The Totem By David Morrell

The Totem
By David Morrell
1979, Fawcett Crest
Paperback, 255 pages

                                               

    Boy, I really wanted to like this book more than I did, but you just can’t win them all. It’s got everything I usually like; possible monsters, possible rabies scare and possible good story-telling. But overall, this became a slog to get through for me.

    One big problem? The main character’s surname is Slaughter. The author even comments how it’s a silly name, unbefitting the character, but it still managed to bug me. Anyhoo, Nathan Slaughter left the police force in Detroit for a quieter life in a small town in Wisconsin. When the job of Sheriff became available he took it, figuring he’d be living an easy life. Until bodies started stacking up.

    The bodies show signs of rabies and eyewitnesses describe some sort of monster with antlers. The bodies, however, don’t stay dead. They get up and start a reign of terror. This is no ordinary rabies. When a rabid young boy becomes an instrument of terror, biting his mother, the town is on high alert.

    I do like when Morrell is telling the tale from the monster's point of view, whichever infected being it might be at that time. Called only “it”, it’s nice to see what is going through the head of the victims of this plague. Some pathos is worked up for the kid who turns. The main characters, Slaughter, the doctor who is trying to sort out a lot of shit with very little information, and Slaughter’s old pal, the drunken reporter, are all right, if at times a little predictable. It’s just that by the half-way point, I became a little agitated and bored with the book. I mean, it’s OK, but I just didn’t get absorbed.

    Morrell, the man who invented John Rambo, had his original manuscript cut down before publication, so maybe some tidbits of story got the axe but I don’t think I could have made it through the book if it was any longer. The longer, original version was published in 1994, bumping it up to over 400 pages. No thanks. Admittedly, I grabbed this Fawcett edition for the groovy cover, which is far less spoilery than the images on other editions.

Saurian By William Schoell

Saurian
By William Schoell
1988 Leisure Books
Paperback, 368 pages

 

                Suspension of disbelief is of the utmost importance while reading this book. It gets pretty goofy but if you play along, you can have some fun with this dinosaur stomping tale of aliens and alcoholism.

 

                In 1957, lil’ Tommy Bartlett is a loner of a kid, content to read comics and monster magazines alone (sounds like me). His folks are useless; his father a drunk and his mom a woman who has given up. Bribed by his mother to play with the local kids, he acquiesces and through them, finds a hidden lake in the woods with a creepy house on the other end. He rows over to the house on his own (the others are chicken) and gets a scare from a weird man in the house. That night, a massive dinosaur levels the Florida shanty town Tommy lived in, leaving the boy the only survivor.

 

                Onward to 1988, and Tom co-owns a bar (odd since his father’s drink is what destroyed his childhood) on the Florida coast. He is drawn back to his childhood area and finds it all built up into an expensive property. He bravely goes back to the hidden pond and found that area developed, too. He’d forgotten the tragedy that befell him back in the Fifties but piece by piece it comes back. The weird man, the massive dinosaur… how does it all fit?

 

                OK, I’m not going to say too much. The dinosaur scenes are tons of fun. The beast is massive, it swallows Blue Whales whole for a snack. It levels cities, hurls boats and licks human remains off the bottom of its feet like you’d suck honey off your finger. Impossibly huge, savage and yet with a human intelligence. So how does this tie in with the weird old man in the house? Don’t worry… kooky exposition lady Mistress Dunn will tell all. Now, even with a completely open mind, I found this to be really dumb, but I carried on and let Schoell tell his story. It’s a lot to swallow but it’s a fun ride.

 

                A few notes: considering his father was consumed by alcohol, Tom drinks a fuck of a lot, even though he says he has no problem. Maybe that’s the author’s point, that addiction sneaks up on you. Tom’s girlfriend in the latter chapters is an alcoholic as well. Lots of drink talk. There is also a lot of padding, as is the case with a lot of Leisure’s horror novels. Some of the well-rounded characters have nothing to do with the narrative, they just add color. That’s fine but a tighter book might have been a little more satisfying. Still, this is a fun, if silly, creature feature. It is well written and easy to blow through.

Clickers By J.F. Gonzalez and Mark Williams

Clickers
By J.F. Gonzalez and Mark Williams
2011 Deadite Press
Paperback, 271 pages

 

                Originally published as an eBook in 1999, this novel has gone through a few incarnations before Deadite Press released this author-approved edition. It still looks like it could still use a little editing and it is a bit overlong, but the book definitely satisfies anyone looking for a gory Creature Feature. I’m not a big fan of Dave Kendall’s cover art, though.

 

                A horror author heads to a coastal town in Maine to work on his next book. He meets a slew of underdeveloped characters (and, really… who cares? We’re here for the mayhem) and before too long, the beaches erupt with large crabs who also happen to have venomous scorpion tails. What transpires is pure a Guy N. Smith and H.P. Lovecraft mash-up. The gore gets ladled on heavy, and nobody is safe.

 

                Mercifully, Guy N. Smith does get name dropped in the text. It’s only fair because Smith’s trademark “click-click-clickety-click” is lifted for these crabby imitations. I mean… the main character (a fairly unlikeable writer named Rick) dubs them Clickers. It’s the title of the damn book! Original or not, the book delivers what it promised; a gore-filled B-movie of a story. My favorite passage, after an old woman is stung by the crab-scorpion; “Her body expanded and blew up like a hot water balloon, inflating to almost double her size before the skin split and reddish, meaty goo splashed all over the crabs, drenching them in Old Woman Sauce.” The fact that “Old Woman Sauce” is capitalized makes me very happy.

 

                No, it’s not a really well written book but it tells the story admirably and despite going on a bit long, it’s just what the doctor ordered when you need mindless, gory sludge. Gonzalez wrote three more entries in the Clickers canon, all of them with fellow horror author Brian Keene. Gonzalez passed away in 2014. Mark Williams died in 1998, a year before Clickers saw print.

 

                I never even mentioned the Lovecrafty stuff! Dig in! There’s more than just stinging crabs on the menu!

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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Mastodon By Steve Stred

 

Mastodon
By Steve Stred
2022 Black Void Publishing
Paperback, 254 pages including Afterword and Writing Playlist!

                Seventeen years to the day of his mother’s disappearance, Tyler’s father’s plane goes down in the exact same spot of Canadian wilderness where Mom vanished. That leaves our 17-year-old hero to head out to search for his dad, although the area is restricted. Military owned. Off limits. Verboten. But thanks to years of hiking and survival lessons with his Pop, Tyler is ready to break the rules and go off to search for his parents. If the number of years sound similar to you, that’s right. Tyler has never seen his mother.

                Once Tyler is past the perimeter of the restricted area, the book alternates between his survivalist skills, his stealth, and his fears. It turns out the area is not safe at all. There are strange beasties afoot in the woods. With the help of a Mountie who is on a similar mission to get to the facility deep within the woods, Tyler discovers a military/ scientific conspiracy that could end his life if he gets too close.

                I came to this book as a creature-feature recommendation from the good ol’ Books of Horror Facebook page. It isn’t something I would ever have discovered on my own, and I enjoyed it, so… thank you. The tension stays high throughout the journey through the woods and gets notched up even higher as Tyler nears his goal. The creatures in this feature are many, with the scientists playing Dr. Moreau and creating hybrid, mutated monsters that now fill the woods.

                Stred is a fine writer and keeps the pages turning at a rapid pace. My only gripe would be that it is very much a boy’s book… a son searching for his father. There isn’t much estrogen in the story. If I had had a stronger relationship with my own father, perhaps it would have resonated with me more. Shit, if my father went down, I’d just say, “oh well… bummer” and move on.

                All in all, this is a fun book that hits a lot of the right notes. I’ll check out more of this author. I like his style.

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