Claw By Jack Younger

 

Claw
By Jack Younger
1976 Manor Books
Paperback, 219 pages

 

                Forget all of those one-star reviews you see online… this book is great! It’s cats killing humans, eating them alive. What’s not to love?

 

                Taking place in Marblehead, Massachusetts (just a hop skip and a jump from where I now sit), the coastal community is racking up a slew of hideous deaths. It is quickly discovered that the cause of these mutilations is… cats! Nobody is safe. Your cat, the one that sits next to you as you read Midnight? Lethal… it will eat you. Eventually, a small group of survivors hole themselves up in a restaurant, hoping that help will be forthcoming. Too bad a violent storm has shut down all power and washed out the bridge into town.

 

                Yeah, this is dumb as shit but it’s also a ton of fun. “A kitten stepped forward playfully to paw a hideous thing that had once been part of a man’s head.” “The furry mass engulfed him.” There were dozens of lines I had to read aloud to my wife, my own dumb cat lying next to me all the time. I laughed out loud a lot. Manor Books rarely disappoint. Part of it is because they had the worst editors ever and typos and misspellings abound. Just part of the fun.

 

                Admittedly, the book slows down half way through, when the plight of Marblehead gets out to the mainland and cops, military and news people try to get in on the action. There’s also a long scene with two cops and an old man they find crawling in the storm that has absolutely nothing to do with the narrative. And, while in real life I would find cat slaughter abominable, it’s pretty funny in this book. Silliness abounds. And watch for the most ridiculous, unromantic dialog leading up to an inappropriate sex scene ever!

 

                Jack Younger is none other than the original Creepy editor Russ Jones. He wrote a handful of novels and comic stories under that name. His comic book background surely informed much of the action and gratuitous gore in this book. The over-the-top badness of this book makes me want to dig deeper into his horror novel work. He is also a very accomplished artist but there’s no word on whether or not he is responsible for the (minimalist) cover art for this book.