Killer By Peter Tonkin

 

Killer
By Peter Tonkin
1975 Signet
Paperback, 244 pages

 

                Jaws with a Killer Whale? Sort of. This gets big kudos from a lot of nature-strikes-back fans for being super gory, so I made it a point to move this towards the top of my To-Be-Read pile. Unfortunately, I wasn’t as taken by it as some folks have been. It’s good, but it’s first and foremost an adventure story and is pretty light on the red stuff, if you ask me.

 

                After a plane crash, the passengers find themselves stranded on a huge ice floe with only the contents of the cargo hold to keep them going. Luckily, there are tents, food, and everything you might need. Except it is in the Antarctic and it is cold as fuck. Luckily, two of the passengers are handy at cold survival, having endured it before. But all of the training in the world could not prepare them for what was to come. Not only is there a pod of Killer Whales with a government-trained leader, but they have to survive Polar Bear attacks, Walruses, an ever melting and dwindling ice floe, blizzards, and each other.

 

                Tonkin gets into it, throwing all kinds of shit at our cast of characters and, for a while, it is pretty exciting. The characters, for the most part, are well-defined and you’ll pick a favorite, depending on your own personality. Unfortunately, the woman who is introduced as our main character (or so I thought) turns out to be ineffective at anything but making coffee, despite being a brilliant post-grad botanist. Oh, and she’s beautiful, of course, so some of the lads on the floe can fantasize and objectify her. Yawn. She is there to work with her usually absent father and most of the other men involved work for him.

 

                The kills by marine mammals are few and far between, I’m sorry to say. In fact, a huge pack of fleeing Walruses fair far worse than our rag-tag team of survivors. The animal-on-animal violence is far more prevalent than the couple of instances of animal-on-human violence. Yes, the survivors are in deep shit and yes, there are some Killer Whales around bopping and cracking their floe, but I almost saw them as an afterthought. I wish the novel had been as good as Ken Barr’s cover art. I have to admit that the story got pretty dull for me by the end.

 

                This is Peter Tonkin’s first novel. He has gone on to become an extremely prolific best-selling author, working predominately in the thriller genre. Killer has been reissued (with the original cover art!) by Valancourt Books under the Paperbacks from Hell banner.

Full Brutal By Kristopher Triana

 

Full Brutal
By Kristopher Triana
2018 Grindhouse Press
Paperback, 256 pages

 

                I consider Kristopher Triana to be one of the Big 3 Splatterpunk authors currently at the top of their game, alongside Aron Beauregard and Daniel Volpe. Those three get consistently high ratings in book love and book hate, happy readers and disgusted readers, and mentions within the horror book community. This was my first Triana offering.

 

                Kim White is a cheerleader, a popular, pretty girl, an excellent student, and a bored virgin. At 16, she has it all; money, looks, popularity, a trusting but often absent father, and smarts. When her best friend tells her that losing her virginity was “life-changing”, Kim sets in motion a plan to change her own life. To do the deed, she chooses one of her teachers. Y’see, the boys her own age are drips and the teacher, well, he could give her so much more. And we’re not talking just sex.

 

                She not only successfully seduces the teacher, but she slowly and incrementally breaks him down, threatening him and making him fuck her again, abusing him to make him wish he had never seen her. In an act of extreme cruelty, she also befriends his daughter Caitlin, who is a grade behind her in school. Getting in tight with his family, she tutors the gullible girl to be a cheerleader and gains the youngsters trust completely. Then, she starts work on destroying Caitlin, little by little. Kim doesn’t give a shit. About anything, not even herself. She’s bored and wants to die. Perhaps that is where I related to her so much.

 

                Unbelievably, I was laughing while enjoying the total decimation of the family at Kim’s sadistic hands. She was just so devious and cruel. Poor little Caitlin, her life was falling apart. Mr. Blakeley’s eventual death (Kim did it) seals the deal and Caitlin eventually succumbs herself. Man, that was some rough stuff. But that’s just the first half of the book.

 

                In all honesty, if the book ended right there, it would have been one of my favorites of the year, anyway. The second half is fun, but in my opinion, unnecessary. What could Kim possibly do to make herself even more of a beast. The second half concerns what she does to control the little fuck-demon in her belly. Yup. Ol’ Mr. Blakely knocked her up and her attempts to miscarry were a failure. Human flesh seems to satisfy the little mistake. So, the second half is full of gore and mayhem.

 

                The second half is fun but, like I said, if the book ended after the first half, it would have been a very powerful story of torment and sadism. I look at the second part as kind of a sequel to the first part. At any rate, I give this one my highest marks and I’ll always feel that Kim spoke for me, even if just a little bit.

Stage Fright By Garrett Boatman

 

Stage Fright
By Garrett Boatman
1988 New American Library
Paperback, 381 pages

                I know, I know… this one is way thicker than I tend to indulge in, but it piqued my interest, so I went for it. It’s a bit of a science-fiction story because it takes place in the not-too-distant future and features technology that doesn’t really exist. But Boatman says just enough and little enough to make the science work if you can just go with it, and it’s pretty rewarding if you do.

                There is a new way to be entertained… dreamies. Like the talkies when they took over silent pictures, dreamies are the next level of the theater-going experience. The dreamatron records the artist’s thoughts or dreams, stores them, and plays them back so an audience can experience them. The absolute king of the medium is Izzy Stark, whose horror work has made him rich and famous. But he needs to push the envelope even further. He discovers the drug Taraxein (a real thing, I learned!) which is made from the blood of schizophrenics. This, obviously, takes Stark’s dreams to the next level. And things start materializing without the need of the dreamatron; he can make his thoughts into matter. He can even take your fears and play on them.

                The book revolves around Stark, his girlfriend, his neighbors, members of his fan-club and his high-school chum/ biographer. He drags everyone into his world of nightmares, and nobody is safe. His fans are getting pumped up for the upcoming concert where he will reveal his new material to a live audience, at least to those who haven’t already fallen prey to Izzy’s murderous whims.

                This book is really nothing like I expected. I mean, the cover is of a skeleton playing a keytar! I thought it would be a silly synth-rock band horror tale, but it is so much more. Boatman tells a solid tale, if you’re willing to go along with the ride, and he is a talented writer. Not only can he write dream sequences that actually feel like dreams, but he has a way with words, too: after coming down from the drug, Stark feels like this; “… his head still ballooned, his skin crawled, a bloated nausea writhed eellike in his stomach.” That’s good stuff.

                I enjoyed the book, but it did get a bit overlong. You wait and wait for the big concert and once it gets there, I was waiting and waiting for it to end. Some of Stark’s images got a little silly; a penknife turning into a big barbarian sword… not my cuppa tea. Despite what I consider a bit of a misfire at the climax, the book kept me interested during its long page count and I have no trouble recommending it. Many of the dreamie vignettes are pretty damn cool. It has been reprinted by Valencourt as part of the Paperbacks from Hell collection and they kept the nifty original keytar cover.

The Medusa Horror by Drew Lamark

 

The Medusa Horror
by Drew Lamark
1983 Futura
paperback, 206 pages

 

                I’d read Drew Lamark’s The Snake Orchards (mini-reviewed back in Midnight #4, July 2019) a few  years ago and enjoyed it so I was pretty psyched when I saw that he’d also written a jellyfish horror book, I grabbed it right away. This one is nowhere near as enjoyable, but it has jellyfish killing people, so it can’t be all bad.

 

                A rich dude puts together an expedition on his yacht to go search for a sunken ship. Many unlovable, nasty people are among his friends. Sylvia is invited to do catering on the two week journey, even though it means having to miss a visit from her military fiancé, who she’s not really sure about anyway. In the way of the sunken ship, its treasure, the island it is near, and the yacht, lies a thick blanket of Portuguese Man o’ war, miles wide and deadly as fuck.

 

                Sounds pretty great, doesn’t it? What has Sylvia got herself into? Well, all of the characters are such shitheads, you really hope the jellyfish sting everyone to death quickly. Two yachts worth of rich, arrogant douchebags can’t die quickly enough. One boat goes down, some people die and it’s down to one boat and a handful of people… and still I didn’t care.

 

                The thing is, the book goes along at such an even keel that there are no ups and downs, no suspense. Yes, there are some nice grisly jelly-deaths but the characters, who are fleshed out as much as is needed, aren’t even interesting as fodder. Sylvia isn’t even such a great person. And, she gets fooled into having sex with one of the crewmen that she (and the reader) had grown to trust. Pretty fucking slimy, Charles.

 

                Drew Lamark is one of many pseudonyms for Drew Launay. Under the name Andrew Laurance, he wrote a number of occult thriller novels (Ouija, Catacomb), so along with The Snake Orchards (the only other book using the Lamark surname), he has plenty of horror cred, but this one just dragged on a bit for me.

 

                Groovy cover on the Futura paperback, though; a nick from the poster art from the film Nightmare (in a Damaged Brain) (1981).

Playmates By Andrew Neiderman

 

Playmates
By Andrew Neiderman
1987 Berkley
Paperback, 312 pages

 

    Stacey and her daughter Tami are driving through New York State to her husband David, who is working on a project near the Catskills. The planned vacation disappears when Stacy takes a shortcut and the car breaks down, forcing them to seek help from a nearby farmhouse. The residents of the house are nuts and they abduct the mother and child, starting off 312 pages of grueling, nail-biting, frustrating suspense.

 

    That is literally the prologue. This book throws you right into turmoil in the opening pages and it doesn’t let up until the very end. Of course, David goes to search for his family, and he has enlisted the help of “Chicky” Ross, a quirky, local detective. The Thompson family in the secluded house are a real treat, with papa Gerald, insane mom Irene and the cruel daughter Shirley. They torture the mother and daughter relentlessly. You see Irene thinks they are two other people, a mother and daughter that they had disposed of a few years prior.

 

    The book gives us plenty of moments of wincing and squirming as well as a few genuine chills. This is how a “held captive” book should work, unlike Stephen King’s shit-tastic, bloated Gerald’s Game which made me wish I had never started it. This is a page-turner that never lets up on the tension and never lets you put down your guard. The characters are well defined with revealing background stories, except for Irene, but the lack of backstory works in her case, as she is just bat-shit crazy.

 

    Neiderman wrote several quality horror books, in particular Pin, which was made into a movie in 1988. Around the time he wrote Playmates, he started ghost-writing for V.C. Andrews after her death and has done so for over three decades. He is the master of writing fucked-up families, and they don’t come much more fucked up than the Thompsons. This Berkley edition has a nice, embossed Richard Newton cover, though you should also keep an eye out for the Time-Warner UK version. The book was made into a movie in 1995 called The Maddening starring Burt Reynolds and Angie Dickinson and there is a tie-in edition for that as well.

Jill By Thomas St. Martin

Jill
By Thomas St. Martin
1979 Dell
Paperback, 271 pages

                I stepped out of my usual comfort zone for this one but I do love women-killing-men stories a lot, too. This book is really more of a whodunnit/ thriller than pure horror but I can heartily recommend it to genre fans. It delivers a good story and plenty of gruesome thrills.

 

                Psychiatrist Kelly Cohen receives a package in the mail containing a threatening note from “Jill”. And a real shrunken head. That explains what happened to the head of a murder victim the previous night. More murders occur, and more heads and threats get mailed to Dr. Cohen. It seems the dates of the murders match the dates of Jack the Ripper's murders back in 1888. “Jill” is no mere coincidence… this is a well thought out,  psychotic plan.

 

                The tale moves at a good speed because it’s obvious that Cohen will be Jill’s grand finale and there’s only about a month to solve the case if the murder date is going to match the Ripper’s again. The list of suspects is small but each character is fully developed and possibilities are painted into some of the characters. A dense backstory of one of Cohen’s former patients that he eventually “cured” is told in long flashbacks that are tragic, but exciting in terms of storytelling.

 

                Some bloodshed, a lot of sex (some of it uncomfortable), some misogyny (all of it uncomfortable), and interesting policework all hold this well-told story together. Just exactly who author Thomas St. Martin might be is as much of a mystery as who Jill is. St. Martin has no other books to his credit and the name is probably a pseudonym. The answer to this mystery is anybody’s guess but the answer to the question “whodunnit” in Jill is satisfying if not entirely surprising. (I looked past the red herrings and “got it” eventually, before the cops did!)

Infested By C.M. Forest

 

Infested
By C.M. Forest
2022 Eerie River Publishing
Paperback, 261 pages

 

    
            A new one that caught my eye. It looked like a bugs on the rampage type of thing, but it really isn’t that at all. It is much, much more for better or worse. I’m on the side of better.

            Olivia wakes up in her fancy, new high-rise apartment alone in a pool of her own puke and with the mother of all hangovers. Her husband is gone, the power is off and there’s a massive storm raging outside. Even worse, her neighbors are all either maimed and dying or violent lunatics trying to beat her to death. The men in the building have been taken over by parasites that look like giant earwigs and all they want to do is kill. Olivia is in deep shit.

 

               The first few chapters of this had me nervous that I was in for another Gerald’s Game, Stephen King’s shit-tastic bore fest, but as Olivia ventured out into the ruckus that was taking place in her building, it definitely eased my worries. Claustrophobic, yes but boring, no. Her search for her husband puts her in harm’s way and she has to mature into a self-reliant hero in short time, a task she isn’t sure she is up to. As the mystery unravels, she learns that there is a hell of a lot more going on in the high-rise than any of us could have imagined.

            This is a very nicely structured story, revealing just enough throughout the 54 short chapters to keep you reading and trying to figure out the big story along with Olivia. It does slog in some spots, but there is a lot to uncover and there’s always enough gore and violence, as well as stalking bug-zombies right around the corner to keep pushing you on. Betrayal, conspiracy theories and an ancient cult all work their way into the mix. The overall concept slides into science-fiction territory by the time we all know what’s going on, but it is a satisfying narrative in spite of (because of?) that. Hey, I’m a horror geek, not a sci-fi nerd. But make no mistake. This is a horror novel.

            This is Forest’s first novel and I’d say that he’s off to an auspicious start. This is an intriguing, well-told, exciting page-turner that more than delivers the goods; not as an animals-attack book, like I’d first expected, but as a tale of survival against interminable odds. Olivia is a believable character; she is very well written despite Forest’s gender! Give this one a read and wait with me for Forest’s next novel. He’s one to keep an eye on.