Mantis By E.B. Stambaugh

Mantis
By E.B. Stambaugh
Futura 1989
Paperback, 288 pages

 

                Of course, every book pales in comparison to Pierce Nace’s incomparable Eat Them Alive, but having a go at another giant mantis book takes a lot of guts. E. M. Stambaugh, whoever you are, I tip my hat to you for even thinking about it. Mantis is no Eat Them Alive, but it is well-written and despite being overly character-driven, it’s not a bad timewaster.

               

                Jerrod Rudd is the Chief of Police in Pleasant Grove, California, a sleepy town where nothing much happens. His marriage is in shambles. He doesn’t have time for his wife, his kids or anything but his job. His annoying Godmother, who raised him, gives his annoying daughter a small Praying Mantis for a science project and the child learns all about her new pet. Meanwhile, the quiet town is besieged by animal slaughters: some dogs, some horses, and then an all-out bloodbath in the local animal shelter. No tracks are left behind and the point of entry to the shelter appears to have been from the skylight.

 

                OK, being that the book is called Mantis and there’s a big Praying Mantis on the cover, we know what’s going on. It sometimes gets a bit tedious waiting for Rudd to sort things out but the information that trickles in is interesting. Bite marks get larger as time goes on, suggesting that whatever is responsible is growing. Unfortunately, his Godmother is a wannabe detective, and she gets super annoying, talking to the press and such. Like Rudd, I wanted to punch her. Much of the book is pure soap opera, with the husband/ wife problems and the big city detective, her old flame, brought in to help. Luckily, the writing is excellent, and I never drifted off, but I was constantly thinking get to the Mantis part!!!

               

                Once it finally does (like 200 or so pages in), blood flows and I was happy. It seems that one of the pet mantid’s siblings got radiated in the local toxic waste dump and grew and grew. I always thought those mantis egg cases that you can buy for your garden were a bad idea. True fact: most of those egg cases in garden stores are Chinese Mantids. Thus, you are introducing an invasive species when you’re trying to keep aphids off of your broccoli. Don’t be a tool. Like Clarice, the annoying Godmother.

Killer Croc By Grahame Webb

 

Killer Croc

By Grahame Webb

1982 Fontana
Paperback, 249 pages

 

                Professor Grahame Webb is a noted zoologist who has specialized in crocodilians for decades and he is well versed in Aboriginal culture, having worked with the people for many years. It seems that when Peter Benechley’s Jaws (1974) became a best-seller, it was irresistible to Webb to put his expertise into a fiction story about an oversized Saltwater Crocodile running amok in the waters of Northern Australia. Published by Aurora Press in 1980, the hardcover was called Numunwari, the name of the sacred crocodile in the story. Obviously, Fontana wanted something with a little more zing and changed the title to Killer Croc and had Wilson Buchanan whip up some Jaws-esque cover art, though it looks more like a swipe of Roger Kastell’s cover art for Creatures (Pocket Books, 1979).

 

                In Arnhem Land, Oondabund is driving a boat for fisherman, poacher and all around bad guy John Besser when they see a massive, 30 foot crocodile. Oondabund recognizes it as an animal sacred to his people while Besser wants to kill it. Besser goes back for it later and gets two of his mates killed. Now, the croc is a maneater and will have to be destroyed. Steve Harris is put on the case to take care of the beast but he is friends with Oondabund and knows the deal. When the croc heads towards the city of Darwin, Harris is pushed by politician Rex Barrett to destroy the federally protected croc. A cop gets eaten and the shit hits the fan. What to do? Well, Oondabund says capture it. It is his spirit animal, literally.

 

                Yes, you have all of the necessary characters for an animal attack book, the crooked politician, the bad guy(s) and the good hearted Harris, but you also get a main Aboriginal character and his people and that is a flavor that I had not tasted before. Oondabund’s broken English is well written (and it never got on my nerves like when some authors try to write phonetically) and Webb reveals a lot of the culture to the reader. Best of all, he imparts a ton of knowledge about the crocodiles and the conservation efforts to keep them safe. While most animal attack books show the animal attacking as a monster, Webb (and Harris, who really is Webb, I think) portrays the croc, Numunwari, as a sentient being with every right to live its life.

 

                For being Webb’s only attempt at fiction, I have to applaud his writing skill. Though it gets a bit long in the third act while trying to catch Numunwari, Webb writes a cracking adventure full of suspense and excitement, with real human characters and a lot of heart. I got miffed when a new character was introduced with 50 pages to go but soon saw the error of my ways; it’s an absolutely essential plot point. The book was adapted into the film Dark Age (Arch Nicholson, 1987) which stayed fairly loyal to the book even while condensing things and rewriting for more action. The exception is Harris’s love interest: in the book it is Oondabund’s (black) daughter while the film has him with a lily white former lover working with the Aboriginal people. Meh!

       

                                    

                 Aurora Press, 1980, Jacket illustration                           Dark Age 1987 VHS, 

                    by Roger Janovsky                                                      Charter Entertainment

The Scurrying By Wes Whitehouse

The Scurrying
By Wes Whitehouse
1983 Futura
Paperback, 350 pages

                I’d been after this one for quite a while so when I saw a. cheap one for sale online somewhere, I grabbed it immediately. London gets laid to waste by millions of rats (again). What could possibly go wrong?

 

                Inside the book, there is a blurb saying that this is Whitehouse’s first novel. Searching on the Interwebz brought up only one other book, GLC - The Inside Story (2000). That is a non-fiction account of one of the government administrative bodies in London, and it sounds dry as hell. Sadly, this book has more bureaucrats and politicians than it has rats at any given time. Coming just a year before James Herbert finished off his excellent Rats Trilogy in 1984, this was a pretty ballsy and stupid idea.

 

                There has been an uptick in rat sightings and exterminators are noticing the rat-bait going either unnoticed or eaten. That means either the rats know it is poisoned or they have become immune. So, naturally, they head aboveground in search of eats. When they’re hungry enough, humans will be on the menu. They will also spread disease.

 

                While that sounds all well and good, 80% of the book concerns one department hindering the progress of another department that is trying to solve the dilemma. Politicians are more concerned with looking bad than stepping up to actually help. That all may be very realistic but that is not what one buys a nature-strikes-back book for. We want rats killing people. You get some of that, but not nearly enough. For instance, you get four pages of a minster readying an office for a proper photo-op and two paragraphs for a group of teens getting offed by the rats on a camping trip. The best scene in the book comes from a rabid dog (infected by a rat) who mangles a toddler. (I’ll admit it; that scene is worth the price of admission.)

 

                For a book that had been on my want list for so long, I found this one to be a massive disappointment. Not only is it misogynistic (I know, many books from the time were, but this really feels like Whitehouse truly thinks that women are merely ornamental) with two lovely women being in love with our hero, the pipe-smoking chief of Environmental Health, but the author seems to really dislike rats and shows a little too much joy in doing them in. If the dying humans got as much ink as the dying rats, my review would be more positive.

 

                The nifty cover is signed “Gulbis”. Could this be Stephen Gulbis, children’s book artist? I think it might be. But still, James Herbert this ain’t.

The Medusa Horror by Drew Lamark

 

The Medusa Horror
by Drew Lamark
1983 Futura
paperback, 206 pages

 

                I’d read Drew Lamark’s The Snake Orchards (mini-reviewed back in Midnight #4, July 2019) a few  years ago and enjoyed it so I was pretty psyched when I saw that he’d also written a jellyfish horror book, I grabbed it right away. This one is nowhere near as enjoyable, but it has jellyfish killing people, so it can’t be all bad.

 

                A rich dude puts together an expedition on his yacht to go search for a sunken ship. Many unlovable, nasty people are among his friends. Sylvia is invited to do catering on the two week journey, even though it means having to miss a visit from her military fiancé, who she’s not really sure about anyway. In the way of the sunken ship, its treasure, the island it is near, and the yacht, lies a thick blanket of Portuguese Man o’ war, miles wide and deadly as fuck.

 

                Sounds pretty great, doesn’t it? What has Sylvia got herself into? Well, all of the characters are such shitheads, you really hope the jellyfish sting everyone to death quickly. Two yachts worth of rich, arrogant douchebags can’t die quickly enough. One boat goes down, some people die and it’s down to one boat and a handful of people… and still I didn’t care.

 

                The thing is, the book goes along at such an even keel that there are no ups and downs, no suspense. Yes, there are some nice grisly jelly-deaths but the characters, who are fleshed out as much as is needed, aren’t even interesting as fodder. Sylvia isn’t even such a great person. And, she gets fooled into having sex with one of the crewmen that she (and the reader) had grown to trust. Pretty fucking slimy, Charles.

 

                Drew Lamark is one of many pseudonyms for Drew Launay. Under the name Andrew Laurance, he wrote a number of occult thriller novels (Ouija, Catacomb), so along with The Snake Orchards (the only other book using the Lamark surname), he has plenty of horror cred, but this one just dragged on a bit for me.

 

                Groovy cover on the Futura paperback, though; a nick from the poster art from the film Nightmare (in a Damaged Brain) (1981).

Savaged By Victoria Burgoyne

 

Savaged
By Victoria Burgoyne
1980 Futura
Paperback, 187 pages

 

What? London is besieged by the threat of rabies? Again? Why do I keep reading these books? The same story over and over. Why? Because I fucking love them, that’s why! And this time it’s hyenas!

A sick little girl oh-so-wishes she could have a laughing dog like in the “Hey, Diddle, Diddle” nursery rhyme. Her dad, the genius father-of-the-year, asks his brother, a smuggler, to procure a hyena. The brother gets a tame one from an acquaintance’s small circus, except the hyena has given birth to twins, who must also go. So, with three predatory carnivores in tow, the uncle heads back to London on a dangerous, rainy night. Naturally, he crashes on the way, losing the twins.

The sick little girl loves her snuggly new friend, who accidentally scratches her, but the “dog” licks the wound to care for it. Meanwhile, some animals have been found slaughtered and soon, good ol’ humanity is at risk as well. Y’see, rabies has been found in some of the victims. Enter veterinarian Mike, who gets put in charge of keeping London safe.

Sure, this is a very familiar story, but Burgoyne keeps things moving at a fast pace, bouncing from place to place and incident to incident as the hunt for the twins, and later the also-rabid mom, goes on relentlessly.  The gore is quite fun, the pathos is heavy, and it’s always fun to read about the effects of rabies on the human body. The hyenas, laughing in the foggy night, provide a vivid and sometimes creepy image.

One strange thing… there are three pages concerning a break-in at a jewelry store and the thieves escape through the twists and turns of London. It serves absolutely no purpose for the rest of the novel and seems to exist only to show the author’s knowledge of the streets of the city.

But I have no complaints about Burgoyne’s writing. I mean, “…he lifted the loose, slimy sinews that dangled higgledy-piggledy over the shin bone like an upturned dish of offal and sliced through the greasy mass.” Nice! This is apparently her only novel and it’s a pretty good one. She is better known as an actress and appeared in the film Death Ship (1980, the year this book was published) and some Dr. Who stuff. So, while no new ground was broken with Savaged, I enjoyed watching London fall into a preventable panic once again.

Did the sick little girl get rabies? I ain’t tellin’!

The Pike by Cliff Twemlow and Devour by Paul Adams

Something a little different here: a whole article on books featuring Northern Pikes as the monster. This appeared in Midnight Magazine #6 as "Comin' Down the Pike". 

It is a walloping understatement to say that Peter Benchley’s Jaws inspired dozens of knock-off killer shark books and movies. Hell, it pretty much spawned the entire nature-strikes-back genre, at least it’s phenomenal 1970s resurgence. Ah yes, sharks: the world’s deadliest fish. Stay out of the ocean!

 

Luckily, in the days before River Monsters was on TV, there were a couple of writers who strayed a bit from the norm and did enough research to find something different. Ignoring the salty sea and looking into freshwater, two books came out a year apart championing the Northern Pike as a worthy killer.

 

The pike is indeed a formidable fish. They are large (they can reach sizes of up to four feet long) and have a mouth full of very sharp teeth. They can be aggressive, and they are fast. They don’t blink! Sounds like pulp horror monster royalty to me.

 

Part time actor, musician, screenwriter, and bouncer Cliff Twemlow mercifully set aside some spare time to write The Pike, which was published by Hamlyn in 1982.  This quick horror novel (just 160 pages! Perfect!) is about a twelve-foot-long pike swimming loose in Lake Windermere in England, shredding everything in its path. This, of course, pulls a lot of thrill seekers to the shores of the lake, hoping for a glimpse of the fish or a body part or two.

 

No real explanation is given for the exceptional size of this fish, but none is needed. We just gear up for the next attack. The novel concentrates on the characters in between the killings; the shop owners in the town who are enjoying the exploding economy thanks to the sightseers, the believable romance between the two leads and ol’ Ulysses Grant, the marine biologist who is the colorful Quint-like character in this story. It stays interesting and more or less scientifically plausible throughout and Twemlow doesn’t wait too long between the gruesome deaths.

 

Interestingly enough, Twemlow adapted his novel into a screenplay and things were in motion to make a film version of The Pike. Calling in some friends in high places, he even got Joan Collins on board and the publicity mills were rolling. A giant, mechanical pike was created (for a quarter-million bucks!) and demonstrated on TV and Joan even posed for a few toothy pictures with it. Unfortunately, funding never came through for the movie and, much to our collective loss, The Pike was never made.

 

Relevant to absolutely nothing, Lake Windermere became a cryptozoological hot-spot decades after the pike retired. Since 2006, a large Nessie-like Sea Monster has been sighted many times in the lake. Named Bownessie, the beast hasn’t had much hard evidence reported about it, but a lot of interesting pictures can be found online. It ain’t no pike.

 

Arriving a year before Twemlow’s book, Devour (Futura, 1981) was Paul Adams’ contribution to killer pike literature. A trim, 188-page presentation of pulp perfection, this publication is my preferred pike paperback. Adams’ fish are mutants, evolved from spawning in the polluted waters of Eastern Britain. Chemical dumping is to blame, and Adams preaches the ecological warnings with a heavy hand, which I personally love. You fuck with nature; nature will fuck you up.

 

Devour is far gorier than The Pike and Adams evidently learned how to set up a successful nature-horror story from his friend Guy N. Smith. (Smith even wrote a forward to Adams’ book Extreme Hauntings: Britain's Most Terrifying Ghosts praising his friends’ work. I’m still not certain they’re not the same person!) Like Smith, Adams’ keeps things moving very quickly and Britain gets laid to waste, like in every notable book in the genre. Characters are introduced and dispatched all in one chapter, leaving you wondering exactly who is going to be alive and in charge by the end of the book. The gore is laid on thick and the blood flows freely. These mutated pike can even plop through the mud on rainy nights, hunting their human meals on land. There is nothing that isn’t great about this book. It is a perfect example of why I love this specific genre.

 

Of course, there are sharks, piranhas, octopuses, and all sorts of watery predators in the pages of horror fiction, but these two excellent books really flexed their fishy muscles and showed us how badass the Northern Pike can be. A near miss is R. Carl Largent’s The Lake which features a “garpike” (just a layman’s term for the unrelated, but also large and scary-looking gar) but the fish isn’t the main menace in the book which, like Devour, is also very environmentally conscious. There is also a short story called “The Pike” by Conrad Williams in his collection Born with Teeth (PS Publishing, 2012), but it is really more of a fishing tale. It was reprinted in Nightmare Magazine #72 (September 2018). The pike completist can read it here.

 

While I await someone to write Night of the Guppy, I will continue to revel in these masterpieces from the Seventies and Eighties.

Update- 7-25-2023... a film about Cliff Twemlow!!! The trailer is here!

Midnight Magazine

Books of Horror