Galaxy 666By Pel Torro
1968 Tower
Paperback, 138 pages
It all started when my friend (and Midnight contributor) Kris Gilpin asked on his Facebook page: “Back in the 70s, a paperback original came out and it was infamous for about 10-15 years for being ‘the worst novel ever written!’” The title turned out to be Galaxy 666 and based on readers’ reviews and a few snippets of prose, I needed to experience it for myself. I landed one from Amazon for about $5.
What is it all about? A group of four individuals, two
scientists and two spacemen, who explore Galaxy 666, a place where all manner
of weird shit happens. That’s it, really. They encounter odd lifeforms on the
planet, along with all kinds of chaos and a broken spaceship.
Is it really bad? Yes. Yes, it is, but not unenjoyable. One
can picture the author (in reality, Lionel Fanthorpe, prolific hack/ pulp
writer) charging to his typewriter with a bottle of booze in one hand and a
thesaurus in the other, eager to vomit up space-age verbiage. Every noun in the
book gets at least three adjectives, every point gets repeated ad nauseam, and
the characters all wax poetic, even at the most inappropriate of times. “Pel
Torro” was obviously padding the word count against a tight deadline, and the
results are hilarious.
While reading the book, I was comparing it to an Andy
Milligan script, with unending passages of inane dialog, but without the bad
acting to sell it. With a film, I can look over at my wife and we can shake our
heads together. With the book, I would read her unbelievable passages and she’d
tell me to shut up so she could enjoy her own, more respectable book. By the
end, it became a chore to finish, even at 138 pages. Not that it wasn’t fun,
but I had endured it long enough and was ready to just move the fuck on.
The first printing of Galaxy 666 was from Badger Books (SF-86) in 1963 with a Henry Fox cover.
This review originally appeared in Midnight Magazine #9, March, 2022.
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