Killer By Peter Tonkin

 

Killer
By Peter Tonkin
1975 Signet
Paperback, 244 pages

 

                Jaws with a Killer Whale? Sort of. This gets big kudos from a lot of nature-strikes-back fans for being super gory, so I made it a point to move this towards the top of my To-Be-Read pile. Unfortunately, I wasn’t as taken by it as some folks have been. It’s good, but it’s first and foremost an adventure story and is pretty light on the red stuff, if you ask me.

 

                After a plane crash, the passengers find themselves stranded on a huge ice floe with only the contents of the cargo hold to keep them going. Luckily, there are tents, food, and everything you might need. Except it is in the Antarctic and it is cold as fuck. Luckily, two of the passengers are handy at cold survival, having endured it before. But all of the training in the world could not prepare them for what was to come. Not only is there a pod of Killer Whales with a government-trained leader, but they have to survive Polar Bear attacks, Walruses, an ever melting and dwindling ice floe, blizzards, and each other.

 

                Tonkin gets into it, throwing all kinds of shit at our cast of characters and, for a while, it is pretty exciting. The characters, for the most part, are well-defined and you’ll pick a favorite, depending on your own personality. Unfortunately, the woman who is introduced as our main character (or so I thought) turns out to be ineffective at anything but making coffee, despite being a brilliant post-grad botanist. Oh, and she’s beautiful, of course, so some of the lads on the floe can fantasize and objectify her. Yawn. She is there to work with her usually absent father and most of the other men involved work for him.

 

                The kills by marine mammals are few and far between, I’m sorry to say. In fact, a huge pack of fleeing Walruses fair far worse than our rag-tag team of survivors. The animal-on-animal violence is far more prevalent than the couple of instances of animal-on-human violence. Yes, the survivors are in deep shit and yes, there are some Killer Whales around bopping and cracking their floe, but I almost saw them as an afterthought. I wish the novel had been as good as Ken Barr’s cover art. I have to admit that the story got pretty dull for me by the end.

 

                This is Peter Tonkin’s first novel. He has gone on to become an extremely prolific best-selling author, working predominately in the thriller genre. Killer has been reissued (with the original cover art!) by Valancourt Books under the Paperbacks from Hell banner.

The Accursed By Paul Boorstin

 

The Accursed
By Paul Boorstin
1977 Signet
Paperback, 184 pages

 

                As a snake lover, it is sometimes tough for me to assess a book such as this. I mean, many people have an unreasonable fear of snakes, or they just dislike them for whatever reason. (Because the Bible tells them to… oops, did I say that out loud?) This book plays on, and plays up that fear, putting (or keeping) snakes in a bad light. This, of course, just adds to the bad publicity.

 

                Then again, I do love seeing snakes wreaking havoc on stupid humans and this book delivers that, including a wonderful scene with a Reticulated Python plucking a baby from its newborn crib in a hospital. That alone makes this book worthwhile. The author’s science is good, having been a National Geographic explorer, though he also makes up a lot of shit to serve his narrative.

 

                In the deep South, one of those cracker-barrel snake-handling preachers is at it again, saying that if you handle the venomous snake and do not get bitten, you’re A-OK in God’s eyes. If you do get bitten, well, Satan had your soul. This guy doesn’t just use local rattlesnakes, he imports Cobras and shit. He is “probably” also responsible for the Reticulated Python that is living in the low-budget, trashy hospital next to the swamp.

 

                Poor Dr. Adam Corbett. He just wants to help the impoverished locals and get them good medical attention. Too bad hospital head Straker is such a penny-pinching douchebag. They clash often and the good doctor has to put up with incompetent nurses, as well. And cover-ups and babies disappear. And, worst of all, his wife has come from Atlanta to be with him in the hick-water hospital and give birth there.

 

                OK, that’s pretty much the set-up. There are deaths, human, serpent and canine, but no real pathos gets created because all of the characterizations are wafer-thin and mostly unlikable. Even the pregnant wife is an annoying idiot who gets herself into lots of predicaments for the sake of storytelling but really, who cares? As always, I root for the snakes. Not a terrible book but not really satisfying either, and it even felt a little long at 184 pages.

The Surrogate By Nick Sharman

The Surrogate
By Nick Sharman
1980 Signet
Paperback, 249 pages

 

                My father was a bit of a douchebag. He’d belittle me, hit me; he told me I was a mistake. He admitted that he had been unfit to be a father. But he was a saint compared to Frank Tillson’s father!

                After a childhood of abuse and his mother’s death, Frank packed up, left home, and never looked back. Working as a radio show host, widowed, and raising an 8-year-old son alone, he gets summoned by his dying father to talk about who is going to get the old man’s considerable fortune. Frank tells him to fuck off. Plus, he tells him to fuck off on behalf of his son, Simon, who ol’ gramps wants to take over his empire. The old man dies with the situation unresolved.

                That is when all hell breaks loose.

                The old man’s reach from beyond the grave raises plenty of chills up the spine and as a horror villain, he is a memorable and formidable monster. With sheer residual hate, he can force his will on people, places, and things of all sorts, even a doll (which is always nice). Sharman creates a gloomy atmosphere, thick with malevolent evil and sludgy black shadows, and things are never quite as they seem.

                I’d read Sharman’s The Cats before and liked it, so I decided to grab this, his third novel, as well. Knowing there were killer-doll parts helped push it to the top of my pile. Sharman, real name Scott Grønmark, is a very good writer, with excellent descriptions and pacing. He uses similes liberally, but it doesn’t get annoying because he chooses the perfect words to paint his pictures. He uses similes like Ghastly Graham used spittle. This is one book that I would think about while at work, then rush home to dig back in. A real page-turner, I tell ya.

Killer Flies By Mark Kendall

 

Killer Flies
By Mark Kendall
1983 Signet
Paperback, 159 pages

 

                Mutated insects, paper-thin characters, sex at inappropriate times, oozing gore, wildly unbelievable situations, a huge concert they won’t call off despite the risk… this book is a blue-print for bad, pulpy 80s Nature-Strikes-Back books. In other words, it’s fucking great.

 

                A truck carrying a government experiment overturns, releasing a swarm of genetically mutated flies loose in New Mexico. They eat everything in sight, including the main character’s daughter. With the help of her hunky ranch hand, she gets over that little bump in the road pretty quickly, but vengeance is on her mind. With the help of the scientist who unwittingly created the insect horde, they try to find the answers and the way to end this assault. Will they find the answer, or will the love triangle get in the way? You’ll wonder all the way to the risible ending.

 

                Featuring some of the worst “men writing women” instances of all time, it is with great pleasure that I learned that Mark Kendall, his colorful biography and all, is a pseudonym for Melinda M. Snodgrass, a serious science fiction writer (most notably for Star Trek: the Next Generation TV show a few years later) and, quite definitely, a woman. She took the gig to pay bills and turned in one of the better examples of animals-amok horror filled with titillation, gore, and silliness. It seems very possible that she wrote this as a satire on the genre. Whatever the case, I read the book quickly and with a smile on my face the whole time.

               

                The book has recently been reprinted and recorded as an audiobook by Encyclopocalypse Publications, thus bringing Snodgrass’s skeleton-in-the-closet to a whole new generation of thrill-seekers. Even though Snodgrass doesn’t mention her work as Mark Kendall (this is the only one) in her bibliography, it is a book that does exactly what it says on the tin. It delivers the gruesome goods.

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The Return By Bentley Little

 

The Return
By Bentley Little
2002 Signet
Paperback, 354 pages

 

                In horror circles, Bentley Little is a name that pops up a lot. Lots of people like his stuff. I’d never read him. While browsing at Savers, I found this one and, while it’s way longer than I usually tuck into, I threw caution to the wind and laid out my 3 bucks. What could possibly go wrong?

 

                Strange things are found at an archeological dig in Arizona, including a large, humanoid skull. Could it be the fabled Mogollon Monster or was that just a story to scare kids? And what really wiped out the Anasazi Indian tribe? Weird shit starts going down in the area, in fact all around the state things are getting spooky. Museum artifacts move by themselves, the main characters see themselves in ancient pottery, faces get ripped of… lots of weirdness ensues. In fact, too much weirdness ensues. It all becomes a bit of a mishmash.

 

                Little is a very good writer, and the characters are relatable, but there’s just so much supernatural phenomenon going on that it gets very dense and confusing. Is it about inanimate objects coming to life, a monster tearing off faces, the townsfolk’s possession, or what? It’s about all of that and more but getting to the point where it all ties together was a chore. I almost gave up a third of the way through, but then a character found a dead 4-year-old kid and took him home and barbequed him and I decided to stick with it.

 

                For the length of the novel and with how much weird shit was happening throughout, the end was kind of a fizzle. At 354 pages, you’d think it would have a slam-bang, solid ending, but I didn’t feel that it did. Still, I don’t regret reading it but when I was about halfway through, I kept glancing at my “to be read” pile and wishing I was done. Not a bad book, but I’m not keeping it. I’m open to trying other Bentley Little books in the future, though.

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The Fog By James Herbert

The Fog

By James Herbert

1975 Signet
Paperback, 275 pages

 

I’ve voiced my opinion that James Herbert tends to over-write in the pages of Midnight before, so I’ll just leave that here and shut up.

 

The Fog is Herbert’s first follow-up to his masterful The Rats and the first half of the book is pure, batshit crazy Herbert greatness. A fissure erupts in the middle of a small town, sucking half of the buildings and inhabitants into it. If that’s not bad enough, the rift also releases a yellowish fog, a mist that when it comes in contact with a person, it makes them insane. Suicide, murder, rape and all sorts of nasty behavior is lovingly depicted, and the fog grows bigger with every mind it destroys. Naturally, it’s headed toward London.

 

The set-up to this story is superb and the descriptions of the fog’s effects are gruesome and horrific. I’d have been happy with another 100 pages of just that. I don’t need an explanation or any science; just give me the mayhem. But we do get the reason behind the fog and the main character (a survivor of the fissure), and his crew of bigwigs try to solve the dilemma. Herbert is a good enough writer where he won’t leave you high and dry while they seek answers. There are exciting and dangerous treks through the fog while the crazy Londoners who are out of control lurk around every corner.

 

Herbert revisited some of this idea in his later book The Dark, though that had a supernatural bent. This one gets a little bogged down in the second half, but is still a highly recommended classic. I have the attention span of a tsetse fly and that might be why I started to lose interest while I awaited the finale, but for those of you with more brain in the pan than I, it might be (or become) a favorite.HerbertH

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The Dark by James Herbert

 

The Dark

By James Herbert

1980 Signet

Paperback, 314 pages

 

    I first read Herbert’s The Rats as a teen way back when and I fell in love with it. For a while, I grabbed every book of his that came out. The problem is, apart from the subsequent rat novels (Lair in 1979 and Domain in 1984), much of Herbert’s work doesn’t fully satisfy me. I find that he is prone to overwriting; a problem for someone like me with the attention span of a two-year-old.

    I only recently got around to The Dark; a novel considered to be a masterpiece of horror fiction. And it is very good. It is filled with gruesome set-pieces and enough gore to satisfy even a jaded gorehound like me. The Dark is essentially the collected evil of humans, an energy force that feeds on a person’s own insecurities and bad thoughts. Obviously, this can lead to psychosis, murder, suicide and just downright nasty behavior. There are some truly cruel ideas in this book. That is a good thing. This is a horror novel. Look for the main character’s mental-hospital-resident wife fucking with his head while under The Dark’s influence. Brutal.

    True to form, however, Herbert overdid it just a bit. The climactic ending starts with 100 pages left in the book and I started struggling; I just wanted to see how it ended. This caused me to put the book down and go to sleep a few times while in the stretch run. But overall, I give The Dark a thumbs up. In my worthless opinion, it is probably his best non-rodent book.

This review originally appeared in Midnight Magazine #7 (Jan. 2021)

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