The Night of the Toy Dragons
By Barney Cohen
1977 Berkley Medallion
Paperback, 218 pages
You should know by now that I’m a sucker for alligator-in-the-sewer
books. There have been good ones (like Croc by David James) and there
have been shitty ones (like Death Tour by David J. Michael) and Barney’s
book falls somewhere between the Davids; not quite as great as Croc but
head and shoulders above the crap-tastic Death Tour.
The Night of the Toy Dragons really shouldn’t be as
good as it is. The first half of the book concerns two groups, the scientists,
and the sewer workers (teams led by intellectual son and blue-collar dad
respectively) who are desperately trying to figure out what is responsible for
a handful of gory deaths in the sewer. After they resolve that question, the
second half is figuring out how to eliminate the problem. There are a shit-ton
of meetings of the brain trust, walkie-talkie calls and endless research. But,
oddly enough, the book never really bogs down because of that. (Hah! The first
guy to go missing is a sewer worker named Boggs! I amuse me!)
What took them almost 90 pages to figure out is that there is
a mutant strain of alligator that has set up housekeeping in the warm New York
sewer system. They’ve been there for a long time and their numbers have been
increasing so much that they’re not a secret anymore. The ‘gators are small (roughly
a foot long) and white, with mouths that take up a good portion of the body.
They hunt in packs (unlike most crocodilians) and are voracious feeders.
I haven’t read anything else by Cohen, whose other books
don’t interest me (thriller, sci-fi, and a biography of the musician Sting), but he does
OK with this one. I can almost taste the amphetamines in his writing as he fervently
whips us through the details of the two teams’ research and their excitement of
discovery. Stick with this one. The pay-off is totally worth it. You’ll dig it,
I think.
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