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).