Something a little different here: a whole article on books featuring Northern Pikes as the monster. This appeared in Midnight Magazine #6 as "Comin' Down the Pike".
It is a walloping understatement to say that Peter Benchley’s Jaws inspired dozens of knock-off killer shark books and movies. Hell, it pretty much spawned the entire nature-strikes-back genre, at least it’s phenomenal 1970s resurgence. Ah yes, sharks: the world’s deadliest fish. Stay out of the ocean!
Luckily, in the days before River Monsters was on TV, there were a couple of writers who strayed a bit from the norm and did enough research to find something different. Ignoring the salty sea and looking into freshwater, two books came out a year apart championing the Northern Pike as a worthy killer.
The pike is indeed a formidable fish. They are large (they can reach sizes of up to four feet long) and have a mouth full of very sharp teeth. They can be aggressive, and they are fast. They don’t blink! Sounds like pulp horror monster royalty to me.
Part time actor, musician, screenwriter, and bouncer Cliff Twemlow mercifully set aside some spare time to write The Pike, which was published by Hamlyn in 1982. This quick horror novel (just 160 pages! Perfect!) is about a twelve-foot-long pike swimming loose in Lake Windermere in England, shredding everything in its path. This, of course, pulls a lot of thrill seekers to the shores of the lake, hoping for a glimpse of the fish or a body part or two.
No real explanation is given for the exceptional size of this fish, but none is needed. We just gear up for the next attack. The novel concentrates on the characters in between the killings; the shop owners in the town who are enjoying the exploding economy thanks to the sightseers, the believable romance between the two leads and ol’ Ulysses Grant, the marine biologist who is the colorful Quint-like character in this story. It stays interesting and more or less scientifically plausible throughout and Twemlow doesn’t wait too long between the gruesome deaths.
Interestingly enough, Twemlow adapted his novel into a screenplay and things were in motion to make a film version of The Pike. Calling in some friends in high places, he even got Joan Collins on board and the publicity mills were rolling. A giant, mechanical pike was created (for a quarter-million bucks!) and demonstrated on TV and Joan even posed for a few toothy pictures with it. Unfortunately, funding never came through for the movie and, much to our collective loss, The Pike was never made.
Relevant to absolutely nothing, Lake Windermere became a cryptozoological hot-spot decades after the pike retired. Since 2006, a large Nessie-like Sea Monster has been sighted many times in the lake. Named Bownessie, the beast hasn’t had much hard evidence reported about it, but a lot of interesting pictures can be found online. It ain’t no pike.
Arriving a year before Twemlow’s book, Devour (Futura, 1981) was Paul Adams’ contribution to killer pike literature. A trim, 188-page presentation of pulp perfection, this publication is my preferred pike paperback. Adams’ fish are mutants, evolved from spawning in the polluted waters of Eastern Britain. Chemical dumping is to blame, and Adams preaches the ecological warnings with a heavy hand, which I personally love. You fuck with nature; nature will fuck you up.
Devour is far gorier than The Pike and Adams evidently learned how to set up a successful nature-horror story from his friend Guy N. Smith. (Smith even wrote a forward to Adams’ book Extreme Hauntings: Britain's Most Terrifying Ghosts praising his friends’ work. I’m still not certain they’re not the same person!) Like Smith, Adams’ keeps things moving very quickly and Britain gets laid to waste, like in every notable book in the genre. Characters are introduced and dispatched all in one chapter, leaving you wondering exactly who is going to be alive and in charge by the end of the book. The gore is laid on thick and the blood flows freely. These mutated pike can even plop through the mud on rainy nights, hunting their human meals on land. There is nothing that isn’t great about this book. It is a perfect example of why I love this specific genre.
Of course, there are sharks, piranhas, octopuses, and all sorts of watery predators in the pages of horror fiction, but these two excellent books really flexed their fishy muscles and showed us how badass the Northern Pike can be. A near miss is R. Carl Largent’s The Lake which features a “garpike” (just a layman’s term for the unrelated, but also large and scary-looking gar) but the fish isn’t the main menace in the book which, like Devour, is also very environmentally conscious. There is also a short story called “The Pike” by Conrad Williams in his collection Born with Teeth (PS Publishing, 2012), but it is really more of a fishing tale. It was reprinted in Nightmare Magazine #72 (September 2018). The pike completist can read it here.
While I await someone to write Night of the Guppy, I will continue to revel in these masterpieces from the Seventies and Eighties.
Update- 7-25-2023... a film about Cliff Twemlow!!! The trailer is here!
Looks like I need to find these!
ReplyDeleteDevour is the better of the two!
Delete