The Pack By William Essex

The Pack
By William Essex
1987 Leisure
Paperback, 384 pages

                                                    

    Horror author John Tigges adopted the Essex moniker to delve into the nastier side of horror fiction and produced three thrilling ooze-fests. The Pack was the first one and it comes highly recommended by me for all lovers of killer animal books and stories taking place in Iowa.

    A pair of abused and underfed dogs break out of their junkyard confines, tasting freedom for the first time. Five years later, they roam the plains and cornfields of Iowa and their numbers have grown, adding other wayward pups along the way. The black mongrel from the junkyard is the leader and he does not want to ever be hungry again. After feasting on a few farm animals, they finally taste the best meat of all. Scrumptious human!
    
    Pete Reckels is a veterinarian who discovers a few of his clients, both animal and human, have been killed, gutted and eaten. He also got a fleeting glimpse of a pack of dogs in the distance, some 30 strong. He works with the local authorities to try and find the dogs and figure out how to stop them, all while the dogs move closer to the city seeking human meat, particularly penises and breasts. It should be pointed out that most of the humans in the book, Pete included, make a lot of bad choices.

    That is the entire book in a nutshell. I mean, Pete has his relationships with his girlfriend, ex-wife and daughter thrown in there for some pathos and fringe characters get a few pages of introduction before becoming dog chow, but the bulk of this fine piece of literature consists of the dogs stalking and killing and shredding and eating their human prey all the while wreaking havoc of the most explosive kind. Like many Leisure novels, it is a bit padded out (“Make ‘em thick, like Stephen King books!”) and repetitious in parts but that does nothing to detract from the fun. These dogs aren’t rabid, they’re just hungry. And they will eat.

    The sketchy wraparound cover art by Brian Kotzky is more than fitting for this book, with fun little details to be admired. Not as clean as his young adult horror covers for Christopher Pike, this portrait of a blood-drooling canine is perfect. Anyone who sees you reading this one on the subway will stay far away from you!

The Mad Death By Nigel Slater

The Mad Death
By Nigel Slater
1983 Granada
Paperback, 256 pages

Rabies in Britain? Not again! Remember David Anne’s Rabid (reviewed in Midnight Magazine #4)? Remember Jack Ramsey’s The Rage? Yes, it had been done before (both aforementioned books were published in 1977) but like a moth to a flame, I keep coming back for more.

 

This one starts with a cat, then a fox, then...a possible epidemic. Our hero, Viv Tait, is a veterinarian with a bad attitude. It seems that he likes animals a lot more than humans. In the scene where we meet him, he is wearing a “Gerbils Role OK” T-shirt. He is short tempered, straight talking with no filter, and dour. He is an asshole. I immediately related to him. Against his will, he is made the head honcho in the war against rabies, entrusted to save Britain from the encroaching epidemic. His assistant is a smart and crafty woman named Penny, who he considers more worthy than her name, so he calls her Tuppence, a moniker that sticks for the rest of the novel. They have a complicated relationship that is aggravating and rewarding at the same time.

 

Despite the cover and its back cover blurbs (“When you go down to the woods, pray that the Mad Death is more than a snarl away”), this is much more of a thriller than a horror story. The gory details and the infected humans are few, but the dire circumstances and the well-formed characters keep the pages turning. After a lull in the middle, I was back at it, frenziedly reading to get to the end, which admittedly was weak. Intentionally. Because, as we have all learned from our own pandemic, nothing ever really changes in this world.

 

This was adapted for a BBC TV mini-series that aired the same year the book was released. As it started filming in 1981, one wonders if the book, its source material, was held back to coincide with the now well-remembered TV show airing. At any rate, the Granada book has lovely cover illustration by John Knights (credited on the back cover!) done in a medium I cannot readily identify.

Killer Pack By Albert Herbert and Roger Myers

 

Killer Pack
By Albert Herbert and Roger Myers
1976 Manor Books
Paperback, 221 pages.

 

                “This book is really poorly written,” thought Mike as he read Killer Pack.

 

                It really is. It took two authors to write this one and they obviously didn’t have the heart to tell each other that neither one of them could actually write. One of the most jarring things for me was the endless quotation marks for inner thoughts. I was all like, who are they talking to? Oh… it’s a thought. Now, that’s not technically a writing error but it is endless and really could (should) have been done differently. Choppy sentences abound, as well. A sentence for every action… He got into the car. He started the car. He drove the car to the store. He got out of the car. He chose a shopping cart. He went into the store. He selected his groceries. He went to the checkout. The total for his groceries was $20. (That’s only a slight exaggeration.)

 

                OK, this book came out the same year as David Fishers’ infinitely superior The Pack and shares the springboard of vacationers getting dogs for the summer, then abandoning them when vacation is over. That’s some sick shit, but it makes for some good killer dogs.

 

                A vacation town in Long Island is having a problem with a pack of rogue dogs. People are getting killed. What is everybody going to do about it? That is the crux of this story; not the killer dogs but what the town officials are planning to do about it. Town Supervisor Diana Wentworth is tough as nails and won’t budge on her No Leash Law. An up-and-coming candidate for her job wants to enforce one. (He’d get my vote… leash your dogs in parks, asshole.) Obviously, as attacks happen, Ms. Wentworth’s platform goes to shit.

 

                Yep, that’s pretty much what the book is about. The dogs become secondary. But despite the absolutely abysmal writing and lackluster action scenes, it’s really fairly enjoyable. It was good to see a strong, if fallible, woman in a position of power and thoughtfully constructed gay characters. Both of those things are rare in Seventies pulp horror novels.

 

                I almost want to read this duo’s other book The Last Survivor just to see if it’s as badly written. I would also probably read Myers’ solo release from 2010, Werewolf: A Gay Romp. Just because.

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The Dogs By Robert Calder

 

The Dogs
By Robert Calder
Dell 1986
Paperback, 226 pages

This is not an easy book to read for the animal lover. It speaks of man’s inhumanity towards animals with an unblinking, cold, and clinical voice. Dog lovers will cringe. That said, it does have some satisfying passages and it is quite good, overall, if you can get past the impassive tone.

Dog experiments… creating superior pups. One gets out. Becomes stray, then a pet. Bites brat. Gets admonished.  Goes rogue. Leads dog pack. Kills. That’s the basic storyline and it goes along at a good clip right up to the end. It is at times predictable but delivers the gory goods where you’d want it. Some kids get maimed and killed too, as a welcome bonus.

There is an overlong side-plot about a dog-fighting ring that is the worst offender in the “humans suck” sweepstakes. Yes, I know these assholes exist and they sicken me, and this is where the unemotional prose irked me the most. It’s a very cold and gratuitous section of the book and the pay-off, when it finally comes, isn’t nearly as satisfying as I’d hoped for.

Yeah, every human character in this book is a piece of shit. Calder makes it clear that Orph, the main dog, is the hero. Calder knows a lot about canines (he even edited a tome of dog stories and essays, The Dog Book, under his real name Jerrold Mundis) and their place in the world of humans. Unfortunately, his bleak portrayal of Homo sapien really makes any sort of emotional tie between the two-legged and the four-legged main characters tenuous at best. Let’s face it, people do not deserve dogs.

I recommend the book with reservations. It is well-written and fast moving but it also serves as a reminder of how much the human race really sucks ass.

This review originally appeared in Midnight Magazine #8, July 2021.

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