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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Night Killers By Richard Lewis

 

Night Killers
By Richard Lewis
1983 Hamlyn
Paperback, 208 pages

                I love Richard Lewis. He never lets me down. He jumped on the nature-strikes-back bandwagon in the late 1970s and knocked out a bunch of excellent horror novels. He wrote TV and movie tie-ins under his real name Alan Radnor, but his horror books as Richard Lewis vault him deep into my heart, right there alongside Guy N. Smith.

 

                Night Killers is a gruesome novel about cockroaches that develop a taste for human flesh. The origin of their dietary change opens the book in very gruesome fashion, with a serial killer’s poor disposal of a victim’s body. This whole opening is a grueling, gory, and exciting scene and eventually leads us to another excellent horror set piece. It’s not until 30 pages in that we meet our main characters. Like most of the great eco-horror novels, Lewis sets ‘em up and knocks ‘em down… the deaths are gruesome and harrowing. Much to my delight, there is a scene with a toddler… no, he wouldn’t go there… Yes. Yes, he did. I am a big fan of “nothing is sacred” horror.

 

                Taking place in a seedy section of London, Sally is in charge of Unity House, a hostel for alcoholics and vagrants; a place for them to stay and be safe. Her boyfriend David, a reporter (I know, an oft used trope) might have stumbled on a big story here in the East End. Main characters or not, Lewis puts them through the paces, and you never know if they’re going to make it to the end or not. The book never lets up with grisly roach killings and claustrophobic situations of hopelessness. Except for a gratuitous rape scene (really, hadn’t she been through enough already?), I have no complaints at all about the savagery Lewis ladles on.

 

                While I enjoyed every moment of this book while reading it, perhaps it is telling that when I sat down to write this review a few weeks later, I didn’t remember it very well. I had to skim through and reread it a bit to remind myself what it was that I liked so much about it. Even though it evidently didn’t stick with me, I loved it as I read it and gleefully recommend it.

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Killstreme By Rayne Havok

 

Killstreme
By Rayne Havok
Self-published, 2020/21
Paperback, 80 pages

 

                This book (and author) came to my attention when I heard that Amazon had banned a few extreme horror books, this one included. Naturally, I immediately wanted to support this book and author, so I put it on my wish-list and kept checking back to see if it was still “unavailable”. Eventually, sanity prevailed, and the book was again for sale on that billionaire’s website. I bought it.

 

                A slender volume, it is. Just over 70 pages of story, double-spaced; it would be about a 30-page story in a normal anthology. But that doesn’t bother me. I like ‘em short. And sweet. And violent. I’ll admit that got a little nervous when I started the story; as with many self-published efforts, a good proof-reading was needed. The first chapter is a mess of punctuation and sentence structure errors, but as the story went on, I either stopped noticing or they weren’t present.

 

                But that’s just the editor in me. Story-wise, this is loads of fun. A sick fuck gets a chance to make his own snuff film. He goes to a secluded film-site and begins his torture/ murder in the vilest ways imaginable. And then the tables turn…

 

                Havok gleefully describes painful torture on the male anatomy and I fucking love it. After so much misogyny in the genre, it’s nice to see uncompromising male genital torture. Read ‘em and weep, fellas. The extremity and over-the-top violence were obviously a lot of fun to write and it sure is fun to read.

 

                I will definitely look into her other work, but I will also hope that she hooks up with a worthwhile proofreader/ editor. Her great ideas deserve to be properly presented.

               

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Man-Eater By Ted Willis

 

Man-Eater
By Ted Willis
1976 Bantam
Paperback, 200 pages

 

This is a good one. More thriller than flat out horror, it delivers the gory goods while maintaining an exciting and compelling story. A washed-up animal trainer releases a pair of tigers into the English countryside and even though they had been raised in captivity, their survival instincts take over. Terror and mayhem ensue.

Willis fills the book with believable characters and even though they might seem cookie-cutter on paper (the tired detective, the eccentric sharp-shooter, socialite, etc.) they are brought to vivid life, and I totally bought it all. Best of all, when the story takes on the tigers’ point of view, it adds another layer of adventure and pathos, rather than falling into silliness like it might in a lesser writer’s hands. The book chugs along quickly and you embrace all of the characters involved, both human and feline.

Willis (eventually Lord Willis) never ventured any closer to the horror genre than he did with Man-Eater. A successful playwright, screenwriter and, especially, TV writer, he even wound up in the Guinness Book of World Records as world's most prolific writer for television. Man-Eater was made into a TV movie for CBS in 1978 called Maneaters Are Loose starring Tom Skerrit. In the film, the action moved from England to California, naturally.

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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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The Unholy By John Halkin

The Unholy

By John Halkin

1982 Hamlyn
Paperback, 158 pages

 

When I think of John Halkin, my mind goes immediately to his trio of Slither, Slime, and Squelch and, to a lesser extent, Bloodworm. All worthwhile reads, especially Slither which is a masterpiece of the genre. Little did I know that right after that book, he’d written another horror novel; not about slimy, killer worms, but about a mummified, severed arm that crawls to life, attaches itself to poor, unfortunate victims and possesses the fuck out of them.

 

It’s the ol’ religious artifact thing again, but the possession angle is new and modern-day Paris is fucked. The surprisingly spry, lifeless arm squeezes its victim at the elbow, hard enough to pop it off, then grafts itself on, taking over the mind and body of the new host. Pages and pages of bloody killing ensues. Set ‘em up and knock ‘em down. Just how I like my 80’s pulp horror.

 

At 158 pages, the book has no chance to get boring. The pace is rapid, the characters are good enough to hold your interest and the gore is plentiful. The ending is a kind of abrupt and there’s a bit more religion than I usually go for (being a religious relic, the arm needs to be explained a little bit, I guess) but I wholeheartedly recommend this one for fans of grisly horror paperbacks.

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Killer Pack By Albert Herbert and Roger Myers

 

Killer Pack
By Albert Herbert and Roger Myers
1976 Manor Books
Paperback, 221 pages.

 

                “This book is really poorly written,” thought Mike as he read Killer Pack.

 

                It really is. It took two authors to write this one and they obviously didn’t have the heart to tell each other that neither one of them could actually write. One of the most jarring things for me was the endless quotation marks for inner thoughts. I was all like, who are they talking to? Oh… it’s a thought. Now, that’s not technically a writing error but it is endless and really could (should) have been done differently. Choppy sentences abound, as well. A sentence for every action… He got into the car. He started the car. He drove the car to the store. He got out of the car. He chose a shopping cart. He went into the store. He selected his groceries. He went to the checkout. The total for his groceries was $20. (That’s only a slight exaggeration.)

 

                OK, this book came out the same year as David Fishers’ infinitely superior The Pack and shares the springboard of vacationers getting dogs for the summer, then abandoning them when vacation is over. That’s some sick shit, but it makes for some good killer dogs.

 

                A vacation town in Long Island is having a problem with a pack of rogue dogs. People are getting killed. What is everybody going to do about it? That is the crux of this story; not the killer dogs but what the town officials are planning to do about it. Town Supervisor Diana Wentworth is tough as nails and won’t budge on her No Leash Law. An up-and-coming candidate for her job wants to enforce one. (He’d get my vote… leash your dogs in parks, asshole.) Obviously, as attacks happen, Ms. Wentworth’s platform goes to shit.

 

                Yep, that’s pretty much what the book is about. The dogs become secondary. But despite the absolutely abysmal writing and lackluster action scenes, it’s really fairly enjoyable. It was good to see a strong, if fallible, woman in a position of power and thoughtfully constructed gay characters. Both of those things are rare in Seventies pulp horror novels.

 

                I almost want to read this duo’s other book The Last Survivor just to see if it’s as badly written. I would also probably read Myers’ solo release from 2010, Werewolf: A Gay Romp. Just because.

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