Killer Flies
By Mark Kendall
1983 Signet
Paperback, 159 pages
Mutated insects, paper-thin
characters, sex at inappropriate times, oozing gore, wildly unbelievable
situations, a huge concert they won’t call off despite the risk… this book is a
blue-print for bad, pulpy 80s Nature-Strikes-Back books. In other words, it’s
fucking great.
A truck carrying a government
experiment overturns, releasing a swarm of genetically mutated flies loose in
New Mexico. They eat everything in sight, including the main character’s
daughter. With the help of her hunky ranch hand, she gets over that little bump
in the road pretty quickly, but vengeance is on her mind. With the help of the
scientist who unwittingly created the insect horde, they try to find the
answers and the way to end this assault. Will they find the answer, or will the
love triangle get in the way? You’ll wonder all the way to the risible ending.
Featuring some of the worst “men
writing women” instances of all time, it is with great pleasure that I learned
that Mark Kendall, his colorful biography and all, is a pseudonym for Melinda
M. Snodgrass, a serious science fiction writer (most notably for Star Trek:
the Next Generation TV show a few years later) and, quite definitely, a
woman. She took the gig to pay bills and turned in one of the better examples
of animals-amok horror filled with titillation, gore, and silliness. It seems
very possible that she wrote this as a satire on the genre. Whatever the case,
I read the book quickly and with a smile on my face the whole time.
The book has recently been
reprinted and recorded as an audiobook by Encyclopocalypse Publications, thus
bringing Snodgrass’s skeleton-in-the-closet to a whole new generation of
thrill-seekers. Even though Snodgrass doesn’t mention her work as Mark Kendall
(this is the only one) in her bibliography, it is a book that does exactly what
it says on the tin. It delivers the gruesome goods.
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