Wolf Tracks By David Case

Wolf Tracks
By David Case
1980 Belmont Tower
Paperback, 240 pages

                That sounds like some kick-ass ice cream! But no, it’s David Case’s second horror novel, written ten years after his first, Fengriffin: A Chilling Tale. That book was made into a great Amicus film, And Now the Screaming Starts (Roy Ward Baker, 1973) starring Peter Cushing. I haven’t yet read that book, but it has plenty of positive online reviews. I wonder what happened during those ten years to make the quality of Case’s writing dip so deep.

 

                There is a string of murders in Toronto. The victims are bitten and ripped up but not eaten. Wolf and human saliva are found in the wounds. Eyewitness accounts are uneven. A huge man, not a man at all, a hulking hairy humanoid. It sure sounds like a werewolf to me. Detectives Greene and the laughably virile and stuck-up La Roche are on the case. Greene sees Cronski, an expert on wolves, who tells him it is not a werewolf, but it might be a wolfman.

 

                Meanwhile, American Harland James is in Toronto to visit his draft-dodging son Paul, hoping to rekindle their relationship. Paul was having girl trouble with his live-in girlfriend Sheila. She is a free-thinking hippy. In 1980. There are a number of hippies in this book. In 1980. OK. Anyway, the father and son hang out and things turn worse when Sheila becomes a victim of the killer.

 

                The book has a handful of side characters who are far more interesting than the leads. Barfly Wash, the ex-boxer, who is called the N-word later in the book for absolutely no story-telling reason, Ike, the legless eyewitness, Gus the bartender and Cronski, the only female with a brain in the book. In fact, it became quite obvious that Case is not a fan of women. La Roche’s wife is a childish idiot and the victims are all boneheaded tarts or prostitutes. Even a female cop on duty (undercover as a hippy…) thinks she might have rather been a whore or go-go girl. That shit makes me bristle. Like a wolfman.

 

                More because of the fact that this was a Belmont Tower release than any ineptitude on the author’s part, there are dozens of misspellings and wrong words throughout the text. Proof-read much? Evidently, in the recent Valencourt reprint, the errors are still present. I find when editing is this poor, it is part of the fun of old, shitty books. So, yes… I did read this quickly despite its flaws, and there are many. As a horror book it fails and as a detective novel, it’s pretty darn easy to know whodunnit early on. But the book has a lovely R.S. Brown cover painting of Lon Chaney Jr., and you do get this bit of dialog…

 

                “She was lying in a pile of cheese sandwiches, Steve. Goddamn cheese sandwiches.”

Dog Kill By Al Dempsey

Dog Kill
By Al Dempsey
1976 Tor Books
Paperback, 203 pages

 

                What a cover! Hats off to Jon Ellis, the artist! And to Tor for commissioning such a dynamic cover!  But fuck you, Tor, for the bait and switch. There are barely any killings in this book; the dogs seem to merely irritate the local farmers and law enforcement. But Dog Annoy wouldn’t have been as good a title as the one we got.

                A group of students release a bunch of test dogs from the University lab. OK… we’re going to have a roving pack of genetically altered mutts tearing up children! No, all but one of the dogs die in short order. The leftover one eventually forms his own pack with the help of Mitzie, an abandoned beagle in heat, whose scent brings all the boys to the yard. They move into a cave in a park and eventually get up to no good.

                OK, this book starts off with a note from the director of the American Humane Society. I was ready for some heavy stuff. As Blackie, the lab dog builds his tribe, each dog is introduced with a Humane Association “Animal Control Study” card. Then, we meet the dog’s owners and the dog. After 100 pages and far too many characters for me to remember who the ones at the beginning of the book were, the pack is complete. And the book is half over.

                The dogs kill some farm animals and some bunnies and, in an unnecessarily graphic scene, a fawn. But I was like “yeah… when they get to humans, it’s going to be amazing!” I was wrong. While there is an attack on a playground ballgame, the body count isn’t what I was hoping for, and the gory details are few. Too much time is spent on a blooming romance between park ranger Mel and Mary Ellen, a poor little rich girl that he has nothing in common with, but she has blonde hair and a good body. Deep. The other characters of note are pretty cut and paste… the yokel sheriff (nick-named Greasy!), the park director acting like the mayor in Jaws and local farmers puttin’ their gun hats on.

                Dempsey obviously knows a lot about dogs; all of the breeds get a lot of historical description. I guess this makes the actions ring truer. Unfortunately, this is at the expense of any kind of story, action or suspense. We already know that humans do not deserve dogs and every one of the dogs in one way or another are not responsible for their predicament. Humans, as always, suck.

                So, yeah… shitty book. Also, the print isn’t justified and that drove me apeshit. Great cover, though.

Gila! by Les Simons

Gila!
By Les Simons
1981 Signet
Paperback, 166 pages

    

    By now, everybody knows that Les Simons is actually Kathryn Ptacek, author of many horror and romance novels. Simons is one of her many pen-names and Gila! was her first published horror novel. Having grown up in the Southwest, Ptacek sets a believable tone for this tale of giant, people-eating, mutated Gila Monsters. In real life, despite being called "monsters", Gilas are slow moving animals and really not much of a threat to humans.

    These radiation-born ones mess up the homo sapiens in a big way. The body count is very high and to a killer-animal reader, that is of the utmost importance. It's not just gore and rampaging reptiles, however; Ptacek manages to squeeze out some pathos, none more than in the visceral fairground scene. (This chapter is so great that it inspired Tom Hallman's paperback cover.) Check it out...

    A mother is relaxing while her five children are enjoying a safe, family friendly County Fair on their own in different spot on the fairground. When the Gilas come, she faces the dilemma: which child to save? Heart wrenching! She makes her decision (a bit of Sophie's Choice there) and... "Hypnotized, frozen, Julia could not take her eyes away. She saw the mangled body of her son fall from the lizard's mouth, saw that only half of it was there and that the upper part of the torso, the shoulders and the head, remained in the lizard's mouth." 

 Hot diggity, that's some excitin' writin'!

    Unlike many animal-gone-amok novels, Ptacek's science isn't completely absurd. I mean, we're dealing with giant Gila Monsters that crave human flesh, created by bombs in the desert. You can't get more 50s Sci-Fi than that, but she obviously knows a good deal about the real-life animal and thus makes a potentially silly idea work. For me, Gila! is one of the finest rampaging reptile reads around. Gore, humor, emotion and action; what more could you ask for? Evidently, Ptacek herself is fond of her first horror novel: for a time, she published a writer's market newsletter called Gila Queen's Guide to Markets, a publication with an eye on the horror and fantasy genres.

    Obviously, I'm not the only fan of this essential tome. Centipede Press released a deluxe, signed hardcover of Gila! and Macabre Ink have issued it as part of their Resurrected Horrors series, both released in 2025. And, of course, you need Grady Hendrix's indispensable Paperbacks from Hell (Quirk, 2017) for many reasons but especially to get a peek at Tom Hallman's rough cover sketch.

                                               
                                                         Centipede Press, 2025

This review first appeared in a slightly different form in Midnight Magazine #1 (MCE 2018)

Satan’s Mistress By Brian McNaughton

Satan’s Mistress
By Brian McNaughton
1978 Carlyle
Paperback, 252 pages

                McNaughton’s follow-up to Satan’s Love Child isn’t as sex-filled as its predecessor, but it’s a truly inspired piece of lunacy in and of itself. Nobody in the book has a shred of decency and wonderfully awful things happen to everyone.

 

                The Laughlins are a fucked-up family. Mom’s an insane hippy, dad is a commercial artist and young Patrick is confused as hell. They live in Mom’s inherited old Mill that has a suspect history. Patrick is an awkward nerd but has typical teenage thoughts and desires, and dreams of a red-haired mistress. In the waking world, he has a crush on a cheerleader. When the folks have an “adult” party, everyone gathers at the Mill and, quite literally, all hell starts to break loose. You see, Mom has found a hidden passageway in the basement that leads to her ancestor’s library which is filled with evil writings. It turns out that the Cthulhu Mythos that Lovecraft wrote about was not fiction!

 

                That’s about the gist of it and believe me, that premise allows all kinds of wacky things to happen. Patrick gets taken over by evil spirits, Dad buggers his gay boss, and everyone gets wrapped up in the madness. There is incest, infant-eating, possession, and brutality, but it’s all served up with a healthy sense of humor and clever storytelling. At one point, the family lawyer, a Lovecraft fan, figures out the connection when he finds the real Necronomicon in the library and says he has to call Colin Wilson, L. Sprague de Camp and Robert E. Briney, all real-life writers who have dabbled in the Mythos (the last one, a collaborator with McNaughton!) to see what they know about it.

 

                In a word, this book is fun. Sit back and enjoy the silly weirdness. By the way, it was Carlyle Books that made this and three other books “the Satan Series” back in the day. Overall, they don’t really share a common thread, though the third book, Satan’s Seductress, does continue this storyline. This title has been restored as Downward to Darkness with McNaughton’s original, preferred text and title, by Wildside Press and it is readily available online. But feel free to stick with this, the pulpier version, for a wild ride.