By David Case
1980 Belmont Tower
Paperback, 240 pages
That sounds like some kick-ass
ice cream! But no, it’s David Case’s second horror novel, written ten years
after his first, Fengriffin: A Chilling Tale. That book was made into a
great Amicus film, And Now the Screaming Starts (Roy Ward Baker, 1973)
starring Peter Cushing. I haven’t yet read that book, but it has plenty of
positive online reviews. I wonder what happened during those ten years to make
the quality of Case’s writing dip so deep.
There is a string of murders in
Toronto. The victims are bitten and ripped up but not eaten. Wolf and human
saliva are found in the wounds. Eyewitness accounts are uneven. A huge man, not
a man at all, a hulking hairy humanoid. It sure sounds like a werewolf to me.
Detectives Greene and the laughably virile and stuck-up La Roche are on the
case. Greene sees Cronski, an expert on wolves, who tells him it is not
a werewolf, but it might be a wolfman.
Meanwhile, American Harland
James is in Toronto to visit his draft-dodging son Paul, hoping to rekindle
their relationship. Paul was having girl trouble with his live-in girlfriend
Sheila. She is a free-thinking hippy. In 1980. There are a number of hippies in
this book. In 1980. OK. Anyway, the father and son hang out and things turn
worse when Sheila becomes a victim of the killer.
The book has a handful of side
characters who are far more interesting than the leads. Barfly Wash, the ex-boxer,
who is called the N-word later in the book for absolutely no story-telling
reason, Ike, the legless eyewitness, Gus the bartender and Cronski, the only
female with a brain in the book. In fact, it became quite obvious that Case is
not a fan of women. La Roche’s wife is a childish idiot and the victims are all
boneheaded tarts or prostitutes. Even a female cop on duty (undercover as a
hippy…) thinks she might have rather been a whore or go-go girl. That shit makes
me bristle. Like a wolfman.
More because of the fact that
this was a Belmont Tower release than any ineptitude on the author’s part,
there are dozens of misspellings and wrong words throughout the text.
Proof-read much? Evidently, in the recent Valencourt reprint, the errors are
still present. I find when editing is this poor, it is part of the fun of old,
shitty books. So, yes… I did read this quickly despite its flaws, and there are
many. As a horror book it fails and as a detective novel, it’s pretty darn easy
to know whodunnit early on. But the book has a lovely R.S. Brown cover painting
of Lon Chaney Jr., and you do get this bit of dialog…
“She was lying in a pile of
cheese sandwiches, Steve. Goddamn cheese sandwiches.”