Dog Kill By Al Dempsey

Dog Kill
By Al Dempsey
1976 Tor Books
Paperback, 203 pages

 

                What a cover! Hats off to Jon Ellis, the artist! And to Tor for commissioning such a dynamic cover!  But fuck you, Tor, for the bait and switch. There are barely any killings in this book; the dogs seem to merely irritate the local farmers and law enforcement. But Dog Annoy wouldn’t have been as good a title as the one we got.

                A group of students release a bunch of test dogs from the University lab. OK… we’re going to have a roving pack of genetically altered mutts tearing up children! No, all but one of the dogs die in short order. The leftover one eventually forms his own pack with the help of Mitzie, an abandoned beagle in heat, whose scent brings all the boys to the yard. They move into a cave in a park and eventually get up to no good.

                OK, this book starts off with a note from the director of the American Humane Society. I was ready for some heavy stuff. As Blackie, the lab dog builds his tribe, each dog is introduced with a Humane Association “Animal Control Study” card. Then, we meet the dog’s owners and the dog. After 100 pages and far too many characters for me to remember who the ones at the beginning of the book were, the pack is complete. And the book is half over.

                The dogs kill some farm animals and some bunnies and, in an unnecessarily graphic scene, a fawn. But I was like “yeah… when they get to humans, it’s going to be amazing!” I was wrong. While there is an attack on a playground ballgame, the body count isn’t what I was hoping for, and the gory details are few. Too much time is spent on a blooming romance between park ranger Mel and Mary Ellen, a poor little rich girl that he has nothing in common with, but she has blonde hair and a good body. Deep. The other characters of note are pretty cut and paste… the yokel sheriff (nick-named Greasy!), the park director acting like the mayor in Jaws and local farmers puttin’ their gun hats on.

                Dempsey obviously knows a lot about dogs; all of the breeds get a lot of historical description. I guess this makes the actions ring truer. Unfortunately, this is at the expense of any kind of story, action or suspense. We already know that humans do not deserve dogs and every one of the dogs in one way or another are not responsible for their predicament. Humans, as always, suck.

                So, yeah… shitty book. Also, the print isn’t justified and that drove me apeshit. Great cover, though.

Gila! by Les Simons

Gila!
By Les Simons
1981 Signet
Paperback, 166 pages

    

    By now, everybody knows that Les Simons is actually Kathryn Ptacek, author of many horror and romance novels. Simons is one of her many pen-names and Gila! was her first published horror novel. Having grown up in the Southwest, Ptacek sets a believable tone for this tale of giant, people-eating, mutated Gila Monsters. In real life, despite being called "monsters", Gilas are slow moving animals and really not much of a threat to humans.

    These radiation-born ones mess up the homo sapiens in a big way. The body count is very high and to a killer-animal reader, that is of the utmost importance. It's not just gore and rampaging reptiles, however; Ptacek manages to squeeze out some pathos, none more than in the visceral fairground scene. (This chapter is so great that it inspired Tom Hallman's paperback cover.) Check it out...

    A mother is relaxing while her five children are enjoying a safe, family friendly County Fair on their own in different spot on the fairground. When the Gilas come, she faces the dilemma: which child to save? Heart wrenching! She makes her decision (a bit of Sophie's Choice there) and... "Hypnotized, frozen, Julia could not take her eyes away. She saw the mangled body of her son fall from the lizard's mouth, saw that only half of it was there and that the upper part of the torso, the shoulders and the head, remained in the lizard's mouth." 

 Hot diggity, that's some excitin' writin'!

    Unlike many animal-gone-amok novels, Ptacek's science isn't completely absurd. I mean, we're dealing with giant Gila Monsters that crave human flesh, created by bombs in the desert. You can't get more 50s Sci-Fi than that, but she obviously knows a good deal about the real-life animal and thus makes a potentially silly idea work. For me, Gila! is one of the finest rampaging reptile reads around. Gore, humor, emotion and action; what more could you ask for? Evidently, Ptacek herself is fond of her first horror novel: for a time, she published a writer's market newsletter called Gila Queen's Guide to Markets, a publication with an eye on the horror and fantasy genres.

    Obviously, I'm not the only fan of this essential tome. Centipede Press released a deluxe, signed hardcover of Gila! and Macabre Ink have issued it as part of their Resurrected Horrors series, both released in 2025. And, of course, you need Grady Hendrix's indispensable Paperbacks from Hell (Quirk, 2017) for many reasons but especially to get a peek at Tom Hallman's rough cover sketch.

                                               
                                                         Centipede Press, 2025

This review first appeared in a slightly different form in Midnight Magazine #1 (MCE 2018)

Satan’s Mistress By Brian McNaughton

Satan’s Mistress
By Brian McNaughton
1978 Carlyle
Paperback, 252 pages

                McNaughton’s follow-up to Satan’s Love Child isn’t as sex-filled as its predecessor, but it’s a truly inspired piece of lunacy in and of itself. Nobody in the book has a shred of decency and wonderfully awful things happen to everyone.

 

                The Laughlins are a fucked-up family. Mom’s an insane hippy, dad is a commercial artist and young Patrick is confused as hell. They live in Mom’s inherited old Mill that has a suspect history. Patrick is an awkward nerd but has typical teenage thoughts and desires, and dreams of a red-haired mistress. In the waking world, he has a crush on a cheerleader. When the folks have an “adult” party, everyone gathers at the Mill and, quite literally, all hell starts to break loose. You see, Mom has found a hidden passageway in the basement that leads to her ancestor’s library which is filled with evil writings. It turns out that the Cthulhu Mythos that Lovecraft wrote about was not fiction!

 

                That’s about the gist of it and believe me, that premise allows all kinds of wacky things to happen. Patrick gets taken over by evil spirits, Dad buggers his gay boss, and everyone gets wrapped up in the madness. There is incest, infant-eating, possession, and brutality, but it’s all served up with a healthy sense of humor and clever storytelling. At one point, the family lawyer, a Lovecraft fan, figures out the connection when he finds the real Necronomicon in the library and says he has to call Colin Wilson, L. Sprague de Camp and Robert E. Briney, all real-life writers who have dabbled in the Mythos (the last one, a collaborator with McNaughton!) to see what they know about it.

 

                In a word, this book is fun. Sit back and enjoy the silly weirdness. By the way, it was Carlyle Books that made this and three other books “the Satan Series” back in the day. Overall, they don’t really share a common thread, though the third book, Satan’s Seductress, does continue this storyline. This title has been restored as Downward to Darkness with McNaughton’s original, preferred text and title, by Wildside Press and it is readily available online. But feel free to stick with this, the pulpier version, for a wild ride.

Killer Croc By Grahame Webb

 

Killer Croc

By Grahame Webb

1982 Fontana
Paperback, 249 pages

 

                Professor Grahame Webb is a noted zoologist who has specialized in crocodilians for decades and he is well versed in Aboriginal culture, having worked with the people for many years. It seems that when Peter Benechley’s Jaws (1974) became a best-seller, it was irresistible to Webb to put his expertise into a fiction story about an oversized Saltwater Crocodile running amok in the waters of Northern Australia. Published by Aurora Press in 1980, the hardcover was called Numunwari, the name of the sacred crocodile in the story. Obviously, Fontana wanted something with a little more zing and changed the title to Killer Croc and had Wilson Buchanan whip up some Jaws-esque cover art, though it looks more like a swipe of Roger Kastell’s cover art for Creatures (Pocket Books, 1979).

 

                In Arnhem Land, Oondabund is driving a boat for fisherman, poacher and all around bad guy John Besser when they see a massive, 30 foot crocodile. Oondabund recognizes it as an animal sacred to his people while Besser wants to kill it. Besser goes back for it later and gets two of his mates killed. Now, the croc is a maneater and will have to be destroyed. Steve Harris is put on the case to take care of the beast but he is friends with Oondabund and knows the deal. When the croc heads towards the city of Darwin, Harris is pushed by politician Rex Barrett to destroy the federally protected croc. A cop gets eaten and the shit hits the fan. What to do? Well, Oondabund says capture it. It is his spirit animal, literally.

 

                Yes, you have all of the necessary characters for an animal attack book, the crooked politician, the bad guy(s) and the good hearted Harris, but you also get a main Aboriginal character and his people and that is a flavor that I had not tasted before. Oondabund’s broken English is well written (and it never got on my nerves like when some authors try to write phonetically) and Webb reveals a lot of the culture to the reader. Best of all, he imparts a ton of knowledge about the crocodiles and the conservation efforts to keep them safe. While most animal attack books show the animal attacking as a monster, Webb (and Harris, who really is Webb, I think) portrays the croc, Numunwari, as a sentient being with every right to live its life.

 

                For being Webb’s only attempt at fiction, I have to applaud his writing skill. Though it gets a bit long in the third act while trying to catch Numunwari, Webb writes a cracking adventure full of suspense and excitement, with real human characters and a lot of heart. I got miffed when a new character was introduced with 50 pages to go but soon saw the error of my ways; it’s an absolutely essential plot point. The book was adapted into the film Dark Age (Arch Nicholson, 1987) which stayed fairly loyal to the book even while condensing things and rewriting for more action. The exception is Harris’s love interest: in the book it is Oondabund’s (black) daughter while the film has him with a lily white former lover working with the Aboriginal people. Meh!

       

                                    

                 Aurora Press, 1980, Jacket illustration                           Dark Age 1987 VHS, 

                    by Roger Janovsky                                                      Charter Entertainment

The Djinn By Graham Masterton

The Djinn
By Graham Masterton
1977 Pinnacle Books
Paperback, 210 pages

                I have been aware of Graham Masterton and his dozens of horror novels for much of my life, but I had never read him. I’ve been told he is great. Well, I finally burst my Masterton cherry and I agree… yes, he is great! I went for his second novel, the one that came right after his debut and probably his most famous book, 1975’s The Manitou. This one is in keeping with that book’s idea; an ancient evil threatens folks in modern times.

 

                Harry Erskine (back from The Manitou) goes to his Godfather Max’s funeral on Cape Cod. The deceased was a collector of early Arabic artifacts and throughout his life, Harry would see some of the collection when he visited. At the funeral, he meets Anne, and they head off to dinner rather than stay and mourn around the Cape house, which has all but fallen to ruins. His Godmother Marjorie is acting strange and there are no paintings or photos left on the walls. Oh, and Max died when he cut off his own face. The mystery is made even worse by the fact that one of the treasures of the collection, an old jar from Iran (that Max likely stole) is sealed up in the turret of the old house. Guess what’s in the jar!

 

                The story is told in more or less real time, the action and unraveling of the mystery taking place over just a few days. Anne, it turns out, is there to try to get the jar and return it to the country to which it belongs. She has a nearby friend in Professor Qualt who also knows a thing or two about ancient Arabic magic and the genies, or djinns, that are thought to inhabit jars. It seems that the one in the Cape house is a famous jar containing an evil djinn that can kill you in forty ways.

 

                Never mind the fact that there are so many people that know so much about dead languages and ancient magic. This book is exciting from start to finish and the primordial evil threatening contemporary people who clearly do not understand it is exciting as hell. Some genuine chills are provided by a wispy hooded entity and when the djinn does appear, it is a roller-coaster ride to hell. Harry might be a bit of a dick, but his reactions and fear come off as very real. He tells the story in first person, a device that I normally don’t like (“hey, that means he’s gonna live!”) but it’s all good and he returns in subsequent Masterton novels.

 

                A+ for my first Masterton book. I’m looking forward to more. The cool stepback cover artwork on this one is by Ed Soyka.

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.