Saurian By William Schoell

Saurian
By William Schoell
1988 Leisure Books
Paperback, 368 pages

 

                Suspension of disbelief is of the utmost importance while reading this book. It gets pretty goofy but if you play along, you can have some fun with this dinosaur stomping tale of aliens and alcoholism.

 

                In 1957, lil’ Tommy Bartlett is a loner of a kid, content to read comics and monster magazines alone (sounds like me). His folks are useless; his father a drunk and his mom a woman who has given up. Bribed by his mother to play with the local kids, he acquiesces and through them, finds a hidden lake in the woods with a creepy house on the other end. He rows over to the house on his own (the others are chicken) and gets a scare from a weird man in the house. That night, a massive dinosaur levels the Florida shanty town Tommy lived in, leaving the boy the only survivor.

 

                Onward to 1988, and Tom co-owns a bar (odd since his father’s drink is what destroyed his childhood) on the Florida coast. He is drawn back to his childhood area and finds it all built up into an expensive property. He bravely goes back to the hidden pond and found that area developed, too. He’d forgotten the tragedy that befell him back in the Fifties but piece by piece it comes back. The weird man, the massive dinosaur… how does it all fit?

 

                OK, I’m not going to say too much. The dinosaur scenes are tons of fun. The beast is massive, it swallows Blue Whales whole for a snack. It levels cities, hurls boats and licks human remains off the bottom of its feet like you’d suck honey off your finger. Impossibly huge, savage and yet with a human intelligence. So how does this tie in with the weird old man in the house? Don’t worry… kooky exposition lady Mistress Dunn will tell all. Now, even with a completely open mind, I found this to be really dumb, but I carried on and let Schoell tell his story. It’s a lot to swallow but it’s a fun ride.

 

                A few notes: considering his father was consumed by alcohol, Tom drinks a fuck of a lot, even though he says he has no problem. Maybe that’s the author’s point, that addiction sneaks up on you. Tom’s girlfriend in the latter chapters is an alcoholic as well. Lots of drink talk. There is also a lot of padding, as is the case with a lot of Leisure’s horror novels. Some of the well-rounded characters have nothing to do with the narrative, they just add color. That’s fine but a tighter book might have been a little more satisfying. Still, this is a fun, if silly, creature feature. It is well written and easy to blow through.