Playmates By Andrew Neiderman

 

Playmates
By Andrew Neiderman
1987 Berkley
Paperback, 312 pages

 

    Stacey and her daughter Tami are driving through New York State to her husband David, who is working on a project near the Catskills. The planned vacation disappears when Stacy takes a shortcut and the car breaks down, forcing them to seek help from a nearby farmhouse. The residents of the house are nuts and they abduct the mother and child, starting off 312 pages of grueling, nail-biting, frustrating suspense.

 

    That is literally the prologue. This book throws you right into turmoil in the opening pages and it doesn’t let up until the very end. Of course, David goes to search for his family, and he has enlisted the help of “Chicky” Ross, a quirky, local detective. The Thompson family in the secluded house are a real treat, with papa Gerald, insane mom Irene and the cruel daughter Shirley. They torture the mother and daughter relentlessly. You see Irene thinks they are two other people, a mother and daughter that they had disposed of a few years prior.

 

    The book gives us plenty of moments of wincing and squirming as well as a few genuine chills. This is how a “held captive” book should work, unlike Stephen King’s shit-tastic, bloated Gerald’s Game which made me wish I had never started it. This is a page-turner that never lets up on the tension and never lets you put down your guard. The characters are well defined with revealing background stories, except for Irene, but the lack of backstory works in her case, as she is just bat-shit crazy.

 

    Neiderman wrote several quality horror books, in particular Pin, which was made into a movie in 1988. Around the time he wrote Playmates, he started ghost-writing for V.C. Andrews after her death and has done so for over three decades. He is the master of writing fucked-up families, and they don’t come much more fucked up than the Thompsons. This Berkley edition has a nice, embossed Richard Newton cover, though you should also keep an eye out for the Time-Warner UK version. The book was made into a movie in 1995 called The Maddening starring Burt Reynolds and Angie Dickinson and there is a tie-in edition for that as well.

Jill By Thomas St. Martin

Jill
By Thomas St. Martin
1979 Dell
Paperback, 271 pages

                I stepped out of my usual comfort zone for this one but I do love women-killing-men stories a lot, too. This book is really more of a whodunnit/ thriller than pure horror but I can heartily recommend it to genre fans. It delivers a good story and plenty of gruesome thrills.

 

                Psychiatrist Kelly Cohen receives a package in the mail containing a threatening note from “Jill”. And a real shrunken head. That explains what happened to the head of a murder victim the previous night. More murders occur, and more heads and threats get mailed to Dr. Cohen. It seems the dates of the murders match the dates of Jack the Ripper's murders back in 1888. “Jill” is no mere coincidence… this is a well thought out,  psychotic plan.

 

                The tale moves at a good speed because it’s obvious that Cohen will be Jill’s grand finale and there’s only about a month to solve the case if the murder date is going to match the Ripper’s again. The list of suspects is small but each character is fully developed and possibilities are painted into some of the characters. A dense backstory of one of Cohen’s former patients that he eventually “cured” is told in long flashbacks that are tragic, but exciting in terms of storytelling.

 

                Some bloodshed, a lot of sex (some of it uncomfortable), some misogyny (all of it uncomfortable), and interesting policework all hold this well-told story together. Just exactly who author Thomas St. Martin might be is as much of a mystery as who Jill is. St. Martin has no other books to his credit and the name is probably a pseudonym. The answer to this mystery is anybody’s guess but the answer to the question “whodunnit” in Jill is satisfying if not entirely surprising. (I looked past the red herrings and “got it” eventually, before the cops did!)

Infested By C.M. Forest

 

Infested
By C.M. Forest
2022 Eerie River Publishing
Paperback, 261 pages

 

    
            A new one that caught my eye. It looked like a bugs on the rampage type of thing, but it really isn’t that at all. It is much, much more for better or worse. I’m on the side of better.

            Olivia wakes up in her fancy, new high-rise apartment alone in a pool of her own puke and with the mother of all hangovers. Her husband is gone, the power is off and there’s a massive storm raging outside. Even worse, her neighbors are all either maimed and dying or violent lunatics trying to beat her to death. The men in the building have been taken over by parasites that look like giant earwigs and all they want to do is kill. Olivia is in deep shit.

 

               The first few chapters of this had me nervous that I was in for another Gerald’s Game, Stephen King’s shit-tastic bore fest, but as Olivia ventured out into the ruckus that was taking place in her building, it definitely eased my worries. Claustrophobic, yes but boring, no. Her search for her husband puts her in harm’s way and she has to mature into a self-reliant hero in short time, a task she isn’t sure she is up to. As the mystery unravels, she learns that there is a hell of a lot more going on in the high-rise than any of us could have imagined.

            This is a very nicely structured story, revealing just enough throughout the 54 short chapters to keep you reading and trying to figure out the big story along with Olivia. It does slog in some spots, but there is a lot to uncover and there’s always enough gore and violence, as well as stalking bug-zombies right around the corner to keep pushing you on. Betrayal, conspiracy theories and an ancient cult all work their way into the mix. The overall concept slides into science-fiction territory by the time we all know what’s going on, but it is a satisfying narrative in spite of (because of?) that. Hey, I’m a horror geek, not a sci-fi nerd. But make no mistake. This is a horror novel.

            This is Forest’s first novel and I’d say that he’s off to an auspicious start. This is an intriguing, well-told, exciting page-turner that more than delivers the goods; not as an animals-attack book, like I’d first expected, but as a tale of survival against interminable odds. Olivia is a believable character; she is very well written despite Forest’s gender! Give this one a read and wait with me for Forest’s next novel. He’s one to keep an eye on.

Savaged By Victoria Burgoyne

 

Savaged
By Victoria Burgoyne
1980 Futura
Paperback, 187 pages

 

What? London is besieged by the threat of rabies? Again? Why do I keep reading these books? The same story over and over. Why? Because I fucking love them, that’s why! And this time it’s hyenas!

A sick little girl oh-so-wishes she could have a laughing dog like in the “Hey, Diddle, Diddle” nursery rhyme. Her dad, the genius father-of-the-year, asks his brother, a smuggler, to procure a hyena. The brother gets a tame one from an acquaintance’s small circus, except the hyena has given birth to twins, who must also go. So, with three predatory carnivores in tow, the uncle heads back to London on a dangerous, rainy night. Naturally, he crashes on the way, losing the twins.

The sick little girl loves her snuggly new friend, who accidentally scratches her, but the “dog” licks the wound to care for it. Meanwhile, some animals have been found slaughtered and soon, good ol’ humanity is at risk as well. Y’see, rabies has been found in some of the victims. Enter veterinarian Mike, who gets put in charge of keeping London safe.

Sure, this is a very familiar story, but Burgoyne keeps things moving at a fast pace, bouncing from place to place and incident to incident as the hunt for the twins, and later the also-rabid mom, goes on relentlessly.  The gore is quite fun, the pathos is heavy, and it’s always fun to read about the effects of rabies on the human body. The hyenas, laughing in the foggy night, provide a vivid and sometimes creepy image.

One strange thing… there are three pages concerning a break-in at a jewelry store and the thieves escape through the twists and turns of London. It serves absolutely no purpose for the rest of the novel and seems to exist only to show the author’s knowledge of the streets of the city.

But I have no complaints about Burgoyne’s writing. I mean, “…he lifted the loose, slimy sinews that dangled higgledy-piggledy over the shin bone like an upturned dish of offal and sliced through the greasy mass.” Nice! This is apparently her only novel and it’s a pretty good one. She is better known as an actress and appeared in the film Death Ship (1980, the year this book was published) and some Dr. Who stuff. So, while no new ground was broken with Savaged, I enjoyed watching London fall into a preventable panic once again.

Did the sick little girl get rabies? I ain’t tellin’!

Playmates By J.N. Williamson

 

Playmates
By J.N. Williamson
1982 Leisure Books
Paperback, 303 pages

 

                I do not care for J.N. Williamson’s style of writing. He is overly florid, with long meandering sentences filled with commas and similes. No doubt, he is a creative and intelligent writer, but it can come across as pretentious and just “oh, look how clever I am!” Word soup. Then, sometimes he absolutely nails it. For instance, Chapter 7 starts off with this: “It isn’t so much that the person who prefers the imaginary to the real has no use for reality. It’s simply that the imagined has the decency of being shy, and stay out of the way, while that which is real continually and obdurately intrudes.”

 

                I think that line is genius if quite overwritten in itself. (Obdurately means stubbornly. I looked it up.) So yeah, I can give him some credit for his prose but overall, he needs to ease up on the thesaurus and sentence structure.

 

                Connor Quinlan comes back to the Irish countryside where he was born after having moved the USA. He brings his wife and 11-year-old daughter Troy. Connor’s da, Pat, is super glad to have the boy home. Young Troy doesn’t have any friends, so she makes friends in the forest behind the house. They happen to be fairies. Are they real or imaginary? To Troy, they are real. They couldn’t be responsible for the grisly deaths that have been happening in the forest, now could they?

 

                This book throws more Irish at you than a St. Patrick’s Day parade full of green vomit. Pat is forever going on about Irish folklore, the beauty of the Emerald Isle, and how his son is finally back where he belongs. Through him, we learn about just who Troy has befriended in the woods. We get talk about leprechauns, fairies, banshees, little people, family secrets and three pages on a lecture about why books shouldn’t be made into movies. (Sounds like Williamson got refused a few times.) Women aren’t given much of a fair shake in the book, either. They are there for their men. Even Troy, the kid, isn’t treated with much respect.

 

                In truth though, I enjoyed parts of this book a lot, even though I don’t give two shits anymore about Ireland’s history. As the story developed, I got keen on finding where it would go. It’s not a keeper but I admit to turning the pages rather quickly. It certainly is different and for that, I have to give it some extra points.

The Accursed By Paul Boorstin

 

The Accursed
By Paul Boorstin
1977 Signet
Paperback, 184 pages

 

                As a snake lover, it is sometimes tough for me to assess a book such as this. I mean, many people have an unreasonable fear of snakes, or they just dislike them for whatever reason. (Because the Bible tells them to… oops, did I say that out loud?) This book plays on, and plays up that fear, putting (or keeping) snakes in a bad light. This, of course, just adds to the bad publicity.

 

                Then again, I do love seeing snakes wreaking havoc on stupid humans and this book delivers that, including a wonderful scene with a Reticulated Python plucking a baby from its newborn crib in a hospital. That alone makes this book worthwhile. The author’s science is good, having been a National Geographic explorer, though he also makes up a lot of shit to serve his narrative.

 

                In the deep South, one of those cracker-barrel snake-handling preachers is at it again, saying that if you handle the venomous snake and do not get bitten, you’re A-OK in God’s eyes. If you do get bitten, well, Satan had your soul. This guy doesn’t just use local rattlesnakes, he imports Cobras and shit. He is “probably” also responsible for the Reticulated Python that is living in the low-budget, trashy hospital next to the swamp.

 

                Poor Dr. Adam Corbett. He just wants to help the impoverished locals and get them good medical attention. Too bad hospital head Straker is such a penny-pinching douchebag. They clash often and the good doctor has to put up with incompetent nurses, as well. And cover-ups and babies disappear. And, worst of all, his wife has come from Atlanta to be with him in the hick-water hospital and give birth there.

 

                OK, that’s pretty much the set-up. There are deaths, human, serpent and canine, but no real pathos gets created because all of the characterizations are wafer-thin and mostly unlikable. Even the pregnant wife is an annoying idiot who gets herself into lots of predicaments for the sake of storytelling but really, who cares? As always, I root for the snakes. Not a terrible book but not really satisfying either, and it even felt a little long at 184 pages.

The Scourge By Nick Sharman

The Scourge
By Nick Sharman
1980 Hamlyn
Paperback, 211 pages

 

                I have read roughly half of Scott Grønmark’s books written as Nick Sharman and have enjoyed them all. He is a gifted writer and I enjoy his use of the English language, sentence structure and storytelling. Every now and then, I pause and admire a sentence. While this doesn’t get the book done any faster, it is yet another way to enjoy one’s reading experience.

 

                Strange things are afoot in London (again!) and folks are dying in mysterious ways. A private eye, Kiley, is almost killed alongside one of the victims and he gets himself involved with an investigation into the seemingly unrelated deaths. The deeper he gets, the more he realizes that he is embroiled in a dangerous and bizarre case. Things point to pharmaceutical kingpin David Benson and “Project Alpha” and time is getting short as people die.

 

                This one is not as nasty as some of Sharman’s other horror books, there are still some very upsetting death scenes. As much of a detective novel as a terror tale, The Scourge is a page-turner in every respect as we follow Kiley on his relentless pursuit for the answer. Yes, there are ridiculous and convenient situations to move things along and Kiley would likely have died a million times over while taking too many chances, but taken for what it is, an 80s pulp horror novel, that’s all part of the fun.

 

                I read a few reviews that made fun of the ending but for me, the last 25 pages are pure, unadulterated perfection. I almost broke a sweat turning pages and I swear I almost slipped in a puddle of blood. Fun, fun, fun with a Capitol F, dammit. This book was released by Signet in the US with a somewhat dull cover. I suggest holding out for the original UK Hamlyn cover with the bloody eyeball. I’m not sure what it has to do with the novel but it’s a hell of a striking image!