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.