The Colony By Paul Lalley

The Colony
By Paul Lalley
1979 Carlyle
Paperback, 221 pages

 

                Carlyle was porn publisher Bee-Line’s imprint for publishing other genres. They had had some success with Brian McNaughton’s Satan series so you’d think they would have had a lot of horror novels made to order but there aren’t many. This nature-strikes-back monsterpiece is one of the few I can find, and finding it (affordable, or at all) hasn’t been easy. Reading it certainly was easy.

 

                The book starts right off with a bang. The South American Fire Ant has served up a few corpses in a small Mississippi town. Luckily, they have Mark West of the Crop and Pest Commission and an able-bodied sheriff in the person of Web Maddox. Together, these two try to wrap their brains around how these foreign insects have come to set up colonies in their sleepy town. A visiting carnival is attacked just pages after it is mentioned, which made me feel pretty darn good about the Pediatric Hospital mentioned on page 9!

 

                The attacks are suitably gruesome and the first third of the book is riddled with envenomated and chewed up humans. The middle section slows down a bit so we can get some back story on our heroes and the other characters involved in the admittedly paper-thin plot. Mark and Web form a good friendship and soon become a good buddy team. Women? Not much to see here, folks. Mark is seeing his secretary but not seriously and he has an ex-wife. That’s pretty much the only estrogen in the book.

 

                Still, reading this one is a hoot. Lalley, whoever he might be, is no Shakespeare and the text is filled with monstrous mistakes: misspellings, missing words, improper or missing punctuation. It only adds to the charm. (I’m sure Bee-Lines porn books were similarly error-ridden.) Funny enough, Mark West’s ex-wife is a proofreader!! I commented to my own wife that the ex-Mrs. West should have worked on this book!

 

                Unlike McNaughton’s Satan’s Love Child published by Carlyle in 1977, it appears that Lalley wasn’t asked to sex-up the narrative. It is quite chaste, in fact, unless you count the town’s name, which is Beaverton. But we won’t count that, OK? This book, warts and all, is an extremely fun read and it blows the shit out of Peter Tremain’s tepid Ants (Sphere, 1979).

The Millfield Terror By John Monsees

The Millfield Terror
By John Monsees
2025 Grindhouse Horror
Paperback, 210 pages

                I received an advanced review copy to… review. So here I go!

 

                The Millfield Terror fits in comfortably with the books released by Hamlyn and New English Library in the Seventies and Eighties but also offers a heavy dose of good ol’ American corruption. It turns out that, even with all mod cons like cellphones and the interwebz, you’re still fucked if mutated nature gets a taste for human meat.

 

                The brain trust in Millfield, Ohio cut corners and hire a shady clean-up crew to take care of a closed chemical plant but their method makes the local centipedes into human hunting, organized giant monsters. Not willing to admit a mistake was made, the councilman who made the call and his brother, the sheriff, initiate a cover-up, despite what locals have seen. The town is sealed off, dooming the citizens, while a group of four believers with evidence (foreman on the clean-up, a doctor, a former scientist and a paperboy) become wanted criminals because they believe in telling the truth. It’s a mad race to stay one step ahead of the rapidly evolving centipedes.

 

                That’s the story in a nutshell but this is a multi-layered story with a town rife with corruption and full of really bad choices, really flawed people trying to save themselves and the town, and intelligent bugs who are far smarter than their prey. Monsees’ science all looks and sounds pretty spot on; my own knowledge is with reptiles and amphibians, not etymology, but it all reads plausible to my eyes. A great deal of writing about the town and its legal (and illegal) dealings also ring true. Obviously, a lot of research went into this and the reader is rewarded with an intelligent and more or less believable tale of giant, mutant centipedes feeding on a small town.

 

The author is a remarkably gifted wordsmith, enjoying some excellent turns of phrases in the vein of Raymond Chandler-meets-Ramsay Campbell. His main characters are all well-formed, behaving believably and the quartet of “good guys” are really worth cheering for. I’m happy to say that, like in our beloved nasties from the past, we get a few small characters introduced just to be bug chow. While the blood and meat does get splattered about and the action is breath-taking, the story really is more about survival, guilt and penance.

 

                Monsees really deserves to be read by a larger audience. It’s tough for an Indy author to gain traction and his writing really has style and panache that should be seen and enjoyed. Give this one a shot and thank me later. The author is responsible for the cover art as well.

Satan’s Love Child By Brian McNaughton

Satan’s Love Child

By Brian McNaughton
1977 Carlyle
Paperback, 256 pages

 

                After a decade or so of publishing adult paperbacks, Bee-Line Books started the imprint of Carlyle Communications in 1977 to test the waters of more respectable book genres. Like Horror. They hired one of their authors, Brian McNaughton, who had written a handful of adult books with the nom de porn Mark Bloodstone to start things out. Satan’s Love Child was the result.

 

                Marcia, a former hippie, is a reporter for the Riveredge Banner, a small-town newspaper. She is also the married mother of three children. Speaking of hippies, a group of them have been hanging around in town and raising a lot of suspicion and Marcia feels that she, with her background, should get a crack at a story. But with murders (some townsfolk point to her pet Doberman as the killer), a crumbling marriage and a teenage daughter, Melody, that hates her stepfather and disappears into the night, Marcia has her hands very full.

 

                Man, everybody hates hippies. Like, just because they’re dirty outsiders doesn’t mean they’re dangerous. Unless they really are a Satanic cult, hell bent on raising the Old Ones and sacrificing the innocent to achieve their goal. Melody’s future and her mother’s past look like they’re going on similar paths and Hell couldn’t be happier. And is there an actual monster on the prowl?

 

                McNaughton is an excellent writer but evidently, when he turned in his manuscript, the publisher asked him to spice it up significantly. You know, like the other books they were trying to break away from. Well, he sure did. The added hard-core sex scenes stand out like a sore thumb and are howlingly hilarious next to the somewhat solemn story that he’d been telling. Not that his previous draft was without a sense of humor, but the sex is so in-your-face that you just have to laugh. No book ever published has more uses of the words “cunt” and “prick”. And all of the good things that go with them.

 

                Like the other McNaughton Satan books I have read, this first one is an easy quick read that never has a chance to get dull. Marcia is a good character, though she is surrounded by less than desirable folks. Her mothering is questionable (always leaving the two youngest children alone) but her motives are just. McNaughton’s original draft, without the howling porn, is now in print as Gemini Rising by Wildside Press (2018). But hey, as a McNaughton fan, why not read as many words that he has written as possible? Even if a huge percentage of those words are “cunt”.

Night-Shriek by Michael Wolfitt

Night-Shriek
by Michael Wolfitt

1983 Granada
Paperback, 223 pages

                I swear I thought I was reading a William Johnstone novel except there was no right-wing agenda and it took place in London, not Louisiana! But holy hell, it’s just as batshit crazy as anything in the Johnstone oeuvre!

 

                A couple, Roger and Hilary, get into an accident on the way home from their friends’ house and wind up in the hospital. Hilary was pregnant and loses the baby. The fetus was a weird looking thing, so the doctor saved it to examine later. The fetus breaks out of the storage cupboard. Cats start spying on people. Nurses die. Everyone involved with the case start dying violently. It seems Hilary had the bloodline of the ancient Cat Goddess Bast. See what I mean?

 

                You know me. I can’t resist cat-horror. There is plenty of feline fear in the pages of this book, be it a sleek black cat staring a victim down through a window or a person actually becoming a cat. The more convoluted the storyline became, the more I had fun with this absolute mess of a book. Egyptology often loses my interest in books but this time, it all worked for me because of the laughably over the top audacity of the story.

 

                I’m not saying this is a terrible book. I found it thoroughly entertaining. Yes, it is batshit crazy, but it never dragged and kept me smiling throughout. And if the cover art by Tim White (actually credited on the back cover!) doesn’t grab you, then I don’t know what will. Filled with kinky sex, mutilations and mind-control… they just don’t publish books like this anymore.

 

Online sources say that Wolfitt is actually Mystery writer/ poet Mike Fredman but I haven’t seen Fredman himself admit that anywhere. I won’t be searching out his recent poetry or any of his Willie Halliday detective novels, but I will cherish this strange little piece of pulp forever.

Joyride By Stephen Crye

Joyride
By Stephen Crye
1983 Pinnacle Books
Paperback, 248 pages

                How do you review a book like Joyride? Do you like slasher movies? Then you will like this book. That is exactly what this is, a slasher film in book form. It hits all of the proper points, and it is a shitload of fun because of it. Brutal and unrelenting.

 

                Robert Atchinson was a high school outcast. Recently orphaned, everybody made fun of him and mentally abused him. Too bad he had such a crush on pretty, blonde Carla. One day, he would muster up the courage to give her the gift he’d bought for her, some bright red hair ribbons. But everything changed after the accident that disfigured him.

 

                Present day, a group of teens are looking to party in the cemetery. They break in and find a remote spot and do the drinking and smoking thing that all high schoolers do. The characters are cookie cutter slasher film fare; the horny ones, the sensible one, the fat one, and the younger brother who tags along. Little do any of them know that the cemetery has a caretaker names Cleats, formerly known as Robert Atchinson, and he has a serious grudge against all of them for what happened in the past. Except one, a pretty blonde who he thinks is Carla.

 

                The story takes place all in one night with flashbacks to Robert’s shitty school life. Crye gets some good atmosphere in the graveyard and the kills are gruesome and memorable. As a groundskeeper, he has many garden tools on hand and puts them to very good use. None of the characters are particularly likeable so we’re all really on Cleats’ side. BEWARE: the first chapter depicts a very gruesome and brutal murder of an innocent dog. It really has nothing to do with the story, it just shows how messed up Cleats is. It’s incredibly disturbing and if you skip right to Chapter 2, you might thank yourself for it.

 

                Is it original? No. Is it well-written? Well, it’s not poorly written. But it’s a blast, a fun page turner full of gore and mayhem. Isn’t that what we all want? Go, Cleats, GO!

 

                On Will Erickson’s brilliant Too Much Horror Fiction blog, he reviews Joyride and got a response from the author’s ex-girlfriend that is full of wonderful information. Crye is Ron Patrick, who was an editor that thought he’d try to write a book just as a goof. This was the result. Evidently, he was a handsome, partying, fun-loving dude who just did it “as a lark”. Under his real name, he also wrote Beyond the Threshold, a title that is in my TBR pile. Sadly, Patrick is now deceased.

 

                And YAY to Pinnacle Books for crediting the cover artists, Somja Lamut and Nenand Jakesovic on the Copyright page!

Water Rites By Guy N. Smith

Water Rites
By Guy N. Smith
1997 Zebra Books
Paperback, 253 pages

 

                This is the last of the Great Scribbler’s horror novels to be released by a major publisher. It is the fourth book from US company Zebra and represents a far more mature writer in Smith than you might be used to if you have only dipped a claw into his early Crabs books. In Paperback Parade #43 (Aug. 1995), Guy announced this then-forthcoming book as The Water Witches.

 

                Phil Quiles hated his job. He tended the underground reservoir in Hopwas. His boss was a dick, his future was in doubt and frankly, his place of work scared him. He was sure something was hiding below the dark surface of the water, watching him. Turns out, he was right. Meanwhile, a nutcase who thinks he met the Queen of the People of the Water as a child, prepares for the flooding of the world as foretold by the Queen. He gathers as many followers as possible that would believe him (or at least pretend they do) to become the chosen few to survive the floods and adapt to an underwater life.

 

                But that’s all just a fantasy. Isn’t it?

 

                This one moves along at a brisk pace and is filled with characters that you will hate, some that you’ll feel sorry for, and some that go through such changes (both mentally and physically) that you will cheer them on. Poor Phil is a real schlub, but his fears are justified, and I could kind of relate to his employee/ boss dynamic. You’d love to quit, but you can’t so you just stand there and take the abuse. Another great character is the shrewish, domineering Jocelyn who lords over her family and even fucks with Phil, too. And let’s not forget Mukasa…

 

                For a story that is essentially about mermaids, el maestro manages to serve up a great deal of creepy atmosphere and chills. No, nobody has a gory demise at the claws of a giant crab, but that reservoir does manage to raise a few hackles and the Quiles family’s plight packs an emotional punch, even though both parents seem a bit dumb compared to their kid.

 

                This one is definitely worth a look and the Richard Newton artwork on the cover is worth the price of purchase alone.

Manitou Doll By Guy N. Smith

Manitou Doll
By Guy N. Smith
1981 Hamlyn
Paperback, 236 pages

                Man, this one starts out with a bang. The first chapter is set in Kansas, 1868, where soldiers are looking to wipe out the Plains Indians. A bloodbath ensues and, true to white-man’s sickness, Indian women are raped. One victim, Mistai, curses them, though she later finds she has become pregnant by her loutish attacker.

 

                Fast forward to the present, to a carnival set up in a seaside town. It is a holiday week, and the place is hopping. Bikers show up and all is well until one gruff individual gets cotton-candy stuck to his beard. He violently beats the woman who accidentally did it and fucks up her kid. Brilliantly violent, it is... damn! Then, he goes on a rampage, eventually raping the American Indian woman working the fortune-telling tent. Bad idea. Didn’t he read the first chapter?

 

                So, that’s the set-up. The fortune teller is also gifted at carving figurines that she supplements her income with. The Caitlin family is on vacation and the deaf child Rowena becomes enamored with Jane, the Indian woman. Jane carves a doll for the girl, starting a chain of horrific events that fucks up the whole carnival and the whole town. Evil forces are killing people and destroying the whole seaside.

 

                Without giving much more away, I’ll just say that this is Guy in top form. Man, those first two chapters had me sweating. The remainder of the book is spent mostly from the family’s point of view and what a messed-up crew they are. The wife is an unsatisfied nag, the husband is a philandering tool, and the child disobeys them at every turn. Guy lays the violence on thick and blood flows freely. The generational curse theme winds its way through the narrative until all is explained.

 

                This isn’t at all what I had expected when I went into this one blind, but it was better than I’d imagined. Nasty rapes aside, this one was just a joy to unravel and wallow in the violence and horror. Top Shelf GNS. Another reason to love him. Get the Hamlyn version with the Punch cover… it’s the best one!