The Pack By William Essex

The Pack
By William Essex
1987 Leisure
Paperback, 384 pages

                                                    

    Horror author John Tigges adopted the Essex moniker to delve into the nastier side of horror fiction and produced three thrilling ooze-fests. The Pack was the first one and it comes highly recommended by me for all lovers of killer animal books and stories taking place in Iowa.

    A pair of abused and underfed dogs break out of their junkyard confines, tasting freedom for the first time. Five years later, they roam the plains and cornfields of Iowa and their numbers have grown, adding other wayward pups along the way. The black mongrel from the junkyard is the leader and he does not want to ever be hungry again. After feasting on a few farm animals, they finally taste the best meat of all. Scrumptious human!
    
    Pete Reckels is a veterinarian who discovers a few of his clients, both animal and human, have been killed, gutted and eaten. He also got a fleeting glimpse of a pack of dogs in the distance, some 30 strong. He works with the local authorities to try and find the dogs and figure out how to stop them, all while the dogs move closer to the city seeking human meat, particularly penises and breasts. It should be pointed out that most of the humans in the book, Pete included, make a lot of bad choices.

    That is the entire book in a nutshell. I mean, Pete has his relationships with his girlfriend, ex-wife and daughter thrown in there for some pathos and fringe characters get a few pages of introduction before becoming dog chow, but the bulk of this fine piece of literature consists of the dogs stalking and killing and shredding and eating their human prey all the while wreaking havoc of the most explosive kind. Like many Leisure novels, it is a bit padded out (“Make ‘em thick, like Stephen King books!”) and repetitious in parts but that does nothing to detract from the fun. These dogs aren’t rabid, they’re just hungry. And they will eat.

    The sketchy wraparound cover art by Brian Kotzky is more than fitting for this book, with fun little details to be admired. Not as clean as his young adult horror covers for Christopher Pike, this portrait of a blood-drooling canine is perfect. Anyone who sees you reading this one on the subway will stay far away from you!

Thirst By Guy N. Smith

 

Thirst

By Guy N. Smith
1980 New English Library
Paperback, 219 pages

                        

                                   1980 David McAllister art                                             1988 reprint

    El maestro GNS starts this one off with a bang that keeps going for the first two-thirds of the book. While it does fizzle a little bit after that, the story as a whole is so good that it’s forgivable. This one is visceral, claustrophobic and let me warn you… you will get thirsty reading it. I suggest having a glass of your favorite beverage within reach while you read.

    A tanker truck full of “Weedkiller”, a highly toxic herbicide, careens off of the road and into a reservoir. Did it spill open? You bet it did and this brand of herbicide has had a few mishaps in the past and it is lethal. A team from the company, including one of its inventors, Ron Blythe, our “hero”, is called in to try to figure out how to clean the spill or at least shut down the flow from the reservoir to Birmingham. They can’t and all hell breaks loose.

    Just getting it on your skin is bad enough but ingesting the chemical/ water mixture is a sure way to become infected. First, there is thirst. Then, you break out in clusters of pus-filled ulcers and ruddy sores. Then, if you’re lucky, you die quickly. The contaminated water isn’t the only problem in Birmingham. Between an infected driver and train engineer, crashes and giant building fires occur. Better pump some water on those flames! Fuck! The chemical is highly flammable. Much of Birmingham is in flames. People are hurriedly trying to get out any way they can. Looks like it’s time for Martial Law.

    Yeah, the shit really hits the fan in ol’ Birmingham. There’s even a prison break, releasing an axe murderer who forces Blythe help him. Y’see, Blythe, a longtime lothario (like all chemists… ahem…huh?) has fallen in love with a woman he met during the crisis. This makes it easier for the killer. This is where I feel the book falters a bit. It’s action-packed, suspenseful and filled with gory bits until these three are forced to team up. They even haul along a brat at one point. The romance blooms too quickly and Blythe is already (unhappily) married. A bit too convenient, I should think.

    Even with those minor quibbles, in the maestro’s hands, the story is always compelling. Nobody serves up the destruction of Britain like GNS and this book is pure pleasure. The copy I read was a 1988 reprint with an OK cover, but you should look for any of the first five printings with a screaming, pustule covered woman in the foreground and the reservoir in the background. It’s a striking cover by David McAllister and is much more eye-catching than the ‘88 edition.

Bowie Sucks By Karmellah Howlett

 

Bowie Sucks
By Karmellah Howlett
2022 Amazon KDP
Paperback, 149 pages

 
                                              

    I’ll admit that I have never read an R.L. Stine, Caroline Cooney or Christopher Pike “young adult horror” book. That stuff came about when I was in my 20s and 30s and I had no interest in them at the time. That said, I went into this new book while in my early 60s and had a lot of fun with it. But wait a minute… I (mostly) love David Bowie! What the…

    Well, Bowie Gleason’s folks love David Bowie more than most, in fact they named their daughter Bowie. Unfortunately for her, she was vampirized which adds quite a lot to her teen angst. Now, she not only has boy problems and high school, but she has to keep secrets from her friends and father. And then there’s the bloodlust thing. All that and the vampire who turned her keeps interfering in her (un)life and following her, trying to guide her. What will her close friends think of her when they discover her situation?

    Told in first person, you can really hear a flustered but funny teenage girl telling the story. Bowie accepts her dilemma and still carries on with her school and life, fake eating while craving blood, falling for a boy that she will outlive by hundreds of years. Poor Bowie does not have it easy! She addresses the reader in a fun “if anyone actually reads this” kind of way. The evil phantom of most self-published books, punctuation miscues, actually work in the favor of Bowie’s squirrely teenage narration.

    If you’re thinking “Buffy”, well you might be right. The characters even refer to it in an amusing manner a few times. The relationship between Bowie and her father is refreshingly close and loving, too, especially as she realizes that she will watch him grow old and die while she remains 16.

    This is listed as #1 in Howlett’s Crypteen series (which is a great name) but as of this writing (January 2025) another entry hasn’t materialized. I’m inclined to keep an eye out for future Crypteens! Bowie Sucks sports a clever cover courtesy of Ashley Greathouse.

Carnivore By Leigh Clark

Carnivore

By Leigh Clark
1997 Leisure/ BMI
Paperback, 311 pages

    A group in a secluded outpost in the Antarctic discovers a large egg deep in the glacial ice. Could it be a dinosaur egg? An EPA agent and a geologist are brought in for the excavation and sure enough, that is exactly what it is.

    The book cuts right to the chase and so will I… there is radiation at this outpost because the Russian leader is, in fact, looking for safe places to dump nuclear waste. The egg hatches and it is a foot tall Tyrannosaurus. The evil Ruskies expose him to more radiation and he grows quickly and before page 70 is eating the humans of Project Deepcore. He’s just a growing young T Rex looking for meat!

    By page 100, I’ll admit, I actually got a little restless. I was one third through the book and all it had so far was an endless supply of humans getting noshed on by a hungry dino. Not that that is a bad thing, but were they going to take him to a circus in the USA? To Madison Square Garden to break loose and devour New York. No, it seemed he was going to stay in this frozen wasteland eating the cast of characters. I feared it might get dull before the end.

    Well, it soon picked up as the main bad guy, Tarosh, becomes even more zealous and starts killing those who defy his orders. Our heroes, the geologist Troy and the EPA agent Kelly, who may or may not be becoming romantic, make plans to get away but between the dinosaur and the Russian madman, things look bleak.

    Yes, this is silly and gratuitous but sometimes that’s all I need in a book. There is a lot of human meat stuck between dinosaur-teeth (not fangs, as Clark occasionally says… T Rexes did not have fangs) and human blood reddening the snow. Also, the temps are so low that piss freezes before it hits the ground but the (warm-blooded) dinosaur seems to get along just fine. Hey, I don’t care. The gore is ladled-on thick, and the suspense gets pretty intense.

    Leigh Clark wrote a few other horror novels and this one was enjoyable enough to warrant looking into his (her?) other work. A word of warning… I read this book during a cold week in January and the freezing landscape in the book made me feel even colder. It might be a better cooling summer read for you.

From Below By William Essex

From Below
By William Essex
1989 Leisure Books
Paperback, 359 pages

    Every once in a while, it happens. You fall upon a book that seems as if it was written for you. While there is no “perfect book” (other than Eat Them Alive!), when you find one that is this close, it makes life worth living. For a while, anyway.

    An electrical storm hits a power station, sending shit-tons of volts into the ground, flash-frying most living things but super-charging the local leeches. (Shades of Jeff Lieberman’s Squirm- 1976.) They reproduce overnight and the ever-expanding wave of 18-inch (3 feet in some descriptions) long, meat-eating, blood-drinking killers grows by day. They strip bodies, both animal and human, down to messy skeletons in a matter of minutes. Driven by hunger, they spend their days in the sewers and travel up toilets and pipes to seek more food.

    Our hero is Ben, journalist in Iowa (!) who is trying, along with the cops, to figure out why there are so many clothed skeletons turning up. Most everyone around him is an idiot or a narrow-minded fool, leaving him to his own devices to crack the case. His girlfriend Norma is a newsletter publisher. At one point she gets to interview horror author John Tigges. Ben and Norma have this exchange about this Tigges guy’s talent…

Ben: “Better than King or Straub?”
Norma: “I’ve read two of Tigges’ and I’d have to say he’s probably the best.”

    William Essex, the author here, is John Tigges. Reference is also made to Tigges-as-Essex’s earlier novel The Pack in a news story as well. I got a good chuckle.

    So, yes, this book delivers everything you need. Huge print, lots of empty pages between chapters and a brisk, humorous writing style make this 359-page wonder whiz by. Of course, we’re here for the gore and we get that in spades! Leeches attack everything with gusto and seem to prefer human genitalia. The science isn’t important here. Essex gives us basic leech science but then tips it on its end because these guys are super-charged and flesh-devouring.

    My only quibble would be that some repetition creeps in. Ben seems to be the only one who considers that the killer might not be a who but a what… and he keeps bouncing that theory around every chapter as if it just came to him. But I can forgive that. This book kicks ass. When I’m on my deathbed, this will be one of the few tomes on my bedside bookshelf, right next to Eat Them Alive!, Slugs, Night of the Crabs, and The Rats.

The Scurrying By Wes Whitehouse

The Scurrying
By Wes Whitehouse
1983 Futura
Paperback, 350 pages

                I’d been after this one for quite a while so when I saw a. cheap one for sale online somewhere, I grabbed it immediately. London gets laid to waste by millions of rats (again). What could possibly go wrong?

 

                Inside the book, there is a blurb saying that this is Whitehouse’s first novel. Searching on the Interwebz brought up only one other book, GLC - The Inside Story (2000). That is a non-fiction account of one of the government administrative bodies in London, and it sounds dry as hell. Sadly, this book has more bureaucrats and politicians than it has rats at any given time. Coming just a year before James Herbert finished off his excellent Rats Trilogy in 1984, this was a pretty ballsy and stupid idea.

 

                There has been an uptick in rat sightings and exterminators are noticing the rat-bait going either unnoticed or eaten. That means either the rats know it is poisoned or they have become immune. So, naturally, they head aboveground in search of eats. When they’re hungry enough, humans will be on the menu. They will also spread disease.

 

                While that sounds all well and good, 80% of the book concerns one department hindering the progress of another department that is trying to solve the dilemma. Politicians are more concerned with looking bad than stepping up to actually help. That all may be very realistic but that is not what one buys a nature-strikes-back book for. We want rats killing people. You get some of that, but not nearly enough. For instance, you get four pages of a minster readying an office for a proper photo-op and two paragraphs for a group of teens getting offed by the rats on a camping trip. The best scene in the book comes from a rabid dog (infected by a rat) who mangles a toddler. (I’ll admit it; that scene is worth the price of admission.)

 

                For a book that had been on my want list for so long, I found this one to be a massive disappointment. Not only is it misogynistic (I know, many books from the time were, but this really feels like Whitehouse truly thinks that women are merely ornamental) with two lovely women being in love with our hero, the pipe-smoking chief of Environmental Health, but the author seems to really dislike rats and shows a little too much joy in doing them in. If the dying humans got as much ink as the dying rats, my review would be more positive.

 

                The nifty cover is signed “Gulbis”. Could this be Stephen Gulbis, children’s book artist? I think it might be. But still, James Herbert this ain’t.

Carrion By Gary Brandner

Carrion
By Gary Brandner
1987 Arrow Books
Paperback, 265 pages

 

                This is one of the best books I’ve read in a while, even though at the halfway point I’d started thinking that same thought and realized that no actual horror had actually happened yet. Such is the power of Gary “The Howling” Brandner’s writing. He sets up a handful of interesting (if not completely likable) characters and lets them unfold the plot to the reader.

 

                McAllister “Mac” Fain is a dime store mystic. He is quick with the sleight of hand, and he reads tarot cards, telling gullible old ladies what they want to hear. His girlfriend Jillian, the only character with any real common sense, wishes he’d do something more honest with his life. He gets the chance when he is contacted by billionaire Kruger who, after seeing an ad in a tabloid, asks if Mac can revive his dead wife. Of course! Mac asks a voodoo guy nearby (hey, it’s LA!) for some pointers to make his delivery look believable but finds out that he actually has a gift. Kruger’s wife lives again, freed from her cryogenic tomb.

 

                Of course, this interests the tabloids and Fain becomes somewhat famous. Doing a speaking gig, he gets the chance again, raising a kid who’d just been electrocuted. This got him more press. And more press goes to his head. But what of the resurrected people? Are they really OK? According to the aforementioned voodoo guy, they will be restless until they kill the person responsible for their return, one McAllister Fain.

 

                This book is a study on how not to handle fame as much as anything. Fain wasn’t super-likeable in the early chapters but after he becomes famous, he becomes a total douche. Still, there’s something about him that you root for. Once the chills start and the dead are on the loose, his fear and paranoia are wonderful to witness. Brandner actually gave me a couple of spine chills and that’s no easy feat! I plowed through this one very quickly. Read it. It’s a good ‘un.

 

                Carrion was first published by Fawcett in 1986 in the US, but I suggest you save your pennies and grab the Arrow version that came out in the UK the following year. That green-faced and bloody ghoul bursting through a window is a far more potent and satisfying image!

Creatures By Richard Masson

 

Creatures
By Richard Masson
1979 Pocket Books
Paperback, 299 pages

 

                This is another one I remembered fondly from my teens and wanted to revisit, but I couldn’t find it among my books. Very few survived the decades. Much to my chagrin, prices are pretty high for this one now. I found an almost affordable one and grabbed it, so intent was I on rereading it. I remember it as being very good, if a bit disturbing with animal cruelty and racism.

 

                Four horrible men, crocodile hunters, are deep in the pit of the Fly River swamps in New Guinea. Karns is a killer, a racist and a short-tempered asshole… and he’s the good guy in the group. The others are even worse; Quilter, an Aussie croc-hater that would just as soon kill everything in sight, Van Ocken, a deranged, murderous rapist with a burned off face, and “Phobosuchus” Smith, an ousted professor whose insanity has him believing there is a species of prehistoric crocodile out in those swamps.

 

                Meanwhile, a flight from Australia to Tokyo, carrying about 130 passengers and crew, has a bit of difficulty. In addition to faulty mechanics taking them off course, some of those passengers are a real piece of work. One of them blows a hole in the back end of the plane when he is spurned by a stewardess. The plane lands about 15 miles from the four murderous crazies. Among the few survivors are a pair of mercenaries, a man who lost his family in the crash, a prostitute (yay!), some stewardesses and the co-pilot. Will the crocodiles get them? Will the swamp men? Both?

 

                Masson weaves this tale perfectly, going from the flight to the psycho-quartet, showing exactly how each “side” deals with the disaster. The plane doesn’t crash land until 100 pages in, and the suspense is thick as swamp muck. Once it does and the swamp men decide to go pillage the wreck (about 15 miles away through uncharted swampland), Masson lays on another new round of tension. Then once they all meet up… forget about it! Madness ensues.

 

                I really can’t stress enough how intense this book gets. Who will live? Who will die? Who will wish they had died in the crash? Who is worse, the swampies or the survivors? Yes, those guys do some horrible things to crocs but there is some comeuppance and the abundance of hungry crocodiles is a wonderful thing to think about.

 

                All this and more, behind a killer cover painting by Roger Kastel (a painting I’m lucky enough to have seen in person!) done in the style of his Jaws masterpiece. This book is highly recommended.

A masterpiece... in the flesh! 

Cannibals By Guy N. Smith

Cannibals
By Guy N. Smith
1996 Sheridan
Paperback, 208 pages

Artwork by Les Edwards

    This is top-shelf GNS all the way. Filled with detestable people that have horrible, gory things happen to them. You really can’t ask for more.

    nvercurie is a tiny village buried in the Scottish Highlands. The people there like… no, demand their privacy and plan on keeping outsiders out. Doug Geddis decides to build a few chalets on his property, much to the consternation of his fellow villagers. You see, Invercurie has a secret living up in the mountains, and they’d like to keep it hidden. But, of course, tourists do start to show up to Geddis’s chalets and despite warnings from the short-tempered locals, the outsiders hike up into the mountains. And that’s where the cannibals live.

    A man and his 19-year-old arm candy, a dysfunctional family of four (and their doomed dog), and a young couple making their first getaway: these are the folks who rented the chintzy chalets and might live to regret it. The mutated cannibal folks visit in the night and yum, that human meat is the tastiest of all. Smith doesn’t shy away from anything in the telling of this tale. The gore is nauseating (i.e. wonderful), and you can almost really smell the caves that the cannibals dwell in.

GNS does his usual expert job on setting the stage. The village is a very real place and the mountains around it are very easy to put yourself right into. The sketchy chalets couldn’t keep out a raccoon, much less a pack of hungry cannibals. Despite the spacious outdoor setting, a real sense of claustrophobia is achieved. Those cannibals are stealthy. I wonder how many readers would agree with me that GNS purposely set up this narrative with a Psycho-like structure.

Cannibals was first published in 1986 by Arrow Books with a somewhat dull cover of what looks like a dog’s snout. When they reissued it in 1988, they wisely changed it over to a great Les Edwards painting, one that respectfully depicts the cannibals as described in Smith’s prose. That cover was retained for Sheridan’s third printing, I’m happy to say. Smith plus Edwards equals perfection. This one comes highly recommended.

The less effective cover for Arrow's first edition.

Killer By Peter Tonkin

 

Killer
By Peter Tonkin
1975 Signet
Paperback, 244 pages

 

                Jaws with a Killer Whale? Sort of. This gets big kudos from a lot of nature-strikes-back fans for being super gory, so I made it a point to move this towards the top of my To-Be-Read pile. Unfortunately, I wasn’t as taken by it as some folks have been. It’s good, but it’s first and foremost an adventure story and is pretty light on the red stuff, if you ask me.

 

                After a plane crash, the passengers find themselves stranded on a huge ice floe with only the contents of the cargo hold to keep them going. Luckily, there are tents, food, and everything you might need. Except it is in the Antarctic and it is cold as fuck. Luckily, two of the passengers are handy at cold survival, having endured it before. But all of the training in the world could not prepare them for what was to come. Not only is there a pod of Killer Whales with a government-trained leader, but they have to survive Polar Bear attacks, Walruses, an ever melting and dwindling ice floe, blizzards, and each other.

 

                Tonkin gets into it, throwing all kinds of shit at our cast of characters and, for a while, it is pretty exciting. The characters, for the most part, are well-defined and you’ll pick a favorite, depending on your own personality. Unfortunately, the woman who is introduced as our main character (or so I thought) turns out to be ineffective at anything but making coffee, despite being a brilliant post-grad botanist. Oh, and she’s beautiful, of course, so some of the lads on the floe can fantasize and objectify her. Yawn. She is there to work with her usually absent father and most of the other men involved work for him.

 

                The kills by marine mammals are few and far between, I’m sorry to say. In fact, a huge pack of fleeing Walruses fair far worse than our rag-tag team of survivors. The animal-on-animal violence is far more prevalent than the couple of instances of animal-on-human violence. Yes, the survivors are in deep shit and yes, there are some Killer Whales around bopping and cracking their floe, but I almost saw them as an afterthought. I wish the novel had been as good as Ken Barr’s cover art. I have to admit that the story got pretty dull for me by the end.

 

                This is Peter Tonkin’s first novel. He has gone on to become an extremely prolific best-selling author, working predominately in the thriller genre. Killer has been reissued (with the original cover art!) by Valancourt Books under the Paperbacks from Hell banner.

Full Brutal By Kristopher Triana

 

Full Brutal
By Kristopher Triana
2018 Grindhouse Press
Paperback, 256 pages

 

                I consider Kristopher Triana to be one of the Big 3 Splatterpunk authors currently at the top of their game, alongside Aron Beauregard and Daniel Volpe. Those three get consistently high ratings in book love and book hate, happy readers and disgusted readers, and mentions within the horror book community. This was my first Triana offering.

 

                Kim White is a cheerleader, a popular, pretty girl, an excellent student, and a bored virgin. At 16, she has it all; money, looks, popularity, a trusting but often absent father, and smarts. When her best friend tells her that losing her virginity was “life-changing”, Kim sets in motion a plan to change her own life. To do the deed, she chooses one of her teachers. Y’see, the boys her own age are drips and the teacher, well, he could give her so much more. And we’re not talking just sex.

 

                She not only successfully seduces the teacher, but she slowly and incrementally breaks him down, threatening him and making him fuck her again, abusing him to make him wish he had never seen her. In an act of extreme cruelty, she also befriends his daughter Caitlin, who is a grade behind her in school. Getting in tight with his family, she tutors the gullible girl to be a cheerleader and gains the youngsters trust completely. Then, she starts work on destroying Caitlin, little by little. Kim doesn’t give a shit. About anything, not even herself. She’s bored and wants to die. Perhaps that is where I related to her so much.

 

                Unbelievably, I was laughing while enjoying the total decimation of the family at Kim’s sadistic hands. She was just so devious and cruel. Poor little Caitlin, her life was falling apart. Mr. Blakeley’s eventual death (Kim did it) seals the deal and Caitlin eventually succumbs herself. Man, that was some rough stuff. But that’s just the first half of the book.

 

                In all honesty, if the book ended right there, it would have been one of my favorites of the year, anyway. The second half is fun, but in my opinion, unnecessary. What could Kim possibly do to make herself even more of a beast. The second half concerns what she does to control the little fuck-demon in her belly. Yup. Ol’ Mr. Blakely knocked her up and her attempts to miscarry were a failure. Human flesh seems to satisfy the little mistake. So, the second half is full of gore and mayhem.

 

                The second half is fun but, like I said, if the book ended after the first half, it would have been a very powerful story of torment and sadism. I look at the second part as kind of a sequel to the first part. At any rate, I give this one my highest marks and I’ll always feel that Kim spoke for me, even if just a little bit.

Stage Fright By Garrett Boatman

 

Stage Fright
By Garrett Boatman
1988 New American Library
Paperback, 381 pages

                I know, I know… this one is way thicker than I tend to indulge in, but it piqued my interest, so I went for it. It’s a bit of a science-fiction story because it takes place in the not-too-distant future and features technology that doesn’t really exist. But Boatman says just enough and little enough to make the science work if you can just go with it, and it’s pretty rewarding if you do.

                There is a new way to be entertained… dreamies. Like the talkies when they took over silent pictures, dreamies are the next level of the theater-going experience. The dreamatron records the artist’s thoughts or dreams, stores them, and plays them back so an audience can experience them. The absolute king of the medium is Izzy Stark, whose horror work has made him rich and famous. But he needs to push the envelope even further. He discovers the drug Taraxein (a real thing, I learned!) which is made from the blood of schizophrenics. This, obviously, takes Stark’s dreams to the next level. And things start materializing without the need of the dreamatron; he can make his thoughts into matter. He can even take your fears and play on them.

                The book revolves around Stark, his girlfriend, his neighbors, members of his fan-club and his high-school chum/ biographer. He drags everyone into his world of nightmares, and nobody is safe. His fans are getting pumped up for the upcoming concert where he will reveal his new material to a live audience, at least to those who haven’t already fallen prey to Izzy’s murderous whims.

                This book is really nothing like I expected. I mean, the cover is of a skeleton playing a keytar! I thought it would be a silly synth-rock band horror tale, but it is so much more. Boatman tells a solid tale, if you’re willing to go along with the ride, and he is a talented writer. Not only can he write dream sequences that actually feel like dreams, but he has a way with words, too: after coming down from the drug, Stark feels like this; “… his head still ballooned, his skin crawled, a bloated nausea writhed eellike in his stomach.” That’s good stuff.

                I enjoyed the book, but it did get a bit overlong. You wait and wait for the big concert and once it gets there, I was waiting and waiting for it to end. Some of Stark’s images got a little silly; a penknife turning into a big barbarian sword… not my cuppa tea. Despite what I consider a bit of a misfire at the climax, the book kept me interested during its long page count and I have no trouble recommending it. Many of the dreamie vignettes are pretty damn cool. It has been reprinted by Valencourt as part of the Paperbacks from Hell collection and they kept the nifty original keytar cover.

The Medusa Horror by Drew Lamark

 

The Medusa Horror
by Drew Lamark
1983 Futura
paperback, 206 pages

 

                I’d read Drew Lamark’s The Snake Orchards (mini-reviewed back in Midnight #4, July 2019) a few  years ago and enjoyed it so I was pretty psyched when I saw that he’d also written a jellyfish horror book, I grabbed it right away. This one is nowhere near as enjoyable, but it has jellyfish killing people, so it can’t be all bad.

 

                A rich dude puts together an expedition on his yacht to go search for a sunken ship. Many unlovable, nasty people are among his friends. Sylvia is invited to do catering on the two week journey, even though it means having to miss a visit from her military fiancé, who she’s not really sure about anyway. In the way of the sunken ship, its treasure, the island it is near, and the yacht, lies a thick blanket of Portuguese Man o’ war, miles wide and deadly as fuck.

 

                Sounds pretty great, doesn’t it? What has Sylvia got herself into? Well, all of the characters are such shitheads, you really hope the jellyfish sting everyone to death quickly. Two yachts worth of rich, arrogant douchebags can’t die quickly enough. One boat goes down, some people die and it’s down to one boat and a handful of people… and still I didn’t care.

 

                The thing is, the book goes along at such an even keel that there are no ups and downs, no suspense. Yes, there are some nice grisly jelly-deaths but the characters, who are fleshed out as much as is needed, aren’t even interesting as fodder. Sylvia isn’t even such a great person. And, she gets fooled into having sex with one of the crewmen that she (and the reader) had grown to trust. Pretty fucking slimy, Charles.

 

                Drew Lamark is one of many pseudonyms for Drew Launay. Under the name Andrew Laurance, he wrote a number of occult thriller novels (Ouija, Catacomb), so along with The Snake Orchards (the only other book using the Lamark surname), he has plenty of horror cred, but this one just dragged on a bit for me.

 

                Groovy cover on the Futura paperback, though; a nick from the poster art from the film Nightmare (in a Damaged Brain) (1981).

Playmates By Andrew Neiderman

 

Playmates
By Andrew Neiderman
1987 Berkley
Paperback, 312 pages

 

    Stacey and her daughter Tami are driving through New York State to her husband David, who is working on a project near the Catskills. The planned vacation disappears when Stacy takes a shortcut and the car breaks down, forcing them to seek help from a nearby farmhouse. The residents of the house are nuts and they abduct the mother and child, starting off 312 pages of grueling, nail-biting, frustrating suspense.

 

    That is literally the prologue. This book throws you right into turmoil in the opening pages and it doesn’t let up until the very end. Of course, David goes to search for his family, and he has enlisted the help of “Chicky” Ross, a quirky, local detective. The Thompson family in the secluded house are a real treat, with papa Gerald, insane mom Irene and the cruel daughter Shirley. They torture the mother and daughter relentlessly. You see Irene thinks they are two other people, a mother and daughter that they had disposed of a few years prior.

 

    The book gives us plenty of moments of wincing and squirming as well as a few genuine chills. This is how a “held captive” book should work, unlike Stephen King’s shit-tastic, bloated Gerald’s Game which made me wish I had never started it. This is a page-turner that never lets up on the tension and never lets you put down your guard. The characters are well defined with revealing background stories, except for Irene, but the lack of backstory works in her case, as she is just bat-shit crazy.

 

    Neiderman wrote several quality horror books, in particular Pin, which was made into a movie in 1988. Around the time he wrote Playmates, he started ghost-writing for V.C. Andrews after her death and has done so for over three decades. He is the master of writing fucked-up families, and they don’t come much more fucked up than the Thompsons. This Berkley edition has a nice, embossed Richard Newton cover, though you should also keep an eye out for the Time-Warner UK version. The book was made into a movie in 1995 called The Maddening starring Burt Reynolds and Angie Dickinson and there is a tie-in edition for that as well.