Thirst II: The Plague By Guy N. Smith

Thirst II: The Plague
By Guy N. Smith
1987 New English Library
Paperback, 160 pages

 
                                              

    Five years after the events that occurred in Thirst (NEL, 1980), the small town of Bryn Gawr is experiencing a bit of déjà vu. I mean, their reservoir that was the site of a toxic weedkiller spill has been cleaned up and declared safe. That horror is but a distant memory. But with a few of the town’s inhabitants going crazy and breaking out with weeping pustules on their skin, it sure looks like the Thirst is back. But how?

    This sequel takes place over just a couple of days, during a massive snow storm that cripples the town. This is where GNS sets up the book’s greatest terrors: people are in total isolation with no way of getting help when the infected maniacs pay a visit. Worst of all is the schoolmaster Sonia, a pretty young woman who is accosted by three former students who strip and bind her. Luckily, they forget to actually rape her, but she is bound and naked in the cold, empty, dark schoolhouse. Chilling in many ways.

    This thin tome is a hoot, and it moves at a break-neck speed, setting ‘em up and knocking ‘em down. You have a crazy cat lady, infected cats and dogs, a bar filled with thirsty, infected maniacs, a busybody who brings horror upon herself and people actually coughing up lungs. For real. The snowstorm and isolation is very effectively written, so much so that as I read it (on a warm Halloween), I actually thought it was snowing out when I looked up from the book. The Master really pulled me in to this one.

    There are rough parts (Sonia’s horrific piece, for sure) and some animal violence but it is all in good pulpy fun, if not good taste, and it disturbs the reader just the right amount. As usual, we get an unlikely romance blooming out of nowhere amidst the violence, but Smith at least reveals that Sonia and Deputy Tony Crane have had undeclared crushes on each other for a while.

    What can I say? This is yet another completely enjoyable, highly recommended bit of horror fiction from my favorite author. Disgusting, full of various bodily fluids, violent and hopeless: a good way to spend a few nights of reading happiness.

Plasmid By Jo Gannon and Robert Knight

Plasmid
By Jo Gannon and Robert Knight
1980 Star
Paperback, 191 pages
                                             

                                                

    First, let’s get it straight. This was originally written as a screenplay by Jo Gannon. Evidently, it didn’t get picked up for a movie, and this book was written by Robert Knight based on Gannon’s screenplay. Surely the fun wordplay here and there are Knight’s, but the story is a good one and knowing it was written for the screen, it really makes me wish it had been made into a film! Sources say that Robert Knight is a pseudonym for Sci-Fi writer Christopher Evans, who wrote other tie-ins, so I’m inclined to believe it.

    Trouble is a’brewin’ at the Fairfield Institute of Genetic Research in Oakhaven, somewhere in England. It seems a patient has killed a couple of doctors and escaped. The patient has chalk white skin and a taste for killing. This brings a lot of unwanted attention to the Institute, especially from Paula Scott, a rabid radio reporter who smells a cover-up. There’s a lot of shit going down and the formula that turned the escaped killer into a mutant is being protected by its shady creator. Meanwhile, everyone that the mutant infects goes plasmid as well. This sets up some fun gore sequences.

    It's great to have the main protagonist be a woman and Paula is no pushover at all. She is a strong ass-kicker who is braver and smarter than those she is up against. Even as a romance blooms between Paula and her boss, she is still a woman of her own means. What is it about crisis in 80s horror books that makes people need to fuck? Well, we get one fairly tasteful sex scene here but otherwise, it’s all business. Paula’s character is the most fully explored, best written in the book, a welcome change from the usual 80s misogyny.

    The last third of the book has the military bumbling their way to the rescue. Their cure might be worse than the plasmid mutants living in the sewer. They plan on pumping poison gas into those sewers, figuring everyone in the city will hear the Prime Minister’s speech telling them to seal up all cracks and holes. I tell you; the doctors and military and government are idiots. That seems to be the main thing Gannon’s script meant to say. Paula gets to tell off the PM nicely, too.

    This is a good, fast-moving and satisfying book, mostly a thriller with mutants. I enjoyed casting it and setting up the camera angles and making my own Plasmid movie. Like most Star books, this one has a cool cover, too.

Dew Claws By Stephen Gresham

Dew Claws
By Stephen Gresham
1986 Zebra
Paperback, 335 pages

    Let’s face it. I wanted this book for the cover. Even though my copy is tattered, a skeleton playing a banjo and wearing a to-the-side baseball cap is a fantastic and hilarious image. Thank you, Zebra. Thank you, artist (William Teason?). But will the book be any good?

    I admit that I almost didn’t make it at first. The lead character is a young boy named Johnny Ray. Strike one. Then, there is a lot of spelled out, thick Southern dialect. I don’t like trying to figure out what is being said. But at about 100 pages in, I realized that I was enjoying the book for what it is… a very well-written, quiet slice of folk horror.

    The afore-mentioned Johnny Ray is out in Night Horse Swamp with his uncle and brothers when everybody except JR gets sucked into the muck and disappear. Soon, he is being fostered by a couple (the Merseys) who operate a daycare, and they become a family. But behind the Mersey’s home lie some thick woods and the swamp. Johnny Ray and some of the other workers have seen things. Spirits, barely visible, and they want the children. JR (as Sam Mercy calls him, and so shall I) has seen his brothers among those cantankerous spirits. They are the Dew Claws, and they are to be feared.

    Gresham works up a nice story of the Dew Claws and lays the Southern Gothic atmosphere on thick. Most of the spelled-out dialect stops, except for the maid Melba, who is very difficult to decipher for my old, addled brain. If I’m being honest, the way the African Americans are depicted made me a little bit uncomfortable but there are some very likeable black characters, so I guess it’s all good. As JR starts to develop a Dew Claw of his own, he sets out seeking a cure and meets a slew of oddball characters who may or may not be able to help. The Chokers are a particular delight as they have an Eastern Indigo snake as a beloved family member named Day Lou. (There is, however, quite a lot of hunting and frog gigging that I could have done without. But I guess that’s a part of swamp living.)

    Not exactly in my wheelhouse of blood and guts or animals killing humans novels, but I’m glad I stuck with this one after all. What does that great cover have to do with anything? Not much. JR plays a banjo and wears a cap sometimes. Good enough for me.

The Undead By Guy N. Smith

The Undead
By Guy N. Smith
1983 New English Library
Paperback, 176 pages

 

                I felt some trepidation at the start of this; the set-up was exactly the same as his previous book The Lurkers. A man who strikes gold with his first novel moves his family to a remote area with xenophobic locals to write follow-up books, despite his wife hating the idea. It’s almost as if the Great Scribbler decided he had a better idea and wanted to reconstruct the same story. Luckily, my worries were unfounded. Yes, the initial set-up is the same but there is so much more going on that by the end, I’d forgotten about any similarities.

 

                This one has a wonderful back story about Bemorra, a recluse that was killing children in the town of Gabor (back in the olden days) and dumping their bodies into a quarry pool deep in Gabor Woods. He is caught and hung, and Gabor is forever cursed. In present time, Ron Halestrom moves to Gabor with his reluctant wife Marie to write more books. His first hit was based on the Bemorra legend so he figures the actual location would provide more inspiration. Soon, Marie’s deaf daughter Amanda was to join them.

 

                Throw in a caravan of gypsies, a group of city kids in a program to get them some fresh air, fights, pool ghosts and the hermit Beguildy, who seems an awful lot like Bemorra, and you’ve got quite the stew of confrontation, violence and horror. Deaf Amanda figures prominently in the action as well, with her psychic ties to the evil in the area. The fast-paced narrative keeps the multiple storylines moving at a good clip and the excitement never lets up.

 

                So, yes, there is a bit of The Lurkers in here, but I’d have to say it has much more in common with 1975’s The Sucking Pit. He would revisit some of the pool scenes from this book in the following year’s The Walking Dead, an official Sucking Pit sequel. Steven Crisp’s cover art really sets the tone for this one, with the floating partial-skeleton pool victims and our main villain-ghoul Bemorra. This one comes highly recommended.

 

                Originally published in GNS2: A Guy N. Smith Fanzine by Chris Elphick

Editions Fleuve Noir 1987

The Undead in French!

Transplant By Daniel Farson

Transplant
By Daniel Farson
1981 Hamlyn
Paperback, 190 pages
                                               
    OK, the characters are as follows… a loudmouth TV host who bullies his interviewees, a doctor who is a heart transplant specialist, a cemetery watchman named Tom, and an occultist who likes to fart around with black magic. The TV host, after a belligerent interview with the doctor, has a heart problem and needs a transplant. Tom is beaten nearly to death by the occultist for always spying on him and ratting him out. In the hospital, his body is unresponsive, so they use that heart to fix the TV host. Got that?
    
    So, the occultist (The Creep) does some voodoo magic on the now corpse of Tom and makes him come back to life to seek out the person who has his heart. OK, this sounds really good, doesn’t it? The problem is, once Tom is one of the walking dead, he’s pretty much just a normal guy seeking vengeance. He goes barhopping, drinks a lot of beer and for some reason, is really attractive to both men and women. He gets a lot of action.

    In other words, it gets really fucking stupid when it should have gotten really creepy and fun. There is some gore, but Tom just isn’t the scary zombie I was hoping for. The TV guy, Dick Manley (!), becomes a much less hateful character with the new heart and a possible poignant ending is set up but wasted.

    More interesting is the author himself. His granduncle (?) was Bram Stoker, he was a Jack the Ripper biographer, a pub owner, a hotshot journalist and TV interviewer (not unlike Manley) and documentary maker, covering topics that many others wouldn’t touch. He wrote about artists, cryptozoology, the bohemian lifestyle and penned a pair of horror novels, this one and Curse (Hamlyn, 1980). He was a very open homosexual in the 60s when it just wasn’t talked about. It’s fair to say that most of the characters in this book have a little bit of Farson in them, especially the pub-crawling zombie Tom. The Creep even has some of Farson’s books and Stoker memorabilia at his place.

    Overall, not horrible but I was sure disappointed after a spirited first two-thirds of the novel. But looking back at just how stupid it became, I’m thinking it is kind of endearing in a goofy sort of way. It’s obvious that Farson was having fun and knowing his real-life eccentricities shines a new light on the proceedings.

Toy Cemetery By William W. Johnstone

Toy Cemetery
By William W. Johnstone
1987 Zebra
Paperback, 412 pages

 
    Old Scratch is running rampant in a small town in the South and it’s up to a rough and tumble Viet Nam vet to stop the madness! It sounds like every other William W. Johnstone book doesn’t it? But wait, there is much more. So much more that I really have no idea where to begin. This is top shelf Johnstone kitchen-sink madness.

    New York divorcé Jay Clute (the war veteran) has inherited his aunt’s fortune down in Victory, Missouri and he and his 10-year-old daughter Kelly take a trip down to his hometown to settle his affairs. As memories flood him, the two notice lots of strange things going on, not the least of which is little dolls running around. They stay in town, meet up with Jay’s old friends and Kelly meets some local kids. But there is an evil grip on the town that has everyone acting strangely and weird creatures skulk in the shadows.

    I’ll let Deva, Jay’s high school sweetheart, and her sarcastic retort to Jay’s suggestion that it must be an explainable phenomenon reveal some of the weirdness… “Grown men and women are thrust into near-incestuous relationships with their kids; creatures roam the night; toys come alive; and the personalities of nearly everyone in town have been altered. Explainable phenomenon. Sure, Jay.” All this and more and yes, Johnstone goes there with a lot of incest, rape and pedophilia in this one.

    Truthfully, this is so chock-full of strangeness that it gets confusing but it’s all good because the gore splats freely and despite the cringey mean-spiritedness of some parts, there is no shortage of intentional humor. My favorite character is old man Milton, Jay’s next-door neighbor who rocks in his rocker, cheerfully calling Jay and his crew assholes every time he sees them. There is an explanation for everything, and it slowly unfolds during the course of this overstuffed tome but don’t worry about logic; this is Johnstone at the peak of his batshit craziness. Just go along for the ride and try to picture the author tapping away at the typewriter, chopping out this stream-of-consciousness prose, wondering himself where it’s all going to end up.

    Johnstone will never be mistaken for a great writer, but his work is fun as hell and this one is as over the top as it gets. And even though good ol’ God is mentioned a number of times, he doesn’t play a huge role in this novel. Thank Him for that!

Siege on Dome 17 By Nick Young

Siege on Dome 17
By Nick Young
2024 White Mountain Pub.
Paperback, 239 pages

    This is Young’s debut novel and it’s fair to say that he’s off to a fairly auspicious start. The many characters’ (some are super unsavory) actions all have an effect on each other in one way or another and the story is multi-faceted, but that’s not to say that Young doesn’t know what we’re here for. Gore and bodily fluids flow and splash aplenty. Blood, plasma, claret, urine, vomit, pus, jizz and entrails leave bodies in every chapter… and there are 41 chapters!

    Ten years have passed since the bombs dropped and the world is a dead, radiated desert and the surviving humans live in steel domes. Dome 17 may well be the last dome with anyone alive. Some remaining humans have become mutants, covered with boils and pus-filled sacs who become crazier over time. Taft is the man in charge of killing the mutants once they lose their humanity. A shitty job indeed. Three housing blocks are in Dome 17 and the A-block is all mutants. The survivors are running out of everything and things are breaking down, including the dome’s retracting roof. It’s turning into a war between the humans and the A-block and things are about to get even worse.

    Giant insects are getting into the dome and the car-sized ants and huge wasps don’t care who they’re killing and eating. One vengeful mutant is feeding victims to a massive spider. The humans have to find a way to curb the insects and the mutants and save their asses, but the rag-tag team of heroes seem like a very unlikely crew to handle the siege. Descriptive violence ensues and the viscera is knee-deep in no time. As with the 80’s pulp horrors that this book is inspired by, inappropriate sex is also graphically depicted.

    Young has a ton of fun with his killings, with guts sliding out of impaled bodies and the above-mentioned fluids spraying far and wide. The characters include a pedo/ child-murdering reverend, a mourning mom, a German co-worker of Taft’s that I pictured looking like Ted V. Mikels, a useless, dog-killing Dome Mayor, a mutant with revenge on his mind, the mayor’s very capable wife who become Taft’s main squeeze, and a plethora of folks, both good and bad, who are trying to survive. They are all worthwhile characters that help push the story along.

    As with most small press books, it could have used another pass by an editor. A character named Arthur become Albert after a few pages and there are some typos throughout but overall, in that respect, this book is in better shape than 90% of the self-published/ small press books that I encounter. Young sent me a review copy with a barf-bag that he thoughtfully included as a bookmark. I didn’t have to use it but I can see where some might! The splatter is heavy, the gore is plentiful and the sick bastards that live in this book just might make you puke! On a side note, I wonder if Young’s idea for the domes came from Skydome in Toronto.

                                              It's a barf-bag! It's a bookmark! It's a barf-bag bookmark!!