Savaged By Victoria Burgoyne

 

Savaged
By Victoria Burgoyne
1980 Futura
Paperback, 187 pages

 

What? London is besieged by the threat of rabies? Again? Why do I keep reading these books? The same story over and over. Why? Because I fucking love them, that’s why! And this time it’s hyenas!

A sick little girl oh-so-wishes she could have a laughing dog like in the “Hey, Diddle, Diddle” nursery rhyme. Her dad, the genius father-of-the-year, asks his brother, a smuggler, to procure a hyena. The brother gets a tame one from an acquaintance’s small circus, except the hyena has given birth to twins, who must also go. So, with three predatory carnivores in tow, the uncle heads back to London on a dangerous, rainy night. Naturally, he crashes on the way, losing the twins.

The sick little girl loves her snuggly new friend, who accidentally scratches her, but the “dog” licks the wound to care for it. Meanwhile, some animals have been found slaughtered and soon, good ol’ humanity is at risk as well. Y’see, rabies has been found in some of the victims. Enter veterinarian Mike, who gets put in charge of keeping London safe.

Sure, this is a very familiar story, but Burgoyne keeps things moving at a fast pace, bouncing from place to place and incident to incident as the hunt for the twins, and later the also-rabid mom, goes on relentlessly.  The gore is quite fun, the pathos is heavy, and it’s always fun to read about the effects of rabies on the human body. The hyenas, laughing in the foggy night, provide a vivid and sometimes creepy image.

One strange thing… there are three pages concerning a break-in at a jewelry store and the thieves escape through the twists and turns of London. It serves absolutely no purpose for the rest of the novel and seems to exist only to show the author’s knowledge of the streets of the city.

But I have no complaints about Burgoyne’s writing. I mean, “…he lifted the loose, slimy sinews that dangled higgledy-piggledy over the shin bone like an upturned dish of offal and sliced through the greasy mass.” Nice! This is apparently her only novel and it’s a pretty good one. She is better known as an actress and appeared in the film Death Ship (1980, the year this book was published) and some Dr. Who stuff. So, while no new ground was broken with Savaged, I enjoyed watching London fall into a preventable panic once again.

Did the sick little girl get rabies? I ain’t tellin’!