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.