The Curse of Loch Ness By Peter Tremayne

The Curse of Loch Ness
By Peter Tremayne
1979 Sphere
Paperback, 230 pages

                The horror novels of Peter Tremayne (nee Peter Berresford Ellis) are really hit or miss with me. Some have been a real chore to get through (Kiss of the Cobra, Zombie) while some have been excellent and fun reads (Swamp, Snowbeast). With The Curse of Loch Ness, I have finally found my (new) favorite, an exciting tale of family curses, back-stabbing locals and a big lake monster that is more than meets the eye.

 

                Being the last remaining member of her family, Jeannie Millbuie inherits the old family castle situated overlooking Loch Ness. It’s not an entirely welcoming old pile of stones; there are weird sounds, endless shadowy corridors and the weird caretaker Mrs. Murdo obviously hates her. Most of the old-timey locals seem to have ulterior motives when it comes to Jeannie’s presence, while others just tell her to leave. Just what is going on in Balmacaan Castle?

 

                The tale is told in two parts. The first is Jeannie’s arrival, her exploration of the castle and the area and then, her abduction. The second part involves her boyfriend Tim, who was summoned to meet her in Inverness but now she has disappeared. Granted, things slowed down a tad with the start of the second part. The first section has you guessing and wondering what the curse is, the secret is, then it backtracks while Tim catches up. But he does so quickly enough and the story charges forward.

 

                The monster? Yeah, he’s in there but he’s unlike any theory of the Loch Ness Monster that you’ve ever heard of. First off, in the chapters from the monster’s own point of view, he is referred to as the intelligence. No dumb dinosaur here, though he is a leftover from prehistoric bloodlines. He is the single most sympathetic character in the book, though Jeannie, Tim, and a handful of other interesting humans are also engaging.

 

                Tremayne’s usual flaw of over-explaining and too much exposition are kept in check this time by having the history of the area and the curse told by a few different people at different times. While one of the baddies is explaining it to Jeannie, the narrative is broken up with her being bored and disinterested in the history lesson. Kind of how I felt reading some of the above-mentioned novels. But this one moves quickly and for the most part kept my interest throughout, making for a very satisfying read. The cover art (some say by Terry Oakes, and I can’t see anything to make me disagree) alone is worth the price of admission.

Snowman By Norman Bogner

Snowman

By Norman Bogner

1979 New English Library
Paperback, 160 pages

                Who doesn’t like a good Yeti book, anyway? Especially when the Yeti is an invincible super monster who can travel from continent to continent and live for thousands of years! Well, that’s the Yeti you get in this book.

                Snowman starts out as a ripping horror tale, with the Yeti settling into the California Mountains above a new, exclusive ski resort. Gory killings happen. It seems like the whole thing was going to be a satisfying “set ‘em up, knock ‘em down” slaughterfest, but the resort’s money men think pretty quickly, and the middle of the book is more about putting a group of Yeti hunters together than about bloodshed. Daniel Bradford, the leader, who faced the Yeti in the Himalayas and (barely) survived, builds his dream team and since money is not an issue, equips them with some ass-kicking hardware.

                So, yeah, the book went from horror to high adventure half way through, but with well rounded, if familiar characters (Bradford’s love-interest/ liaison to the resort, the tenacious reporter, etc.) and an interesting monster, it’s all good. I suggest saving this book for the warmer weather because when the crew is up in the icy, thin air on the mountain, freezing their asses off, you feel it!

                This book was first published in 1978 by Dell Books but, like me, you should hold out until you find the New English Library edition with the nifty cover monster cribbed from Terror in the Midnight Sun (Sweden, 1959) by David McCallister. Snowman is New York Times best-selling author Bogner’s only novel that could be considered horror and it’s pretty durn good.

    Snowman was reprinted in 2025 by Fathom Press with a beautiful new cover by Stephen Andrade.     

                                   

           Dull Books... err Dell Books, 1978                             Fathom Press, 2025. Cover art by
                                                                                                          Stephen Andrade

The Spirit By Thomas Page

 

The Spirit
By Thomas Page
1979 Hamlyn
Paperback, 252 pages

                We’ve got a Bigfoot novel here, ladies and gentlemen, and it’s a pretty good one. While it is far from perfect, it is satisfying, a quick read and it delivers the goods. I mean, it pretty much opens with a beheading!

                Two men are tracking Bigfoot across the country. One is John Moon, a Native American Vietnam vet in search of inner peace and to "learn his name", his place in life. Bigfoot is The Spirit that will show him the way. John Moon is pretty much bonkers, by the way. The other man is Raymond Jason, a moneybags adventurer whose prior expedition was marred by a lethal Bigfoot encounter. He seeks not only revenge, but to show the world that the monster exists. Raymond Jason is pretty much an asshole.

 

                Our two main characters travel state to state, even into British Columbia, tracking the beast. They finally get up close and personal with their quarry at a mountain in Washington state. Luckily for the reader there is a ski resort that has recently opened on Bigfoot’s home base.

 

                OK, I mean John Moon’s character isn’t exactly enlightened by today’s standards, but I wouldn’t call it completely un-PC. The fact that there is only one female character stands out more for me. Hey, it was the 70s; a grain of salt is often needed. But the story revolving around the two men and their searches is a tight thriller, full of action and I blew through it quickly after deciding (about 50 pages in) that it was pretty good. Some neat ideas about the origin of the Bigfoot species are offered up, as well.

 

                Page is no stranger to fantastic fiction, having written The Hephaestus Plague in 1973. You know, the one the movie Bug was based on with incendiary beetles? Based on that book and this one, he is OK by me. The Spirit has been re-released by Valancourt under Grady Hendrix’s Paperbacks from Hell banner, so it’s easy enough to find now. And as Hendrix says about The Spirit, it’s a rare Bigfoot novel with absolutely no Bigfoot rape scenes. Yay!

The Jersey Devil By Hunter Shea

 

The Jersey Devil
By Hunter Shea
Pinnacle Books, 2016
Paperback, 378 pages

                If I’m going to tackle a book that is 378 pages long, it has to be written by Hunter Shea. Only he can tell a story that long that will hold my intertest. No fluff, no filler; every word is essential and moves the tale along. And what a tale it is. Shea’s cryptozoological monster books are a treasure. He takes every known fact/ rumor about the mythical beasts and makes it an integral part of the story. I was prompted to research the Jersey Devil after finishing this book and yes… he nailed it. And improved on the legend.

 

                The Willet Family are a close-knit crew, and they have a history with the Devil. Ol’ Boompa, the gran’pa, had encountered it years ago and has had revenge burning in his veins ever since. With a spate of new Devil sightings, the family gets together with a shit-ton of firepower, and they head out to hunt. Naturally, they get a lot more than they bargained for.

 

                Rarely do I root for humans in a book like this, but Shea makes the Willet Family so damn likeable that you have to. The Devils, plural, yes- there are many, are formidable creatures but they aren’t infallible. But there are just so many. Throw in captive humans kept for breeding reasons, a rock concert, and innocent people stuck in a very bad place, and you have a page turner that moves very quickly and delivers the gory goods.

 

                I’ve said it before; Hunter Shea gets it. His name should always be mentioned when speaking of the greats of the genre that I love the most… nature-strikes-back. Guy N. Smith, James Herbert, Hunter Shea… he is among the elite.

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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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Swamp Monster Massacre By Hunter Shea

 

Swamp Monster Massacre
By Hunter Shea
2017 Severed Press
Paperback, 138 pages

After reading The Montauk Monster, I started looking up Hunter Shea books online to see what else I needed to read by him. A two-sentence review by “Nick” on Goodreads ("The fucking bigfoots were throwing alligators at them!" If that sentence makes you smile, then this book is for you.) had this in my Amazon basket before you could say Gator Bombs!

This book does exactly what is says on the tin; Swamp Apes in the Everglades attack a swamp-tour boat that was hijacked by an arms dealer and happens to run over a young Bigfoot in a crash. The airboat’s passengers are the characters, not much more than fodder, but we don’t ask for much; we just want the bloody massacre, and we get it.

Shea once again writes his own cryptozoological rules and gives a lot more Skunk Ape lore than was previously known. Their smell, their underwater prowess and hunting skills are given a great deal of detail and their hatred of the interlopers is well deserved.  With the short page count, I could barely put the book down, especially with Shea’s propensity for ending chapters like “And what happened next would change everything...” I mean, you just have to go on and keep reading!

Hunter Shea gets it. Nature strikes back in a bloody tornado of body parts. I will keep reading his output. He writes for me.

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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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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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Loch Ness Revenge By Hunter Shea

 

Loch Ness Revenge
By Hunter Shea
2016 Severed Press
Paperback, 141 pages
 

            I love Hunter Shea. I love cryptozoology, monsters, animals killing humans and gore. This is the medium in which Shea works and he excels at it. Of course, I just had to read what he does with ol’ Nessie!

In their childhood, twins Natalie and Austin saw their parents eaten by the Loch Ness Monster. Natalie had made it her life’s mission to find the monster and avenge her parents. Two decades after the incident, she is primed and ready and Austin joins her to mount a war against the lake creature.

This one isn’t as brutal and gory as some of Shea’s other books, but the action and emotions are always blazing like a flamethrower. The characters (the twins, Austin’s pal Heinrik, and monster-hunter/ videographer Rob) are all well thought out and loveable, surprising for such a short book. The banter between the twins is believable and funny. Once again, Shea gives us a strong and capable woman in Natalie, a welcome character who was all but absent in the 80s pulp novels he must love. The story is told in first person by Natalie.

I don’t ask for a lot in a book. Entertain me, thrill me, scare me or make me laugh. That’s what will make me feel like my time was well spent. Hunter Shae usually delivers all four. My time was well spent with Loch Ness Revenge.

This review originally appeared in Midnight Magazine #9, March, 2022.

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The Montauk Monster By Hunter Shea

 

The Montauk Monster
By Hunter Shea
2014 Pinnacle Books
Paperback, 347 pages

 

I admit it. I’m stuck-up. I don’t give new things a chance. Any horror novel written after 1990 surely sucks. But while perusing the books at Savers recently, this one caught my eye. Despite being newer (2014) and twice as thick as I like to read, the back cover hype made me give it a chance. A gory monster book for $3; it was worth a shot.

Remember when the mangy, hairless raccoon carcass washed up in Montauk, NY and a new cryptozoological hero was born? Well, Shea took that sensational (if fleeting) story and fleshed it out as reality and the results are phenomenal. Indescribable monsters are flooding into Long Island and shredding everyone in sight. Where do they come from and how do you stop them?

Shea gets it. He knows how to write a nature-strikes-back/ bloody monster story and this one is right up there with the best of this beloved genre. All of my favorite tropes are present: introducing characters that are mere monster fodder, gratuitous gore and sex, snarling, unstoppable monsters and the death of characters that you thought would live. One welcome update to the model that I love so much is an ass-kicking, disabled woman; someone that Guy N. Smith would never have had the presence of mind include in a story.

After enjoying this one as much as I did, I looked up Shea’s other titles and it seems that the cryptozoology monsters are his thing. I look forward to reading more of his work, especially his Skunk Ape novel, which clocks in at well under 200 pages. The Montauk Monster runs a bit long because plenty of explanation is needed for the beasts’ existence, but it still moves quickly, and I couldn’t be happier with my $3 purchase.

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

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