. The Amulet. Cold Moon... Katie. Gilded Needles. The Elementals. Toplin. Many more, too. Some horror. Some historical. He wrote screenplays before his death (from AIDS), including Beetlejuice, and contributed to Tales From the Darkside.
 
His publisher, Avon, serialized his Blackwater books. There was one a month for six months. It was a brave idea that didn't succeed, unfortunately.

A few years later, Stephen King's publisher serialized The Green Mile. This time it worked.

King himself said of the writer: "He's the finest writer of paperback originals in America."

My dream was a simple one. I could see McDowell in his grave. He hadn't rotted. He was dressed in handsome Southern garb. He was bearded. He stared without blinking at the coffin lid. I was trying to dig down to him with a long, square shovel, but the ground was too dry to assist me. I don't know what I would have done had I reached him, but I was awfully depressed by the fact that he was dead and his books were dead, too. I guess I'm determined to play some part in  resurrecting his reputation and his books.

I despise seeing true talent go to waste, just as I despise seeing the untalented accorded the adoration of easily persuaded morons.

McDowell was the finest of writers. Cold Moon Over Babylon, the first book I read of his, made me uneasy and anxious. It also excited me. That was one of McDowell's talents. He could scare and excite you at the same time. There was a deep sensuality to his language that had nothing to do with sex, but had everything to do with mood, time, and place.


Consider this from the 87th page of Cold Moon...

The slow spin, gentle sway, and smooth inexorable rise continued until the delicate bare feet skimmed the water. Gradually, then, the revolutions subsided and the figure hovered lightly on the surface of the river. It turned deliberately toward the Larkin farmhouse on the northern bank of the Styx. The eyes opened, but behind the gray lids was a flat infinite blackness, blacker far than the muddy Styx in the shadow of the rotting bridge. Those terrible eyes were without surface; the lids opened directly onto noisome void and nonentity, and the black holes were fixed on the darkened window of Evelyn Larkin's bedroom.

While you read these words,  Michael McDowell lies beneath us. Still. Prostate. Calcium-depleted. Above him, in a stratosphere of  mud and slush, beyond a loamy island of crawling things, his legacy has begun to fade.

That makes me sad.

Evil Children Whose Wrong is Right

The "Evil Child" genre, ignited long ago by The Bad Seed ('56), then nurtured into popular culture in the 70's by David Seltzer's The Omen ('76) and Frank De Felitta's Audrey Rose ('75), spawned dozens of imitators. The genre never died, but it did slip into a coma.

The cover art for Joanne Fluke's The Stepchild ('80) had a heavy Bad Seed influence with its titular villain appearing to be Patty McCormack's slightly younger sister.

Author Joanne Fluke now specializes in mystery thrillers with culinary themes. Titles include Cherry Cheesecake Murder, Peach Cobbler Murder, and Chocolate Chip Cookie murder. They sound like slightly more adult Enid Blyton titles to me.

She jumped on the bandwagon with The Stepchild, her first book, and certainly demonstrated a strong affinity for the mystery genre. The book is light on real horror, though.

I found James Gordon's The Stone Boy (Charter, '84) in a wooden bin outside a suburban newsagency in Melbourne. It wasn't getting much respect in the hot sun and its fifty cent price tag didn't bode well for its content.

Nonetheless, I was captivated by its stark cover art and cover copy that really grabbed my attention: "The worst has happened. Your son is coming home."

How could I resist that?

The Stone Boy is a solid horror story, written in the first person, about a man facing an uncomfortable past (his son). It has a very effective climax that I didn't see coming.

The book opens with an old children's folk rhyme that I first heard when I was a child. It establishes the tenor of novel:

One afternoon
in the middle of the night,
Two dead boys
got up to fight;
back to back
they faced each other,
sword in hand,
they shot each other;
a deaf policeman
heard the noise
and came and shot
the two dead boys

Definitely worth a read.

The film of the same name, produced in '84 only, is not related to the novel.

Another first novel, The Other Child (Pinnacle Books, '79) was written to capitalize on the burgeoning evil child genre also, even though it was more concerned with an evil adult who coveted another woman's child. Once again, it was more of a mystery than a balls-to-the-wall horror outing.

I've always been partial to the book's striking cover art. There is something so wrong but so right about a pretty little girl with a gun.

Author Margaret Chittenden continues to write mysteries.