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.

Savaged By Victoria Burgoyne

 

Savaged
By Victoria Burgoyne
1980 Futura
Paperback, 187 pages

 

What? London is besieged by the threat of rabies? Again? Why do I keep reading these books? The same story over and over. Why? Because I fucking love them, that’s why! And this time it’s hyenas!

A sick little girl oh-so-wishes she could have a laughing dog like in the “Hey, Diddle, Diddle” nursery rhyme. Her dad, the genius father-of-the-year, asks his brother, a smuggler, to procure a hyena. The brother gets a tame one from an acquaintance’s small circus, except the hyena has given birth to twins, who must also go. So, with three predatory carnivores in tow, the uncle heads back to London on a dangerous, rainy night. Naturally, he crashes on the way, losing the twins.

The sick little girl loves her snuggly new friend, who accidentally scratches her, but the “dog” licks the wound to care for it. Meanwhile, some animals have been found slaughtered and soon, good ol’ humanity is at risk as well. Y’see, rabies has been found in some of the victims. Enter veterinarian Mike, who gets put in charge of keeping London safe.

Sure, this is a very familiar story, but Burgoyne keeps things moving at a fast pace, bouncing from place to place and incident to incident as the hunt for the twins, and later the also-rabid mom, goes on relentlessly.  The gore is quite fun, the pathos is heavy, and it’s always fun to read about the effects of rabies on the human body. The hyenas, laughing in the foggy night, provide a vivid and sometimes creepy image.

One strange thing… there are three pages concerning a break-in at a jewelry store and the thieves escape through the twists and turns of London. It serves absolutely no purpose for the rest of the novel and seems to exist only to show the author’s knowledge of the streets of the city.

But I have no complaints about Burgoyne’s writing. I mean, “…he lifted the loose, slimy sinews that dangled higgledy-piggledy over the shin bone like an upturned dish of offal and sliced through the greasy mass.” Nice! This is apparently her only novel and it’s a pretty good one. She is better known as an actress and appeared in the film Death Ship (1980, the year this book was published) and some Dr. Who stuff. So, while no new ground was broken with Savaged, I enjoyed watching London fall into a preventable panic once again.

Did the sick little girl get rabies? I ain’t tellin’!

The Mad Death By Nigel Slater

The Mad Death
By Nigel Slater
1983 Granada
Paperback, 256 pages

Rabies in Britain? Not again! Remember David Anne’s Rabid (reviewed in Midnight Magazine #4)? Remember Jack Ramsey’s The Rage? Yes, it had been done before (both aforementioned books were published in 1977) but like a moth to a flame, I keep coming back for more.

 

This one starts with a cat, then a fox, then...a possible epidemic. Our hero, Viv Tait, is a veterinarian with a bad attitude. It seems that he likes animals a lot more than humans. In the scene where we meet him, he is wearing a “Gerbils Role OK” T-shirt. He is short tempered, straight talking with no filter, and dour. He is an asshole. I immediately related to him. Against his will, he is made the head honcho in the war against rabies, entrusted to save Britain from the encroaching epidemic. His assistant is a smart and crafty woman named Penny, who he considers more worthy than her name, so he calls her Tuppence, a moniker that sticks for the rest of the novel. They have a complicated relationship that is aggravating and rewarding at the same time.

 

Despite the cover and its back cover blurbs (“When you go down to the woods, pray that the Mad Death is more than a snarl away”), this is much more of a thriller than a horror story. The gory details and the infected humans are few, but the dire circumstances and the well-formed characters keep the pages turning. After a lull in the middle, I was back at it, frenziedly reading to get to the end, which admittedly was weak. Intentionally. Because, as we have all learned from our own pandemic, nothing ever really changes in this world.

 

This was adapted for a BBC TV mini-series that aired the same year the book was released. As it started filming in 1981, one wonders if the book, its source material, was held back to coincide with the now well-remembered TV show airing. At any rate, the Granada book has lovely cover illustration by John Knights (credited on the back cover!) done in a medium I cannot readily identify.