Beneath Still Waters By Matthew J. Costello

Beneath Still Waters
By Matthew J. Costello
1989 Berkley
Paperback, 266 pages

                It sucks to try to review a book the day after you finish it and you really don’t remember much about it. This one is a slog to recall. Admittedly, I only wanted to read it in the first place because of the cool (uncredited) cover art.

 

                Perhaps taking a cue from Guy N. Smith’s Demons published the previous year, this one is about the small, evacuated New York town of Gouldens Falls that is flooded to make a new reservoir. Just prior to the flooding, two local boys hop the fence to explore the abandoned buildings. One disappears and when the other one looks for him, he’s almost caught by some sinister people that have grabbed his friend. Something fishy was going on and he runs to safety. Fifty years later, in the present, journalist Dan Elliot wants to do a piece on the buried town so he visits nearby Ellerton and gets more than he bargained for when people go missing in the lake. Even two divers who were looking for a drowning victim don’t come up. Local journalist Susan Sloan is also interested in the big story. Plus, her daughter Claire is having watery nightmares.

 

                Or something like that. There is plenty going on for the length of this novel but none of it is very exciting and the scary bad guys are ill-defined and seem somewhat glossed over. Save for Claire, no character really gets into your heart enough to give a shit. Admittedly, I read this fairly quickly because it always felt like something important was about to happen but it never did. The crack in the dam discovered mid-way telegraphed the obvious climactic action way too soon. (That is not a spoiler in any way. Even the back cover tells you the problem.) The horror elements are weak and the whole thing just seemed like a wasted premise to me. (And GNS’s Demons, the sequel to Deathbell (1980), did the flooded town thing so much  better!)

 

                There are few good moments, like when the rescue divers, and later on Dan, are under the water searching the flooded town in dim light, searching for bodies (or in Dan’s case, clues to the mysterious happenings). Costello manages to write the slow-motion, drifting scenery rather vividly and it creates a few chills. But other than that, I didn’t get much satisfaction from this one. Not a keeper for me.

Savage By Paul Boorstin

Savage
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.

Playmates By Andrew Neiderman

Playmates

By Andrew Neiderman
1987 Berkley
Paperback, 312 pages

 

    Stacey and her daughter Tami are driving through New York State to her husband David, who is working on a project near the Catskills. The planned vacation disappears when Stacy takes a shortcut and the car breaks down, forcing them to seek help from a nearby farmhouse. The residents of the house are nuts and they abduct the mother and child, starting off 312 pages of grueling, nail-biting, frustrating suspense.

 

    That is literally the prologue. This book throws you right into turmoil in the opening pages and it doesn’t let up until the very end. Of course, David goes to search for his family, and he has enlisted the help of “Chicky” Ross, a quirky, local detective. The Thompson family in the secluded house are a real treat, with papa Gerald, insane mom Irene and the cruel daughter Shirley. They torture the mother and daughter relentlessly. You see Irene thinks they are two other people, a mother and daughter that they had disposed of a few years prior.

 

    The book gives us plenty of moments of wincing and squirming as well as a few genuine chills. This is how a “held captive” book should work, unlike Stephen King’s shit-tastic, bloated Gerald’s Game which made me wish I had never started it. This is a page-turner that never lets up on the tension and never lets you put down your guard. The characters are well defined with revealing background stories, except for Irene, but the lack of backstory works in her case, as she is just bat-shit crazy.

 

    Neiderman wrote several quality horror books, in particular Pin, which was made into a movie in 1988. Around the time he wrote Playmates, he started ghost-writing for V.C. Andrews after her death and has done so for over three decades. He is the master of writing fucked-up families, and they don’t come much more fucked up than the Thompsons. This Berkley edition has a nice, embossed Richard Newton cover, though you should also keep an eye out for the Time-Warner UK version. The book was made into a movie in 1995 called The Maddening starring Burt Reynolds and Angie Dickinson and there is a tie-in edition for that as well.

Came a Spider By Edward Levy

 

Came a Spider
By Edward Levy
1978 Berkley
Paperback, 232 pages

 

Genetically altered, huge, hungry black spiders overrun Los Angeles. I know, we’ve heard all this before but this lesser-known spiders-attack book has plenty of new ideas to offer and is written in a breathless style that kept the pages a-turnin’.

 

Starting off with a young boy getting bitten by a voracious spider in the desert, it never really lets up. Oh yeah, kids buy the farm in this one. In fact, little Lee, the victim, was now an incubator. These spiders lay eggs in their human victims or just completely devour them. “A thick, black, hairy carpet…” is a pretty nice way to describe the onslaught of arachnid atrocities.

 

In addition to the spider juggernaut, Levy gives us some pretty good characters. The police lieutenant in charge is a very relatable guy for me… a bit overweight, getting a bit old and tired. This is not what he needed. There is also a touched upon, but never fully explored, nerd romance between the scientist in charge of finding a solution and one of the scientists responsible for creating the new strain.

 

Real science is out the window here… this new species reproduces super-fast and are ready to eat up LA at the drop of a coin. They eat up the zoo, and there is a wildly entertaining attack on a movie theater. Fuck The Blob… these guys mean business. Containing them proves to be a real problem.

 

Yeah, like I said; nothing brand new here but a very entertaining take on the Spiders Attack genre. It’s as good as a Richard Lewis spider novel and better than much of the swill I read and enjoy. Levy has a few other novels that I’m interested in reading, including The Beast Within which was adapted by Tom Holland for a film for MGM in 1982.

The Night of the Toy Dragons By Barney Cohen

 

The Night of the Toy Dragons
By Barney Cohen
1977 Berkley Medallion
Paperback, 218 pages

You should know by now that I’m a sucker for alligator-in-the-sewer books. There have been good ones (like Croc by David James) and there have been shitty ones (like Death Tour by David J. Michael) and Barney’s book falls somewhere between the Davids; not quite as great as Croc but head and shoulders above the crap-tastic Death Tour.

 

The Night of the Toy Dragons really shouldn’t be as good as it is. The first half of the book concerns two groups, the scientists, and the sewer workers (teams led by intellectual son and blue-collar dad respectively) who are desperately trying to figure out what is responsible for a handful of gory deaths in the sewer. After they resolve that question, the second half is figuring out how to eliminate the problem. There are a shit-ton of meetings of the brain trust, walkie-talkie calls and endless research. But, oddly enough, the book never really bogs down because of that. (Hah! The first guy to go missing is a sewer worker named Boggs! I amuse me!)

 

What took them almost 90 pages to figure out is that there is a mutant strain of alligator that has set up housekeeping in the warm New York sewer system. They’ve been there for a long time and their numbers have been increasing so much that they’re not a secret anymore. The ‘gators are small (roughly a foot long) and white, with mouths that take up a good portion of the body. They hunt in packs (unlike most crocodilians) and are voracious feeders.

 

I haven’t read anything else by Cohen, whose other books don’t interest me (thriller, sci-fi, and a biography of the musician Sting), but he does OK with this one. I can almost taste the amphetamines in his writing as he fervently whips us through the details of the two teams’ research and their excitement of discovery. Stick with this one. The pay-off is totally worth it. You’ll dig it, I think.

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Bonegrinder By John Lutz

 

Bonegrinder
By John Lutz
1980 Berkley
Paperback, 232 pages

 

                No, perv, this isn’t a porno, it is an early novel from John Lutz, who went on to be a very successful mystery writer, author of Single White Female and an Edgar Award winner. Like so many animal-attack books, it came in the wake of Jaws, and it certainly wears it’s influence on its sleeve.

 

                There seems to be a monster in the lake in a small resort town in the Ozarks. There have been a few gory deaths and sketchy descriptions and that is enough to cause a lot of excitement in this remote setting. Tourists, news people and gawkers crash the scene, hoping to get a glimpse of the newly coined “Bonegrinder” or, better yet, one of the monster’s bloody victims. That’s more than Sherriff Wintone can take, and he struggles to maintain the peace and his own life in the midst of this Crypto-Craze.

 

                I don’t know. I guess this was a pretty good book; certainly, it is well-written, but most of the characters are somewhat annoying. The sheriff is pretty much likeable, though he’s written with such a laid-back delivery and colloquialisms that I struggled a few times. Of course, he is the Sherriff Brody of the story, but I kept picturing him as Richard Farnsworth in Misery (1990) due to the writing of the character. Of course, Farnsworth was far older than Wintone was supposed to be, so it made the love interest scenes a bit jarring. And, like the sheriff, I wanted to smack the town drunk in the face.

 

                All in all, the book felt a little overlong for me and the holding off (and holding off and holding off) on the reveal of the monster made me impatient. I can see how Lutz became adept at mysteries. I figured out one side-plot quickly, so I was pleased with myself. It’s not a bad book and I don’t regret the time I spent with it, but it didn’t completely satisfy me.

 

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The Snake by John Godey

The Snake
by John Godey
Berkley 1978
Paperback, 280 pages

 

This book is great.

 

An eleven-foot-long, highly venomous Black Mamba is loose in Central Park in New York. That is the premise. The story itself is more about what goes on in New York City while this animal is at large than the animal itself. The different factions of citizens and their different wants and needs and proposed solutions to the problem are what drive the narrative.

 

Suspenseful, humorous, and dripping with cynical social commentary, The Snake works on many levels. The science is top-notch here; Godey’s research was impeccable. No bullshit, made-up anti-snake propaganda here, just facts that the characters (and the reader, for that matter) choose how they want to take it. Oh yes, snake-hating is on display here. It wouldn’t be realistic if there wasn’t, but there are also people who want to save the innocent animal who is, after all, just trying to survive in a foreign and unknown habitat. The Snake is more of a thriller than a horror novel, but don’t let that deter you.

 

Godey nails it, speaking from every angle. The cops who want to end the search, the mayor who makes impossible demands, the herpetologist who wants to save the snake, the religious group who claim it’s the devil incarnate and the reporters looking for a scoop… everyone gets a believable voice. John Godey (which is the penname of Morton Freedgood) also wrote The Taking of Pelham 1-2-3 and since I’ve only seen (and loved) the film, I really want to read the novel after finishing this. His writing in The Snake is consistently engaging and entertaining. I even laughed out loud a couple of times. That doesn’t happen often. Read this mofo.

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

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