Carnosaur By Harry Adam Knight

 

Carnosaur
By Harry Adam Knight
2022 Valancourt
Paperback, 205 pages

 

    John Brosnan was a prolific Science Fiction, comic book (2000 AD), and movie book writer, but when he strapped on the name “Harry Adam Knight” or “Simon Ian Childer” (often co-writing with Leroy Kettle), he let the entrails fly and the world became a better place. The “HAK” and “SIC” (Brosnan was very aware of the words that his pseudonyms were almost spelling) are all great fun and worth the gore-hound’s time.

 

    Carnosaur was one that I had been yearning for for quite some time but prices on old copies of the 1984 Star paperback and the movie tie-in edition from Tor in 1993 have gotten out of hand. Enter Valancourt Books, my Knight in shining armor! Their new release (with a snazzy cover by Lynne Hansen and an introduction by Will Errickson of the indispensable Too Much Horror Fiction blog) made my 2022 suck a lot less.

     

    Were those gory murders committed by a Siberian Tiger that had escaped from a private zoo? Rich zoo owner Sir Penward says yes and has his tiger put down. But one witness, a kid, says something else, setting reporter David Pascal off in pursuit of the truth. To cut to the chase, he finds it. Penward has been extracting DNA from dinosaur fossils and creating his own living dinosaurs. Before you can say “Holy Jurassic Park!,” you need to know that this mofo came out six years before Michael Crichton’s best-seller.

 

    Brosnan (writing alone as Knight this time) gets a lot of action going with an exciting pack of dinosaurs. Featured most prominently are Deinonychus, Tarbosaurus, Megalosaurus, and Plesiosaurus, but there are others, as well as big cats and bulls and other things that can fuck you up. Goddamn, this is a lot of fun. If the dinosaur doesn’t get you, the panther will. Gore, sex, cartoonish adversaries, and dinosaurs. It really doesn’t get much better than this.

 

    If you’ve only seen Roger Corman’s production of the film adaptation, you haven’t enjoyed this story. While I enjoy the film (and its sequels), it just doesn’t have the scope of the book. Buy this, read it, and thank me later. No, thank Valancourt Books for the wonderful work they’ve been doing bringing these kinds of books back from the dead.

 

Update: Since writing this review in 2022, I have obtained the original Star Books edition and the movie tie-in from Tor in 1993. Enjoy these covers!

                       

                                           Star Books 1984                                          Tor movie tie-in 1993

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The Pet By Charles Grant

The Pet
By Charles Grant
1986 Tor Books
Paperback, 343 pages

 

I have a bunch of Charles L. Grants books in my To-Be-Read pile. I’m a huge fan of his Shadows anthologies and have grabbed a few of his novels, hoping they would be as rewarding. The thing is, his novels are thicker books than I usually enjoy, so they’re often passed over in favor of quicker reads. Well, I finally bit the bullet and read one and I’m glad I did.

 

The Pet is two things: it’s a horror story and a high school drama. Don has a fucked-up home life and his only comfort in being in his room with his animal posters and figures of wild beasts. I can relate, though I had pets as a kid… he’s not allowed to. His school friends are few and, like all teenagers, he likes someone but isn’t sure if she likes him. Oh, and there’s a serial killer in the town.

 

Yeah, there’s a lot going on in this book, but Grant keeps it focused and moving along at a nice pace. I was really rooting for the romance to bloom amidst the mayhem, too. (Hey, I’m a sucker for that stuff.) I thought I had it all figured out about 100 pages in, but I was wrong. Oh, so wrong. The supernatural is very much at play in the second half of the story.

 

There’s some decent bloodshed, gripping suspense and urgent action but none of it will work for you if you don’t really suspend disbelief. Let yourself go and enjoy the ride. By the way, the book is good enough that I read it faster than many shorter ones. It kept me eager to see what happened next. Maybe I’ll pull another Grant book out of the ol’ TBR pile soon.

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Quarrel with the Moon By J.C. Conaway

 

Quarrel with the Moon
By J.C. Conaway
1982 Tor Books
Paperback, 319 pages

 

What a pretentious fucking title for a werewolf novel! But despite a few overly florid passages, the prose doesn’t get too purple in this book and it’s really pretty darn good.

An anthropologist and his fashion model girlfriend (!) travel to the mountains of West Virginia, he to study some human-like bones found at a dig and she to try to rekindle their troubled relationship. But ol’ Josh, the anthropologist, grew up on that there mountain and it is a kind of homecoming for him as well. Naturally, their relationship doesn’t improve with all of his kin in the way, and his kin are weird, and a little deformed. ..and a little hairy. And then there are the bloody murders.

It should be noted that Josh and Cresta, the model, are both pretty shitty people and it’s hard to root for or feel bad for either of them. In fact, only Josh’s Aunt Avvie has a decent soul. But this is a horror novel, and we only want blood, guts and incestuous family relations, and there is plenty of that to go around.  It’s kind of a long book but it reads quickly and doesn’t get boring, even when the characters do incredibly dumb and frustrating things. There are plenty of twists and reveals along the way to keep you pleasantly satisfied.

                It’s pretty easy to guess some of what is going to happen, but Conaway (who seems to be primarily a romance author) keeps it moving at a good pace and writes well enough for you to admire the story’s construction and telling. And some of it gets batshit crazy, pushing this one into “recommended” territory.

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