By Paul Boorstin
1981 Berkley Books
Paperback, 291 pages
I’d read The Accursed by
Paul Boorstin and liked it so when I saw he had another horror book out with a
nifty keyhole step-back decap cover, I knew I’d like to have it in my
collection. Luckily, it wasn’t expensive when I found one in pretty good shape
(although my cat has since bitten four holes into the cover). The drawback to
this book is that the Berkley edition has tiny, densely packed print that made
it a real chore to read. The narrative and writing is very good but it would
have benefitted from some pruning and much larger print.
Photojournalist Christine Latham
is given an assignment to cover the opening of the El Dorada Hotel in (the
fictional) Panaguas in South America. Panaguas is in the middle of a revolution
and guerillas are all but guaranteed to show up at the resort. The luxury hotel
was built on cleared jungle land after the country’s leader disposed of the
native people by all means possible. Of the many beautiful people invited to
the opening, only a handful arrive and pretty soon, heads are gonna roll.
Literally.
The cast of characters is good and
are all given ample time to blossom; the producer and his busty starlet, a
washed up pop star, an older psychic woman, an anthropologist, the country’s leaders
and numerous mercenaries amongst them. All of them are very flawed and except
for Chris, none of them are likely to be someone you’ll root for but you do get
familiar with them, which keeps what might be their fates on your mind.
I mean, Chris finds some real shrunken heads among the touristy fake ones in
the gift shop, and then some of the characters wind up headless. Who is doing
the killing? And the shrinking? The story plays out as a mystery as much as a
horror adventure complete with red herrings and plenty of plot twists. It’s
good to have a strong woman as the main character of an Eighties novel for a
change, too.
Boorstin is an excellent writer
and pens some lovely passages and the gore, once it comes, splashes with vigor.
The bodies pile up and there are some wonderfully shocking set-pieces. For our
characters, escape is impossible, survival improbable. The book feels overlong
by the time you’ve hit the halfway mark but picks up steam in the second half.
Still, with that tiny print, plowing through this one is rough going, no matter
how much you’d like to. There are a few jaw-dropping twists that I never saw
coming and all in all, this one is a keeper, though I doubt I’ll ever read it
again. But that step-back cover alone is worth it.
The Berkley edition has an extra
19 pages devoted to a preview of Laurence Block’s (then forthcoming) novel Ariel
that I didn’t bother reading because it was in the same tiny typeface. I just
couldn’t do it to myself.
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