Transplant
By Daniel Farson
1981 Hamlyn
Paperback, 190 pages
                                               
    OK, the characters are as follows… a loudmouth TV host who bullies his interviewees, a doctor who is a heart transplant specialist, a cemetery watchman named Tom, and an occultist who likes to fart around with black magic. The TV host, after a belligerent interview with the doctor, has a heart problem and needs a transplant. Tom is beaten nearly to death by the occultist for always spying on him and ratting him out. In the hospital, his body is unresponsive, so they use that heart to fix the TV host. Got that?
    
    So, the occultist (The Creep) does some voodoo magic on the now corpse of Tom and makes him come back to life to seek out the person who has his heart. OK, this sounds really good, doesn’t it? The problem is, once Tom is one of the walking dead, he’s pretty much just a normal guy seeking vengeance. He goes barhopping, drinks a lot of beer and for some reason, is really attractive to both men and women. He gets a lot of action.

    In other words, it gets really fucking stupid when it should have gotten really creepy and fun. There is some gore, but Tom just isn’t the scary zombie I was hoping for. The TV guy, Dick Manley (!), becomes a much less hateful character with the new heart and a possible poignant ending is set up but wasted.

    More interesting is the author himself. His granduncle (?) was Bram Stoker, he was a Jack the Ripper biographer, a pub owner, a hotshot journalist and TV interviewer (not unlike Manley) and documentary maker, covering topics that many others wouldn’t touch. He wrote about artists, cryptozoology, the bohemian lifestyle and penned a pair of horror novels, this one and Curse (Hamlyn, 1980). He was a very open homosexual in the 60s when it just wasn’t talked about. It’s fair to say that most of the characters in this book have a little bit of Farson in them, especially the pub-crawling zombie Tom. The Creep even has some of Farson’s books and Stoker memorabilia at his place.

    Overall, not horrible but I was sure disappointed after a spirited first two-thirds of the novel. But looking back at just how stupid it became, I’m thinking it is kind of endearing in a goofy sort of way. It’s obvious that Farson was having fun and knowing his real-life eccentricities shines a new light on the proceedings.