A Change Is Gonna Come

A sadly-still-relevant 50 year old classic by the ironically-immortal Sam Cooke... my version's fairly straight-ahead here, with a solo vocal track, an arpeggiated guitar track (doubled by one thru the EHX B9 Organ Machine pedal), a boom-chik guitar track, and a bassline. First takes on alla these except the boom-chik, where I dropped in to overdub the bridge...

And, as always: recorded, mixed and mastered at No Robot.

Lonesome Crow (1972)

In Trance (1975)

Virgin Killer (1976)

Taken by Force (1977)

3. Roth’s solos on this track are legendary in guitar circles, particularly the first one, which is easily the greatest lead break I’ve ever heard. It’s fast, complex (the dreaded whole tone scale), and perfectly placed…and then he plays arguably harder (and doubled!) leads later in the song!

Wow, I haven't been doing any of my big Halloween plans so far.  Yeah, I still intend to give ya a story, but I'm way behind on writing it (I had intended to do two, like I did last year, but laziness has pretty much fragged that idea).  I still have a week... maybe I can get it together by then.  Also, I was gonna put up some horror book reviews in honor of the season.  Still got a week there, too, so, we'll see.  I'm horribly addicted to slack.

But, I did go ghost-hunting with some friends last night, and it was, in the words (and the exact same spirit) of Count Floyd, "Oooo, veddy scary, kids!"



I gotta admit, while I love ghost stories beyond all else, I'm not a believer.  I'm a hardline atheist, so supernatural anything is kinda a gooby idea to me... but, that doesn't mean playing around with it isn't fun, and I also love the idea of urban exploration, but am (usually) a bit chickenshit when it comes to breaking the law and possibly getting caught for something stupid at my age, so this was a chance to legally wander around tumbledown buildings at 2 a.m.  So, yay!

Here's the site for the tour we booked, if you wanna go look at more pictures and stuff.  The tour was nicely done - the people putting it on were cool, sincere and enthusiastic about what they were doing, and did their best to build things up and make the most out of any little oddity that could possibly be made the most of.   They were good sports and they delivered anything promised - it's not their fault that ghosts didn't show up.  They claimed that earlier a ghost had scratched a guy, and one guy on the tour (who I think was just playing along) said a girl was standing next to him in the dark, and he thought she was just one of the other people on the tour but when he turned to look, she wasn't there anymore.  Oooo!  I had to resist being a smartass and saying things like "Hey, who was that kid riding the tricycle at the end of the hall?" or whatever to egg them on, but really, the scariest thing was having to ride through the woods in the dead of night in the back of a pickup truck that was goin' pretty goddamn fast for having a bed full of people.  I was reminded of scenes from Mr. Majestyk for some reason...



Anyway, I never came anywhere close to getting the creeps (even when they sat me down in a pitch-black hall with highly-sensitive headphones on for ten minutes to listen for ghostly footsteps -- that was just kinda relaxing), but it was fun and worth the trip.  I took lotsa pictures so I could scare all you keeds. 

If you click on any of the pictures it'll make 'em a whole lot bigger so you can see lots more detail, so, you are hereby encouraged to do so.

After wandering through lots of wet weeds in some very-much-boondocks area and listening to cool stories of ghost-horses and such, we got to a building with a long hall in it (it was called "the short hall" but it looked longer than the building they were calling "the long hall" so go figure).

Here's how dark it was if you just used a flashlight, without the camera's flash going off (fortunately a friend showed me how to turn it back on or this'd be all you got -- I'm not big on picture-takin' so don't know all the camera-tech):





These places were crazy-fuckin' dark because they were mostly tunnels and it was 1 or 2 a.m., but once I got the flash goin', I took better pictures.  In this one, you can clearly see an "orb."   Orbs are round manifestations of psychic ghostly energy that only show up in photographs.  I've found that ghosts are attracted to very dusty areas, because the more visible dust you find in the air, the more orbs you're gonna see!  Very shpookie!


This room was called "the vortex."  I'm not sure exactly why, other than "vortex" sounds kinda scary.  Like if Carol Anne's gonna go missing on ya, the "vortex" is where she's gonna do it.

I don't know what that big rusty thing is.  But this is the clearest ghost picture I got -- you can kind of see a figure standing right next to it, that looks kind of like a woman in black holding a purple flashlight.  I swear that figure wasn't there when I took the picture!

(Okay, I'm lyin', just trying to make things a little more interesting.  That was actually the tour guide.  She was very nice and told us spooky stories about the time she saw what looked like a Christmas tree bulb in one of the trees growing in the rooms.)

Here's the ceiling in the vortex room.  Think it needs some fixin'.





When we got back into the hallway, the dust had gotten stirred up, and like I said, dust attracts ghosts, so here's a couple of pictures of an orb-swarm.  A veritable sm-orb-asborg, if you will (and you won't, 'cuz that's silly).




Ya gotta admit, that does look pretty cool, even if though it's dust.  But it may be dust that's been there since the Civil War, so I guess it could be connected to the 4,000 soldiers who died in the Battle of Okolona and are supposed to be buried all over the place there.

People (as part of a Wiccan ritual, we were told) left messages on the walls for the spirits.  Apparently some kids had been playing around the in the building and ghosts followed them home or something, so people left messages to appease the spirits.  The handwriting looks pretty similar on all of 'em...

That wasn't the most sinister graffiti we saw, though.  In another building, there was this message of terror:




 What kind of depraved being could have left such a message?!?  Also, there was this symbol.  I don't know what it is, probably some demonic symbol of darkest witchcraft:

Fills me with horror, whatever it is.

By the way, that room was the dustiest place anywhere, so orbs infested it like you wouldn't believe.

Also, just left of the center of the picture, you can see some spooky lights there.  They look like two red eyes, with kind of a license-platey manifestation between them.  Mankind may never unravel the mystery behind exactly what eldrich horror was lurking out there just beyond the bushes where everybody was sneaking out to pee.  Also, on the opposite wall was painted "WHO MADE WHO?" which proves ghosts dig AC/DC, and there was a cartoon face saying "Awww shit!" which captured the terror of the whole shebang.



Here's a tree growing out of some kind of pit in the "long hall" building.  That's where they sat me down in the dark alone for a nice rest.  I expected that to be scary, but, nope.  The guy was kind of disappointed when I told him the only unusual sound I heard was a distant beep-beep-beep of a forklift backing up at a peanut factory nearby.  Hardly the ghost of "Philip," who's supposed to hang around that hall.  One guy came there wearing a Union Soldier uniform, hoping to provoke the ghosts into some kind of fight or something.  They apparently called his name on some of the EVP equipment, but I didn't hear it.

If you blow the pic up and look really closely, one of these orbs seems to have the number "80" in it.  So that could be the ghost of some football player still wearing his jersey.

This is part of a munitions factory.  I'm not really sure what that light in the far right is... probably somebody's flashlight on the wall or something, but I guess if you want to use your imagination it could be something.  I didn't notice what was going on over there at the time I was taking the picture, so, could be anything.

This is part of an upper story of an extremely-dilapidated factory (going up the stairs to that thing was pretty scary 'cuz there was no railing and the stairs were covered with rubble).  Who knows who Wes C. Brown and Ace are?  Probably ghosts.   We sat up in that room for 'bout an hour in the total darkness, listening to some weird electronic box that would spit out words and syllables.  I'm not sure what was supposed to provoke the box to spout the words, but we sat around trying to interpret them.  The story we put together was that some guy named Walter got his head hurt (the box said "head hurt" about a dozen times) in a "fight" and that some other guys named Tim and Seth also got killed, one due to a "heart attack."  And it sounded like it called one of them a "retard," which is a weird thing for a ghost to say.  It also said something like "Los Angeles police" a couple times, which also didn't make much sense.  A couple of people with me swore it said my name like 3 times, but I never picked up on that.  Huh.  I was pretty sick the whole trip (nasty cough I was fighting back - I mean, the kind of cough so strong it makes you throw up every once in a while) so maybe the dead wanted me to join them.  Cool!

Anyway, creepy room, with all these open pits... ya didn't wanna go wandering around in there in the dark.



Couple more assorted pics, just so you can play "Where's Walter" -




I took that last one during our whole talk with "Walter," to see if he'd show up.  The little squawk box told me to "stop," though, so I quit.  (Or maybe it just said "yarb" and we used our imaginations to make it sound like "stop"... which is really how most of that conversation went).

Anyway, it was kinda silly, but it was fun.  It's all horseshit, but I'd go again.  Supposedly this group's going to do something different next Halloween... if the site's nearby, I'd probably go for it.  We'll see...

Meanwhile... look to your orb for the warning...

 Okay, here 'tiz.  I try to do this every Halloween, just to make myself write if for no other reason.  I'd planned on doing another, but laziness had its way with me so that didn't happen.  If I finish it later I'll give it to ya, Halloween or otherwise.

Meanwhile, we have Scribblebones.  A friend of mine (this here fella) heard the title and suggested that my next story be titled "Fluffy Bunny Goes On A Happy-Time Picnic" or something along those lines.  Yeah, it's kind of a cutesy title.  Promise ya it ain't a cute story, though!  I don't always succeed, but I always write horror with intent to harm... I want to fuck up your sleep.   This one's a bit slow to be full-bore-all-out, but plays in the dark and if I did it right it'll mess with you some by the end of it.  The other one I was working on was going to be more flat-out gory/horrific/sick, but this one's a bit more psychological. 

Anyway, I hope it's good.  If it's not, it's nobody's fault but mine.  A friend on Twitter, Bud Smith, generously offered to proof/edit it for me, which is something I didn't take lightly because the guy's a pro, I admire his stuff a lot and I urge you to check it out... but, I procrastinated too long and wanted to get it up by Halloween, so here it is, raw and 11th hour.  Could probably stand to have some of the chrome stripped off, but, eh, I think maybe it'll still work.

If you like it, there's more on this blog.  Here's a little table o' contents of our horror fiction output:

 My stuff:
Long Tall Sally 
Shik-Chuff 
Damp Basements of Heaven 
Up The Stairs Where The Windows are Painted Black 

And a great, scary story from multi-talented blog-brother KickerOfElves , who I'm hoping will do more soon:
Men With Knives

 And if you just want more creepiness and would-be-writer babble in general, I did a post recounting nightmares I've had, some of which got turned into stories (or will be someday, slack permitting).  That should be good for Halloween...

 Anyway, on to the furshlugginer story already...

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                                               SCRIBBLEBONES


    The rain was so silvery in the sunlight that Tom expected it to jingle when it hit the ground.  It even raised a silvery smell as it steamed off the hot sidewalks, a heavy tang like old tarnish.  Inappropriate tinsel for a solemn occasion.

    Tom had never been to a funeral where it hadn't rained.   Consistently, it was one of the patterns the universe had laid out for his family, always being buried in the rain.

    He didn't remember a lot about his grandfather other than that the old man had always called him "Tomcat" (Tom was forbidden to tell him how much he hated that), but he remembered the rain during his funeral, and so did most of the rest of the town; it had come down so hard that there'd been flooded farms in the far reaches of the county, bad enough to bring a couple more funerals in Granddaddy's wake.  It had cheated him of a graveside service and threatened to float his casket back out of the ground.

    Twenty-some years later, all Grandmama Bess got was this light shower, not enough to stop the graveside service but enough to inspire the preacher - who'd apparently rather have been a stand-up comic - to spend most of it ad-libbing silly remarks about the weather.  The jokes annoyed Tom and, even more than the weak turnout, seemed to highlight the fact that nobody really cared about the passing of a woman who had, for any practical purpose, been dead at least ten years now.  Thanks to Alzheimer's  -- that thief and murderer and zombie-making voodoo witch doctor -- this funeral was a formality.   It was a joke and the rain was, too, a noncommittal devil-beats-his-wife-and-marries-his-daughter shower with the sun shining, a mocking rain-without-the-decency-of-gloom.  So long, Grandmama Bess's body!  Here's some spit from a universe that fulfills its obligations even if it stiffs you when it comes to the good stuff.

    She'd never gotten what she deserved, anyway, so this pfft of a sendoff was no surprise.  There weren't but a half-dozen people here and out of all of them he was the only one who didn't look like he'd be back for his own funeral in a week or so.   Most of grandmama's friends had already died or forgotten her, he supposed, or maybe they just didn't see the point in making the effort.  He'd quit making the drive to come visit her when she'd forgotten who he was (and didn't seem very interested in meeting this new fellow), and he didn't believe in any afterlife she could look down from and appreciate his respects.  So, it was curiosity about seeing the old town again as much as a vague sense of duty that brought him back.

    The preacher -- too young, with a nervous-eater build, an Adam's apple that bobbed like jerking off under a blanket, and an annoying habit of smacking his lips before starting a new paragraph -- finished up his shabby routine without a rimshot and Tom stalked off without shaking the guy's hand or thanking him.  The irreverent reverend tagged along after him for a few yards, maybe wanting to console him, or maybe wanting to be consoled that "looks-like-a-rain-out-in-the-last-inning" knee-slappers were a great way to put the fun in funeral, but Tom power-walked to his car fast enough to discourage him. 

    He drove around the town a while, trying to find anything familiar, but there wasn't much left.  Maybe that's how Grandmama Bess's Alzheimer's had felt, that I-know-I-spent-a-lot-of-time-here-but-damn-if-I-can-recognize-much-of-it confusion.  The candy store he used to walk to to buy comics was gone entirely and an ugly brick law office was built on the spot.  Mr. Hamilton's -- a probably-dead-by-now friendly guy with a pen full of dogs Tom had liked -- had been remodeled and added-onto so much that there was nothing familiar about it anymore.   The dogpen was long gone, replaced by an above-ground pool.  Leaving town he looked for the lake where Granddaddy'd tried to take him fishing once (until he lost patience because "Tomcat" didn't instantly fall in love with it), but even that wasn't where he thought it was.  You can't just lose a whole lake, can you?  Maybe, in a town like this.

    He was feeling his grandmother's loss more now than he'd thought he would.  The funeral had made ten years or so of loss seem immediate, and she was worth mourning.  She'd always been especially kind to him, often more so than his parents. 

    Especially when it came to the whole Scribblebones thing.

    From a period between around age four and eight, Tom had been obsessed with an imaginary friend named Scribblebones.  He couldn't remember much about Scribblebones now, but at the time it had been so all-consuming that it scared his parents, and there'd been talk of putting him in therapy  when he wouldn't give up and admit that Scribblebones didn't exist.  It seemed silly now, but at the time, Scribblebones had seemed very real to him.  Christians all agree to believe in Jesus so their beliefs are supposed to be respected, Tom thought, but being the only Scribblebones disciple stacked the statistics against him and meant he was "crazy."

    His friend had been vague, a jagged skeleton-like shape (you could still see Tom's drawings of him in the backgrounds of childhood photos), and he'd had weird dreams and they'd played strange games.  Scribblebones had even taught him a song; he couldn't remember any of it but the lines "he's got skinny where he should have fat, makes his bones go this way and that way and that" -- something-something-something. 

    He'd been an imaginative kid, he supposed, although he didn't feel like an especially imaginative adult.  Boring, really.  He managed an industrial laundry and hated to admit that office work was probably a good fit for him.  Nothing as freaktacular as Scribblebones ever again entered his life.  Now the best he could do was make a helluva spreadsheet.  His parents were even more boring, and the abberative imagination had spooked them.

    Grandmama Bess had tirelessly argued that Tom was just creative, it was normal, and there was no need to stigmatize him by sticking a "therapy" tag on him.  He'd always be grateful for that, not making the weirdness official by putting it on record.  For a stretch Grandmama Bess had been the only one on his (and Scribblebones's) side, against parents who were suddenly the enemy.

    Thinking about it, he was happy he'd shown up for the funeral, even if it didn't mean anything to anyone.  His parents hadn't made the trip because they'd retired to France, putting an ocean between them and their old life.  His mother had given up on her mother a long time ago; it was too painful for her to watch the decline.  It seemed cold, but Tom couldn't blame her much.

    His old neighborhood was only a twenty-minute drive so he decided to take it, although he knew it probably wouldn't look any more familiar than Grandmama's town had.  At least maybe there'd be a tree or two he'd climbed.

    As he turned down his street he decided the neighborhood had gone upscale.  Time should have run it down, but everything was nice-looking, well-tended.  And mostly unfamiliar.  Houses that had been big enough for the 80's had been expanded and remodeled.  Trees he remembered were gone, and new trees had sprung up where none had been before.  A vacant lot where he and his friends had played (mostly kickball -- it was a kickball neighborhood) had turned into a forest, which was now being cut down to finally put a house up.  The few familiar things he could find (including one neighbor's ugly, massive sundial) looked out of place now, stolen goods.

    He was out of place, too, but decided to park the car and take a walk.  It'd be a long drive back to Birmingham and he might never make it here again, now that all ties to the place were untied.  He pulled over in front of the forested area, got out, and started walking back toward his house.   The road was dry here and the clouds were gone, so the universe was officially out of the funeral business for a while. 

    Nostalgia wouldn't come to him.  The road twisted the same, but it was going through a different neighborhood.   This was hardly worthwhile.

    At least his house had been kept up nicely, and added onto.  A young woman was working in a flower garden to the side of the house while a toddler pedaled his hot-rod tricycle around a driveway covered in pink, green, yellow and blue chalk drawings.  Tom stopped for a minute to try to figure out what had been added on, and the woman -- barely more than a girl -- looked up and smiled at him.  She was Latina and very pretty even though slobbed-out for gardening; she had on a man's faded blue shirt that was too big for her, and her dark curls were tied back in a bandanna, pirate style.  "Hi.  Nice day, isn't it?" she said.

    "Looks like it'll turn into one now that the rain's gone," he said, smiling back.

    A little frown only made her cuter.  "Rain?  We didn't get any rain here."  She stood up and stretched, now that this was turning into a conversation.

    "Oh.  It was raining where I was earlier.  My grandmother's funeral."

    "Oh, I'm sorry," she said, face going sad but still very pretty.  She looked sincere, and Tom decided he liked her; she seemed like a genuinely nice person.  It'd still give his uptighty-whitey parents fits, though, knowing Hispanics were living in their house now.  But the hell with his parents.

    "It's okay, she was very old, and had Alzheimer's for years."

    "Ah.  My grandfather was just diagnosed with that.  It's such a sad disease."

    "It is," Tom nodded.  "They have better treatments now, so hopefully your grandfather won't be hit as hard."

    "It's in the early stages.  He seems okay now, but..." she made a who-knows face and shrugged.  "It's so not fair.  He just retired last year, and now he has a grandson.  I hope he's around for a while, because Fernando is a real Grandpa's boy."

    The kid, presumably Fernando, had stopped pedaling and was staring at Tom.  Tom smiled and waved.  Fernando waved back.  He didn't smile, but the mother did, like waving back was the most adorable thing ever.  "Hope so," Tom said, then nodded at the house.  "I love what you've done with the house.  I used to live here when I was about his age."  He nodded toward Fernando.  "Up until I went to college, actually."

    "In our house? Oh, how neat!" she said, tucking her right hand into her left armpit to pull the gardening glove off, then reached out to shake.  "I'm Conchita Ruiz.  We moved here a year or so before Fernando was born... oh, I guess that was four years or so ago now."

    "Tom Ward," he said, shaking her hand.  It felt fragile and small, and he was scared he'd crush it if he returned her grip too much.  "I barely recognize the place.  Somebody added on to it."  Her eyes were tan and he liked the way they caught the light.

    "Wasn't us," she said, tugging off the other glove and pocketing them both.  "We were just barely able to afford the place.  It's big enough for us, though.  No complaints."

    "It seemed big enough to me, too.  My parents probably would've stayed here but they got a crazy idea and moved to France."
   
    "France?  Wow."

    "Yeah, wow's what I said.  Came out of the blue and has never made any sense to me, but, that's what they did.  I still haven't made the trip to see them."
   
    "I'd love to go to France," Conchita sighed.

    "Well, if you do, say hi to them for me, because I don't see myself going anytime soon."  She laughed at that.  "This was a good house to grow up in.  How's Fernando liking it?"

    "Oh, he loves it.  A little too much, maybe.  Thanks to him we're going to have to do some repainting.  We're just waiting for him to grow out of drawing on the walls before we do it, though, because we can't seem to stop him."

    "Ah.  Well, if you scrape the paint off the walls, you'll probably find some of my old artwork, too.  I went through that phase pretty hard."   That's how his Scribblebones thing had started, Tom recalled, crayon scribbles of a skeleton on the wall of his bedroom.  He'd gotten a belt-spanking for that one, which was still one of his earliest memories.  He'd only been spanked the first time, though.  After that, just concern, like it was something he wasn't responsible for, some sickness.

    "Well, Fernando's going at it pretty hard, too.  We give him time-outs, took his crayons away, but whenever our backs are turned for a minute, there he goes.  He says a friend is telling him to do it, but since the friend is imaginary, that's hardly an excuse."

    Tom felt a strange chill and looked over at the driveway, at the chalk drawings.  They looked familiar.  Jagged, linear, round head with big square teeth, skinny limbs that went this way and that... "Imaginary friend, huh?" he said absently, distracted by the chalk figures.

    "Yes, he's picked up quite the little imagination," Conchita said, disdainfully.  "I see you looking at the chalk.  We got him that, hoping it'd curtail the drawing-on-the-walls thing.  The rain'll clean that off."  She sighed.  "Unfortunately it hasn't stopped him from attacking the walls, completely.  We give him paper, too.  You should see all the art we have stuck on our refrigerator."

    Yeah, maybe I should Tom wanted to blurt out, but settled for stepping closer to the driveway to get a better look at the chalking.  There were a few dogs and flowers and trucks mixed in, but the prevailing figure was that jagged, bony thing over and over.  Yes, Tom knew him well.  But how in the hell did Fernando?  He looked at the kid, and the kid gave him a slight smile, friendly but cautious.  He had a Moe-Howard mop of black hair that'd probably look nice when combed, and dark, intelligent eyes.  Tom squatted down near him and pointed to one of the skeletal figures.  "These are nice.  Did you draw them?" he asked.

    Fernando nodded.

    "That's supposed to be his friend," Conchita said.  "His name's Scribabo.  Or something like that."

    Yeah, something like that, Tom thought, feeling a wave of chill.  He couldn't believe this.

    "I'm afraid we speak English and Spanish so Fernando's having a little difficulty sorting them out, getting two words for everything.  We're not sure if he's trying to say something in English or Spanish."

    It's neither, really, Tom wanted to say, but there was no way to do it without freaking Conchita out.

    "Scribabo, huh?" Tom said to Fernando.

    "Scribba-bons!" Fernando said emphatically.

    "Scribblebones?" Tom said.

    Fernando smiled big and nodded.  Finally he'd made himself understood!  He chattered something else that Tom couldn't understand.

    "What was that?  Scribble-bones?" Conchita asked.

    "That's what it sounded like to me," Tom said.

    "I bet that's it!  We thought it looked like a skeleton.  Kind of a skull... and those look like ribs."  She toed a chalk drawing.  "And he's scribbly, for sure."

    "Yep," Tom said, with a feeling of dread.  "More so than the rest of his artwork.  Look at the dog, and the stem on that flower.  Straight, clean lines.  But this bony guy here... the lines go all over the place."  This way and that way and that.  He's got skinny where he should have fat.

    "Yes, it does!" Conchita said, staring at the drawings.  "He's scribbled on purpose!  Scribblebones."  She smiled at Tom.  "You've solved a big mystery for us!"

    Tom forced a smile and tipped an imaginary hat.  "Shucks, ma'am, it's what I do.  Wandering the world, interpreting refrigerator art."  He was trying to keep it light, but this scared him more than anything had ever scared him.  Scribblebones was his imaginary friend.  How did Fernando meet him?  It was impossible.

    Unless, somehow, Scribblebones wasn't imaginary. 

    And that was too disturbing to contemplate.  For a fantasy figure he was great.  For a real one, he was terrifying.

    Conchita laughed and brought her hands together with a clap.  "I can't wait to tell Joe about this!  Hey, would you like to come in, see the house?  I bet you'd like to see it after twenty-some years, huh?"

    "Yes, desperately," he said.  "I was hoping you'd ask.  I didn't want to seem creepy so I wasn't going to bring it up, but, yes, I'd very much like to see it again."

    "Oh, you're not creepy."  She laughed.  "And anyway, my husband's home and he's bigger than you."

    "Well, then," Tom laughed, and Conchita patted his arm so he'd know she was teasing.  She put her hand on Fernando's head and said, "Come inside, Fernando, let's go get some cookies."

    The boy abandoned the tricycle and ran into the house, Conchita and Tom right behind.  The door opened into the kitchen and Tom immediately saw a refrigerator buried in art.  Like the marks on the sidewalk, there was some variation, but mostly it was jagged lightning-bolt skeletons, all over.  Conchita saw him looking and said, "Too much, you think?"  She handed him one of the lemon cookies she’d gotten for her son.

    "One can never have too much refrigerator art," Tom said, staring at the figures, feeling forgotten things from his past waking up and pulling at him, ghosts stirring in locked mental rooms.   These could have been some of his own old drawings.  He recognized some of the same poses, even, Scribblebones handing out black flowers, Scribblebones surrounded by little animals that could be puppies or might be rats.  They looked like neither, really, but Tom remembered them as rats.  Some line from the song, he thought, "His bones were all crooked and all-not-nice, all chewed up by rats and mice," something like that. 

    He could understand his parents' concern a little better now; viewed from an adult perspective, Scribblebones wasn't exactly a nice playmate.

    "Joe?" Conchita called.  "Where are you?  We have company."

    "In here." They stepped into the living room.  A short-but-stocky dark-skinned guy who looked very much like Fernando in twenty years, more pudge, and a better haircut stood up from the couch and shook Tom's hand.  "Hi, Joe Ruiz," he said, then gestured to a chair.

    "Tom Ward," Tom said, not sitting yet.

    "Tom lived in this house as a kid, and I thought he might like to see it again," Conchita said.

    "Sure, sure," Joe said, nodding.  "Used to live here, eh?"  His smile was nice, bookended by deep dimples.  It put even more Fernando into his face.

    "Yep, some twenty years back or so.  You've improved things a lot.  This is really nice."   It was, too, much classier than it had been when Tom grew up in it.  The furniture didn't look expensive, and he could see a few inevitable toddler-in-the-house spots on it and the carpet, but it was still a big improvement in homey-ness.  Maybe the Ruiz's were just better housekeepers or had a better sense of style.  The living room was arranged completely differently from the one Tom had grown up in, but he liked this better.  He decided he'd been raised in a furniture-arrangement mistake.  "You've done great things with this."

    "Well, Cheeta's got an interior design degree and I work for a contractor who remodels houses, so we've done a few things here, there.  Of course, Hurricane Fernando's been hard at work trying to undo them."  He scooped Fernando up and lay him across his knee and did a little bongo-roll on his butt as a fake spanking.  Fernando laughed, in a way that made Tom feel certain he'd never gotten a real one.

    "Tom figured out what Fernando's been saying.  You know, the name of his imaginary friend?" Conchita said.

    "Ol' Screwball or Skeeball or whatever?"  Joe craned his neck back and laughed as Fernando tried to stick his fingers into his mouth.

    "Yeah.  You ready for this?  Scribblebones."

    Joe frowned at the air and grinned.  "Yeah, that's probably it.  It makes sense.  How'd you figure it out?"

    Tom shrugged.  "That's just what it sounded like.  And it fit the pictures."

    "Yeah, the pictures," Joe sighed.  "Man, oh man, the pictures.  I just painted this place and about the time the fumes faded out 'Nando went to work.  You should see that, man, oh man."   He swatted him lightly on the butt again and Fernando grabbed his father's hand and wrestled with it, grinning.

    "He probably shouldn't, because it's awful, but I'm going to show him anyway.  C'mon,"  Conchita said, and Tom followed her through the house.  Tom's old room was their bedroom now, the old guest bedroom was Fernando's room, and his parents' room had become a study with a computer and a worktable piled with catalogs, fabric samples, and other interior-design paraphernalia.  Conchita apologized for the messiness of it, but for a work space it really wasn’t bad.

    Fernando’s crayon frescoes were mostly in his room, but he’d also snuck one -- drawn with a ball-point pen -- onto the wall of his parents’ bedroom.  Scribblebones looked especially spidery in that one, long-limbed, his head oblong and thin.  It looked like a toddler’s portrait of a crippled man wasting with disease.

    The one that bothered Tom the most, though, depicted Scribblebones with a big-toothed grimace (he guessed it was supposed to be a smile, but God it looked grim) holding hands with a smaller skeletal figure.  Conchita pointed at it. “That’s supposed to be Fernando, he says.  See the flowers? On the day he drew that he came in with a bunch of daisies.  Don’t know where he got them because I don’t think anybody around here has them in their yard, and we certainly don’t let him go wandering around.  We keep a pretty tight eye on him.  Not enough to spare the walls, though, I guess.  Anyway, that one kind of, I don’t know, gives me the creeps a little.”

    “I can see as it would,” Tom said.  He felt cold and heavy, looking at it.  His past was shaking the bars of its cage and he wanted it to stop.

    “I still wonder where he got the flowers.  I grow lots of them, but no daisies.”  She gnawed at one of her fingers and frowned at the picture.  “Also, I hate thinking he sees himself that way.”

    “It’s probably just how he draws people,” Tom said.  “Maybe everybody looks like a skeleton.”

    “He doesn’t draw Joe or me that way.  Or himself, usually.”

    “It’s pretty amazing a kid his age draws at all.  Usually they just scribble.”

    “He’s bright,” Conchita said.  “Very bright.  Almost scary.”

    Tom nodded.  He, too, had been a gifted child, and now he was wondering if he’d had an extra teacher.  Something very strange was going on in this house, and he felt like he should tell them about it.  If he had any proof, he would, but without proof they’d just think they’d let some raving lunatic into their house and throw him out or call the cops.  He tried to think of a way to prove things, but he was drawing a blank.  Looking at the picture, he was remembering more things, and he could feel a presence he hadn’t felt since he was very small.  Scribblebones was here.  And remembered him.

    “Fernando has a couple of Halloween books and toys.  I guess that’s where he got the skeleton idea.”

    “Yeah, kids love that stuff.  Especially boys.  Creepy stuff is the coolest.  He’s a little young for it, but, like you said, he’s ahead of the curve.”

    “I suppose so.  I just wish he wasn’t so obsessed with it, drawing it all the time, playing games with somebody we can’t see.”

    “Oh, I did the same thing,” Tom said, wishing he could go into details.  “My parents worried about me a lot, I was so imaginative.”   And now I’m worried that I wasn’t really all that imaginative after all.

    “I suppose it’s normal.  Harmless.”

    Tom nodded.  And maybe it was.   He was a relatively normal adult, and he’d been friends with this Scribblebones thing.  Scribblebones had never harmed him.

    Maybe.  But what about Paul Winstead, though?

    He’d forgotten about Paul Winstead, or maybe blacked him out of his memory, until now.  It seemed like the Paul Winstead thing was what made them want to put him into therapy.

    Tom couldn’t remember all of it, but he’d apparently gotten into a “he is too real!” argument with Paul, who was five or six years older than him, old enough that he’d seemed like a grownup.  Paul was a bully to begin with, and a little kid insistent on an imaginary friend was bait he couldn’t resist, so he’d pushed Tom around, held him down, and fed him grass.  “Why don’t you get Scrambled Eggs to come save you?” Paul had said, slapping him upside the head; Tom remembered how clever Paul had thought he was, renaming Scribblebones like that.  He’d finally let Tom up and Tom spat out grass and yelled “Scribblebones is too real and he’s going to GET you!” and then ran home.

    Two or three weeks later, they’d found Paul in some woods at the back of the neighborhood, beaten to death.  Apparently some maniac had gone over him with a hammer or something, spent some time at it and really did it ugly.  They never figured out who did it, to Tom’s knowledge -- it could have been a lot of people, because Paul was an asshole who made lots of enemies.  Speculation ran to Paul’s mean drunk of a father, but he’d had an alibi so the case went nowhere.  Others thought Paul’s smart mouth might have gotten him in trouble with some high school hoods, but again, there was no proof.

    Tom had claimed it was Scribblebones.  Of course, that was impossible because Scribblebones was imaginary (right?), and it wasn’t Tom having some schizophrenic episode because he was only five or six at the time, incapable of taking on a borderline-teenager like Paul.  The grazing episode had proven what a hopeless theory that was.  But even wanting his imaginary friend to be responsible for such a hideous act had disturbed his parents.

    And now it disturbed Tom, because he wondered if it might be true.  With this evidence that Scribblebones wasn’t just something he’d invented, was anything out of the realm of possibility? 

    He looked at the grim smile in Fernando’s drawing, the empty black eyes staring back at him with a “where ya been? I’ve been waiting” patience in them, even though they weren’t much more than scribble.  He must’ve been making a face, because Conchita said, “It’s kind of impressive art for a three-year old, isn’t it?  I mean, it has an expression.  Like a mood."

    “Yeah... yeah, I was just thinking that.”

    “Maybe he’ll be an artist when he gets older.”

    “Wouldn’t surprise me.  You can tell he’s making up stories, too, telling them with his pictures.  Maybe he’ll work in comic books.”

    “I’ve got a cousin who does that.  Nobody big, just some independent things, but... there’s a precedent.”

    Oh, there’s a precedent all right, Tom thought, wondering again how he could prove it.  “Maybe it runs in the family,” he said, looking over the other drawings in the room.  They weren’t all drawn on the walls; there were bits of paper, and a chalkboard with Scribblebones scrawled over a few layers of other badly-erased Scribblebones.  On one wall was a rusty smear where something had been rubbed out.

    Conchita pointed at it.  “That one really bothered me.  I washed it off.  Fernando drew his friend up there in blood.   He gets bloody noses, so it naturally made good paint, but that looked so horrible...”

    “I can imagine,” Tom said, remembering he’d done something similar.  Standing in this room, he felt watched.

    “I hope he won’t become a graffiti artist.”

    “Oh, he’ll grow out of the drawing on walls thing.  I did.”

    Conchita laughed.  “Sounds like this house has been the site of a lot of childhood vandalism.”

    “Second generation now,” Tom said, wondering if the family who’d lived here before the Ruiz’s had had a kid with a Scribblebones friend.  “It’s all art!”

    “Yeah, try telling Joe that.  He got so mad when he saw that wall.  He yelled, Fernando cried, Joe felt bad and then had to make Fernando laugh.  So, he’s probably confused about whether he did bad or good.  Joe just can’t be mean to him, though.  Big softie.”

    “He seems like a nice guy.”

    “He is.  He’ll grumble like a bear while he repaints the room, though.  Hopefully by then Fernando will be old enough not to draw on the walls anymore.  Or, even better, have given up the whole Scribblebones thing.”

    “Yeah, that’d be good,” Tom said, wondering what it would take.  An exorcist?   How had he given it up?  He couldn’t remember, but he thought he just outgrew it.  Or Scribblebones had gotten tired of him and left.  Maybe whatever he -- it -- was only liked small children.  Maybe grown-ups were too much of a challenge.

    He felt a strong urge to warn them, though, because knowing what he now knew, this all seemed highly dangerous.  Little Fernando was playing with some weird supernatural thing, and how could Tom, as a responsible adult, stand by and let that go on?  But without proof there was nothing he could do. 

    “Well, I better be hitting the road,” he sighed, feeling helpless.  “Thank you for letting me get another look at the old homestead.  You’ve been very kind, and I’m glad the house is in such good hands.”

    “Bring back any old memories?”

    “Oh, you don’t know the half of it,” he said, taking a last look at a picture he might have drawn himself, thirty years or so ago.  Somewhere under the paint there might still be such drawings, but they’d think he was crazy if he tried scraping through to them.

    They walked back to the living room and he shook hands with Joe and Fernando, thanked them again, told them it was nice meeting them all, then left.

    He felt numb on his ride home, almost too distracted to be driving.  All he could think about was the absurdity of the whole thing.  It was impossible. Impossible.   And yet, there it was.

    And he was remembering darker sides to it.  Nightmares, with such weird images they didn’t seem to come from inside his own head, things a child shouldn’t have been capable of picturing.  He remembered his mother talking to psychiatrists about them, and that’s when he’d stopped telling her about his dreams.  Scribblebones, he remembered, had told him not to.

    He couldn’t remember seeing Scribblebones, exactly; he’d seemed like a regular imaginary friend, but then there were snippets of images, vague memories, things he couldn’t reach anymore.  Much of his childhood was locked away from him, he realized.  The details were faded, shut away in the dark.

    Had he invented this thing, believed it so hard that he’d given some kind of life to it and now Fernando had found it?  Or was it something that had been around before him, something that found and befriended him, as it may have befriended others previously?  Where'd the damn thing come from?

    Scribblebones had seemed very real at the time.  Now he seemed real again.  Tom remembered that Kurt Cobain’s suicide note had been addressed to his childhood imaginary friend, Boddah.  Some things never fully left.

    His head hurt and his nerves were shaking when he pulled into his driveway.  He told himself it was none of his concern, now, but he didn’t buy that.  He was the only one who knew.  It was a responsibility.

    But he had an idea.  He went to the closet where the family photo albums were stored, pulled them out, and carried them to the couch.  After poring over them and yanking pictures as he went, he soon had his evidence; over two dozen pictures with Scribblebones art visible in the background, all obviously taken around 1980, with a recognizable Tom in all of them.   One was even of him painting a Scribblebones picture with poster paint; he’d gotten it all over him (including a near-perfect Hitler mustache in blue where he'd wiped his nose) and his dad had found that funny enough to want a photo of it.  Other pictures were of birthday parties, Christmases... one was a shot of his room that they’d taken so he wouldn’t get too homesick at camp, and the Scribblebones pictures were all over the place in that one.  The styles were a little different, but he and Fernando had obviously been drawing the same subject.  The Ruiz's would see that.  What they could do about it was a different matter, but at least he’d be able to prove this situation was real.

    Tom gathered up the photos, stuffed them into an envelope, and went to bed, planning to call in sick and drive back to the Ruiz’s in the morning.  But he was too disturbed to sleep much, and when he did nod off he had a horrible - yet somehow familiar - dream in which the shadow of a thin, crooked figure was cast in the light from doorways of rooms he knew were empty.   He heard a scratchy little whisper that he hadn’t heard in decades, and woke in a cold sweat.

    Checking the clock and seeing it was a little past 4 a.m., he decided to go ahead and make the drive.  He’d wait and catch them before they headed off to work.  He got his keys and the envelope of pictures, locked up his apartment, and started the drive again.

    Darkness rushed to meet his car and he caught himself driving too fast; he'd get there too early even if he stuck to the speed limit, and then he'd have to sit in their driveway like a stalker.  They might think he was crazy, anyway, despite the photos.  Show some kindness to a guy and suddenly he's intruding into your lives, bearing disturbing stories.   He was conscious of the fact that he was in his parents' role now, not Grandmama Bess's.  But Grandmama Bess hadn't known what Scribblebones was, really.

    An impulse urged him to turn back, leave it alone, let Fernando grow out of it like he had.  He hadn't been harmed.

    Paul Winstead had, though.

    "That was a coincidence," he said aloud.  The similarity between his imaginary friend and Fernando's, no, too big to be a coincidence, but the Paul Winstead thing, that was unrelated.  It fit a story -- a really bad story -- but some transient had done that.  Or Winstead's old man.  Alibi be damned, that lousy drunk was capable of it; that's why Paul was such a mean little shit, it was what he'd learned at home.  No jaggedy skeleton-thing had pounded him to death, that was ridiculous.

    Most of the drive was a lonely stretch through deep forest, and that did nothing to help his mood.  The woods were full of mist that crept over the road and fogged his windshield, and there was no other traffic at this hour.  Usually some long-haul trucker would blow past you, but not tonight, he had it all to himself.

    Or, at least he hoped he did.  He'd been feeling a presence all day.  And it was worse now.

    There was even a vague smell, like mildew and old sweat and sick-man's breath.  Something was riding with him, and his skin crawled, fearing its touch.

    In the misty woods, pairs of white-blue lights moved.   Eyes. Deer, moving through the trees like ghosts, entranced by his lights.  Another reason he shouldn't be driving so fast.  To hell with imaginary friends, one real deer jumping in front of him at this speed would finish it all.

    The smell went from vague to a stench.  He heard a rattling breath from the back seat and a chill shook him.   There was something in the car with him.  Dread spiked his heart and he checked the rear-view mirror.  The back seat was all darkness, but then darkness slid on darkness as something moved.

    Crooked fingers reached from the back seat and covered his eyes, and he screamed and tried to pull away, but they gripped his face, cold and damp and bony.   An old friend was singing in his ear in a voice as twisted as the rest of him as he tried to pry the stiffened hands away. 

    Rumble strips hammered at his tires and the car dipped wildly as it dove into the ditch, slamming him around in the seat, and then he felt it go airborne, twist almost lazily and drop him on the ceiling before coming down hard enough to crack his teeth and shock the breath out of him. Then the car rolled and rolled and the world was all flying glass and stabbing limbs and pain and the sky was made of grass and mud and the ground was full of moonlit clouds, over and over until a heavy SLAM shook him into a massive black nothing that washed over like a tide.

    When he woke up again, he opened the one eye he still had and looked around.  The car was tilted crazily against a tree, down a slope, far off the road, and bugs were whirring as a pink and orange dawn was lighting the sky.  He looked down at his body and then looked back up at the sky, almost vomiting.  Bad idea, looking at his body.  He wasn't going to do that again.  He was obviously dead, it was just taking a while to happen.  Nobody could live with that body.  Nobody would want to.   He was scrambled.  Scribbled.

    He listened to his blood dripping and felt the pain trying to force the breath out him.  There probably wasn't a bone in him that wasn't broken.  They were protruding through his limbs like thorns from a rose stem.  His arms and legs were twisted in every direction but the right ones.  Even his hands were ruins that couldn't grip the wheel anymore, and pieces were chopped and torn out of him everywhere, laying around the car.  His breathing tasted like iron-rich mud.  It rattled like scrambling rats in a chest gone all out of form.   The pain was so overwhelming that he had to laugh at it, it was so ridiculous.  He was ridiculous, being alive in that shape.  But he thought he understood now.

    His bones went this way and that way and that. 

    He had skinny where he should have had fat. 

    La da dee dee daaaaaaaah.

    He wouldn't look at it again.   He's spare himself that one last thing.  It was much easier to watch the sky, to watch the dawn which, for him, was the sunset.  

    When it started to rain, he laughed until he coughed.  The universe was filling its contract a little early, but damn if it wasn't coming through.  Soon he couldn't tell what was dripping rain and what was draining blood.

    The dawn sky darkened, and the rain fell heavier and grew cold, but Tom wasn't there to feel it.

    He'd already gone away to play with a friend.




   



                    THE END

Well, I would say 'better late than never,' but you'll have to judge for yourselves after you listen...

Anyway, this - the penultimate free blues of the year - is a tasty little gem from the late great Tampa Red, "If You Want Me to Love You."

Click the pic or the songtitle to give it a listen...

So, the end of the year (+ hopefully, the world!) and this is the last of 2012's monthly blues tracks...


Shit's been busy here lately, so this one's another band track from the Beaker demos, featuring me on bass + vox, Matt McK on drums (+ production), and Donny Guitar on, umm... guitar, trying to do justice to the great Johnny Cash's ultra-classic Folsom Prison Blues.

Click the pic or the songtitle to hear it (right-click to download):


As always, leave a comment + let me know what you think...

What follows is complete horrifying vulgar idiocy brainvomit I just felt like writing because I think words are funny, and using way too goddamn many of 'em is even funnier. Your mileage may vary, but rest assured that, terrible as it is, there are much worse things being published exclusively to Kindles.

===============================

    Meanwhile, as we sit complacent and allow it to happen, somewhere two men (or perhaps they are handpuppets -- I have a condition which sometimes makes me confused) calling themselves "Shitskull" and "Prevert"  (though these are assuredly not their names because what monstrous parents would name a child such things?  It makes me angry to even think of such a thing happening!  And damn you for even bringing it up!) are reviewing movies that may not even exist.  We cannot stop it, because it's probably not even happening.  I tell a lot of fucking lies.  And everybody hates me for it.  Or do they?

    "A hilarious cavalcade of dung!" cries Shitskull as he introduces the first film, Adolph Hitler: Bicycle Champion.  "This film entertained me more than watching a fat baby try to lick his way through a plexiglas box to get to stack of doughnuts!  Comparing Hitler -- who also only had one testicle -- to Lance Armstrong based on this one thing they have in common (besides, of course, a shared genocidal hatred of gypsies) -- is sheer dimwit genius!  I hope the writer will compose a sequel sometime when he's not too busy building little cities out of his own poo-poo and then stomping on them while roaring that he‘s Godzilla!  Which is something I bet he does, I just get that impression."

    "I disagree!" cried Prevert, waving his cutlass.  "This film is nothing more than a marketing ploy to sell Lego sets of its locations, such as the ice-skating rink, the abortion clinic, the sewage treatment plant, the registrar's office, and Wyoming!  I haven't seen such an atrocity since Daniel Day Lewis was fleeing town because he thought he got Linda Ronstadt pregnant and accidentally shoved all his clothes up Rosie O'Donal's ass because he thought it was his suitcase!  I thought this film would never end!  It seemed longer than Nancy Pfotenhauer's grotesque horror wrist-neck!  By the end, I was actually rooting against Hitler, which is something I thought I would never do!"

    In response, Shitskull thundered, "By God I hate you, there, bouncing in your chair in your excitement of being an idiot!   This is the most wonderful movie that is still a piece of shit since last Tuesday's Billy Finds a Lollipop And Then Murders The Guy With The Hot-Dog Cart, which I STILL maintain is a work of art and not 'a wading pool filled with old-man pee in which Stanley Kubrick could bob for potatoes,' which no one even knows what that MEANS yet we have to suppose it's meant as a negative review... although coming from you we can't be sure, as you are a twisted, perverted homunculus who delights in the filthy things of this world.”

    “You are so stupid, I feel sorry for your pants,” snipped Prevert cattily, “for it’s only a matter of time before you perform some wretched act in them.”

    “Which would no doubt set you off into a clapping fit since defiling pants is your jam, dawg!”

    “Obviously, you are the product of sodomy among clowns.”

    “And you, sir, are the product of digestion.  I wish I could tear out my liver and shake it in your face like a pom-pom as I cheered for your demise by termites.”

    “And you should never have been born.  God damn your mother and the vagabond spastic who was fool enough to mount her.  But I’ll tell you this much, I will  -- if you did shake your liver in my face, it would be much more entertaining than your stupid Hitler-bicycle movie which you love and want to marry.”  At this point Prevert made kissy faces to illustrate Shitskull’s enamoration for this movie that’s not even real.

    “Well, your shabby shitdom aside, it’s time for our next film, Indiana Garden-Rake Massacre, staring Tatum O’Neil, who I’ve never been able to take seriously because the hell kind of name is ‘Tatum’?  It sounds like a command I don’t know how to carry out!  Anyway, I would rather stare into the diseased cunt of Wilford Brimley for ninety-three minutes than watch this exercise in tedium that appears to have been financed with quarters the producer got for showing strangers his tee-tee.  I‘d rather watch wombats fuck for two hours.  Even if I weren‘t a guy who likes watching wombats fuck, I mean.”

    “For once, I agree with you: this is a horrible film!  It’s like watching a murdered child rot, but without the glee.  John Travolta is absolutely terrible in it, although I did enjoy seeing him get his penis stuck in that toaster, which is easily the highlight of the film.”

    “Yes!  It’s the only part I liked, watching him shrieking and flailing about, yelling ‘Oh, my penis!’  In fact, the movie should have been titled Oh, My Penis! because as far as I’m concerned you can cram the rest of this film up director Nathan Borigmi’s urethra and then set it on fire!  I would like to murder him and his entire family with an axe and then masturbate over their corpses.”

    “I’d love to rent a hot air balloon and ride it into the stratosphere and then shit over the side into the bassinet of his sleeping child, that’s how much I hate him for making this movie!”

    “I want to chop off his hands so he can never hold a camera again, then I would go down the street clapping with the severed hands over my head while I danced a jig in the shower of blood!  I‘m pounding down steroids to try to develop enough strength to fling him into the heart of the sun so we can be shed of him!”

    “When I saw this film I renounced Christ for fear that I might have to spend eternity in Heaven with Nathan Borigmi!  Who, if I may say, is a wall-eyed fudpuck of the first magnitude, and probably an alcoholic who treats his wife abominably.  It’s ironic that he made a film about a rake massacre because that’s just what I wanted to do with him as I watched it -- murder him with a rake!”  Clenching his teeth, Prevert furiously hacked at the air with an invisible rake.  It was disturbing to watch.

    “Oh, how I wish I could live in outer space so I didn’t have to share an atmosphere with him!”  Shitskull shook his fists and howled as hatred took him to a place beyond articulateness.

    “Would that I could burn this world to a cinder and eradicate all life to ensure that no alien civilization would have a chance of knowing such a movie had ever happened!”

    “I’m totally sneaking into his house and farting on his toothbrush, I am.”

    “I despise the entire eastern seaboard he was born in, and plan to travel up and down it, slapping  greasy dick-prints onto the cars of everyone who lives there, shrieking like a displeased monkey all the while.”

    “I really dislike him.”
   
    “As do I.”

    “Anyway, our next film is a sci-fi epic, Silly String Theory, set in an alternate universe where Pomeranians in black leather uniforms are the ruling race.  They oppress the hapless humans, who find it hard to fight back because their oppressors are so cute.  This movie was trite and derivative and I found myself wishing that the film was someone smaller and weaker than me so I could kick it in the stomach and taunt it with threats of further and more depraved violence as it lay writhing in the gutter.”

    “How can you say that?”  Prevert cried, bouncing in his chair.  “I thought this was a WONDERFUL film!  I became so excited whenever a leather-clad Pomeranian appeared on the screen that I had to be restrained and sedated with seconal enemas!  My delight was such that I fired off many squirts of incontinent  happiness-pee.  This was the greatest film since that all-spastic-cast Western that Walt Disney made when he went insane from decades of injecting bourbon into his vans deferens!  I was literally beside myself before the end of this movie, meaning that I was so full of glee that my body had to divide itself into twins like a planarian to contain all my happiness!  If you didn’t like this movie, why, you should be butchered with a series of gardening tools.  Mostly a hoe, like your mother, the unsavory sow.”

    “You liked this shitfeast?  Seriously?  You should murder yourself by wrenching off one of your toadlike little legs and stabbing yourself with the splintered end of the bone!” roared Shitskull.  “I hated this movie so much that I, too, split into twins just to contain all of my hate!  And both of us were flinging our own feces at the screen as we screamed oaths until our lips were foamed with blood from our torn vocal chords!   I will fight you, by God!  I will fight you in the street if you say you liked this film!”

    “I was charmed, delighted, enchanted, and overwhelmed with wonder!”

    “You are a nothing!  I wish I could go back in time to the scene of your birth and shit in your crib until my bones came out!”

    “Delighted, I say!  I watched the whole film like this.”  Prevert clasped his hands under his chin and beamed, fluttering his eyelashes.

    Shitskull pounded on his own knees and fidgeted in anger.  “I could just set you on fire right now.  Oh.  Oh, how I hate you.  Oh.  You pitiful onion of a man.  I would rape you but I couldn’t possibly get an erection while you live.”

    “I can’t wait until it comes out on DVD so I can put it on repeat, staple myself to the couch, and watch it for the remainder of my lifespan, which I hope is incredibly long.”

    “I curse the day your mother’s uterus hawked you forth like a cunt-loogie.  That’s what you were, instead of a baby.  You were not born, you were sharted.”

    “I want to give this movie a great big hug and a kiss and a reacharound!”

    “Well, I want to cram a print of it up my ass so that I can shit it all over a picture of you being eaten by possums!  THAT you can hug!  Hug THAT!”

    “Perhaps I will!”

    “You upset me so much.  I don’t know how I can bear it.”

    “Maybe you won’t.   Perhaps you will flop around in convulsions of unable-to-bear-it-ness until your death is a blessing to us all.  Then maybe we can relax our sphincters without fearing you’ll crawl up in there and make some kind of nest, you foul little caricature of a being.  In any case, our next film stars Rob Schneider and Chuck Norris, and it’s a romantic comedy called Help! I’m a Stupid Asshole!  Because it’s a romantic comedy, Jennifer Anniston is in it.  Jennifer Anniston is every romantic comedy's default setting. And you finally get to see her butt, which is almost as pretty as her face!  I loved this movie so much I had to change my pants three times!”

    “I loved this movie, too!  I had to take out my car keys and use them to gouge my flesh so I wouldn’t become so happy that I would die!”

    “I liked Jennifer Anniston and I liked her butt!”

    “Her butt has personality!  It looks like an aerial view of two bald mongoloids sharing an Oreo, and that’s something I never realized I wanted to see until I saw it!”

    “Even Chuck Norris is good in this movie, because he spends the whole film drinking gutter water and vomiting.  It’s finally a role he can manage.  I’m glad they put him in the film just so I could watch him heave until his diaphragm folded in half.  I also liked the part where the children dropped cinderblocks on his hands over and over again for thirty minutes.”

    “I could have watched an hour of that!  His screaming made me laugh like a little girl who’s seen a boy’s tinkle-thang.   I hope he gets a posthumous Oscar.”

    “He’s not dead.”

    “I know, but Oscar time’s still a way off.  I’m wishing, here!”

    “I also clapped when his pants fell down and you could see that he has a miserable little penis that looks almost exactly like a circus peanut.  And I liked the way he screamed like a provoked inebriate when those ladies laughed and threw nickels at it.”

    “I also like Rob Schneider’s acting.  He reacts to everything  like it’s just hurt him and he’s mad at it.  Doesn’t matter if Jennifer Anniston’s kissing him or a spaniel’s peeing in his face, there’s Rob, cringing away like my maiden aunt being confronted with a ziploc full of pubic hair!”

    “His acting is genius.  He reminds me of a moth flinging itself against a window, persistent and idiotic, trying to break through and convey something.  And then the end credits roll and you realize that there is no moth.  There’s not even a window.”

    “Huh?”

    “I know, right?  My point exactly!  And he always seems so happy with his pathetic performances, with the misplaced pride of a lunatic gloating over a bucket of dung.   You don’t watch his performances so much as just sit there and let them wash over you like a pestilential rain.  We are the children, and he’s the schoolyard creep handing out the peyote-powder Pixie Stix.  He’s like a gun that shoots stupid, aimed at the audience.”

    “My favorite movie of his has gone overlooked.  Death To The Lollipop Guild.  Remember the one where he played a guy named Bathtowel Brown, who collected walrus poop?  And - outside of the Walrus Doodoo Museum in Trenton, New Jersey -- he had the finest single collection of walrus waste in the country?  His strange little acting quirks really made that film.  Like the bit where whenever he was talking to anyone in the street, he’d tuck his penis into one of their front pockets?  And when they asked him why, he’d say things like ‘it’s cold out here,’ or ‘We’re on the street so I don’t want people to see my penis.’  And by the end of the movie, everyone was telling each other, ‘I wish he’d never even grown that penis. God damn stem cell research, anyway.’  That had a poignancy that we had no right to expect from a film about walrus droppings.  And we have Rob Schneider to thank for it!  It‘s his Slingblade II: Electric Boogaloo, I think.”

    “Wasn’t that the film where he had the ponytail?  That’s a good look for him.  It pulled his face back a bit, made it look like a sack of trash someone’s carrying to the curb.  Bewildered, unpleasantly-damp trash, at that.”

    “Yep!  It was almost as funny as Kathy Griffin isn’t!” 

    “Finally, something we can agree on!”

    “Yes.  It’s a magical day.  I’d still love to sack you up and fling you into a pond like a puppy with a potato-shaped head, but, at least we’ll always have this magical moment.”

    “Yes.  I‘ll treasure it forever, hopefully after your legendary belt-sander accident that enables them to bury you in a cigar box like some unloved hamster.”

    Then they both farted until they ascended into Heaven, and Jesus turned in his two-week’s notice.

Greetings, whoever's still here!

No, I'm not dead... just lazy and distracted by other stuff.  The blog's overdue for some book reviews, I guess, so here we go.  Read a lot of not-all-that-great stuff, and some of it is very familiar to everybody by now so a review may not be all that useful, but there are a couple of obscurities in here that you might welcome some information about.




The Parasite - Ramsey Campbell (Pocket Books, 1980)
Ramsey Campbell is a master short story writer, turning out some classically creepy, nightmarish works,  but his  hallucinogenic style doesn't translate well to novels... and this is a long novel, which seems even longer than it is.  As a child, Rose is invaded by some soft, horrible thing in an abandoned house, while she and her friends are playing a séance game.  As an adult, she starts exhibiting psychic powers, such as getting glimpses of the future and being able to leave her body and fly around.  She struggles to maintain a normal life with Bill, her husband and writing partner (they’re film critics), but the attacks of paranormal powers become more pervasive, and she begins to research them, finding out things about Adolph Hitler, Aleister Crowley, and an evil man named Peter Grace who mastered powers like the ones she’s exhibiting.  Grace had apparently achieved some sort of immortality through rebirths, which scares Rose.  She soon realizes she’s been possessed and the intruder within her is growing stronger and demanding more control.  There’s some very creepy stuff here and a lot of it is really effective, but there’s an awful lot that feels like padding, too.   And Campbell’s prose is too much of a good thing;  he comes up with brilliant, hallucinatory images, but at 372 pages it gets overwhelming and drowns the narrative flow; it’s a good style for small bites but a feast of it will make you sick, and the book becomes tedious and reading it soon feels like a chore.  The opening bit is great and the last 50 pages or so are a strong payoff, but the middle -- though undeniably well-written -- feels like torture.  I attempted this book five or six times because I believed it was important to the horror genre, and finally only made it through out of sheer determination.  I’m an admirer of Campbell’s short stories and will give his other novels a try because I’ve read a couple that weren’t bad (Face That Must Die is great, and Ancient Images was good), but this one... agh, I gotta say pass on it.


Dark Inspiration - Russell James (Samhain Publishing, 2011)
A couple who were suffering some estrangement after the miscarriage of their twin girls move to a small town in Tennessee, setting up a new life in an old house with a bad reputation.  The wife starts interacting with the ghosts of some twin girls who drowned in a nearby pond, while the husband starts writing a Southern gothic novel and discovers an attic full of taxidermied animals and an ancient book on Egyptian magic.  Driven by some malefic spirit, he starts experimenting with taxidermy himself, and that hobby soon gets out of hand...   It’s an entertaining horror novel, although the writing feels a bit amateurish (not bad, just rather unskilled) and some of the ghost stuff gets pretty corny and makes it feel like a young-adult novel at times.  Flawed, but not boring.


Dagon - Fred Chappell (St. Martin’s Press, originally 1968)
Strange Lovecratian horror mixed with Southern gothic, written in an almost-hallucinatory style that reminded me a bit of Faulkner’s Sanctuary.   Peter is a priest interested in pagan gods, and he plans to write a book on Dagon, a maimed sea-monster deity, while he and his wife stay at the farm he inherited from his grandparents.  It turns out the farm had a connection to a cult worshipping Dagon and other ancient gods, and staying in the area has a bad effect on Peter.  Going through his granparents’ correspondence he finds references to Lovecraftian deities, and he’s both seduced and repulsed by Mina, the daughter of a moonshiner who squats on his land.  Mina is noseless and vaguely fish-like but has a strange control over him.  Peter almost gets trapped in his attic with the same chains that imprisoned his father when Peter was a young boy, and under the farm’s evil influence he ends up a degraded, addicted, maimed thing who’s being prepared for a dark purpose.   The story falters a lot and often doesn’t make a lot of sense, and most of it deals with Peter becoming a pathetic alcoholic dependent rather than having much to do with ancient gods.  Some of the writing is brilliantly poetic but it adds up to something that’s a bit too murky and obscure to pack the impact it could have had.  The pretenses at “literature” get in the way, but it’s still a worthwhile though not particularly compelling read.  A lot of people consider this an important work in the genre, but I’d say it was dispensable.




Where the Chill Waits - T. Chris Martindale  (Warner Books - 1991)
A gung-ho asshole boss with major daddy issues drags three apple polishing employees into the deep Canadian woods for a deer-hunting trip.  The city boys have enough trouble roughing it, but things soon get worse when they waken an evil Windigo spirit.   A huge deer they shoot turns out to have been rotting for months, and their Indian guide wants to turn back, getting very bad vibes.  But it’s too late and the Windigo curses them all.  Two of the men come back semi-conscious and frozen to the core, and growing taller as they start transforming into cannibalistic ice-monsters.  The wife of one of the men seeks help from the Indian guide and his old grandfather, and they try exorcising the Windigo... but that’s not an easy thing to do, especially for people who don’t really know the old rituals.  The writing is good and Martindale tries hard to pack in logs of scares, but after a while it comes across as an overlong B-movie with too many climaxes, and none of them especially powerful.  It’s not bad and it’s well-crafted, but not particularly special.





Exorcism - Eth Natas  (Lexington House, 1972)
Reading like a rush job to cash in on The Exorcist, this pretty-badly-written obscurity deals with a guy named Bentley (our first-person narrator) who takes in his 19-year-old niece, Melanie, after her parents are killed in a mountain-climbing accident.  Almost immediately upon arrival, Melanie starts acting strangely, displaying knowledge of her new town’s past, limping for no reason, and having weird fits.   Things quickly get worse as her face changes, her body twists, she starts calling Bentley “Daddy,” and says her name is Lotte.  She somehow manages to get across town (despite being so crippled she can barely shuffle around) and murders Bentley’s snooty girlfriend.  It becomes clear (to the reader, at least -- our narrator’s not quite as quick on the uptake) that she’s possessed by the spirit of some diseased little girl who burned to death in the house.  Very conveniently, Bentley’s eccentric neighbor is a warlock who performs exorcisms (or at least tries to).  The prose is pretty clumsy and odd (any sex scene that uses the word “phallus” is a sign of writer’s-discomfort) and there are few things that seem put in just to spice the book up, like a dream where Bentley’s almost forced to blow a hooded cultist, or an LSD trip during which he has sex with Melanie/Lotte.  It’s nothing special story-wise but it’s short (190 large-print pages, with frequent blank space) and it’s interesting as an artifact -- the publisher’s obscure, the cover art looks like a badly-doctored photo from a ‘60’s J.C. Penney catalog, and the backwards-Satan author name is a strange choice of pseudonyms (especially since the book’s about a different sort of possession and has no Satanic activity).  Junky weirdness whose main charm is its obscurity.






This Dark Earth - John Hornor Jacobs (Gallery Books, 2012)
Zombie apocalypse stories are, almost by necessity, derivative, and this one’s no exception; it (probably accidentally, since I think he wrote it a while back) almost exactly parallels a certain storyline in The Walking Dead comics.  But, Jacobs (as with Southern Gods) is such a good writer that you’ll forgive him the limitations of the genre, and the story’s so great you won’t mind if you’ve heard this one before.  An outbreak of a zombie virus is followed by nuclear bombs in an apparent containment effort.  The resultant EMP knocks out all electronics, shutting down everything mankind has become so over-reliant upon.  A doctor trying to escape the carnage and get back to her son teams up with a big, good-natured trucker named Knock-Out.  They survive to set up a community, and the son eventually becomes its leader because he’s smart at finding ways to deal with the undead.  They herd them into pens and bash their heads in, as sort of a slaughterhouse operation.  While sent on a mission to herd zombies away from the settlement by slowly riding motorcycles and having them chase the sound, our protagonists run into a group of well-equipped slavers who are capturing women to rape and forcing men into doing very nasty work.   The slavers are extremely cruel and ruthless and equipped with military vehicles, so it’s not good at all that they’ve become aware of our heroes’ settlement...   Well-written and fast-moving zombie horror that doesn’t break new ground (seriously, the deja-vu you’ll feel if you’ve read those Walking Dead comics will be almost overwhelming), but leads the pack as far as the quality of storytelling goes.







Elizabeth - Jessica Hamilton (pen name for Ken Greenhall)  (Popular Library, 1977)
Our narrator, Elizabeth, is a very unusual 14-year-old girl.  Wise beyond her years and emotionally-dead beyond life itself, she’s learning -- through the instruction of Frances, a woman who appears in her mirror -- that she’s a witch.  Elizabeth first uses her powers to kill off her parents, then goes to live with her grandmother and uncle, with whom she has an incestuous relationship.  When her grandmother proves bothersome, Elizabeth has her vanish.  She manipulates her tutor, Miss Barton, and pretty much everyone else around her.  This book is remarkable not so much for its plot (which is pretty standard witchcraft stuff) but for the power of the writing; Elizabeth’s narrative voice is like sociopathic poetry, wise and cold and matter-of-fact about darkness.  The writing’s so great I immediately went out and ordered used copies of the author’s other horror novels, knowing I’d spotted a heavyweight who’s somehow gone overlooked.  (Thanks to the great horror-fiction blog, Too Much Horror Fiction, for pointing this out -- I’d had a copy I bought at a library sale sitting around my house for years and hadn’t gotten the impetus to read it until I read Will’s excellent review).




The Hippy Cult Murders - Ray Stanley (Macfadden-Bartell, 1970)
Pure Manson-sploitation in which a charismatic hippie named Waco gets a vision that fear is the greatest power, and the god of fear is Zember.  Along with his friend Whitey he plans to gather a family of hippies and impregnate a “pure” girl with the son of Zember.  They head off to L.A. where Waco brains a couple of girls with a meat-tenderizing hammer that Zember compelled him to buy, then he carves Z’s on their bodies (for Zember -- I had nothing to do with it, I swear).   Waco slowly starts gathering a group together, targeting homeless teens (mostly girls, who all become group sex objects) and it gets too large to keep living in his bus and tent, so he decides he needs to rent some land.  He finances this by murdering some wealthy couples during a wife-swapping orgy, raping and terrorizing them before stabbing them all to death.  It all gets to be too much for Whitey, who also resents playing second fiddle to Waco all the time and thinks the “Zember” business is bullshit, so he starts causing trouble.  Whitey’s disposition only gets worse when Waco cuts one of his fingers off and gangrene sets in.  As cops follow the really-sloppy trail Waco’s leaving (he’s too crazy to have much sense about covering his tracks and even does his crimes in a VW bus with flowers painted all over it), Waco’s planning an orgy where he’ll marry a young girl who’s “pure” enough... but Whitey’s fed up and planning to spoil things.  There’s plenty of sex, violence, drugs, and weirdness, and it’s lurid enough not to be disappointing even though  it’s still pretty restrained and not nearly as graphic as it could have been.  The writing is solid, matter-of-fact stuff without a lot of flash to the style but plenty of detail, and it keeps the story compelling.  It’s a very hard-to-find book (I got lucky and snagged a copy for 35 cents off the bargain wall-o’-trash at Hawsey’s Book Index in Pensacola back in the 80’s, before that store went from being one of the best used book stores ever to the total useless shit it turned it into around 2000 or so - the change-over of that store made me sadder than any bookstore-experience has ever made me I'd gladly fist-fight whoever came up with that "business plan").  I wouldn’t say it’s worth the crazy prices people are asking for it now (nothing is), but if you find an affordable copy then it’s well-worth the read.



Baxter (aka Hell Hound)  - Jessica Hamilton (pen name for Ken Greenhall)   (Sphere, 1977)
Very strange (and brilliant) tale of a sociopathic pit bull (who narrates some of the chapters in first person).  Baxter the pit bull seeks to find an owner worthy of him; most people are too foolish and weak and their ways make little sense to him.  His search for the proper owner requires him to eliminate a few people, not by dog attacks that would implicate him as dangerous -- Baxter causes “accidents.”  He pushes the old lady who owns him down stairs so he can go live with the neighbors.  But then they have a baby, which takes their attention from him, so he has to make other arrangements.  He ends up with a troubled 12-year-old boy named Carl, who has sexual hang-ups about Hitler, among other dangerous perversions, and he recognizes a kindred spirit in Baxter.  But this boy may be too sick for even Baxter to deal with.   Very well-written, obscure little masterpiece that’s fetching insane money used now and, like this writer’s Elizabeth, deserves to be put back into print.  I was going to hold this review off 'til the next time I did a "critter book" set, (did you miss those?  Shame on you - here and here and here ) but who knows when that'll be - I figured I better put the review up while you can still maybe find a copy that won't break your bank (I got this one for 'bout $10 but I was damn lucky).





There are a million covers for this book (I re-read it in the Barnes & Noble Robert Louis Stevenson hardback collection - love those) but this is my favorite 'cuz it's the one my mom read to me when I was four years old.



The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde - Robert Louis Stevenson 
One of the ultimate classic (short) horror novels, I re-read this one every few years because it’s almost perfectly constructed.  I don’t think I need to describe the plot because it’s so ingrained into the human consciousness by now that it’s one of those stories you’re familiar with even if you never read it or saw any of the movies.  But if you haven’t, you should change that.










Labyrinth - Eric Mackenzie-Lamb (Signet, 1979)
A college professor leads a group of students into the Okefenokee swamp to study nature.  While taking a soil sample one of the students digs up a couple of old coins, and when the professor takes them to an expert he learns they’re probably part of a lost treasure worth a hell of a lot of money.  Unfortunately the coin expert’s also a crook and soon some violent (and homosexual, I guess to remind you of Deliverance) killers are also looking for it.  Things get busy but also confusing... possibly because the book’s not all that enthralling after a point.  The writing’s not bad or anything, and some subplots (such as the teacher getting framed for seducing a student) are interesting, but it doesn’t really add up to much, and when the action really kicked in I didn’t care much anymore.  Not really a horror novel,  more of an adventure-thing, but since they kind of tried to market it as one I’ll include it with the horror book reviews.

And, as always, please follow me (and a bunch of other people cooler than me) on Twitter.

Yep, it's been a while since I did one of these, but I'm about to make it up to ya in sheer volume.  If a baker's dozen is thirteen, then a butcher's dozen is fifteen.  And if that's too goofy for you (and if it ain't you're no son o' mine), there's a Butcher book in here to use as an excuse.  Basically, I had to call the post something, alright?  Anyway, I take on some heavyweights here.  Wanna see me swing on James Bond?  How 'bout Jack Reacher (just a lil''cuz I really do like the dude)?  And you can just call me the Death-Merchant-Death-Merchant!  Read on...





Swampmaster #1 - Jake Spencer  (Diamond, 1992)
First a three-book series has a Seminole Indian named Johnny Firecloud (as far as I can tell he’s no relation to the 70’s exploitation movie character of the same name) trying to survive a post-nuke future and lead a resistance against the National Front, which is occupying twenty states.  The National Front started when a bunch of right-wing hate groups (the KKK, Neo-Nazis, etc.) banded together and seceded from the union (now known as the Free States).  In the ensuing civil war nukes were exchanged, so there are lots of mutants running around, and the National Front are a bunch of crazy perverts running torture camps.  For some reason that’ll be inexplicable to anyone in the South, Georgia is a free state and Atlanta is the capital of all the Free States (Texas also didn’t go with the Neo-Nazis -- I’d’ve thought they’d be the first to secede).  Anyway, a meeting to unite all Free territories against the National Front is supposed to take place in Atlanta, so the National Front sends in spies to plant “bio-nukes” in the city.   Firecloud and his wacky crew of freedom fighters (including an Asian woman and her acrobatic twin midget sidekicks, Marcus One and Marcus Two) have to try to stop it, but Firecloud gets caught up in fighting some “White Trash” mutants who are covered in tumors and fungus; he almost ends up the sex slave of an eczema-covered White Trash woman named Itchin’ Peg.  Then, to get a pilot for a helicopter Firecloud’s captured, they have to attack a circus train full of freaks and slaves who are forced to work in a traveling carnival.  (The National Front apparently loves carnivals as much as it does Hitler -- one of their leaders, who’s known as “Clam Mouth” because he has overactive salivary glands and drools all the time, is obsessed with a carnival he’s building on his desk).  The book is too long at 232 small-print pages, and there aren’t enough fight scenes.  What are there aren’t bad, but they’re so bogged down in detail that they move too slowly.  Firecloud’s an expert with a compound bow but ends up not using it very much, and, despite the title, not much happens in the swampland, either.  He does use his bow and arrows to fight off some sharks, though, which is a little crazy.  It’s not badly-written at all but the characters aren’t all that interesting and my interest in what they were doing tended to lag, especially when things got too wacky to maintain much sense of realism.  Still, not the worst you could find or anything.






(The weapon Justin Perry uses most often is not pictured)





Justin Perry: The Assassin #1 - John D. Revere (Pinnacle, 1983)
What a weird, perverse book.  Roger Johnson, a Colonel in the USAF, signs on to be a killer for the CIA when is wife is killed because she uncovered a Communist plot.  In his new identity as Justin Perry, he’s a murderous pervert who’s so obsessed with sex that he can barely pay attention while being briefed on his missions if there’s a woman in the room.   He’s sent to kill a German who was supposedly killed in Belsen, but that was apparently faked because he’s reappeared.  While following up on this (pretty incidentally, since a woman he picked up in a bar coincidentally is in on it) he gets attacked during sex and has to kill a knifeman while ejaculating all over the poor woman’s couch.  That doesn’t matter for long, though, because the knifeman kills the girl instead, but she enjoys it because she’s a masochist and being murdered heightens her orgasm.  Justin ends up being captured by the German (who’s gay and has a slave-boy for a chauffer) and Justin and his friend Bob Dante are tied down, given bull-breeding drugs, and are going to be sexed to death by a bunch of gross old women and the gay chauffer.   Perry escapes and learns that it’s all a plot by a right-wing secret society called SADIF (Sons And Daughters In Freedom), which has infiltrated the Catholic church (Joseph Mengele is the Pope’s gardener!) and Perry’s own parents belong to it.  The SADIF agents kidnap Justin’s son as a bargaining chip (and he almost becomes the German’s catamite) to make Justin deliver a secret list.  It’s not badly written, style-wise, but it’s light on action and preoccupied with sex to a degree that it doesn’t even feel healthy anymore; it’s not even a turn-on, it’s just disturbing and has a dark, queasy sleaze to it.  Justin seems to be sleeping with women mostly to combat some latent homosexuality that comes out when he gets aroused by killing men at close quarters.  One gay guy he kills by stabbing him up the ass with a bayonet.  And almost every woman he finds is a masochist who want to be beaten up during sex.  Perry’s so preoccupied with it it’s almost pathological, and his mentality is so unbalanced that the book feels surreal (for a while I wondered if Bob Dante might be some other personality of Justin’s or something, because they’re both described as looking kind of demonic and satyr-like; Justin Perry’s the only action hero I know of with a unibrow).   It’s overlong and the action scenes are pretty scant, and just seem to be something the author wanted to dispense with so Justin could have more sex.  Kinda disturbing one-fisted action.










Death of a Citizen - Donald Hamilton  (Titan Books, originally 1960)
In the first novel of the Matt Helm series, Matt is retired from doing secret government wet work and has been a husband, father, and writer of Western novels for fifteen years (from which you could make a good case that Hamilton may have viewed him as an idealized alter-ego).  But then he runs into Tina, a girl he used to work with back in the day, at a party.  She’s apparently still an agent and wants his help to stop an assassination; a top scientist has been targeted by Commies because his death would cause a big setback in technological research.   After finding a dead woman in his bathtub, Matt’s back in the game and quickly reverts to his old ways, spotting people dogging their train and, when necessary, neutralizing them.  But Matt -- or Eric, as he’s known in secret service mode -- figures out that this web is a whole hell of a lot more tangled than it appeared.  They take his daughter hostage to try to force him to kill for them.  Oh yeah, he’ll kill all right...   Tough, gritty, but always realistic and believable.  It’s amazing that they could ever make anything as silly and stupid as those Dean Martin movies out of a character as hard-as-nails as this badass.  It’s like somebody tried to turn Dirty Harry into Maxwell Smart.  Pretend those movies don’t even exist and check out these books, there’s no way you’ll regret it.










 Wulff's so badass his point-thirty-eight can blow up entire ships!

The Lone Wolf #2:  Bay Prowler - Mike Barry (Berkley Medallion, 1973)
Second in the strange series by sci-fi author Barry Malzberg has Burt Wulff (he’s still Burt at this stage, although - oddly - he gets called “Conlan” on page 170)  is in San Francisco, carrying out his war against the international drug trade.  While attacking a drug den Wulff finds an overdosed meth-head named tamara and, after killing her drug-dealer boyfriend, he takes her along, trying to help her.  She doesn’t know who he is or what he’s doing (she’s pretty much an imbecile) but calls him “Avenger.”   They have sex, which makes Wulff feel “alive” again and gives him a new reason to try to survive.  He’s still a psycho, though, so after getting Tamara to safety (it’s a strange move in an action-series book, but this time the hero’s love-interest doesn’t die) Wulff goes after a half-million dollar drug shipment that’s coming in on a boat (originally it was a million dollar shipment but Barry apparently forgot the original figure by the time he got to writing about it).  The mob’s frustrated by Wulff so they keep sending hitters after him, but he gets them first (partially by luck, because he’s not much of a tactician) and when he has to go through their 100-man army it’s so easy for him that he literally worries more about catching bronchitis from the cold air than getting shot.  It moves fast enough but the writing is strange, a semi-poetic stream of consciousness, and it’s the opposite of gun-porn; Malzberg apparently has no knowledge of weapons at all, referring to guns as “point-thirty-eights” and “point-forty-fives” and thinking grenades are a whole lot more powerful than they are.  It’s obviously fast, sloppy, and not a labor of love, but you could do worse.







 This cover photo is an important part of two people’s resumes.


Butcher #3: Keepers of Death -- Stuart Jason  (Pinnacle, 1972)
Ex-mafioso-turned-agent-for-White-Hat Bucher is sent to Memphis for a “Cone Pone Hoedown Festival” (I am not making that up and god only knows why anybody else thought they should) to infiltrate a hippie commune and learn what they know about the disappearance of an East German scientist who defected to the U.S. with plans for a gravity-drive spaceship.  Bucher poses as a hit man (who he killed in the traditional opening chapter scene where Bucher always takes out a hit team trying for the $100,000 bounty on his head).  He’s suspicious of the hippies, though; even though they grow pot and have nonstop random sex, they don’t have long hair or weird clothes (except for one girl who wears a gunny sack).  Bucher follows the trail to Sweden, then Rome.  Along the way he brings a few more colorful hit-men’s careers to an end; they’re always weirdoes in these books, like the goon who’s constantly doing a gorilla imitation because he thinks it’s more intimidating than hilarious.  Not all of them get “kooshed” with Bucher’s silenced P-38; he also gets to showcase his brass knuckles in a fist-fight with a giant, and he uses his switchblade to knife-fight a guy covered with warts (seems like somebody in these books always has warts).    During all this killing Bucher learns that the whole thing’s a wild goose chase and the real problem is a revolution’s about to be triggered by a nuclear  strike on Washington, D.C.  It feels strangely like the writer (James Dockery in this case, using the Stuart Jason psuedo) decided his original plot lacked some oomph and decided, screw it, let’s scrap it mid-book and substitute something bigger.  Bucher’s quest to save America is made all the more difficult when the syndicate ups the “dead only” bounty on his head to a quarter million.  For an ex-Mafia thug, Bucher’s pretty puritanical about all the rampant sex going on (he seems to find it distasteful even when he engages in it) and though he kills a lot of people, he feels bad about it and is disgusted that the world has to be so violent and evil.  Good thing it is, though, or there wouldn’t be another thirty-some of these books.  Pretty average but the average for a Butcher book ain’t bad.








Coolest cover you've ever seen in your life?  Probably!  I want a van with that painted on the side of it!

Chopper Cop #2:  The Hitchhike Killer - Paul Ross  (Popular Library, 1972)
Motorcycle-riding hipster cop Terry Bunker is called in to track down a serial killer on a motorcycle who's picking up hitchhiking hippie girls, driving them out to the desert, then running them over on his bike.  The brass hate to put Terry on a case because he bends the rules a lot, rides a Harley chopper, has longish hair and sideburns instead of the regulation crew-cut, and says "Peace!" a lot, but he's the best when it comes to dealing with younger people who usually hate cops.   Terry's not crazy about other cops, either; he terrorizes them and leads them on a high-speed chase just for the hell of it as he's going in to get his assignment.  And all the kids aren't always crazy about Terry, either; a gang of them beat him up when they find out he's a "pig."  Terry has smarts, though, and he deduces from the time-frame and the distance between a couple of the killings that the psycho's making trips on a small airline.  (Did you know airlines in the early 70's handed out small packs of cigarettes along with the tiny bottles of booze?  Apparently so.)  Checking this out mixes Terry up with a couple of pretty stewardesses and a co-pilot he suspects of being the killer.  While smoking grass with them Terry makes some mistakes and another girl ends up dead while Terry sends the cops chasing a wrong lead.  There are a few other slip-ups before he closes in on the truth.  Good, fast-moving plot with only a few action scenes, but they're well-timed and punchy.  Terry's smart but not infallible, which keeps things realistic and interesting.   I could easily picture this as an old grindhouse movie... sometimes I even saw film-scratches in my head.  A quick read, well worth checking out.



Yes, the headband does appear in the book.

Traveler #1: First, You Fight - D. B. Drumm  (Dell, 1984)
A nuclear holocaust happens in 1989 (they must not have expected this to be a long-running series:  the 13th and final volume came out in 1987, just in time) during the presidency of an ex-cowboy-movie-star named Andrew Frayling (middle name probably Ronaldwilsonreagan).  Special forces soldier Kiel Paxton loses his wife and infant son to the bombs, and he's also suffering from a dose of nerve gas he picked up on a mission in Central America.  It's left him with heightened senses (and a sixth kind of "spidey sense" that helps warn him of trouble), but it makes it difficult for him to be around people because their energy keys him up.  He has a minivan called the "Meat Wagon" (with a Wankel engine that'll run on most any combustible fluid) and a bunch of weapons, so he drives around taking mercenary jobs for gas, food, and ammo.   While escaping an army of roadrats he goes into a city in Utah and finds himself in the middle of a Fistful of Dollars situation, with two competing warlords both wanting to hire him... or kill him to stop him from working for the other.   Both of them want him to capture a weapons shipment from an army of vicious "Glory Boys" - former military types gone bandit - and they send him to scout that out... but Traveler decides the townspeople would be better off if all three warring factions were laid to rest.  But while doing that he also has to battle his own seizures and freak-outs from all the stress being put on his wrecked nerves.  This Road Warrior-inspired series grew more sci-fi-ish (and silly) as it went along... if I remember correctly by the third or fourth book a guy riding a giant mutant housecat shows up. I know sci-fi (and Specialist series) author John Shirley was "D. B. Drumm" for at least a few of these books, but I don't think this was one of them; he's probably responsible for the sci-fi element being upped. But this one's pretty straightforward and the writing's good and the story keeps moving at a fast clip.



ATTENTION, TERRORISTS:  Jeff Foxworthy has had enough of your shit!

The Peacemaker #1:  The Zaharan Pursuit - Adam Hamilton (Berkley Medallion, 1974)
Barrington Hewes-Bradford (don’tcha just hate him already?) - or Barry to his friends and people who don’t have time for all that shit -- is a wealthy corporate magnate who, in addition to running oil, shipping, and airline businesses is also devoted to stamping out any evil forces that threaten world peace.  While partying on his yacht a crewman is bludgeoned with a flashlight and dumped overboard by someone who he caught sending signals.  Soon afterward a bigger boat does a hit-and-run with the yacht.  It all strikes Barry as strange so he has his helper, Lobo, investigate.  They find the boat that hit them had been smuggling military ordinance and has a connection to a supposed Latin American revolutionary named Zaharan.  One of Barry’s invesitgators ends up with a couple of bullets in the head and a Z carved in him -- a sure sign they’re tangling with Zaharan (unless it’s Zorro - I think he’s got copyright on that).  While attending frou-frou cocktail parties with his silly twit friends (people call each other “darling” a lot -- they’re that kind of assholes) , Barry learns of more cover-ups; the guy who owns the boat that hit his yacht is hiding something, and one of the jet-setters is killed with a shotgun, then his girlfriend is sniped at in her hospital bed.  Going after the shooter requires a car and boat chase, and Barry also scuba-dives for reconnaissance and has one of his men try to blow up a plane carrying an arms shipment bound for Zaharan’s revolutionaries.  There’s a twist at the end that’s pretty implausible but I cut it some slack for trying.   This is kind of like an attempt to combine Dynasty with The A Team before either was on the air, and while rather-cardboard Barry is fairly rough-and-tumble for a rich boy, it still made me want to go read a Gannon novel for an antidote.  Even the cover gets things out of whack; who thought putting a picture of our hero talking on the phone would be badass?  Look out, troublemakers, or Barry will make a few calls!  “Peacemaker” is also an odd choice of monikers for a vigilante hero series to be built around.  Not terrible, but no great shakes.  There were three more.




The Katmandu Contract - Nick Carter (Award 1975) 
Revolutionaries kidnap a senator’s kids and take them to Nepal, demanding a billion (or a million - the book flubs a little at keeping the number straight) dollars in diamonds.  Nick Carter is sent to deliver the diamonds... and ensure they don’t get to keep them after he gets the kids back, since governments could topple if the revolution is that well-funded.  Sent to stop Nick is Kunwar, a top assassin who’s filed his teeth to vampire fangs.  Kunwar first puts a bullet in Nick’s Eurasian girlfriend, which adds a vengeance-hunt dimension to the espionage.  This one’s really well-done and heavy on the action scenes, with Nick surviving being pushed in front of a train, going through a big car chase, and having numerous karate fights which get really brutal; the author (James Fritzhand in this case) seems to have knowledge of (or at least a fascination for) the martial arts, because Nick’s like Sonny Chiba in this book, destroying people with his hands.  He also makes use of all his other weapons, too (you get the infamous gas grenade twice!), and this book lets Nick truly live up to his “Killmaster” title.  There’s an unusual bit of added intrigue where Nick has to smuggle the diamonds in his stomach (tied to a tooth with fishing line!) and has a problem eating enough to hold back the nausea.   Smart, fast-paced, and not too far-fetched to stay plausible.  This is a good one.






ATTENTION TERRORISTS!  John Kerry has had enough of your shit!

Death Merchant #54: Apocalypse U.S.A.! - Joseph Rosenberger (Pinnacle, 1982)
Quadafi is plotting to have a deadly nerve gas sprayed over the east coast, which would kill around 20 million Americans.  Richard Camellion - the Death Merchant - isn’t really all that concerned about that ‘cuz he’s full of wacky beliefs that the U.S. will be destroyed by nukes within the next seventeen years and that Nostradamus is right that the Earth and moon would switch orbits and people would evolve into energy-beings, etc.  But, it’s an excuse to kill a bunch of people so he and his team (who seem as skilled as he is and just as full of horseshit conspiracy theories) stage big firefights in an ice-cream factory, a junkyard, a brick factory, and a ship... all explained in excruciating detail but none of which have much point, because there’s not really a plot so much as a premise.  The fights get very dull because every character -- including our “heroes” -- are total cardboard.  I only kept reading because Rosenberger is so obviously an insane idiot, and his prose is like a cut on your lip; it’s irritating, it’s painful, but the masochist in you can’t resist picking away at it.  Usually action-series books are short but this is 200 pages of small, dense print because highly-self-indulgent educated-idiot Rosenberger can’t oh-my-god-PLEASE-shut-the-fuck-up about all the trivia he knows and tell the freakin' story.  There’s at least a season’s worth of In Search of... episodes about conspiracy theories involving Israel, the Mafia, the Kennedy assassination, the arms race, what the government spends money on, etc., and all if it alarmingly simpleminded; Rosenberger has a tiresome trove of facts he likes to show off (hey, wanna learn how bricks are made in the middle of a gunfight?) but he puts them together like a moron.  And I don’t think I’ve ever read a writer who had NO evidence of understanding humor, at all;  Camellion is utterly witless, yet tries to make pained jokes that actually made me feel embarrassed for Rosenberger.  And the footnotes about everything reminded me of Vladimir Nabokov’s Pale Fire, where the notes are a separate, unaware story of fantasies of madness.  There’s also a lot of prognostication clumsily forced into the story, every bit of which has since been proven wrong.  This is lousy as an action novel (despite the ridiculous body count and fashion-show of firearms), but it’s kind of perversely fascinating as an artifact of idiotic insanity.  Really, it’s like listening to somebody tripping on ‘shrooms try to tell you what happened in a Chuck Norris movie they saw.  You can almost feel Rosenberger gripping your sleeve and babbling this stuff at you. Awful, awful stuff, but entertaining in a way for all the wrong reasons.  And, for our sins, there were seventy-one of these goddamn things.




Jack Reacher #1: The Killing Floor - Lee Child  (Jove, 1997)
Please don't misunderstand the bulk of the criticism that will follow:  I very much liked this book and plan to buy the rest of them (already ordered the next ten)... but hooboy are there some flaws!  The story's compelling enough to make forgiving them a pretty easy thing to do, but you should start reading these with some idea of what you're getting into.  This is pretty much the written equivalent of a BDAM (Big Dumb Action Movie) and it's got all the lovable boneheadedness of any one of them.  Child is just good at throwing enough cleverness and convincing-sounding horseshit into the narrative to distract you and make this wackiness seem in some way viable. 

First off, much has been made of how original a character Jack Reacher is.  He's a former military policeman who got out of the army and now just drifts around the U.S. like a hobo.   He's bigger, stronger, smarter, tougher, and more resourceful than anyone he comes into contact with.  My main question is... does no one remember John Rambo and Mike Hammer?   Because that's essentially what Reacher is -- a blend of these two action icons.  He's got Rambo's background and lifestyle and Hammer's giant-among-dwarfs toughness/smartness/size.  Throw in a bit of Sherlock Holmes intuition, maybe a little MacGuyver resourcefulness, and a hint of The Punisher for attitude, and that's Reacher.  And this isn't a complaint -- I love Mike Hammer and Rambo and the rest so making a combo of them all gets a big hell-yeah-buddy from me -- I'm just not going to say it's original when it's clearly derivative.  But since the sources are so well-chosen, who cares, right?  More power to 'im!

Reacher's name is well-chosen because when it comes to suspension of disbelief, he's really reaching.  Okay, see if you can buy this:  while riding a bus to nowhere in particular, he makes an impulsive, unscheduled stop in an obscure small town in Georgia for no reason other than a blues guitarist he likes was killed there some sixty-odd years ago, so it seems as good a place to sight-see as any.  He's promptly arrested because he's seen walking away from the site of a murder that happened a couple of hours before he got off the bus.   So far, okay, but here's the Jesus-rose-from-the-dead part: the guy who got murdered turns out to be Reacher's brother, who he hasn't heard from in seven years!   You buyin' this?  I hope so, because your powers of accepting coincidences are going to be called on again and again and again;  you won't only have to suspend your disbelief, you're going to have to levitate it.   Seriously, this is one of the craziest plot points I've ever been asked to swallow since Edgar Rice Burroughs'The Return of Tarzan, where Tarzan is sailing around the entire coast of Africa and gets very-luckily shipwrecked a mile from his childhood cabin... and then Jane, while making a separate voyage to search for him, ends up shipwrecked a mile from that!   (Note: I also enjoyed The Return of Tarzan despite that - I'm just tellin' ya what's involved here).

Anyway, Reacher's brother was working for the Treasury Department to track down the-most-evil-counterfeiters-ever.  They have an incredibly ingenious (although utterly preposterous to anyone knowing the basics of the process described) method of faking money, and they're utterly ruthless about protecting it: anyone who gets in their way is torture-murdered along with their whole family.  Reacher and a few allies (a spunky female cop, a black police detective everybody underestimates, etc.) set out to finish what Reacher's brother started, and then some.  Along the way Reacher has to kill maybe a dozen people, and never so much as faces any charges for it -- the only killing he ever gets in any trouble for is the one he had nothing to do with.  He's extremely tough and highly skilled... maybe a little TOO highly skilled, because he makes some wild educated guesses and they ALWAYS work out.   Fer instance, the bad guys are after some info in his late brother's things, so they steal them.  Reacher bets they'd only save his brother's briefcase and throw the rest away, and he bets a guy like his brother would be tricky and have hidden the info in some less-obvious luggage.   And lo and behold, this is so, and Reacher even guesses exactly which dumpster on the interstate the luggage was thrown into!  It's a small world after all!

Or, when a deceased cop hides a key they need, Reacher deduces (A) that there is some kind of key hidden, (B) exactly where the key is (even though it was crazy well-hidden), AND (C) figures out exactly where the thing it unlocks will be hidden, too!   I want this mofo pickin' my lottery numbers for me!  This kind of thing happens over and over again.  Reacher guesses on the first try what fake name a guy will be using to hide out at motels.   A woman is torture-killed in an airport Reacher's running through like O. J. Simpson in a Hertz commercial -- how'd the killer have time to do it and hide the body when Reacher was in such hot pursuit?  Magic!   Every trick works out.

    But even though it sounds like I'm complaining, I'm not, really -- I'm just trying to give it some perspective because these books are so highly-praised;  I'm just telling you they're really the modern equivalent of the Penetrator/Executioner/Death Merchant style action-fest rather than any kind of high-brow-at-all lit;  don't let the high-end design (it really is nice) and thickness of the books fool you.  But, also, don't be fooled into thinking there's anything wrong with reading those old-school-style action-fests, either; of course there's not, which is why a good chunk of this blog is devoted to them. 

    I would say that at 524 pages this was overlong for an action novel, but since it never really got boring I can't complain about that much.  The action scenes are really well done (about as good as any I've ever read, and I've read a lot) and there's some snappy dialogue.  And Reacher (who's in first person here but that changes to third in most of the other books)  is interesting and well-suited for the conflicts he gets into.  And even though he's a super-tough guy, the bad guys are scary enough that there's still a real sense of menace in the situations he gets into.  So, like I said, even though there's a lot about the plotting of this book that's so preposterous you've got to marvel at Child's panache for thinking he can get away with it (even while you’re happily letting him do exactly that), it’s a fast-moving and engaging read and I’ll gladly go again, even if the other books turn out to be just as ridiculous.  So, I say check it out, most definitely.  Be prepared to give what’s going to be asked of you and you’ll probably enjoy it.

By the way, I haven't seen the movie yet, but Reacher's nothing like Tom Cruise.  They should've cast Dolph Lundgren.  That would've been perfect.   For some high-praise for Reacher, check out the always-excellent Spy Guys & Gals, which inspired me to check him out.










Thick-witted git doesn’t even know how to hold a gun!  Whatcha gonna do, knit us a sweater with that thing?  Nice bow-tie, Skippy!


Casino Royale - Ian Fleming  (Signet, 1953)
Here's where I make me a Big Mac out of a sacred cow.

I don’t know how the movies made a badass out of this simpering, self-pampering daffodil.  I had hear that Fleming started writing these books because he wanted Britain to have a bad mamajama like Mickey Spillane’s Mike Hammer.  I dunno, maybe that guy shows up in later books, but the James Bond here is a huge wimp who does very little and all of it badly.  Sent to Royale to out-gamble an enemy agent at baccarat and break his bank, Bond fails and is saved only when someone gives him another stake so he can try again.  While trying to stop him a bomb goes off and almost kills him -- he’s so shaken that he calls for a massage (even though he knows people are trying to kill him).   Then there’s a car chase and he promptly wrecks and is knocked out (his car is 25 horsepower!  I kept picturing him tear-assing around on a riding lawnmower) and is captured.  His defense is to try kicking a guy in the shins and run away, but they push him down and he’s helpless again.  Then the enemy hits him in the balls a bunch of times with a rug-beater until Bond is rescued by an enemy agent who only doesn’t kill him because he hasn’t been ordered to.  And that’s really about it; Bond is basically an ineffectual victim who only survives by the kindness of his enemies and gets fooled by double agents.  There’s no real action and Fleming’s writing is prim and prissy, all manners and no grit.  This was the first Bond novel and I hope the others get better, because a hero that does nothing but get his balls paddled isn’t very awe-inspiring.







That's not a perspective shot, people... after reading this book I'm pretty sure Brett Wallace's fist really is three times the size of his head!

Ninja Master#2 : Mountain of Fear - Wade Barker  (Warner Books, 1981)
Ric Meyers steps in and turns the series into hyper-violent lunacy as ninja master Brett Wallace shows up in the backwoods burg of Tylertown, where everybody’s incredibly, cartoonishly evil.  First he deals with the racist cops who gang-raped a couple of black girls who were passing through, and then he takes on the henchmen of a Nazi doing medical experiments on orphans.  There’s not much of a plot, just a set-up for action scenes which are damn near constant, and they’re great even though they’re completely impossible.  Brett’s more of a superhero than just a highly trained fighter, and he’s even able to throw playing cards through people or fling throwing stars through the crack under a door.  He’s never in a whole lot of danger because he’s Superman fighting mere mortals, but there’s tons of entertaining mayhem, with guys getting their testicles kicked through their intestines and such.  Meyers does have a disturbing tendency to like writing sick scenes where women get raped and brutalized, so you will have that to contend with before the cartoon starts.  Pretty ridiculous but you’re not gonna be bored, guaranteed.   For more info, Glorious Trash did a great review (which inspired me to take my copy out and read it)










Secret Mission: Prague - Don Smith  (Award, 1968)
Spy Phil Sherman is sent to Czechoslovakia to trace shipments of machine guns to rioting Black militants in American cities, which could erupt in a war within America.  (This loses a little bite since there are now well-armed Black gangs in most cities and what they mostly do is shoot each other, but in 1968 this must have seemed nightmarish).  Phil’s contact promptly ends up dead in his hotel room with a knife in his back, and Phil has to dispose of the body without getting the attention of the authorities.  Then, investigating the flight on which the guns were being carried, his car gets blown up and he luckily avoids going with it.  He teams up with a girl named Zanya who survived the Hungarian revolution and was left a bit skittish by it.  Phil doesn’t even carry a gun until he takes one off a dead agent, who he’s almost killed with in a car wreck.  He plants his ID on the dead man (whose face was torn off in the wreck) and tries passing himself off as dead to take the heat off of him.  There’s a lot of chasing around as Phil and Zanya try to get out of the country, but it’s more intrigue than action, so much so that it becomes a little tedious.  The writing is good but the story’s a bit dry and could stand a few more fights and shoot-outs.  Phil’s the kind of guy who tries to avoid trouble as much as he can while accomplishing his mission, and that’s wise in real life, but this is a book so it creates a bit of a drag in the pacing and makes me wish Phil were more of a troublemaker like Nick Carter.  It’s realistic, though, and even if it’s not the most slam-bang book out there, it’s far from dumb.











Raker #1 - Don Scott   (Pinnacle, 1982)
The ad copy for this series (reproduced above so you can marvel at it) had me expecting something hilarious, or possibly infuriating.  I was expecting some bonehead right-wing Archie Bunker-with-a-gun kind of deal... and that's more or less what this is, but it doesn't go far enough with it to be fun, and since the story itself is too much of a bore to make up for that, the whole thing's a fizzle.  Raker is an agent for a "company" (apparently with the government?) which sends him out to see what's up with some cop-killings in Black neighborhoods.  The same incidents are happening in city after city, always with the same m.o. -- pairs of white cops get called to check on false domestic disturbances and get ambushed with shotguns.  Raker thinks the B.L.A.  (Black Liberation Army) is trying to kick off a nationwide race war.  Most of the book is spent with Raker trying to talk to contacts and find leads to trace the thing, and there's not a lot of action.  What action there is seems incidental and briefly inserted in hopes of shutting up guys like me who'd complain that there were no fights.  Sorry that didn't work!  A few people get splattered with shotguns, but there's not much impact in the way these scenes are written, and all the characters are so cardboard that you just can't care about it much.  And that's one of the problems -- even Raker himself is very cardboard and boring.  There's only one half-hearted attempt to give him any background at all, a flashback scene where he's infiltrating a group of protesting hippies while his brother's being killed in 'Nam.  Raker tends to think every guy he meets is a "fruit," and while he's not blatantly racist he does do a stereotypical "Black accent" on the phone that Stepin Fetchit would find over the top.   A big point is made that the Black guy on Raker's team "acts white."  More of that kind of assholish stuff could have made Raker an antihero to laugh at, at least, but the dude's not really well-drawn or interesting enough to feel anything about one way or the other.  I can see why this series stopped at two volumes.



Have I mentioned lately that I'm on Twitter?  And so are all these other cool people you should follow! 

Hi all...

Sorry for the extended absence; luckily, zwolf's still posting some excellent and entertaining reviews of pulps and such.

Meanwhile, on the homefront, my wife has beaten breast cancer and is well on her way to feeling fully healthy again, giving me a chance to use my blues song-a-month run here last year as demo fodder while seeking a new band with whom I can play locally.



And around the time that we got the good news on her cancer, I met up with local band Alamantra... they are some good guys who play well, though sadly, the stars did not align as hoped, and I'm no longer with them now, though our two gigs were quite fun and fairly rocked.

We played Friday night at the Nick in Birmingham, along with the High Fidelics, Asteroid Shop, and  Looksy... (Thanks to super-soundman and all-around super-guy Victor E. Wilson for making everyone sound so damn good and for providing these photos!!!)


...and then Saturday night in Florence, with Planet Ink and, once again, the High Fidelics. Gotta say, everyone was very cool and all of the bands rocked. The High Fidelics were the real stand-out band for me... They play straight-ahead surf-rock, with the bassist splitting his time cleverly between a guitar slung as a Fender-6 and a regular Fender bass, and the guitar and organ workout all night during the set (which one night included a killer Henry Mancini medley of Peter Gunn and Baby Elephant Walk), but the real star of the band, for my money, is their bad-ass drummer, whose fills get more and more complex and over-the-top throughout the set, nicely staying away from the silliness of Tommy Lee by using humor as a musical weapon. Hard to explain, but amazing to behold... check 'em out!

So, that's where I've been... and now I'm looking to build another local band to slog the clubs here in town, playing blues and funk, rock and soul... looking for a drummer first and foremost, so hit me up if you are that drummer or if you know him... 

 Okay, let's all just agree that I suck at coming up with blog-post titles, forgive me, and move on, shall we?

Here be another batch o' horror novels to add to your summer reading list (or not), just in time to be a month late or so.   I've had very good reading luck lately and managed to get walloped with some amazing new ones that impressed me way more than usual and are sure to end up on my all-time best list (NOS4A2, Last Days, and Penpal) and re-visited a couple I'd read years ago that impressed me all over again (House Next Door and Deliverance).  Read on for details...





NOS4A2 - Joe Hill   (William Morrow, 2013)

Victoria "The Brat" McQueen has a special ability; she can find missing things by riding her bicycle over a rickety, bat-filled covered bridge that used to span a river near her house.  The bridge itself is a lost thing; it  fell in years before but reappears when she needs to get somewhere, and always opens onto the place she's looking for. She learns from another supernaturally-gifted person - a weird librarian girl named Maggie whose Scrabble tiles tell her things - that they have these abilities because they're unusually creative.  But being unusually creative has some downsides; for one, Vic gets bad headaches when she rides over her bridge, and playing with the Scrabble tiles has left Maggie with a bad stutter. 

But the really bad thing is that sometimes evil people are unusually creative, too, and one of those is Charlie Manx, a dapper psychopath who can drive his vintage Rolls Royce to an amusement park in his imagination, which he calls Christmasland.  He kidnaps children and takes them there, where they become gleefully-evil demon-things as Manx absorbs their innocent life-force like a psychic vampire.   Vic escapes an encounter with Manx but grows up troubled, ending up as a neurotic but artistically-talented fuck-up who has a kid (named Bruce Wayne) with an overweight comic-book nerd named Lou.  Lou is a hapless good guy who proves unable to deal with Vic's craziness, although he always tries.  And Vic is a mess but her heart's in the right place... which is something she'll unfortunately get to prove when Manx rises from the dead and kidnaps her son to take him to Christmasland.  Trading her bicycle for a Triumph motorcycle she's rebuilt, Vic will stop at nothing to rescue Wayne from Christmasland, even if she has to fight the FBI and Manx's psychotic henchman, The Gasmask Man.  

This is surreal horror with a lot of fantasy elements, reminiscent of Neil Gaiman's Neverwhere and King & Straub's The Talisman, with a lot of travel back and forth between the real world and places in the imagination (which, in this solipsistic scenario, are as real as anything else... the book slyly makes a point that since all of this is a work of fiction, anyway, the "real" world parts are no more reality than the Christmasland that Manx has built in his head  - it's all the product of creativity, and the craziness can be as solid as any of the rest of it).  This is extremely well-written and symbol-rich (Hill keeps surprising you with the depth of things), and since there's so much going on it could get tangled up pretty easily, but Hill is a master craftsman (and unusually creative) so it never gets out of control.  Even the fantastic stuff rings true.   I can sometimes get irritated by horror novels that veer too much into magical-fantasy stuff, and I'm not a big fan of Christmas in general so I worried about an overload as I was going into this thing, but Hill's so good at this I was glad to play along, and there's enough grit and rough stuff to keep it from getting too sappy, even though he does have a sentimental streak.   It flirts with schmaltz at times but never marries it.  This is a thick sucker but it's immersive; you get lost in it and don't really mind the length, and it moves fast and never quits.   I'll admit I figured out the trick that was going to end the good vs. evil battle a couple dozen pages in, but I didn't mind when it happened; even if it was no surprise, it felt right, and inevitable.

Basically, I couldn't put this down, and I doubt you'll be able to, either.  Very much recommended.

And even if you usually buy e-books (and if you do, I kinda hate you just the least lil’ bit -- those things are a plague)  you're going to want to pick this one up in hardback to get the most out of it.  The illustrations and end-papers by Hill's comics collaborator Gabriel Rodriguez add greatly to the book, and they're best appreciated on paper.  Also, I'm a sucker for deckle-edging, even if it does confuse a few Amazon patrons who think their book's "defective" because the edges are "unfinished" (are paper books really that antiquated already, or are people just becoming so sheltered from everything cool than they don't know what deckle-edging is?).  There’s also a neat little riff Hill did on the “Note On The Type” section that’s only in the hardback, because it wouldn’t make much sense on an e-book. The future belongs to the paper loyalists!

Follow Joe Hill on Twitter  (a lot of author's Twitter feeds are just promos for books, but I'd follow Joe even if I wasn't into his books, just because his feed's so good - dude's funny, smart, and likeable, and has a weird love of posting pictures of his fans strangling or otherwise attacking him).






Joe Hill's earlier book, Horns (which I own in hardback, paperback, and audio book yet still haven't gotten around to yet for some reason (which is probably somethin' to do with me bein' stupid), but most assuredly shall, since I loved this book and Heart-Shaped Box) has been reviewed here by Mighty Blowhole blog-brother, KickerOfElves, so go check that out here).

 




Last Days - Adam Nevill   (St. Martin's Griffin, 2012)


The writer of one of my favorite books of the decade, The Ritual, (which I reviewed here)  is back with more brilliant, must-read horror.  Kyle, a director of indie documentaries, is contacted by a weird new-age company to quickly shoot a documentary about a 1970's suicide cult, The Temple of the Last Days.  He's not crazy about the assignment at first -- he has less than a week to prepare for it and not much more than that to shoot it, but he's behind on his bills so he enlists his team -- cameraman Dan and a computer-loser editor known as "Finger Mouse" - to put it all together.  They start in London, interviewing former cult members who got out before the final massacre.   From the beginning they realize something weird and scary is happening; they hear weird noises at one cult site and see a skinny naked thing in the dark that terrifies them... but things are about to get much, much worse.  Skeletal-shaped stains are scorch-marked into walls of former cult sites (and then the filmmakers' own houses) and the former cultists they interview keep ending up maimed or dead.   Some unseen visitors leave disturbing artifacts behind, like blackened bones and scraps of ancient clothing.  

Things become more sinister when they learn some of the dead cultists had been bitten by things with aged, rotten teeth.  Kyle and Dan become horrified and paranoid, certain they've been set up by the cult, but there seems to be little way out of the situation.  Mummy people break through the walls into rooms left in darkness... as Kyle finds out when a circuit breaker shorts out.  What happens in pages 329 through 333 might make you afraid of the dark for a while, because it's one of the scariest written horror scenes since Danny Torrence went into room 217.    Kyle finds out another filmmaker who originally started this project is completely unhinged now, and he confronts the man bankrolling it and gets sent to Belgium to view an ancient group of Bruegel's-"Triumph Of Death"-esque paintings that will explain the history of what's happening, and may predict the horrible fate in store for them all.  

Nevill is a master at holding things back an parceling them out to the reader in a way that makes you actually dread learning them, and there's some very dark, creepy imagery here.  I don't know if it tops The Ritual, but it equals it and that should be enough to ask of any book.  Any serious reader of horror needs to familiarize yourself with this writer now.  He's skilled and he gets it. 

Now, you get it.



 




Penpal - Dathan Auerbach  (1000 Vultures, 2012)

Short stories presented as childhood memories (often overlapping) fit together brilliantly and build to one episodic horror novel of amazing eeriness.  Our nameless first person narrator recounts strange events where he woke up in the middle of the night deep in the woods by his house, wondering how he got there and barely able to find his way out. 

Then he talks about a kindergarten project where the kids sent out letters on helium balloons, hoping to get letters back from whoever found them; instead of letters he got dozens of weird Polaroids back from some very strange stranger... and realizes later that he appears in a lot of them. 

He and his mother move away from his old neighborhood and he and his friend Josh sneak back to his old abandoned house, thinking his missing cat may have gone back there; the result of that escapade is one of the most incredibly creepy things I've read in a long life of reading horror -- it's chilling and will definitely bug you.  

Next, he and Josh try to map out a stream through the woods near a crazy old lady's house... and she ends up being even crazier than they'd thought.  

Next, the narrator goes on a movie date with a girl that turns into a tragedy of horrible creepiness, which will also get under your skin and lodge there, freezing. 

Then the last bit brings it all together and makes one hell of an impact.  It's all simply but compellingly written, and Aurbach's imaginative powers and skill at plotting are very strong and impressive.  It's a fast read, both because it's short (around 240 large-print pages) and because you're not going to want to put it down until you find out what happened.  The old-lady story is a bit of a digression from the main flow and fits a little clumsy with the rest, but that's easy to forgive; it may be a flaw but not a fatal one.  Vivid, emotional, and super-disturbing in a quiet, hard-hitting way.   You won't be shaking this one off quickly.  Very, very highly recommended.








 
Infinity House - Shane McKenzie  (Gallows Press, 2012)

A couple of weed-dealing ghetto kids get ripped off by one of their would-be customers, and since they're left with no money or product to sell, they're pretty desperate.  One of the brothers finds money in the yard of a creepy old house they've been warned never to visit, and need (and greed) overtake fear so they go looking for more.  The place was the site of child murders committed by a crazy man and I guess that left it haunted because the brothers get trapped inside and the walls are thick with flies, the floors are deep in maggots, and wicked little zombie children are everywhere, eating -- and being eaten by -- maggots.  There appears to be no escape from this vermiculated hell, and McKenzie doesn‘t balk at giving you the nasty details. 

There's nothing clever about this, and it's not very intriguing because it never comes together as a story, just a lot of gruesome descriptions of everything being eaten by maggots.  It's got a certain nightmare quality to it, so if spectacle is all you're looking for then there's plenty of that and it's not badly written, but if you want any kind of narrative progression or a conclusion to be led to, you'll be out of luck there.  There's another story, "I Didn't Mean To Hurt You," in which a little girl sneaks out to a fair her bigoted mother wouldn't let her go to, and it ends up being a prequel to "Infinity House," and, similarly, is more spectacle than story.  Trying to make this 138-page large-print pamphlet seem more like a book, they also include an interview with the author.  It's interesting and Shane sounds like a guy I'd like, I just wish his descriptive skills were matched by stories instead of scenarios.  Still, there's promise for the future here and if all you're after is some fast-reading gory weirdness, it's pretty good at supplying that.




 Vintage paperback - it's so old that Jon Voight wasn't even a lunatic asshole yet when it came out!


Cover for Dickey's screenplay.

Deliverance - James Dickey  (Dell, 1970)
It's almost impossible to top the movie version, which is about as close to perfect as movies get, but this book manages to edge it out by a wee bit.  Following the lead of their rugged outdoorsman friend Lewis, businessmen Bobby, Drew, and our narrator Ed head out into the backwoods for a canoe trip down a river that's soon to be dammed and turned into a lake.  Just dealing with the rapids would be challenge enough, but they run into a couple of degenerate mountain men who have strange ideas about how to have fun with city folk, and the trip becomes a nightmarish fight for survival, one that will severely test them all... especially Ed.  Poets are usually awful novelists, but Dickey shows a lot of restraint and knows the story is more important than how it's being told.  By all accounts (and I've heard personal ones from people who had to deal with him) Dickey was a totally insane out-of-control drunken hell-raiser, so it's doubly amazing that he keeps such phenomenal control of a story that could so easily become complete chaos.  The descriptive power is amazing and he knows when to play it nuanced and when to hammer you with brutality.  Reading this is essential, and it gets better with repeats, just like the film.  Also worth looking for is Dickey's screenplay.  He wrote it in such detail that Boorman demanded a re-write because Dickey's version didn't leave a director much to do.  It's a good deal different from the filmed version, and I thumbed through it once in a library over twenty years ago and things stuck with me so much I recently tracked down a used copy.










 Hardback cover.




 Evocative paperback cover, although I couldn't tell you what that "X" business is about.

The House Next Door - Anne Rivers Siddons  (Simon & Schuster, 1978)

Dark and highly-sinister haunted house classic that's a must-read for fans of books like The Haunting of Hill House.   Our narrator, Colquit Kennedy, is vexed when a new house starts being built in the lot next door.  At first she and her husband Walter are just bummed by a little loss of privacy and being deprived of a view of the woods, but their neat little Atlanta-suburban lives are about to be intruded upon much more than that, and they'll have much worse things to be upset about.  The novel is basically divided into three novellas, each covering a different ill-fated family that moves into the house.

First there's rather-insufferable yuppie couple Buddy and Pie Harralson, who are building the house under the bold plans of an up-and-coming young architect named Kim Dougherty.  Things start going wrong for the Harrelsons before the house is even finished;  Kim falls and has a bloody miscarriage, and then some unseen animal starts mangling local animals, including the Harralson's puppy. 

But at the housewarming party, worse life-ruining things are in store, and the Harralsons are soon out of the picture and the Sheehans move in -- fragile, tragic Anita, who's recovering from a series of nervous breakdowns (the most recent due to the death of their son in Vietnam) and her husband Buck, a flawed good guy who's devoted to helping Anita back to stability.  But the malevolent house isn't going to help; it shows Anita a war movie with a guy burning in a helicopter crash in 'Nam, just like her son did (and no TV station was airing any such movie), and phone calls start coming, apparently from the dead son.  What eventually happens with the Sheehans is almost unbearably dark, and the Kennedys realize that something, somehow, is very malignant about that new house... and it's getting worse.

Into this atmosphere of dread comes the family perhaps least suited for dealing with it -- the Greenes, a nice but brow-beaten wife, her militant asshole husband (one of the most realistically despicable humans ever captured on paper) and a little girl who's immediately struck with a terrible and humiliating intestinal disease.  The Kennedys try to step in and stave them from the house but only make themselves pariahs in the effort, and doom awaits all connected with the place. 

This is a novel approach to horror because the house isn't haunted because of some explicable event -- it's just born bad.  And it doesn't just pile up bodies; worse, it ruins lives.  The house finds out whatever's important to the people around it, then destroys that forever and basks in the misery.  Very creepy with a really nasty tone to the fates of the occupants; who'd've thought that Siddons, who's mostly a romance-type author, would have it in her?  The writing is very good and the characters are masterfully drawn (although a bit genteel and sometimes a little silly... but, I know people like that, so it's not really a misstep) and you actually start feeling some dread at what's going to happen to them.  I read this when it first came out and I liked it, but it got even better with the re-read.  Stephen King was impressed enough with this to devote a large chunk of Danse Macabre (do I have to tell you how essential that book is?  DO I?!?)  to it, so if my recommendation isn't strong enough for you, take his.




 


Cool American cover art on the left, meh what-the-hell? British cover on the right.

The Night Boat - Robert R. McCammon (Avon / Sphere, 1980)

One of McCammon's early works, this is a little like the movie Shock Waves.   A diver sets off a vintage depth charge that causes a buried Nazi U-boat to surface and sail into the harbor.  Inside are the mummified crewmen, who've been put under a voodoo curse to keep on living in agony unless their bodies are completely destroyed.  The pain of being dried out drives them to kill people to drink their blood, and they also plan to resume their mission of sinking other ships.  The fungus-covered zombies are pretty creepy and there's some good gory scenes, but overall it's just too slow, and McCammon's writing is always competent but it's not compelling enough to carry things in this case.  I remember not really being crazy about this book when I read it 20-some years ago, but I liked the idea of Nazi-zombie-submariners enough to try giving it a second chance.  Second time around got similar results.  It's okay, just nothing special.




A young Alanis Morissette tells Orville Redenbacher what she wants for Christmas (anything but popcorn).

An Evil Streak - Andrea Newman  (Pocket, 1977)


Uncle Alex (our first-person narrator) is a prissy, somewhat-deformed man who's obsessed with his niece, Gemma... or at least he's obsessed with manipulating those around him, and Gemma is a means of doing that.  When she comes of age he steers her into marriage with a young doctor, but the doctor is soon at odds with control-freak Alex, and then he's just something in Alex's way.   So Alex hires a handsome young actor, David, as a housekeeper.  Alex has homosexual tendencies (but, like all of his sexual appetites, they're inactive and a bit warped) but that doesn't play out with David, so Alex goes for the next best thing -- he engineers an affair between David and Gemma, so he can have them both vicariously.  He provides his house to do it in, secretly intercepts and reads all their letters, and even has a secret room with a two-way mirror installed so he can watch them have sex (and take pictures, make sound recordings, and afterward go in and savor the smells).   He sees the whole thing as a play he's director/producing, based on the Troilus and Criseyde story, and meddles so much he even befriends David's wife (who knows about her husband's affairs but seems amused by them).   When things get in a rut, Alex decides David should get Gemma pregnant... and that's a big mistake.  Not really much of a horror novel, just a story of a real creep playing a game with a lot of lesser creeps, and it's not badly written prose-wise but remains very uninvolving somehow.  It’s drawn out and the affair is not nearly as interesting as Alex thinks it is... and nor is he.   Since he’s repugnant and vapid it’s not a lot of fun to hang out with him for 240 dense pages; after a while it starts reading like a long e-mail from a materialistic social-butterfly aunt telling you all the doings of her friends who you’ve never met.  It doesn't deliver the kind of pedo-sickness the cover art implies, but I wouldn't have really wanted it to, anyway... I just wish it had delivered more of something than the blandness that it does.  I almost gave up on reading it about ten times but I knew I’d never pick it up again if I did, so I stubbornly mucked through; the decent prose kept that from being too painful, but I’m still not certain it was worthwhile. 


If you're so disposed, you can follow me and a bunch of other people on Twitter - details of how to do that are here.

Hiya, it's me again with more reviews of action-series (and books that I can logically force into that definition) books.   I know it's a long stretch between me posting these monkeyspanks, but how can ya miss me if I don't go away?  And at least I give you a lot of bang for your buck when I finally get 'round to it... there's eighteen books reviewed here!  That's at least a dozen more than you probably want, even!   You can count them if you're a weirdo.   By fate, not by design, most of these are the first or second (or in the case of the Sonny Barger books, the first and the second) in the series.  Hence the title.   Anyway, enough intro... after all, you've got eighteen of these things to read!  And with all my lil' I-think-I'm-soooooo-funny intrusions, they're long enough as is.


It's the best infomercial for Sharpfinger knives ever!

Dead in 5 Heartbeats - Ralph "Sonny" Barger with Keith & Kent Zimmerman  (Harper Torch, 2003)

"I'm not no peace creep by any sense of the word," president of the Hell's Angels MC, Sonny Barger, once said, and he brings those sensibilities to his sideline as a novelist.  Gritty and kick-ass biker novel about the  problems faced by "Patch" Kinkade, former president of the Infidelz Motorcycle Club, as he tries to relocate to Arizona.  Almost as soon as he moves, a member of the Infidelz is gunned down and a gang war is brewing, so a reluctant Patch is called back to deal with that, as well an Infidel who's about to spill all the club's secrets to the feds.  It all plays like a really good grindhouse movie (and it's just become one - you can pre-order the DVDs now at http://deadin5heartbeats.com/ - I've got mine in), with realistic action scenes and plenty of fighin''n' ridin'.  Patch is a well-drawn character; he's a world-weary guy who'd like to settle down to a peaceful life, but circumstances don't make that feasible, and, being a stand-up fella, he does what (and who) he's gotta do.  

If you ever read the kind of short stories they had in Easyriders magazine (back before it turned "motorcycle enthusiast" instead of "biker") and wished they'd write something longer, this will make you really happy.  Who knew Sonny had it in him?  I hope he's got plenty more, but so far we've only gotten one other novel.  Hopefully the movie will be a hit and inspire him to write some more.  But, I'll forgive him if he's busy making more Sons of Anarchy episodes  (if you're not watching that show, go pick up the DVDs immediately - Breaking Bad and Walking Dead are the only things even giving it a contest for the best show on TV).











6 Chambers, 1 Bullet - Ralph "Sonny" Barger, with Keith & Kent Zimmerman (William Morrow, 2006)

After being burned on a gun deal where they're paid with counterfeit money, four members of the Infidelz MC are found in a meat locker, dead and frozen on their bikes.   Even though he's alienated from his club, Patch Kincaid teams up with a guy named Redbeard -- brother of one of the dead 'Delz -- to find out who did it so payback can be dealt.   They discover a Russian mob connection, and Patch and Redbeard get the snot walloped out of them by twin Russian boxers and their crime crew.  Patch is a hard guy to deter, though, and decides that the best way to get at the killer is to get himself sent to prison.  After a contempt-of-court charge he's sent up, and he works the system to ferret out the killer.  He knows the guy's supposed to have a panther tattoo so he equips himself with a jailhouse tat of a panther trap and a shank made out of a piece of a plastic bucket, and he goes hunting.   But there's a lot going on that Patch doesn't know.   Good thing he's a resourceful dude....  Good, tough biker action novel with a few slightly-far-fetched plot twists but a good sense of pacing and style.  Never gets boring, and Patch remains an interesting character.  Now, how 'bout another one?










Hellrider #2:  Blood Run - Dan Killerman (Dan Schmidt?)    (Pinnacle, 1985)

Jesse Heller (The Man Called Hell... who nobody ever gets around to calling Hell) is still a little banged up from the events of volume one (which was not, but should have been, called Barren Anus Of Suffering - don't be scared, you can click it!) when he picks up a hitchhiker named Lisa.   You'd think she'd find a more effective means of transportation since she's on the run from a motorcycle gang who want her dead.  Her old man was a member of the Sinners MC, and she witnessed them kill some college kids over a drug deal, so they want her out of the picture.   Heller has a vendetta against outlaw MC's, anyway, so he doesn't mind getting mixed up in this too much, even though he's on the run himself because cops want him for the massacre that ended the first book.  

The Sinners are an evil bunch, with foul bad-guy names like Turd, Pisser, and Cheese Nuts.  How tough can these guys really be if they allowed such names to stick?  Anyway, as in the first book, Heller takes almost more of a beating than he can dish out.  Every other page there's some new injury from a fight or a bike wreck, but he still manages to get a few shots off and brutally chain-whips a guy.  He also loses his guns a helluva lot, but manages to find one when he needs one (after taking another pounding, of course).   The Sinners aren't his only problem, either -- he's also got a crazy sheriff on his case.  This all results in a barrage of action that's pretty much constant after a point, but it turns into one big numbing blur. 

It's copyright by Dan Schmidt, so that's probably who actually wrote it, but, hey, "Killerman" is a cooler name, yeah?  A third, The Guns of Hell, must have been written because it was announced on the last page as coming out in just two more months, but it never surfaced.  Oddly, the back of the book says the gang is called The Grim Reapers, but they're the Sinners.  Maybe the existence of a real Grim Reapers MC made Killerman think twice?  I know I wouldn't write a book about killing off guys in a club who might come play kickball with my head. Okay and not badly written, but pretty average.  I still wish they'd made more, but Pinnacle was kinda on the ropes in those days.





 Attention mutants!  Bill O'Reilly has had enough of your shit! And he'd like a kitty to pet!


The Outrider #1  - Richard Harding  (Pinnacle, 1984)

I love the idea of post-apocalypse series (hell, I used to write ‘em) but they always seemed to get goofy on me.   This one starts with the cover.  What were they thinking, having Andrew-Dice-Down’s-Syndrome as the hero?   Then again, he looks a little like Bill O’Reilly, but that’s not really much kinder.  By the fourth book they had a different guy, but the damage may have been done because that dude was set in reader's minds. 

Anyway, that’s Bonner, a guy who used to be an “outrider” when the U.S. was destroyed in a nuclear war.   He, and others like him, drove all over the wrecked country, finding out where people and resources were and trying to unite it in some way.  Some of the outriders turned evil and set up little kingdoms, like the Hotstates, The Snowstates, and the Slavestates.  Bonner has an old enemy named Leather, who runs the Slavestates (in what used to be Washington D.C.), and he has a $10,000 bounty on Bonner’s head.  One of the fools who tries to collect it tells Bonner that Dara -- a female outrider who was Bonner’s girlfriend -- is still alive and being held hostage by Leather (who she was crazed with hate to kill because he’d slaughtered her village).  Bonner loads up his car (basically pipework welded around a engine) and drives out to get her back.  On the way he assembles a motley crew of helpers, including an outrider buddy who uses the ever-popular exploding arrows that captivated the world in the 80’s, a flame-thrower-wielding “gas-hound” named Cooker, a couple of 7-foot-tall mute giants called The Mean Brothers, and a lesbian biker gang.   They have to take on Leather’s squads of “radiation leper” bikers (guys who are eager to die in battle since it’ll save them from rotting away with radiation poisoning) and an 8-foot-tall tracker named Beck. 

There’s lots of gunfights and explosions and Bonner throwing knives into people, and some colorful post-nuke things like subway tunnels full of “rat people” and a trip through the Firelands (the coal belt, which got ignited and perpetually burns).  Past the halfway point it’s pretty much constant fighting, which actually gets kind of numbing even though it’s not badly written.   Bonner cuts off Leather’s hands, which he’ll replace (rather hilariously) with blocks of wood with knives in them -- they’ll fight it out about that in the following books.   A bit goofy, but the writing’s okay and it reads quickly, so you could do worse.









 Attention, heretics!  Marcel Marceau has had enough of your shit!
 (Remember, posing for this cover is on a couple of people's resumes.  I don't advise you to look too hard at the woman... there's something horrifyingly spooky about the look on her face.  And... a crocheted dress?  Ah, the 70's!)



The Inquisitor #2:  The Last Time I Saw Hell - Simon Quinn (Martin Cruz Smith)   (Dell, 1974)

Our hero, Francis Xavier Killy, enforcer for the Catholic Church, is already in deep shit as the book opens.  And I mean that in the most literal sense -- he's been rendered nearly comatose by a dart full of drugs and a couple of goons have tossed him into the fetid slime of the Paris sewer.  The flow carries him through underground pipes toward blades that grind the sewage into liquid mulch.  To find out how he gets out of that stinky situation you're going to have to be a stupid as I am and pay the ridiculously high price these books are fetching on the used market.   And even though I ponied up my dough for this, I still had to wait a hundred pages because it goes into a flashback right before Killy's about to go into the blades.  Gotta admit, Cruz knows how to hook a reader. 

Killy is the son of a Boston cop and worked for the CIA before his Catholicism led him to the church's Militia Christi, a part of the Holy Office of the Inquisition that takes care of church business by any means necessary.   And a guy named Sully, a former priest who collaborated with the Nazis, is now threatening the church and the entire French government.  He's pretty much forsaken Christ to worship Napoleon and has been using Action, the assassination squad of the French Intelligence services, to gather info on their own citizens and plan a coup on the French president.   Killy is dispatched after him... but Action is after Killy, too.   A girl he slept with (vows of celibacy would make for a boring book, so Killy's not burdened with those) almost shoots him with a gun disguised as a pen, they put a bomb in his car, and even blow up half a hotel where he's staying.  There's also a car chase and a shoot-out, all of which are well-written action scenes that make you wish there were more of them, but the book is mostly complicated (but intelligent) espionage and intrigue instead, which is nicely done but a bit slow.  

Killy is tough but not bloodthirsty at all;  in fact, he has to do fifteen days of penance for any man he kills, so he doesn't even carry a gun since that'd only make him more quick to cause deaths.   And that also makes the final confrontation with Sully pretty inventive (and a bit far-fetched) as Killy tries to take him to Hell... as literally as he can arrange.   It's good but not the holy grail or anything;  they should re-publish these in collections and drop the price.




 Yeah, my cover has a price sticker on it, but considering that yeah-who-gives-a-shit cover art I figured it wasn't worth trying to peel off...



Hardball #1  - William Sanders  (Diamond Books, 1992)

As the book opens, agent Dane is locked up and tortured in an African prison, awaiting execution.  He'd been caught while looking for a friend of his to help him on a mission.  Dane  (who's also your first person narrator) is former CIA, now free-lance (or trying to be -- the CIA has a way of pulling him back in) and he's getting a little burned out at 40 years old, weary from years of killing and in rough shape from getting shot, beaten, and diseased in trouble spots all over the world.   The CIA gets him out of his predicament and sends him to an island for rest and recovery, and to keep an eye on a congressman who'll be shacking up there with his mistress.  Dane gets back in shape quickly and has to fend off some partying jerks with a skeet gun.  When the jerks come back and shoot up his trailer in a speedboat-drive-by, he tries to buy a gun but can't get around the gun laws and ends up with shotgun slugs and an old cap-and-ball .44 Dragoon pistol that kills fine but is slow and tedious to load.   He pals around with an 80-year-old Indian and screws the congressman's mistress, and it's a pretty nice vacation... until an Arab hit team lands on the island and Dane has to fend them off with the few weapons he has.  Capturing AK-47s helps, and at one point he improvises a single-use shotgun out of an old bicycle pump.  

It takes a while to get violent (which I didn't mind because the day-to-day life won the island was interesting even if no one was getting killed), but when it kicks into gear it stays there a long time, and Dan racks up quite a body count and gets out of some tough scrapes.   The writing is better than usual for an action series (Sanders was supposedly in Army Security in Turkey and Laos, so he knows his stuff) and it keeps you engaged, giving Dane plenty of personality and making him tough but not superhuman.  He's definitely in the Matt Helm school of badass.  Why they gave the series a dumb name like "Hardball" is beyond me, and all three books had the blandest covers in the genre, with those featureless, modified silhouettes.   That can’t have helped sales, which is too bad because this was pretty good stuff. 





 Attention absurdly-huge clams!  Mike Nelson has had enough of your shit!


Sea Trap - Nick Carter (Jon Messman)   (Award, 1969)

Judas, an evil mastermind with a metal hand (and a gun built into one of the fingers) and a horribly-scarred face, is an old enemy of Nick’s, having appeared in a couple of previous volumes.  In this one he’s come up with a bizarre giant man-made clam to trap submarines (stop laughing!  it could happen!), and he’s holding one of them hostage and threatening to sell it, with all its tech secrets, to an enemy country if the U.S. doesn’t pay him a hundred million dollars.   The “hundred million dollars” makes this sound even more like a plot dreamed up by an eight-year-old than the giant clam does.  Helping him design the clam is a demented marine biologist who’s pathologically attracted to women, but he’s impotent so his frustration leads him torture and mutilate them and have them raped by a huge Mongolian.  

All these bad guys are so monstrous I pictured them drawn by Jack Kirby, and the things they do to women are horror novel stuff, torturing them ‘til they’re insane freaks, sticking sea lampreys and leeches on them, etc.   Nick goes undercover with an oceanographer who thinks he’s working for the Navy.  The oceanographer turns out to be a beautiful, intelligent, self-assured woman, so Nick decides it’ll be fun to “tame” her, which he’s sure he can do by acting like a chauvinist pig asshole.  He arrogantly bets her she’ll fall in love with him, then tries to flirt by rubbing his knee in her crotch!   On the side, Nick lays two other girls almost as soon as he meets them;  as luck would have it, they both end up as victims of the mad professor, giving Nick a revenge motive on top of the rest of his assignment.  Don’t worry, there’s plenty of mayhem, too, with Nick getting in gunfights, a battle to the death with the Mongol, and stuck in one hell of a fix when he calls an airstrike on the island while Judas pumps a couple tons of chum into the surrounding water to attract sharks in a huge feeding frenzy!  Pretty crazy written-in-third-person actionfest that never stops moving and keeps Nick in constant trouble while letting him be a more diabolical asshole than usual; the way he treats the feminist oceanographer (and the fact that he gets away with it -- I don’t think I’m really spoiling anything to tell you he wins his bet) had to be pretty Neanderthal even for the swinging ‘60’s.  A scene with the two of them stuck in a malfunctioning submarine had me laughing pretty hard;  Nick has to repair something under her seat and keeps smiling up at her from between her legs.  The gore and depravity level is pretty high here, with one guy even getting eaten alive by a mob of psychotics.  Kinda loonie but it’s a good one, even if it’s less plausible than some.  Then again, who doesn't love a good hey-let's-get-in-the-sandbox-and-play-armymen wheeee! plot once in a while?  I don't mind clams big enough to swallow nuclear subs as long as they don't abuse it by having them show up in every book.








Pale Horse Coming - Stephen Hunter (Pocket Star Books, 2001)


This extremely kick-ass book belongs with these action-series reviews even though it trods mainstream bestseller turf and has an elevated (more literary than pulp) level of writing, because you can put chrome on something and shine it up and give it a leather interior and full options package, but when you step on the gas and it rumbles and bitches rubber there's no mistaking a hot-rod.  And though it does it in style and goes a little smoother and a little farther, it's taking you to the same place as any Executioner or Death Merchant type of book. 

When a lawyer is sent to investigate the disappearance of a black man on an isolated all-black prison farm in Thebes, Mississippi, he tells his double-tough friend Earl Swagger (father of super-sniper Bob Lee Swagger, who stars in most of Hunter's other books) to come get him if he doesn't return soon.  Good move on his part, because it's 1951, Thebes is accessible only by the river, and in its isolation there are things going on that make Parchman look like Six Flags... and its minders aren't going to want a white lawyer with liberal leanings get back to tell anybody what he's seen.  

Earl goes in and rescues him but gets caught in the attempt, and since the prison guards (led by a huge, musclebound albino sadist named Bigboy, who considers himself an artist with a bullwhip) don't believe who he is, they subject Earl to the torments of the damned.   Hunter really makes Thebes sound like a circle of the Inferno and it's a miracle that even Earl is able to withstand the level of constant punishment he has to endure, working hard labor in incredible heat with little food or water, injured and lacking sleep from brawling with his fellow prisoners, who hate him because he's white.  Eventually -- though it seems impossible -- Earl escapes... but he's going back to settle things, bringing with him five old men (and one young one who's so blatantly supposed to be Audie Murphy that I don't know why Hunter even bothered changing his last name to "Ryan") who are the top gunfighters alive;  they're all based on real-life gunmen.   Rather strangely for a big gun advocate like Hunter, he portrays them all as mainly being motivated by a chance to kill people; even more than seeing justice done, these dudes just want to use their guns to kill people for the thrill of it.  They're damn near supernatural in their shooting abilities but they'll still have quite a fight on their hands.  

The dialogue is a wee bit stiff and treads (and sometimes crosses) a line between archaically poetic and hoo-rah fucking cornball;  if you can, imagine the dialogue from Deadwood, but without all the cussing.   But it gets the job done, and with style, and this book is all kinds of epic badass.  It'll blow you away, guaranteed.   Recommended and damn-near required. 





 That's the last time you'll criticize my taste in neckties, fucker!


Agent For COMINSEC #1:  The Bloody Monday Conspiracy - Ralph Hayes (Belmont Tower, 1974)

A group of Arab terrorists known as Bloody Monday kidnap a chairman of China.  They hope to provoke nuclear war between China and the United States, if not from the act itself then because his successor would be more of a radical.   Top secret agency COMINSEC (Committee for International Security) gets wind of the plot and send in their top agent, Taggart, to stop it.   Taggart is a violent asshole who used to be a Mafia hit man, and he works not out of patriotism (he doesn't really give a damn about national security or world peace) but for the money, and because he flat-out loves killing and working for COMINSEC gives him the chance to do a lot of it.   Violence is his first solution to any situation -- if he wants info he finds out who has it and then beats it out of them.  

He tries joining Bloody Monday to infiltrate it;  the pretty much beats his way into that, too, but takes a whole lot of pounding himself along the way, since he ends up captured, tied up, and nibbled by rats.   But he doesn't mind all that so much since it gives him a chance to drown a guy in a kettle of boiling sheep fat after a knife-and-hammer fight.   Another guy even ends up killed with a steam shovel, and I don't even know how many he shoots or blows up.  Then, when a pretty bizarre setback happens, his mission takes an extreme turn... right into more violence.  

The book still manages to have a complex (but far-fetched) plot even though it's throwing nonstop fights in your face as hard as it can.  They get numbing after a while;  Hayes' writing isn't bad at all but it's very meat-and-potatoes, without a lot of flash.   He's not afraid to make the hero not particularly likeable (Taggart is basically a shark -- he finds something to kill and then tears through it while feeling nothing) or to give him a good whacking (I don't know how he's in good enough shape to finish the mission after all the abuse he endures), and his main motivation seems to be body count... and isn't that what you read this stuff for?   Pretty plain but it moves and it doesn't take a lot of your reading time, so if it doesn't offer major rewards that's fair enough.





 Attention, Muppies!  The Punisher, oops, I mean Jake, has had enough of your shit!



Jake Strait #2:  The Devil Knocks -- Frank Rich  (Gold Eagle, 1993)
Jake Strait, a "boogeyman" or private enforcer of the very Blade Runnerish year 2031 is contacted to cause  revolution in the police state of Denver.  Political coups are not his kind of gig, but then a pimp pisses him off enough for Jake to blow his head off, and he suddenly needs a ticket out of town before the pimp-protection-agency's hired guns overwhelm him.  So, with his bank account tapped of credits and few other options, Jake takes the job, recruiting an old skimmer-pilot who's become a "squeeze" junkie to get him to Denver, because he (wisely) doesn't fully trust his employers. 


Then the book makes a misstep into some doggie doo and turns the road trip into kind of a comic saga, where characters get a bit goofy and broad, and things lose their focus.  I'm okay with Jake being a smartass, but there's a thing I have about books or movies: when situations get too absurd I feel like the book's not taking things seriously so neither do I.  That's why I just get pissed off at "horror comedy" movies like Sean of the Dead or whacky horror-goof books like John Dies At The End.   I know that's a "me" thing and some people (*coughgeekscough*) love that shit... but I just can't deal with that, it makes me feel stupid. 

So, I got mad at the book at that point, even though I admit the parody is kind of clever, with rebels fighting "muppies" (Militant Urban Professionals) in designer armor, and they aren't allowed to use armor-piercing bullets or they'll get sued.  And the Muppies fight back with rubber bullets so they won't damage buildings, since what they're fighting for is better apartments.  And it is funny to see Jake's reaction to the absurdity;  they've sent in a cynic to do an idealist's job. 

There's a ton of action but since I'd already decided I was dealing with satire it didn't have much impact for me, and in the final stretch it tires to pull heavy drama out of characters previously established as buffoons, and that doesn't work for me, either.  I still think it's a smart, badass series with writing that's far better than the usual, and there are some great hard-boiled badass lines in this thing, but I just hope the remaining two are more like the first one, or, preferably, even darker and grimmer.  Recommended for some, but with a caveat for guys like me.






Hawker #2: L.A. Wars -- Carl Ramm (Randy Wayne White)   (Dell, 1984)

Frustrated-cop-turned-vigilante Hawker goes to tinseltown to take on the Bloods and Crips... or, as they're known here (because gangs can sue you for copyright infringement for all I know) the Satanas and the Panthers, respectively.  The Satanas are Hispanic and the Panthers are Black, but they're all violent degenerates and superstitious, so Hawker plays a Batman card and does things to scare them, like painting hawk pictures (sometimes in flammable explosive that makes them think he can piss fire), disappearing in smoke bombs, and calling himself the devil.   He gets in numerous gunfights with each gang, killing many and, in one case, blasting a rapist's dick off.  

Meanwhile, he sports with a famous actress, Melanie St. John, who he meets on the beach when he helps her with a sting from a stingray.   She's captivated by Hawker's lack of interest (he's another of those complicated men, and no one can understand him but his woman) and invites him to a party.  There he learns that she's not shallow and drug-addled like the rest of her friends.   Hawker passes up a chance for sex with a thinly-veiled version of Suzanne Sommers and gets in a brawl with a thinly-veiled version of John Travolta ("Johnny Barberino," who "started out a teenager in television dramas and then gone on to become America's heartthrob by doing a series of discoteque rock operas").   Randy Wayne White must've really been fed up with Travolta at the time 'cuz "Johnny Barberino" gets plastered with just about every type of villainy you can think of.  

Anyway, Hawker is so badass he even gets into gunfights while bedding the actress, and even though the cops figure out almost instantly that he's a vigilante (turns out painting a hawk on crime scenes when your name is Hawker isn't just unimaginative, it's the least-neato way to be incog), but they're so frustrated by the legal system's inability to solve the gang problem that they give him a wink-wink nod-nod say-no-more.   As you'd expect, Hawker takes on the leaders of both gangs, reveals a surprise bad guy, AND eventually gets to lay the Suzanne Sommers figure as the end credits roll.  

It's a little pat (okay, a LOT pat) but ya gotta love it because it just delivers and delivers -- if most action novels try to fit in a fight every twenty pages, Hawker goes for more like eight, and still has enough of a plot to keep it from being a cartoon.  There's a wee bit of cornball moralizing here and there, but when the guy cuts loose with a MAC-10 several times in a book, you can forgive him.  Writing's simple, clean, and works well for this kind of mayhem-tale. 





 If only this book were actually about this girl...


Room 59 #3:  Aim And Fire -- Cliff Ryder   (Gold Eagle, 2008)

A big-shot terrorist everyone had believed dead smuggles a suitcase nuke over the Mexican border, massacring a couple dozen illegal immigrants to keep the secret safe.   Another Al-Queda operative working very deep cover has gotten into a government position where they build rockets, and the two plan to work together to send up the bomb on a rocket and cause an EMP that'll destroy electronics across half the U.S., and millions will die in the resulting riots, and if you're reading this on a Kindle you'll never find out how it ends.  

Clandestine anti-terror group Room 59 gets wind of the plot from the suspicions of Nate Spencer, a border security guard who's notorious for not sticking to the book and being a loose cannon.  They pair him up with Tracy Wentworth, a Homeland Security analyst who also bucks the system and has been longing for field work.  They send the two into Mexico to trace the trail of the nuke and find out where it's going.  ON the way they get in a good car chase/ gunfight with some zetas and snatch a gang leader for info, before pulling a full-scale assault on the rocket compound at the last minute.  

This is well-written and very cinematic (I'm wondering if the "59" isn't supposed to make you think "24"), and stays on a realistic scale even if that hampers the action a little bit.   One annoying thing is the need to make the "Room 59" part relevant; to do so they have to stay in contact with the home base a lot, which results in people yammering a lot of jargon on cell phones during fire fights (I lost count of how many times people said something, then said "I repeat" and said it again), and one car chase is even watched on some remote Skype-type program on a Room 59 director's laptop instead of putting the reader with the agents in the truck.  And maybe it's just because I hate technology, but I think it's impossible to write or film computer hacking so it looks like "action"  -- it's always just going to be some nerd typing fast.  I know people are in love with the little gadgets that have taken the place of their brains -- and, for the most part, their lives -- but can we minimize their presence in an action novel for fucksake?   I want to watch the agents dealing death in a firefight, not watch them live-Tweet it. 

Also, the people giving the orders are never as interesting as the people carrying them out, so less focus on Kate, the director of Room 59, would also be welcome.   Also, I wanted the leather-clad badass chick on the cover to show up in the book;  Tracy kicks a fair amount of ass but the closest she gets is black sweatpants, and kinky as I am, that's not eeeeeeeeven on my fetish-radar.  Minor quibble, and a personal one, but hey, it's what sold me the book.   Overall it's a good read and the writing is smart,  I'd just shift more focus away from the control center.  Fuck the brass, the grunts are the interesting ones.







The Liquidator #1 -- R. L. Brent (Award, 1974)

Jake Brand's father was a cop who got murdered by a junkie.  Jake's brother Roy decided the best way to avenge him was to shut down the Mafia that supplied the junkie, so he passed up a football career to become a prosecutor.   He caused such trouble for the mob that they had a hit man with a sawed-off shotgun take him out.  Jake became a cop to carry on the war, and was using his contacts to pin down a mob boss named Hester.  Jake's efforts get the mob so rattled they cease operations for a few days and bring in a hit man.  Brand thinks the torpedo is after him, but instead the guy disguises himself as Brand and guns someone down in front of witnesses.  A betrayal by Brand's girlfriend completes the frame, and Brand spends five years in prison.   He's pardoned for saving the lives of guards on two separate occasions and once he gets out he immediately resumes his war on the mob, even though he's no longer a cop.   He icepicks one guy, clogs another's shotgun, and gets in car chases and gunfights, keeping the novel moving at a fast clip.   The writing is very good and elevates this above the standard Executioner variation.







The Black Berets #2: Cold Vengeance -- Mike McCray  (Dell, 1984)

Picking up where the first volume left off, a hit team hired by Parkes, the CIA agent who tried to backstab the team on their first mission, gets sent to the Black Berets' compound.   They burn it down but are killed by Tsali, the orphan kid the Black Berets rescued and are raising.  They rebuild the compound better than before, adding a lot of computer surveillance stuff.  Then they start answering ads in mercenary magazines as a way to get a line on Parkes so they can give him the payback he's got coming.  Rosie, Harry, and Applebaum get hired by one of Parkes' groups to do some work for Quadaffi... which, of course, they don't do.   Instead they turn on the troops they've infiltrated and manage to take out a large number of them by attacking their helicopters with LAW rockets, making it look like an enemy attack that they alone survived.   While those three try to figure out a way to take down the rest of the army, Beeker, Cowboy, and Tsali fight off more attacks on the compound and try to track down Parkes.   There's a pretty harrowing scene where, to keep from blowing their cover, Rosie has to torture a good guy to death -- including ripping nipples off with pliers.  So far these books all seem to include at least one scene that will make you squirm. There are still plenty of well-done action scenes and the characterization is top-notch, but the slam-bang stuff takes a bit of a backseat to the intrigue here, slowing things down just a little.  Not enough where it's a problem, though, and McCray's writing is still a standout for action series books.

This series turns out to have an interesting history to it, as Glorious Trash's Joe Kenney (for my money, THE authority on adventure-series books) told me last time I reviewed one of these.  Turns out Mike McCray was actually John Preston, a gay writer who wrote a lot of gay fiction.  The Black Berets are all straight, but once you have this knowledge it's almost impossible not to look for subtext.  And you can kind of find it, just in the camaraderie the team feel for each other, but honestly, it’s no more than you’d find from a military-team book you’d get from a hetero author, so it shouldn‘t distract you.  Preston also wrote an action series that was gay-oriented, The Mission of Alex Kane.  Haven’t seen any of those and won’t likely be seeking them out because I’m not the target audience, but if I’m no phobe, either, so if I ran across any in a used bookstore I’d probably give one a try, anyway, just on the strength of writing he shows in the Black Berets books. According to Wikipedia (which is not a source I take as gospel at all), several Black Berets novels were written by Michael McDowell, who was a frickin’ genius in the horror field.  He apparently collaborated with Preston on some things.  And then things get confusing... because McDowell is also credited with writing books by “Preston MacAdam” (such as the Michael Sheriff: The Shield series).  But, John Preston is also credited on the web as being “Preston MacAdam,” and is also rumored to have written some of the S.O.B.s (Soldiers of Barrabas) series.  So, I don’t know if Michael McDowell actually wrote any Black Berets books, or who wrote the Michael Sheriff books.   But, if you’re interested,  that may be a pseudonym plot worth investigating.  Unfortunately it’s a cold trail, since both John Preston and Michael McDowell died of AIDs in the ‘90’s.  Anyway, if there are other Michael McDowell works out there, I’d be doubly interested because I’m a huge fan of that guy; you can look for a review of The Elementals by him next time I do a horror-novel-review post.  Or you can find a copy and read it yourself, because I promise you that's what I'm going to tell you to do, anyway.











 This is one of those fancypants books that you open up and there's a double-page picture..




 ...which I find oddly hilarious.  Attention, Viet Cong!  Kappa Delta Sig has had enough of your shit, bro!


The Hard Corps #1 - Chuck Bainbridge  (Jove, 1986)

This reads like Jove wanted their own version of Dell’s Black Berets or Gold Eagle’s Phoenix Force team, but a variation on those isn’t a bad thing.   Five guys with unique talents for killing meet in Vietnam and once the war’s over they don’t feel suited for much else, so they reform their team and become mercenaries known as The Hard Corps (which is a silly-as-a-fish-with-titties name to me, but luckily the book ended up being a lot better than the title). 

The five guys include an Italian hood turned explosives expert, a ninja-type (‘cept white) guy who kills with a Rambo-type survival knife, bow and arrow, and other silent-death methods.  Another favors Japanese swords, one’s a Green Beret captain, and an older dude serves as a mechanic, cook, doctor, and gunsmith.   They have a big compound in Washington state, complete with helicopters, bunkers, and all kinds of military gear.  

After a first chapter where they rescue some kidnapped kids from Mexican terrorists (their fee:  a million dollars -- so that’s how they afford the helicopters and other goodies), they come home and a chopper full of Vietnamese resistance fighters lands on their base.  Among them is Trang Nih, a rebel leader who’s being sought by Viet Cong Communists.   Rather improbably (but essential for the action) a small army led by Vietcong commander Captain Vinh promptly invades the Hard Corps compound, trying to kill Trang Nih and his men.   Of course, our heroes can’t be allowing that and soon the Vietnam war is on again, on a smaller scale and without government interference (which means the good guys win). 

It’s a pretty ridiculous premise, with around a hundred Vietcong soldiers showing up in Washington to get taken out by a five man team, but what the hell, right?  That’s why we read these things, and when it comes to action, this thing delivers -- without much plot to get in the way there’s almost constant gunfights, mortar attacks, ninja sneakin’ ‘n’ stabbin’, all that good stuff.  And for characterization purposes (which aren’t bad -- they don’t seem quite real, but they’re far from cardboard characters, either) each guy on the team gets his own flashback chapter... which are also geared toward action sequences from back in ‘Nam or during their rough childhoods.   I’ll admit I wasn’t expecting much out of this but ended up pleasantly surprised; there’s more premise than plot, but that’s enough for the purpose, and Bainbridge does a good job giving them individual identities so they don’t blur together, and his action scenes are solid and keep the book moving without getting too ridiculous.  Not bad a’tall, I’m glad there are seven more. 





 Yeah, it's got housepaint on it, but it saved me thirty bucks, so viva le housepaint.



Operation Hang Ten #4: Cute And Deadly Surf Twins - Patrick Morgan  (Macfadden-Bartell, 1970)

Considering this series tried to combine spying and surfing, and had a title like Cute And Deadly Surf Twins, I was expecting it to be pretty light and goofy, so I was pretty surprised when it started with such a bang.  After a brief surfing interlude, beach bum turned beach-Bond Bill Cartwright gets the shit kicked out of him by the Diablos motorcycle gang.  He gives a good account of himself in the brawl and even bites a dude’s finger off, but one badass versus a dozen just isn’t good math and he ends up stomped, pissed on, and thrown off a cliff... all because he was looking for a guy named Moon.  

After two months in the hospital, Cartwright gets out and keeps trying to track down Moon, who’s working with Chinese commies who are counterfeiting money and smuggling it in surfboards with secret compartments.   Thanks to some fancy driving and good ol’ fashioned brutality, he gets some payback on the Diablos and kidnaps one of their women, who he hangs naked by her wrists and terrorizes until she gives him information. 

Then he goes after a biker (the resulting fight is so brutal the guy’s upper lip gets chopped off by the edge of a board) and rescues a girl who’s been starved and almost raped to death by Moon.  Closing in on him leads to more brawls with the gang, and Cartwright takes another beating with a bike chain, but dishes out more mayhem with a surfboard and a rotary sander.  He still ends up caught, but escapes even though he has to swim five miles with his hands tied and a bullet in his shoulder.  

This is surprisingly gritty and violent stuff, and the only goofiness is the strange choice of having Cartwright’s trailer run by a computer that makes all his food and mixes drinks; that’s weird, unnecessary, and I’m not sure why it’s in the book.   Also superfluous is a novice female agent named Pat Parrot who he reluctantly has to work with;  he’s a little put out with her at first because when she shows up she’s disguised as a hippie!   At times the book seems to be trying a little too hard to maintain its “surfing” connections, since espionage doesn’t really fit in well with goofing around on the beach, but it’s still a lot better book thatn just a novelty piece.  The writing’s pretty solid.   And that’s kind of unfortunate for me, since this series is price-prohibitive; used copies are going for around twenty bucks each, minimum, and I’m just not paying that.  I got lucky and found two of them at a used bookstore that didn’t know what they had, and they were thirty-eight cents each.   They’re worth way more than that, but thirty-eight dollars... not so much.




 Attention, fertility drug companies!   Mitt Romney has had enough of your shit!  (Just kidding!  He's all for unregulated capitalism!  This Yard madman must be stopped!)

The Hunter #1: Scavenger Kill - Ralph Hayes  (Leisure Books, 1975)

It’s our ol’ buddy Ralph again.  I was tempted to read a Stoner book for this batch, too, and go for the trifecta, but, good as he is, I was worried about getting Ralphed out.  After Vietnam, Col. John Yard tried finding peace by hunting big game in Africa, but finds it hard to put up with the obnoxious tourists he has to take on safaris.  Into this discontent comes an old war buddy whose wife has killed herself and their deformed, brainless baby because a bad fertility drug caused her to give birth to the monster.  Yard decides that Marice Lavelle, who owns the pharmaceutical company than markets the drug, needs to pay for his crimes.  Lavelle doesn’t care if his products cause abominations as long as they remain profitable, and he wants to start selling the drug in Africa and Asia.   Since he can’t talk yard out of this vengeance quest (even after a brawl), Yard’s friend Moses Ngala decides to join him on it.  Moses is Black and Hayes is preoccupied with never letting you forget that, awkwardly referring to Moses “shaking his black head” or “putting a black hand on Yard’s shoulder,” and also getting him in brutal bar fights with racists.   Yard also tangles with thugs as they try to track down the elusive Lavelle, who usually stays hidden on the top floor of a hotel surrounded by bodyguards (including one with a metal hand).  The action scenes are pretty workmanlike but Yard takes his share of punishment.  He also gets away with putting a silencer on a revolver;  you’d think a gun expert would know that doesn’t work.  Anyway, not bad but not outstanding.




 Attention, Brian Dennehy!  Sylvester Stallone is tired of your shit!
(What, you didn't think I wasn't gonna do that, did you?) 


First Blood - David Morrell  (Fawcett Crest, 1972)
Of course this is the basis for Sylvester Stallone’s action franchise classic, but it differs from the movie adaptation quite a bit.  Rambo is more of a “kid” and he’s a bit more disturbed and not quite as reasonable;  he’s perfectly willing to kill the deputies who chase him into the woods when he gets fed up by being pushed around by Sheriff Teasle.  Also, he spends more time just trying to hide and survive than he does being the super-powered aggressor that Stallone’s version was; early on he’s hampered by badly broken ribs that keep him from doing a lot of fighting.   And, most importantly, the outcome is very different.  Morrell’s writing is simple without a lot of flash, but he handles outdoor things well and maintains an interesting, convoluted conflict between Rambo and Teasle;  both know the whole thing’s a big, stupid mistake that’s causing great harm, but after a point they’re committed to it and have to ride it out even if it’s going to end badly.   Good stuff.  For a better, more in-depth review of this book, check out Glorious Trash, where all three of the trilogy (and the circumstances under which the last two were written) are discussed.


Now, if you're so inclined, here's how you can follow me and a bunch of people cooler than me on Twitter.

... or, in a few cases, ehhhhh, maybe-don't-read-this list.  I know, it's a bit late in the game and you'll never get all of these read by Halloween.  But, you still have a couple of weeks, you can still get at least one in, maybe even three or four if you're dedicated.  And a few of these are definitely worth putting the rest of your life on hold for a while.  So, here we go...



                                                         Have you seen this woman?





Night Film - Marisha Pessl  (Random House, 2013)

Amazing, horrific (though not strictly horror) novel about the search for information on a horror movie director’s strange daughter's last days before she killed herself by jumping down the elevator shaft of an abandoned building.  The director, Stanislaus Cordova (whose films seem patterned on Dario Argento's, but that may be an imposition of mine... but, he does have a strange, beautiful, artistically-talented daughter), is a recluse whose works are so terrifying that the public can't see them anymore; they're screened only in underground tunnels or catacombs, or in high-priced bootleg copies (which parents‘ groups are trying to buy up and destroy because one of them inspired a psycho to murder children).  It’s hard to even find information on the films, because they’re only discussed online in a "black board" website on a hidden part of the internet, accessible only to members who've been given the code by another member.  They’re cult films in the most literal sense of that term.

Reporter Scott McGrath, who was once sued and disgraced for trying to research Cordova, re-opens his investigation when Cordova's daughter Ashley commits suicide; he’s driven partially by thinking he saw her shortly before it happened, during a dreamlike late-night walk through the park.   As he follows leads he picks up a couple of sidekicks who help him, and the more they learn, the crazier and more sinister things get, and the more trouble they get into.  Each lead gives them a new place to look or person to talk to, and most of the people they contact are scared or somehow broken from their contact with Cordova, or his daughter.   Something about her spooked everyone, or obsessed them.  

They talk to a guy who helped her escape a mental hospital, an aging actress who's become a recluse due to a plastic surgery disaster, visit a secret "Hellfire Club" type party-house, and even break into Cordova's estate for a nightmarish trip trough old movie sets full of hidden secrets about the films... which McGrath thinks may be more sinister than anyone could guess.   And they also get mixed up in some pretty heavy black magic that Ashley -- who felt cursed -- was trying to weave.  

This book reads like Laura with the lights out; the prose is brilliant and Pessl does an incredible job making the reader as obsessed with finding out more about Ashley and her father as the protagonists are.  They’re always offscreen, remote either because they’re hiding or dead, but their presence throws a shadow across everything.   I like horror novels dealing with a research process of something dark that only gets darker the more its brought into the light (such as Adam Nevill's brilliant Last Days,  William H. Hallahan's Search for Joseph Tully, William Hjortsberg's Falling Angel, Peter Clines'14, (see below) etc.), and this one is handled masterfully.  The info is torturously parceled out in bits that keep you hungry for more, feeding you just enough to prolong your starvation.  Even if things take a late turn in another direction (which nevertheless doesn't disappoint), most of the book is pretty intense and unnervingly scary stuff that may mess with your sleep.  It weaves an atmosphere that closes in black and freezing, and I've never read anything else quite like it;  it'll stay in your mind when you're away from the book.   It’s a literary book, but without the pretension that often plagues those; no self-conscious moments here, and the prose never gets in the way of the story.

The design of the book adds to the sense of realism by incorporating reproductions of articles, websites, and photos.  I've seen people complaining that they couldn't see things well in the e-book version; I'm never in favor of e-books to begin with, they're a plague, but even if you're of a different (*cough* wrong *cough*) bent you're going to want to get this one in hardback, both for the picture and article reproductions, but also because this is one damn nice book -- the quality of the paper and binding is top-notch, and it's a book you're definitely going to want to keep and read multiple times.  Also, as the research progresses, you'll probably want to turn back and look at the "primary sources" again; I know I stared at the picture of Ashley on p. 223 dozens of times -- I don't know who the model is who did the Ashley photos but she's hauntingly gorgeous.  Admit it, you wanna know more about that girl.  This is a must-read and gets my highest recommendation.  




Check out Pessl's website and follow her on Twitter.







The Elementals -- Michael McDowell  (Avon, 1981)

This Southern-gothic horror masterpiece starts out bizarre and just keeps on runnin’.  Members of the Savage family stab their mother’s corpse at her funeral, as part of an old family tradition;  the Savages have a history of premature burials, and one woman who’d apparently died in childbirth revived in the tomb and ended up eating her baby’s corpse out of starvation.  It’s just McDowell’s way of letting you know he has no problem with getting nasty and it sets you on edge for what’s going to come.  The family members are all realistically Southern-awful to one degree or another, and anybody raised in the South will feel very familiar with these white-trash-with-money types, although they’re never stereotypical;  McDowell’s characters are realistic, multi-faceted, and have more depth than a lot of real people you know.  

The Savages retire for the summer to their ancestral homes on a peninsula (sometimes island, depending on the tide) on the Alabama coast, where they’re isolated with little electricity.  They have three large houses, but the third is a decaying hulk that’s filling up with sand as a large dune swallows it.  That house is feared and shunned, and for good reasons.   Thirteen year old India (otherwise incredibly mature for her age) gets very intrigued by the house, but while poking around and peeking through the windows she sees an extremely creepy little black girl who’s laughing with a mouth full of sand.  Other sinister figures appear in photos she takes of the place.  The family’s black maid, Odessa Red, warns her that the things in that house are evil spirits that can take any shape, and she works voodoo to protect the family... but that gets limited results.  India will have to do something highly, gruesomely creepy to get them out of the situation when the spirit-things (often made of sand) start attacking the other houses.  

Extremely well-written and disturbingly spooky horror;  that all of McDowell’s work is not kept in print is one of the biggest tragedies in horror literature;  I’m dead serious when I say Library of America should be doing volumes on this guy.  At least someone recently brought The Amulet back into print.  This is one of his best and you are strongly urged to seek it out; he’s in the upper pantheon of horror writers and should not be forgotten.  I’ve read this one a couple of times already and unless a truck hits me within the next few years I’m sure it won’t be my last.













14 - Peter Clines  (Permuted Press, 2012)

I won't tell you much about what happens in this book because it's one of those Lost type stories where the fun comes from discovering weird events and seeing how they fall together to eventually make sense.

 Basically, a guy named  Matt gets a cheap apartment in an old building in L.A. and starts noticing some weird things about it.  He has green mutant cockroaches with an extra leg, and they apparently don't eat anything.  The light in his kitchen puts off black light no matter what kind of bulb goes into the socket.  And some doors in the building are fake, while others (namely the titular 14) are padlocked and painted shut, and have obviously been so for decades.   When he talks to his neighbors he learns they've noticed other strange things, and -- sneaking around behind the landlord's back -- they decide to investigate the building's weirdness further... and it's weirder than they could ever imagine, landing them in a potential Lovecraftian apocalypse. 

The writing is good and the characters are well-drawn and likeable (although maybe a bit too comic-bookish, with the blue-haired artist girl, the computer geek -- the usual misfit-hero-nerd kind of deal) and the plot is good at leading the reader on by keeping the trail of little weirdnesses and discoveries coming, always leading you to another, bigger one.  And they‘re everywhere!  It's not as much of a horror novel as it is sci-fi, though.  But, it's the Lovecraftian type of sci-fi, so there are plenty of scary things going on... but it's more of an adventure than a real scarefest.  It's a bit long but does a good job keeping your interest, and it doesn't disappoint.   Definitely worth checking out.


















The Small Hand and Dolly - Susan Hill  (Vintage, 2010, 2012)

Two short ghost-novels from the author of The Woman In Black. 

The first involves a dealer in antiquarian books getting lost in the backwoods of England and ending up at a derelict old house with the overgrown remains of a garden.  While wandering around this ruin he feels a small, cold hand take his, as if some little child wanted to lead him somewhere.  Unnerved by the experience, he becomes rather obsessed with the place, and sometimes the small hand returns and tries to pull him into bodies of water.  Eventually he learns what's causing this, and it's not pretty.

In "Dolly," a well-mannered, very self-effacing little boy and his cousin, a horribly bratty little girl, goe to stay with their aunt for the summer.  The little girl wants a doll but her aunt gets her the wrong kind and the girl smashes it in a tantrum.  The boy can hear it crying so he finally sneaks it into a churchyard and buries it, hoping it will find some peace.   Years later their aunt dies and wills him her house, leaving the girl only the broken doll... which he decides to dig up, and things get profoundly creepy from there out.

Both short novels (about 140 pages each) are very well-written and spooky, with "Dolly" being the darker and more intensely disturbing of the two.  That one will bug me for a while.   “The Small Hand” would probably have been more effective as a short story instead of being novel-length; it runs out of gas a bit, plot-wise, although the strength of either story is the atmosphere and mood.  Well worth picking up if you like old-school horror with a Victorian bent.











Seed - Ania Ahlborn  (47North, 2012)

Jack Winter’s already having a hard time -- he has two daughters to support while being under-employed doing welding jobs, his wife’s getting fed up with him neglecting his family for a band he’s in, their car’s on its last legs -- but things are about to get a lot worse.  Jack gets startled by a pair of animal eyes he sees in the road and wrecks their car.  Everyone’s alright, but six-year-old Charlie starts behaving malevolently, and Jack thinks maybe she’s possessed by the thing with the animal eyes -- a thing he recognized because it used to scare him when he was a kid playing in the cemetery.  Jack tries to confront this demon from his past and learns that it may have caused more tragedy than he realized because he’d blocked some things out of his memory. Meanwhile, little Charlie is having a ball chasing the family dog into traffic and spooking her mother until she’s verging on a nervous breakdown.  And she’ll do worse. 

The writing style isn’t bad, although some flashback scenes are very clumsily handled and feel like they were inserted at the last minute to make this book-length;  they’re so awkward I think I read through a couple before I realized they were supposed to be scenes from the past and adult-Jack wasn’t just behaving childishly.   Ahlborn’s got talent but it’s still in an amateurish stage here -- it’s not bad at all but I’m betting it’ll get better later if she gets a good editor.  Not a must-get but still well worth reading.










The Lurkers -- Kristopher Rufty (Samhain, 2012)

This Richard-Laymon-inspired horror novel lets you know it's probably going to be just a lil' bit dumb right from the start: a woman goes to check out intruders trashing her kitchen in the middle of the night without waking her husband, calling the cops, or taking a weapon.  Just like NOBODY WOULD EVER DO.  They both end up massacred by evil little gnome-people called Haunchies.  Yep.  Haunchies.   I’m not sure you want me to take your monsters seriously when you call them “Haunchies.”   What was wrong with “Lurkers?”  Would anybody buy this book if it was called “The Haunchies”? 

Prologue over, we go into the story of Amy, an abused woman on the run from her psycho boyfriend, Piper, and things smarten up a bit and give me some hope for the rest of the book... for a while.  A male friend, Gary, and his bitchy girlfriend, Wendy, set out to pick up Amy before Piper can track her down, and they meet up with two friendly metalhead couples.  They're characterized pretty well even though it's fairly obvious from the start that they're only introduced into the book so there'll be more kill-scenes later.  This part of the book is interesting even if it's not very horror-novelish, and the book then throws you a pretty amazing curve by getting what you thought was going to be the main character killed exactly halfway through the book.  That's an audacious move and gave me even more hope for the book;  Rufty's tossed some standard-horror-formula out the window and let you know that nobody's safe here, and you wonder what transgressions he's going to hit you with next. 

Unfortunately, after that masterstroke, things get dumb again.  The Haunchies show up, wanting to kill and eat the males and mate with the females, and soon everybody's running everywhere and unpleasant-as-possible things are happening almost constantly, with only the occasional break to find out if two of the girls might be able to form a threesome with one of the guys later, or if Piper will still be able to rape and murder all our heroes while escaping the Haunchies. 

The monsters never come across as anything but silly and cartoonish, despite the mayhem they enact;  I know Rufty wanted them to be pint-sized versions of the cannibal tribe from Off Season or maybe a whole bunch of those Zuni fetish dolls from Matheson's "Prey," but they come off as more like horny Ghoulies or something.   Rape scenes are always repugnant (and Rufty goes there -- he'll go pretty much anywhere) but when the rapists are about two feet tall it gets a little absurd.  And these characters never really grow -- you think they are, for a while, and then in the clinch they abandon their humanity (and survival instincts) to carry out petty vendettas, and it just doesn't ring true.   

There's plenty of gore and nastiness so if that's enough for you to put up with too much dumbness when it comes to the plot, you may be satisfied because Rufty does a good job not holding back on that.   Overall, the writing's not bad, but the style feels borrowed, mostly from Laymon -- it's got the same all-the-way-evil-and-nothing-but bad guys, the same juvenile preoccupation with sex even at inopportune moments (even while crawling through a tunnel escaping a horrible fate, one woman gets turned on almost to the point of orgasm because her breasts are dragging the ground), the same one-line paragraphs to emphasize some dramatic point, overused to the point of awkwardness.  It's not a terrible book by any means, I didn't have a chore getting through it, and I'd consider another Rufty book if the plotline intrigued me, but it is pretty lunk-headed, so be forgiving if you go for it.



                                         The paperback's cover is a reproduction of the original 1898 edition's.



Tenebrae -- Ernest G. Henham (Valancourt Books, 2013)

Originally published in 1898, this weird piece of morbidity reads like a homage to Edgar Allan Poe on ‘shrooms. The gloomy-minded narrator is an independently wealthy (via inheritance) scholar who lives in a decaying mansion with his beloved brother and his drug-addled uncle, who’s so crazy and damaged from drug and alcohol abuse that he thinks he’s the King of the Insects and concocts poisons to drink; he even convinces his nephew to sweeten his coffee with arsenic.  The narrator spends his days translating manuscripts on the mysteries of death and trying to romance a neighbor girl.  When he discovers she’s in love with his brother instead, he starts hating him to the point of madness and eventually murders him.  The neighbor girl then marries the narrator for some strange reason.  He’s still not happy, though, and his paranoia grows until he’s ranting at his wife over a game of chess and screaming at strangers about chrysanthemums.  This stuff is so over the top it’s hilarious, perhaps intentionally so.  He also starts seeing a giant spider, which terrifies him beyond reason since he’s even scared of the small kind. 

The writing is florid -- almost feverish -- and is so drenched in Poe-ism that it almost crushes you with maniacal gloom... but it’s highly readable despite its age.  It’s very much a mood piece and isn’t terrible eventful, so readers looking for a lot of action aren’t going to enjoy this much.  But for students of the macabre it’ll be a fascinating artifact worth seeking out. 





The Black Hope Horror:  The True Story of a Haunting -- Ben Williams, Jean Williams, & John Bruce Shoemaker (William Morrow & Company, 1991)

Nonfiction that’ll make you appreciate lies, because facts are under no obligation to be interesting and I wish this book owed me something.  A not-terribly-interesting old couple have a house built near Houston, Texas, and on moving in almost instantly decide the place is haunted... which makes you wonder for the rest of the book if they're not superstitious, suggestible people who are concentrating on anything that can be interpreted as "ghostly."  

At first it's simple things -- sunken spots in the yard that won't stay filled, ants that show up in the kitchen, shadows that cause asthma attacks, toilets that flush by themselves, and a lot of snakes showing up on the property.   They also have uncommonly bad luck with health in their family;  practically everyone comes down with cancer or some other terrible disease (which unfortunately isn't that uncommon in the south, since our leaders let anybody who gives 'em a dollar dump any kind of toxic sludge anywhere). 

In any case, they have more than their share of tragedy, and so many people die I couldn't keep track of how some of them were related.  Other bad things happen to people who visit the house; their daughters get divorced and one becomes so crazy and hateful they litigate for custody of her daughter.   Any cat they adopt dies (one after giving birth to a litter of inside-out kittens).   The neighbors also have a lot of  bad luck, and when the people next door dig up human bones when they try to build a swimming pool, they learn that the real estate company sold them land that had once been the Black Hope Cemetery, a graveyard for poor black people.  The Williams want to sue but the lawyers set up an impossible paradox, where they'll have to prove graves are on the property, but if they dig them up to prove it they'll be arrested for grave desecration.  They have a lot of nightmares, think they see ghosts, and experience more events they interpret as supernatural attacks (birds attacking the house with acorns, a woodpecker persistently hammering at a window, etc.)  

It's not badly written but it's very bland, and the family is so average there's not much to characterize them or make the reader invest much in them, especially when the terrors they're subjected to are so mundane.  They did have an unpleasant time there and it's sad that they had such bad luck with the health issues, but flushing toilets and aiiiieeeee-mean-birds-pelted-us-with-acorns-for-godsake! just don't make for much of a read.  It's the Amityville Meh. It's fairly short, though, so "true ghost" fanatics might find it worthwhile.





                                           Unsuspecting female swimmer at top heading to the right - check!
                                           Toothy shark approaching from below - check!


Rip Tide - Donald D. Cheatham  (Zebra, 1984)

Rip OFF is more like it.  Amateurish Jaws imitation ups the number of shark attacks and adds a superstrong hurricane to the mix but still fails to distinguish itself. 

This time the predator is a twenty-some foot tiger shark feeding on swimmers, boaters, and even other sharks off the coast of Florida.  A male-female pair of buddy cops, Stark and Sallings, are assigned to deal with the situation, but they never really do so we follow them around through the book for no good reason.  They're both obnoxious assholes, but you get the sense the author doesn't know that.  Stark, the male cop, used to work in St. Louis where he was basically Dirty Harry with a bigger dick, bending a lot of rules to bring in a crazy sniper who'd killed over 100 people (sure, why stop at anything realistic?) and even targeted pregnant women (I guess to get maximum scores per bullet).  Good thing Stark had some success there, because his efforts to bring in the shark are so incompetent that he even manages to lose a severed head he dug up (completely by accident) while visiting a nude beach.  

Stark gets laid a lot, mostly because every woman around him is as big an asshole as he is.  He and Sallings flirt a lot, he screws one of her friends (who promptly kicks him out for being an idiot), and has no trouble bedding a lady shark expert (ya gotta have a Hopper figure) who's really obnoxious and fond of saying "What does this have to do with the price of potatoes in Idaho?" over and over again.  Stark and Sallings swap smartass jokes that are devoid of anything funny. 

Meanwhile, the shark attacks a lot of people and the mayhem is fairly gory, so you get that much, at least.   Then a huge hurricane shows up and you get more mayhem like people being killed by pebbles blowing around, etc.   The shark is almost completely forgotten as this suddenly becomes a hurricane-disaster novel instead of a Jaws variation.

That would all be fine if the writing was competent, but it isn't; there are some interesting facts (Cheatham did his research, at least, or managed to trick me into thinking he did -- I didn't verify it all), but it's written like a third-grader's class project, with laborious sentences, exclamation points used outside of dialogue, clumsy plotting, and some unintentional hilarity (I loved it in chapter 18 when Stark apparently answers the telephone and starts mixing a drink without every getting out of the shower).   Maybe the worst thing is, there's no payoff -- the shark's still in business at the end of the book and never even faces a credible threat.  The chapters are numbered, but since there are 26 of the Cheatham, for some reason, thought it'd also be clever to assign each a letter in the military alphabet.  So, the book pretty much sucks from Alpha to Zulu. 







The Track of the Cat -- Walter Van Tilberg Clark  (Nevada, originally 1949)

I'd wanted to read this one a long time, hearing it was one of the best horror novels ever, but written in the guise of a Western.  I like both genres and am all for some cross-pollenation, so it was pretty disappointing that it turned out to be an excruciating and almost-unreadable chore to get through. 

A ranch family is plagued by a big cat that's killing their cattle.  An old Indian thinks it's the black panther who killed his wife and daughter, and which is not merely a cat but a talisman representing the end of the world.  While the family -- intensely dysfunctional -- squabbles about the youngest brother’s fiancé, the most impetuous brother, Curt -- a brash, bullying asshole who has to impose his will on everyone and everything, including the very land itself  -- becomes obsessed with killing this cat.  At first he’s just fueled by stories from the old Indian (who’s clearly suffering from senile dementia) but then gets really driven when the cat kills his older brother Arthur (who -- the story goes far out of its way to establish for no particular reason - is a “dreamer”).  Curt gets lost in a blizzard and ends up helpless and desperate and nearly insane, out of food, almost out of matches, so lost in the snow-covered landscape he can’t tell if he’s walking toward home or farther from it, and doesn’t even know if it’s morning or dusk. 

This is basically a good short story (Jack London’s “To Build A Fire” in particular) bloated into an insufferably long novel by literary pretense; very little happens and it’s all described in excruciating, pointless detail until you need a crazed will like Curt’s to keep reading.  None of the overly-melodramatic family squabbles add up to anything, they’re uninteresting, and don’t move the plot at all.  We’re kept neurotically up to date on how long the Indian’s gone without eating, how much the drunken father’s been drinking, etc. and it’s all very nicely written but who gives a fuck?  Clark is good with words and can draw vivid pictures, but they’re pictures of mundane events and it results in some very constipated prose.  This is sort of a “Moby Dick in the West,” but a lot more happened in Moby Dick; this could have made the same point with a stronger punch at an eighth of the length.  I really wanted to get into this, given its reputation, but the emperor’s got no clothes.   A good idea, executed awfully.


=====================================

I'm still planning on writing ya'll a horror story before Halloween, but I'm one lazy bastid and am a bit writer's blocked so we'll see how that goes.  I've got a large chunk of it done but I need to finish it and then polish the hell out of it and try to ramp up the octane, because if I can't make a good run at scaring the unholy bejesus out of you and do some serious lasting psychological damage, then I'm not going to be happy.  But, I'll try.  In the meantime, please revisit my Halloween stories of yesteryear:

Scribblebones
Long Tall Sally
Shik-Chuff
The Damp Basements of Heaven
Up The Stairs Where The Windows Are Painted Black
and little descriptions of some real-life nightmares I've had 

and blog-brother KickerOfElves's much-creepy
Men With Knives

 and my buddy Proftbolt's eerie
East of Rulesville.

 And if all those are too long or creepy for ya and you can't deal with more than 140 characters at a time, here are people you can follow on Twitter.

Okay, remember how I was gonna write ya'll a horror story for Halloween?  I didn't lie, I just failed.  But the only reason I failed is because it's not two weeks ago.  Since it's a long sucker (nearly 11,000 words, flirting with novella-hood) I wanted to take the time to polish it up and be respectful of the time you'll have to invest if you read it.  That was more important than some self-imposed deadline, I thought.

Just a lil' warning, I always write horror with bad intentions, and I tried pretty damn hard to scare your ass with this one.  I want your SLEEP.   I think I did ehhhh-yeah-maybe, but you be the judge... I'm a little not-crazy about it 'cuz it shares too many scare-tactics with a novel I wrote called -Signal 30-, but since nobody's ever read that, that's probably one of the things that's only gonna bother me.  I'm even re-using the Black Keys opening quote from it, because it just seems appropriate.

Feedback, as always, is wonderful.

Anyway, here goesy, hope you enjoy, and hope it does some damage. 

===================================================================

                              BODIES NOT RECOVERED



"You'll know what the sun's all about
When the lights go out."
- The Black Keys




    "I oughtta know what a god-be-damned hole sounds like!  I've dug, like, fifty-fuckin'-eleven of 'em since nine this morning!" Mark yelled.

    "Those are the blisters talking," Sam told Lacy, although he was pretty sure it was Mark's misguided attempt to impress Lacy that was really making him cuss so much.  Mark had been loud and uncharacteristically obnoxious ever since Lacy had shown up on her motorcycle that morning.  She was obviously badass so Mark was assuming she'd go for tough guys.  And he wasn't one.  And it was turning out he wasn't even good at faking it.  The extra profanity was conspicuous and embarrassing.

    "Listen to that," Mark yelled, stabbed his shovel into the earth a few more times, then spread his hands in a see-there? gesture.

    "I don't hear anything special," Sam said, then looked over at Lacy, who twisted a side of her mouth and raised her eyebrows.  Sam couldn't blame Mark for trying to impress her; she was gorgeous and radiated cool without trying.  He was glad Mark was failing, but he doubted he'd do much better.  Lacy McKee didn't seem like the kind of girl who got impressed with things.  She did the impressing and gave back fuck-you.

    "Well, maybe if you came over here you'd hear it.  In fact, I'm pretty damn sure that would happen."  Mark rocked his sapling around like a dance partner and pulled a face.  The only bad-boy he was coming across as was the kind that got sat in corners.

    Lacy sighed, rolled her magic green eyes at Sam, narrowed them, then slung her shovel across her shoulders and trudged up the hill toward Mark, like Christ carrying his cross to Golgotha.  If she was going, Sam was going, and apparently Ambrose and Kate felt the same, because they were dropping their shovels and walking over to indulge Mark.  It wasn't hard to get distracted from this job, anyway; planting trees to stop erosion had turned out to be harder work than it had sounded, repetitive, boring, and paid just enough to keep it from being strictly volunteer.  And now that the morning was gone it was starting to get hot on top of everything else

    They gathered around the hole Mark had dug and he stared at them with his fake attitude.  Dirt had given him half a mustache, Sam noted, and decided not to tell him.

    "Go ahead, make the magic," Lacy sighed, kicking a dirt clod back into the hole with one battered motorcycle boot ("not my good ones," she'd explained).

    "You mind?  I'm trying to get the dirt out of the hole," Mark said.

    "Wanna take enough out to make a grave of it?" she asked, real deadpan.

    He grinned back at her and said, "I like funny chicks."

    "Well, peep peep peep."

    "Okay, listen now."  He jammed the shovel into the ground with a whump.  "Hear that?"

    "It does have some bass to it," Ambrose said.  He took off his red-fading-to-pink cap ("not my good one either," he'd told Lacy), forearmed sweat off his forehead, and squatted down.  Ambrose had just turned twenty, but Sam was pretty sure he'd be bald in a couple of years.  Poor guy, like the big round nose and receding chin hadn't been punishment enough from the DNA fairy.   His nickname was "Turtle" but he didn't know that.  "Do it again."

    Mark tossed the shovelful of dirt out of the hole and struck again.  "Whoomp.  There it is."

    "Weird-oh!" Kate said.  She put her hand on boyfriend Ambrose's shoulder and squatted next to him.  She'd taken this tree-planting job because she was desperate to lose some weight, but Sam didn't think she was fat at all.  Neither did Ambrose, who'd yelled "Oh, shut up!" at her twice already when she'd made fat jokes about herself.  Lacy'd branded her a lunatic and had taken to calling her Annie.  Annie Rexic.

    Mark levered the dirt out and attacked the hole again.  Whoomp.  "See?  Somethin' fuckin' down there."  He wiped his face with the hem of his tee-shirt, probably trying to show off his abs to Lacy, or at least his lack of pudge.  Maybe just his puberty.  Sam was sad to see the face-wiping had taken care of the half-'stache.

    "Could be anything," Kate said, looking up the hillside.  Little pine saplings dotted it like battlefield grave markers, and here and there was a bigger maple like the one Mark was trying to plant.  "When that mudslide brought down half the hill eight, ten years ago, it buried everything in its path.  Houses, yards, cars.  Like God's own bulldozer."  She made a rumbling sound in her throat and pushed at the air with her hands.

    "I know," Mark said.  "That's why we're planting all this shit, trying to stop it from happening again."   He waved an arm at some distant houses down the slope.  "I'm sure it's something got buried, that's a gimmie.  But what?"  He jabbed the shovel again, got the hollow noise.  "Doesn't sound like a Volvo.  It's organic and shit."

    "Hey, I know, why don't we dig it up and see?!" Lacy said, smiling wide and blinking those bright green eyes, then instantly going back to a bored-with-this-and-too-cool-for-it-too look.

    "Yeah, I know we could, but, it's kind of creepy," Mark said.  "Don't you think?  I don't know if I wanna know what's down there.  Bust through and get swallowed by a sinkhole like that jag-off on CNN."

    "Well, the hole's probably deep enough for the tree already," Sam said. 

    "No it's not," Kate said.  "And anyway, I want to know what's down there.  I have a long life ahead of me and I don't want to spend it wondering what that might've been."

    "Me either," Mark said.  "But still... I dunno, don't fuckin' know..."

    "Probably a coffin," Lacy said, nodding.

    "Oh, it is not!" Kate laughed. "There were no graveyards on this hill!"

    "Maybe somebody had one in his living room," Lacy shrugged.  "My Uncle Buddy did.  Kept Aunt Matilda in there.  My rotten, green, fuzzy Aunt Matilda.  Oh, how I hated having to kiss her every Christmas and Thanksgiving."

    "Oh, you are so full of shit!" Kate laughed. 

    "'N' that's why I done gots me a shovel," Lacy said, then nudged Mark with her foot.  "Outta there, Braveheart.  I'll do it."

    "I'll do it, I'll do it," Mark said, but he was already climbing out of the hole, and Lacy was in it, digging.  Mark stood there muttering and looking goofy while the dirt flew and the shovel's thumping turned to scraping.  Lacy cleared a space at the bottom of the hole and said, "I'll be damned."

    "What is that?" Kate said, frowning.

    "Asphalt shingles," Ambrose said.

    "Got us a roof," Lacy said, tapping the shovel on it.  "Which most likely means we found us a house."

    "Oh, hell naw," Mark said, backing away from the hole.  "A house buried down there?  That's too creepy to stand!"

    "It could be," Kate said, also stepping back from the hole.  "That mudslide was huge.  It buried a big chunk of neighborhood.  There used to be houses all the way up to there."  She pointed up the side of the hill. 

    "But a house?" Mark said. 

    "Probably just a piece of one," Kate said.  "Mudslides usually crush things.  Maybe just the roof, with some air under it."

    "One way to find out," Lacy said, climbing out of the hole.  "That bit felt kind of mushy.  I don't think it'd be hard to hack through."  She pulled the top half of her long, thick, curly brown mane back and tied it with some elastic she fished out of her pocket, then sat down by the hole and started spearing her spade into the shingles.  On the third blow a hole opened, and then enough wet, rotten wood was cleared to make a space big enough for a person to squeeze into.  Cool, damp air rose like musty breath.  It was deep black down there.  Black like sleep.

    "Oh, fuck me, you've got to be kidding me!" Mark said, doing a little squirmy dance.  His macho act had apparently been discarded in the face of this creepiness.  "That is sick!"

    "Hello!" Lacy yelled down the hole, getting back a dead echo.  "Anybody home?"

    "Don't... do that!" Mark sputtered.

    Lacy laughed.  "Think somebody's going to answer?"  She yelled again.  "Jehovah's Witnesses!  I'd like to talk to you about Jesus!"

    "Now I know they're not going to answer," Sam said, and Lacy laughed, giving the happiness in him a little shake.

    "Well, we've gotta go down there," Lacy said.  "We can use the rope we were using to space out the trees.  Anybody got any flashlights?  I keep a small one on my bike."

    "You're shittin' me," Mark said.

    Lacy looked alarmed and glanced over her shoulder.  "Whew, figure of speech.  Scared me for a second, I thought you were falling out of my butt."   She clapped her hands and stretched, making her Motörhead tee-shirt ride up and show a hard tummy.  "No, I'm not shitting you.   I do have a flashlight on my bike, and yes, we should go down there."

    "You'd really go down there?"  Kate said.  "Seriously?"

    "Yeah," Lacy said.   "It's no big thing, I do stuff like that.  Didn't I ever tell you I was a spelunker?"

    Sam said, "Your ethnicity has nothing to do with this, and anyway, I don't believe stereotypes."

    Lacy laughed and pulled his ear.  "I like you, you're funny!  I'm taking you with me."
   
    "Guess I'm going, then," Sam said, and Kate stared at him open-mouthed. "Me and my friend from Spelunkia."

    "We believe spelunkia can be cured in our lifetime," Lacy said.  "Won't you give?"

     Mark went pale, knowing that if Sam went he'd have to go, too, or look like a pussy.

    "I don't think this is a good idea," Ambrose said, staring into that blackness.

    "That's why I thought of it," Lacy said.  "Look, you stay up here, so if anything goes wrong, you can run for help.  Like Lassie with the stupid-Timmy-fell-down-the-well-again shit, arf arf.  The rest of us will go poke around down there and grow some hair on our funnybits from the sheer bravery of it all."

    "The rest of us?  I hope you don't think I'm going down there," Kate said, half-laughing.

    "Sure you are.  You've got a long life ahead of you and you don't want to spend it with hairless funnybits, wondering what the inside of a buried house looked like.  Besides, there's probably stuff worth money down there."

    "Wouldn't that be stealing?"

    "From who?  Insurance is bound to have paid off whoever owned the place.  And they're likely to have left any jewelry or whatever when the mudslide hit.  I figure you find it, it's yours.  Like a big buried treasure chest."

    "Maybe so.   The whole thing sounds stupid and dangerous, though."

    "Everything fun is stupid and dangerous," Lacy sighed.  "Look, we leave somebody up here...."

    "I volunteer for that," Ambrose said.  "No way am I going down there.  I'm not even curious.  Anyway, we're supposed to be here working, to stop this kind of thing from happening."

    "So we stop the clock on the workday.  This job's not urgent.  Doesn't feel like it's ever going to rain again, anyway."  Lacy wiped sweat off her face, squinted at Ambrose, then sighed.  "Fine, we leave Ambrosia up here to run for the rescue squad if anything goes bad.  But I kinda am the rescue squad.  I go caving all the time.  And this is a house, it's bound to be more organized than a cave.  Man-made floor plan, suburban tract bullshit from the 70's.  Get down there, you'll probably find out it's the same as your houses."

    "Probably rotten to shit," Mark said, dropping a clod of dirt into the blackness, where it made an unimpressive knock.  "The floors would probably cave in on you."

    "That's why we use ropes," Lacy said.  "We test the floor before putting our weight on it.  I know how to handle this from false-floors in caves.  They're called flowstone benches, and we know how to navigate them.  And if conditions are really bad down there, we just come back up the rope."

    "I think it's workable," Sam said.  The idea of seeing what was left of the house was getting him excited now, enough to overcome his fear.  And Lacy was convincing, exuding enough confidence to make him feel like nothing bad was going to happen with her down there directing things.  Besides, he'd be twenty-two at the end of this month and how many stupid things had he ever done?  Not enough.  He was going to join the workforce and get old soon, and he'd need better stories.

    "Of course it is," Lacy said, happy to have an ally.  "Now, who's got flashlights?"

    "My dad makes me keep one in my car," Kate said.  "I still think this is stupid, but I'll go get it."

    "I've got one under my seat," Sam said.  "I don't know how good the batteries are, though.  I let some kid borrow 'em at the lake.  He had one of those remote-control boats, and the batteries in the controller died on him while the boat was out in the middle of the lake.  He was crying and everything, so I let him use my batteries to drive the boat back to shore."

    "That is so sweet," Lacy said.  "Really, it is.  I'll feel safe being in the dark with such a gentleman."

    "Well, I wouldn't take it that far..." Sam said, and she laughed. 

    Mark looked like he was about to storm the beach at Normandy.  "I don't have a flashlight," he said, maybe looking for an excuse.

    "You can borrow Kate's 'cuz no way am I letting her go down there," Ambrose said.

    "Letting her, huh?" Lacy said.  "The ownership papers you got on her... they all notarized and shit?"

    "I'm not a chauvinist, just a loving boyfriend.  And this is a stupid idea.  I wouldn’t let you go either if I had any way to stop you.”

    “Does this mean you’re my loving boyfriend?” Lacy teased.

    “I thought that was my job,” Sam said.  If he was going to be brave about going down a hole, why not be bold, too?

    “Ooo, we’ll see,” Lacy said.
   
    “Yeah, I’ll borrow the flashlight,” Mark said quickly.  “What the fuck, right?”

    “Exactly,” Lacy said.  “I'll get the light from my saddlebag.  And we’ve already got gloves for digging.  Let’s go.”

    They retrieved their flashlights, Ambrose grumbling that it was a dumb idea the whole time. When he handed Lacy the rope, he said "I'm handing you enough rope.  Maybe you've heard of it."

    "Ha ha, I get it.  Good one, dad!" she said, rolling her eyes and making a you're-a-drag face at him as she took it.  Lacy hitched the rope to a tough little bush, made sure it was secure, and then, holding it, stomped around the edges of the hole, breaking off rotten wood and widening it.  She beamed her light down, revealing kicked in chunks of roof littering moldy pink fiberglass insulation.  A couple of fatty, diseased-looking mushrooms lay amongst the debris.  “Not often you get to look down into an attic, huh?” she said.

    “Be careful, that fiberglass is itchy as shit,” Mark said.  He was looking pale.  Sam wondered if he’d back out, or get down there and pitch a major freak-out.  Maybe taking him along wasn’t advisable.  Surprisingly, Sam felt no urge to back out himself.  He didn’t usually do things like this, but he really wanted a look at what was down there, even though imagining it gave him chills.

    Lacy fed the rope into the hole, then, gripping it, stepped in.  The attic floor was only a few feet down, but Sam was happy to see she was being very careful.  She stood on a beam and bounced a little, then scuffed her boots on it to see if any wood chipped off.  “Pretty solid,” she said.

    “I wonder if the whole house is intact,” Kate said.

    “Only one way to find out,” Lacy said.  “C’mon, you know you wanna.”

    Kate bit her lip.  “Yeah, I do.  Okay.”

    “What’re you doing?!” Ambrose yelled as Kate stepped into the hole.

    “I  appreciate your not letting me, and I love you, too, but... I want to see this.”

    “It’s a bad idea,” he warned.  “Curiosity killed the Kate.”

    “Very clever, and you have my permission to put it on my headstone later, but I’m going.”

    “You want your flashlight back?” Mark asked.

    “No, you can keep it.  I’ll just cling close to Lacy.  That’s the only way I’m going, anyway.”

    “Ah, I was planning to do that,” Sam said, being bold again.  Lacy shot him a grin.  He tested the rope and then followed her down into the attic, duck-walked over to a spot where he could almost stand up, and beamed the flashlight around.  He was half-flinching, expecting bats to come flying at him, but then realized that was stupid; bats couldn't get into a place with no opening to the outside world.  Even if there'd been some when the place got buried, they'd have starved out by now.       

    Lacy crept deeper into the attic, beaming her light around, looking for a trap door as Kate and Mark followed them in.  Boxes and junk were clustered ahead in the dark, and as she got closer their shadows swirled around the walls like sediment in a jar of muddy water.   Kate wasn’t keeping her word about sticking close to Lacy, instead clutching Sam’s arm.  Ambrose was already peeking into the hole and asking,  “What do ya’ll see?   What’s it like in there?  Is it bad?”

    “C’mon in and find out,” Sam said, dragging Kate forward.  Mark hung behind them, using them as a shield, darting his light into every corner.  The angles of the roof closed in and clamped them and already the hot sunlit world seemed a mile away;  it was dark, cool, and close down here, and smelled like a kicked-over leaf-pile.  Sam could feel the pressure of the earth around them like a great muddy fist.

    Lacy gave an ice-cream maker a little kick and said, “There ya go.  Find one in every attic.”

    “Pretty sure there’s one in ours,” Sam said.  “Mom and dad got all excited about the idea of homemade ice cream, found out how much trouble and mess it was, and that’s the last I saw of it.”

    “That’s the story of every ice-cream maker ever.”  Lacy beamed the light over collapsed boxes of waterlogged sweaters being eaten by mildew, a rusty typewriter, a playpen so battered and gnawed-upon it should’ve gone to the junkyard instead of the attic, luggage, an ice chest, a box of artificial Christmas tree limbs.  The paper grocery sack -- bearing the logo of a store that had burned down when Sam was eight -- that had held the ornaments had crumbled in the damp and now they were scattered like fruit under some crazy tree.  “There’s got to be a stationary bike around here somewhere,” Lacy said.  “There’s always a stationary bike.”

    “Of course,” Kate said.  “To burn off the calories from all that homemade ice cream you were going to be eating.”

    Lacy made a shotgun-racking-then-booming sound of approval for Kate’s nailing it.

    Sam peered into a box of water-fattened Reader’s Digest volumes.  “The condensed books ain’t condensed no mo’,” he said.

    “I think something moved over there,” Mark breathed, beaming his light.  A battered tricycle was parked in a back corner, its shadow all crazy angles.

    “I believe you’re right, Mark!” Lacy gasped, and Kate left bruises on Sam’s arm.  “Oh my god, here it comes!”

    “Where?” Mark yelped.

    “In your imagination!”  Lacy said.  “Most dangerous place on earth.  I’m just fuckin’ with ya, fraidy.  But, you were fuckin’ with yourself first.  Weren't no virgin.”

    “I don’t mind you fucking with Mark,” Kate said, “but can you find a way to do it that doesn’t fuck me in the bargain?”

    “Sorry, babe,” Lacy said, patting her arm.

    “Don’t do it to me, either,” Mark said.  “I think I bruised my asshole.”

    Lacy laughed.  “Okay, I may have to like you better now that the macho act is wearing off a little.”

    “You noticed that too, huh?” Kate said.

    “Oh yeah, couldn’t miss it.”

    “I’m not crazy about closed-in spaces, is all,” Mark said.

    “It should be much roomier under that door,” Lacy said, holding her flashlight on a trap door with a folding wooden ladder built into it.  “But if you want to back out, now’s the time.  Pretty sure Ambrose would welcome the company.”   She gestured back at the ragged spot of daylight.

    Mark shook his head no, and Lacy shrugged and set to work on the attic door.  It was stiff, and when it finally gave it went with a horrible rusty twang and crack that was almost too much to take in the darkness.   It sounded like a coffin lid being wrenched off.   Damp, earthy air hissed up from below, and they coughed.

    “Smells like all the dirty socks in the world down there,” Sam said.

    “Wet carpet,” Lacy speculated.  “You’ll get used to it.”

    “I don’t want to get used to that,” Kate said.  “Smells like gangrene!”

    “If you know what gangrene smells like you’ve led a far more interesting life than the one I’d pictured you with,” Lacy said, feeding the rope down and then trying to unfold the ladder on the door.  The hinging was half-rust, rigored with it, and made more awful noise when she pried at it.  Sam closed his eyes, picturing some orchestra of skeletons tuning up in Hell.   This is what a Brueghel painting sounds like, he though, flashing on “Triumph of Death” and then wishing he hadn’t.  Lacy braced herself and stomped at it, announced that she’d gotten it, and extended the ladder down.  “Keep hold of the rope when you go down, and we need to go down one at a time.  The ladder seems in okay shape but I’m not trusting anything down here.”

    “One at a time.  That means one of us will be alone up here for a minute,” Kate said.

    “That’s gonna be you,” Mark said, stabbing Sam with a finger.

    Sam shrugged.   “Better than being the first one down there.”

    “And that’ll be you,” Mark said, pointing at Lacy.

    “But of course.  I’m the mama duck, leadin' mah buh-yootiful ducklin's.”  She stepped onto the ladder and started down, making quacking sounds.

    “Aren’t you afraid of anything?” Kate asked.

    “Sure,” Lacy said.  “Nothing to be afraid of here, though.  This is fun.  C’mon, you next.  Being alone in the dark with Mark is one thing I am scared of.”

    “Funny,” Mark growled, watching Kate make her way down. "Real funny." He followed, and Sam waited, looking at the playpen.  Teeth had left dents in the flimsy metal, and he wondered who was still stuck in a playpen once they had teeth and the strength to bite that hard.  He wondered if all the brownish stains were rust.  He took out his phone and snapped a picture of it and some of the other junk in the attic, then tried to send it to Ambrose but he couldn’t get a signal.  It’d just make Ambrose more frantic for them to come up, anyway.  With the ladder free, he headed down.

    They were in a hallway, littered with chunks of moldy sheetrock.  The carpet was sodden, a puddle squishing up around their feet with every step.  Mushrooms were growing from it, pale and fleshy, like parts sloughed from a corpse.  The walls had a lean to them, not at right angles anymore, and looking at them hurt Sam’s mind.  Doors lined the hall, some ominously closed, others yawning to utter black.  Stepping back, he shined his light into an open room and saw a clutter of knocked-over furniture and a shattered window that had let in a flow of mud.  He could smell it.  A rainbow of mold - black, green, blue, fuzzy white -- and pale yellow fungus grew on everything.  All was damp and chilly.

    “Guess who’s not getting their deposit baaaaaack?” Lacy sang, heading down the hall.  A bathroom on the right was sunken and water-stained, tiles cracked loose. Sheet rock rotted down to the studs and wiring.  The window was intact and looked out on solid earth, a giant dead ant farm.  “Anybody need to pee?”

    “I already did, back up in the attic,” Mark said.

    “Laughing at yourself serves you well, my friend.”  Lacy clapped him on the shoulder.  “Looks like the living room here.  Literally.  The room is alive.  Fungus among us.”   A couch was swollen and turned fuzzy black and stank abominably, sprouting mushrooms and antler-like projections of fungus, like cold fingers reaching in the dark.  Roaches that had never experienced light still instinctively ran from it.

    “Fuck, bugs!” Kate squealed.

    “There’s always bugs,” Lacy said.  “Persistent bastards, they can live anywhere.  Listen, you can hear them, like rain.”   They stood still and listened to the slight -- possibly imagined -- skritch of chitinous legs.  The sound of the dark.

    “I am not going in there.”

    “Sure you are.  Roaches are gross but they can’t do a thing to you.”

    “Yeah?  Ever see Creepshow?”

    “This is Creepshow,” Mark mumbled, and Sam wondered if he was aware that he was swatting at himself.  Mark was obviously fighting back some major panic and Sam felt a little sorry for him, even if being an ass had gotten him into this.

    Lacy beamed the light around but there was much it wouldn’t reach; the house was filled with a chilly, stale-stinking murk, the very air mildewed and rife with spores.   Sam had wanted a shower all day, originally from the sweat of work but now from contact with the air in this place.  It wrapped them like a damp rotting blanket, a feeling like being in a dead thing’s mouth.  The light struggled against the shadows, unwelcome here, darkness wanting to keep its secrets.

    Sam clicked the lightswitch, expecting nothing and getting it.  Lacy laughed at him and said "How hard would you have lost it if the light came on?"

    "Purty-damn.  But, I had to try it, because you just never know."

    "Agnostic," Lacy said.

    “Well, at least let’s not go in there first,” Kate said.  “Give the critters a chance to hide.”

    “They may not know they need to,” Lacy said, “after generation on generation with no predators.”

    “So you don’t think there’s rats or anything, at least?”

    “Probably not.  Closed environment, they’d have starved.  Roaches, though, can eat practically anything organic.  The binding of old books.  Each other.”   She cleared her throat against the moldy air and said, “Okay, we can check the other rooms first if you like.  Probably bedrooms.”   They stepped back into the hall and she beamed the light into the room full of knocked-over furniture.  The bed was under a wash of mud and the mattress was so rotten it was hardly a man-made thing anymore, just one big fungus.  Coins littered the carpet from where someone’s change-jar spilled.  A framed picture still hanging on the wall showed a guy in a Hawaiian shirt and shorts smiling over some tiny sports car.  Hard to believe it was ever that sunny anywhere, after just ten minutes spent down here.

    Mark picked up a nickel and put it in his pocket, just a souvenir.  Sam took a dime.  The date was twenty years ago but surely the house hadn’t been buried that long.  “When was that mudslide?” he asked.

    “Hell, I don’t know,” Lacy said.  “Like, ten, fifteen years ago?  That’s a guess.”

    “I think it was more like seven or eight, but I’ll be looking it up on the internet when we get back, you can bet on that,” Kate said.  “I want to find out who lived here, and call them up and tell them, ‘I was just in your house.  What kind of car were you standing by in that picture?’”

    “Oh, man, they would freak.  If you don’t do it, I’m going to,” Lacy said, then snapped a cellphone photo of the car picture, and another of the muddy bed.

    Sam tried the closed door across the hall.  It was warped shut, but the wood was rotten enough that it gave when he pounded a shoulder into it a couple of times, and it felt like house shifted a little, raising a chill.

    The crack when it gave was too loud, and the door rasped against the carpet as it opened, plowing some of the shag up.  Under the pressure of the mud, the house had twisted, then warped further in the damp, and the door no longer hung true; Sam had to force it open inch by inch.  He wasn’t entirely sure he wanted to see what was in there; the room had a very muddy stench.  He shoved his light in first, in hopes of scaring off any vermin, then looked in and yelped.

    A giant root had invaded the room, smashing its way through the window like the arm of some oversized mummy.  The shadow it threw on the walls reached around in a frantic search, and the effect was so horrible he stepped back.  “Scared the hell out of me.  Jeez, I don’t know if I want to go in there, that shit is way too creepy.”

    “Well, I do,” Lacy said, pressing past him.  She beamed her light around, and amidst the veins of the root were toys.  A large, rotten teddy bear watched her from the corner.  “Whoever they were, they had one strange kid.  Look at this.”

    The others stepped into the room and held their breath at the sight of a cage.  Some of the padding on the bars had been torn and bitten, exposing what appeared to be wrought iron underneath.  Inside was a rubber baby doll that had been gnawed almost to pieces.  The head of an Elmo doll lay next to it.  Just the head, stupid and laughing.

    “Who the hell would put their kid in a fuckin’ cage?” Mark asked.

    “Somebody who maybe had to,” Lacy said, holding up a little amber pill jar and shining her light on the label.  The dresser had a few other medicine bottles on it, and a syringe.  More medicine bottles lined the floor, along with a few books that had spilled off.   The one title Sam could read was a high-level medical text on severe birth defects.  Lacy put the jar down and looked at another.  “Looks like sedatives,” she said.  “And some kind of endocrine-adjusting supplements.  They must’ve had one messed-up child.”

    “Too big to be a baby,” Kate said, pointing out some pajamas draped over a rocking chair.

    “Jesus, what the fuck was going on in this house?” Mark asked.

    “Something private,” Kate said.  “I don’t want you to call those people to tell them we were here anymore.”

    “Yeah, I’m not gonna,” Lacy said.  “Any name off these pill bottles would be an instant win in a game of Scrabble.  Chlorpromazine.  That’s like Thorazine, isn’t it?   Slobberknocker dope. What kind of kid did these people have?”

    “And a cage?  Seriously, what the fuck?” Mark said, kicking the iron bars.  “Sick bastards.”

    “I don’t imagine they did it all the time.  There’s a baby bed over there,” Lacy said.  “It looks to me like they had to have a place to put the kid if he or she went into fits or something.  A lot of these pills are tranqs.  Any drug ending in 'zine' is some heavyweight narco to be giving a kid.”

    “Yeah, I don’t just get meanness out of this,”  Sam said.  “Look how padded the bars are.  They were trying to keep it from hurting itself.”

    “Maybe it was a baby gorilla or something,” Kate said.  “Or a chimp.”

    Sam picked up one of the books on the floor and showed it to her.  It was full of black and white glossy photos of various deformities and intense medical texts describing each one, some underlined with notes in the margin that moisture had blurred.  “I kind of doubt it,” he said.

    “I guess I was wishing,” Kate sighed, and Sam tossed the book onto a handmade pillow in the shape of a daisy, very retro.  The wallpaper had daisies on it, too; someone had struggled to brighten up what must have been a very depressing room.  Lacy snapped several pictures, even though Sam felt certain she’d keep her word about not taunting the parents with them.  Nothing was funny anymore. 

    “Let’s get the hell out of here,” Mark said.  “And by ‘here’ I mean the whole damn house.  We’ve seen enough.”

    “There’s gotta be only a couple more rooms to see,” Sam said.  “Little cookie-cutter house.  Seeing the rest can’t take more than a few minutes, and we’ve come this far.”

    “Yeah,” Kate said.  “I think my friend Cody lives in a house exactly like this.  The layout’s the same.  We’ve seen most of it, might as well see the rest.”

    “Even the part with bugs?” Mark asked.

    “They’ll run.”

    Mark grumbled to himself and rubbed at his arms.  He never should have come down here, Sam thought.  The place is too creepy for him.  And he’s never going to impress Lacy anyway.

    Lacy took another couple of pictures, the flash throwing the root’s shadow on the wall like some vast black aorta, and said, “Okay, let’s go look at the rest before Mark pees.”

    “I’m not gonna pee,” he mumbled.  “It’s just not respectful.  Trespassing.”

    “Yeah, and spooky as shit,” Sam said, punching him on the shoulder.  Mark snorted and rolled his eyes at him.

    “I know I’m going to have nightmares about this place the rest of my life, so I might as well see all of it,” Kate said.

    “Leaving it unseen would be worse, anyway,” Lacy said.   “You’d always wonder what was waiting in that unchecked room.  Your mind would fill it with things way worse than whatever’s actually there.  Which is probably some shitty 70’s bedroom set.  The horror!”

    “Okay, let’s get it over with,” Mark said, and they left the room and went down the hall to another door, which made them pause and stare.

    Someone had taped it shut.  They’d used masking tape in crazy, haphazard patterns that were crumbling off the door now; bits of tape lay on the floor like cracker crumbs.  It would be nothing to tear through, but the fact that someone had wanted this room sealed off -- albeit crudely -- created a bad feeling.

    “Maybe Mark’s right, maybe we shouldn’t open that,” Kate whispered.

    “Damn right I’m right.  Let’s get up the ladder and out of here,” he said.  “Send in some cops, let them tell us what’s in there.”

    “Whatever’s in there can’t hurt you,” Lacy said.  “This place has been buried for a decade, no way in or out.  It’s a closed system.  Anything but bugs starved off long ago.”

    “I don’t know,” Sam said.  “That looks... I don’t know, it just looks wrong.  The tape’s slapped up like somebody didn’t know how to use tape but really wanted to keep something in there.  And were they living in a house with a taped-up door?  The door’s tilted but the tape still fits it.  Like maybe it got taped up after this place was buried.”

    "Oh my god," Kate whispered.  "Oh my god."

    Lacy stared at Sam, chewing on her lip, then put her hand on the doorknob.  “Well, let’s peek.”

    Kate let out a little squeal and backed up behind Mark.  Lacy looked at Sam again.

    “I’m not gonna stop you,” Sam laughed, “but I’m not going to do it for you, either.  This shit’s on you, Pandora.”

    Lacy sighed.  “Pussies.”  She turned the knob and pushed the door.

    A whiff of very old rot wafted out at them, then dissipated and left them with thoughts of dead things.  They paused  again as the door slowly swung in, pulled by the tilt of the house until it bonked against the wall.  The room beyond was blackness.  For a minute, no one even dared intrude on it with a beam of light, the vibe coming out of there was so strong.  Then Lacy finally raised her flashlight.  Its beam was thick with dust, crawling across a carpet littered with dead bugs and husks of larvae.  The edge of dresser.  The edge of a bed covered in a stained white blanket.  More blanket, crusted black.

    Bone.

    A skeletal hand, arm, part of a leg.  Kate cried out and turned away.

    “Holy shit,” Lacy breathed. 
   
    A skull, with hair and mummified flesh, so clotted with old blood it looked like it had been dipped in tar.   Another head of filthy hair beside it, ribs, dried flesh like driftwood.  The whole bed was caked with long-dried gore and fetid, slimy rot.

    “Okay, let’s go, now!” Mark said, pulling at Lacy.

    “No, I’m going to look,” she said, her voice small and trembling.  “You can stay here if you want, but I need to see what happened.”

    “I don’t, it’s a fucking crime scene, we are going to GO.  NOW.”  He pulled violently.

    Lacy wrenched herself from Mark’s grasp.  “Get your hands off me, asshole!”

    “Alright, sorry, alright,” he said, holding his hands up.  “But let’s go.”

    “In a minute.”

    “Lacy, don’t go in there,” Kate said.

    “I’m just going to see what caused it,” Lacy said.  “They’re long dead, and so is whatever did that.”

    “What did do that?”  Kate asked.  “A bear?  They’re torn up!”

    “That’s what I want to see,” Lacy said, and despite her talk of things being long dead, she approached the bed like she was sneaking up on it.  Sam was surprised to find himself following, almost like he was magnetized to Lacy.  But he didn’t fight it; he wanted to see, no matter how morbid.

    There were two bodies, mostly skeletal, partially mummified, the rest long rotten or devoured.  And that’s what they looked like -- devoured, like the bones left after someone had gone through a bucket of chicken.  Fingers were gnawed to the bone and bite marks remained clear on skin that had dried to leather.  Only the faces had been left untouched, as if the feaster couldn’t bear to defile them.  Blood had thickened, dried, and cracked around them, like shards of black glass.  Though dry, there was still enough stench to make Sam fight against vomiting.   

    “Jesus,” Lacy breathed.  “What do you think?  They died and their dog went at them?  Surely not the kid...”

    “It wasn’t a dog,” Sam said, shining his flashlight (whose beam was going distressingly amber) at the carpet.  Lacy looked down and saw child-sized footprints in old blood.

    “Holy shit,” Lacy said.

    “And look at this,” Sam said, focusing the light on one corpse’s wrist, where a deep slash was evident.  Panning the light around picked up the glitter of the box cutter that made it.

    “Suicide,” Lacy said.

    “To feed their kid.”

    Lacy nodded, panning the light over the damage.  Even dried-out and with the worst of it decayed away it was horrible to look at, and they couldn’t stand to be in the room with it for more than a few seconds.  When they left they shut the door again.

    Sam looked at the old masking tape on the door frame.  “It only goes up to here,” he said, pointing a foot or so above the doorknob.  “The kid sealed it.  He didn’t want to go back in there.”

    “Probably having nightmares about it,” Lacy said.  “Didn’t even want to think about it.  Imagine, having to eat your own parents.  Probably in pitch darkness, gnawing corpses.”

    “Don’t talk about it,” Kate said.

    “You know this means the kid’s still down here,” Mark said.  “So let’s get the hell out.”

    “First, let’s find it,” Lacy said.

    “You are fucking crazy,” Mark said.

    “I want to see it.  We’ve seen this much so let’s see the rest.  It’ll probably be bones, mostly, anyway.”

    “That’s crazy, Lacy,” Kate said.  “After seeing that, in the bedroom, you want to see more?”

    “I don’t want to wonder forever what it looked like,” she said.  “My imagination would just make it worse.  All those books on deformity?  I’ve got to know.  Look, it’s dead by now.  It’s probably what those roaches were eating.”

    “Jesus Christ, Lacy,” Kate said.

    “Well, it probably is.  It won’t be too bad.  Just a mummy.  You can handle it.  But if not, I don’t blame you, this is creepy stuff, so go on back up. I’ll be back up soon.”

    “You’d stay down here with this... stuff here?  Alone?”  Kate said.  “That wouldn’t scare you out of your mind?”

    “She’s already out of her mind,” Mark said.  He wasn’t even trying to flirt anymore; Lacy was too much for him, it didn't matter how pretty she was. 

    “I’m not scared of dead things,” Lacy said.  “It’s sick what happened here, and it’s sad, but that’s over and now they’re funhouse props.”

    “Funhouse props?  Oh my fucking god,” Mark said.  “You want to find that goddamn kid and take it home with you, don’t you?  Use it as a Halloween decoration!”

    Lacy smiled.  “Now that you’ve given me the idea, sure, why not?”

    “You’re not really...” Kate gasped.

    “No I’m not really,” Lacy said.  “I’m just going to look.  You go on up, babysit macho man before he snaps into a conniption fit”

    “I’m not leaving you down here alone.”

    “I’ll stay with her,” Sam said.  “I kinda want to see it, too.  I mean, she’s right, wondering about it forever is just going to make it worse.”

    “God, we’re idiots,” Mark snarled.  “You're a lunatic and I'm a fool for not knocking you out and dragging you out of here caveman style."

    "Be a bigger fool if you try it," Lack said, too casual for comfort.  That hung in the air for a second, throwing frost.

    Mark finally took a deep breath and huffed, "Okay, whatever, let’s find your fucking man-eating devil baby or whatever.”

    Lacy shot Sam a smile, like she’d managed to manipulate Mark and they both knew it.  He grinned back but thought Lacy might be a little too crazy for him to deal with, either.  They were at least one room past sanity already, and it was all starting to feel like a nightmare. She led them down the hall.  Sam’s flashlight beam was going orange now, and he slapped the side of it, urging the batteries to wake up.  As they reached the room with the fungoid couch again, they paused; knowing there was a deformed corpse waiting somewhere in that darkness made them hesitate.  Listening for it was nonsense, but that's still what they did.

    Holding their breath, they could hear skittering, quiet, like a needle scratching the end of a record in another room.  With their new knowledge it was easy to imagine it might be something other than roaches.   There was a presence in that darkness. Could something, perhaps, live on roaches for a decade?  Sam had read that the reason bears in the woods got so fat is they ate bugs and grubs.  And they could hibernate all winter.  Maybe the kid hadn’t died.  Maybe it had fattened up and was hibernating.  Or in suspended animation like a toad in concrete.

    Sam made an angry noise at himself, and Kate whispered, “What?”

    “Nothing.  Just freaking myself out, thinking stupid things.”

    “Keep that imagination in check, boy-o,” Lacy half-sang.  “This is no place to set up a land of make-believe.  Find you a place with better lighting.”

    “Yeah, I’d figure on real bad results from that,” Sam said.

    “I’m already afraid of the dreams I’m going to have about this place,” Kate said, flinching as the floorboard creaked beneath them.

    "I ain't worried about bad dreams, considering I know I'm never getting to sleep again," Mark said.  His voice was getting a warbley whine to it.

    “It’s not going to be as bad as you think, when we find it,” Lacy said.  “You’re probably going to be disappointed that it didn’t meet your...” She stopped as the flashlight beam found a bone.

    It was lying by itself in the corner of the kitchen, and it looked too small to be human.  Lacy beamed her light past it, looking for more, and Sam thought her light, too, was noticeably dimmer than it had been.  And Mark’s was going amber, the color of decaying light.    Sam’s light wasn’t on at all anymore.  He slapped it again and stared directly into it; it gleamed orange then winked out again, like somebody taking a last pull on a cigarette.

    “That can’t be part of the kid,” Kate said.

    “No.  Too small,” Lacy said.  “Besides, what would’ve been left to tear it apart?”   The beam found a dark spot on the carpet, where something had spilled.  “They had a dog.”

    “Oh my god,” Kate said, gasping again as the beam found a ribcage.   Chunks of fur scattered around it like dustbunnies. The dog, approximately beagle-sized, had been killed and eaten in the kitchen.  And that’s where they were going.

    Around them, roaches scurried.  Dead ones crunched underfoot.  One buzzed and flew through the beam, and Lacy yelped and laughed.  The tension was getting to her, and that made Sam want to leave.  He could barely see Mark in the gloom but his silence was baleful; he was too scared to even complain anymore.  This was damaging him.  It wasn't even fun to laugh at him anymore.

    The kitchen was muddy; another window had gone, pouring the sink full.  A thick skin of mildew fuzzed everything, creating a smell that made each breath feel invasive.

    The dog’s skull was on the counter, cracked open, brains gone --- nature’s empty pudding cup.  Smears of wax, what was left of a candle, lay beside it like a garnish.

    Lacy opened the refrigerator.  It had been emptied of most everything, except a jar of olives on the top shelf.  Black olives, though who knew if they’d started that way?  Somebody must’ve really hated them if even starvation hadn’t made them tempting enough to eat.  Or maybe they'd just missed them in the dark.   A plastic catsup bottle lay twisted and imploded, sucked to death.  The cupboards around were open, and empty.  A couple of garbage bags stacked in the corner presumably held the cans and boxes.

    “Jeez, they must’ve been down here starving for weeks,” Sam said.  “I wonder why they didn’t try to escape?”

    “They probably did,” Lacy said.  “But digging down and breaking through a roof that’s been rotting in the ground for a decade or so has to be a lot easier than chopping up through a fresh one braced by a foot or two of dirt.  Plus, they may have been hurt.  I saw broken bones in those bodies and I doubt the kid did that.  They might’ve gotten hurt when the house was buried.  Or were just weak to begin with, I don’t know.”

    “They were probably down here in the dark for a month or more, waiting for a rescue.  And they were just forgotten.”

    “We may end up in the same situation if we don’t hurry up,” Kate said.  “My flashlight’s almost dead and yours looks weaker, Lacy.”

    “And mine’s gone,” Sam added.

    “Don’t worry, I got spare batteries in my pocket,” Lacy said.  “Old spelunker rule, your flashlight’s only as good as the batteries.”

    “Good to know that,” Sam sighed.

    “Fear not, mama duck's looking out for you,” Lacy patted him on the shoulder.  “Now, we’re running out of places for that body to be, so we probably won't even need to change 'em.”

    “Well, it’s got to be here somewhere, we know that much.”

    It was in a cupboard, in the back, hiding.  Its eyes -- dried white like fish scales and gleaming in the flashlight, were the first things they saw when Lacy opened the door.  It was curled in on itself like the husk of a dead spider, and Kate gave a little cry when she saw it.  The face was hardly a face at all now; it probably hadn’t been much of one in life but death had pulled it into even less, just a gnarled knot like the burl of a tree, dead eyes gleaming and tusk-like teeth protruding from a mouth that wouldn’t stay shut.  The teeth looked twice as big as big as they should be, but that could be due to the mummification, Sam thought.  Its hands looked too big for the sticklike arms, and its skin was an awful mottle of ivory, brown, and deep purple-black where blood had settled.  Some flesh was missing and bone peeped through.

    “It must’ve just crawled in here to starve,” Lacy whispered.

    “Probably to get away from the roaches,” Sam said.  “They were probably swarming in here.”

    There was a rustling noise from the cabinet and Lacy crouched down and shined the flashlight in the cadaver’s face.

    It moved, coughing up a clot of cockroaches before it leapt out at her.  They caught a flash of it, just briefly, before Lacy’s flashlight flew across the room and smashed.  The darkness was full of screaming and yelps of pain from Lacy, and under it all, wet tearing sounds.  Sam felt something hot and wet spritz across one of his forearms and he stumbled into a counter and fell, slipping on something slick.  Lacy’s blood, he realized.  He could smell it.  She was still screaming but then it clogged into a gobbling, retching noise, a pneumonic cough.  In the weak beam of Mark’s flashlight Sam saw a scrawny arm reaching down Lacy’s throat and uprooting things before the light winked out.

    Someone tripped over Sam and dropped a knee hard onto the hand that was holding his flashlight.  The pain was alarming; he felt bones snap and roll over each other, and he yelled.  The sounds Lacy and the thing feeding on her were making were impossible to stand. There was breathing - Sam couldn't tell if it was Lacy's or the thing's - that sounded like a surge of mud.  Kate, screaming, had somehow gotten her flashlight back and was trying to make it work.  A brown dimness showed them blood, everywhere, blood, and an impossibly thin dead thing wrenching at Lacy, trying to take some piece off of her.  One thumbnail, gone thick and long, had hooked out one of her eyes.   It was still beautiful green but no longer pretty now that it was out of its frame. She was still moving, wilting.  Then the light was out again.

    Something kicked Sam in the ribs.  Mark, he realized.  Mark had tripped over him and smashed his hand and now he was stomping at him in the panic to get away.  Sam rolled over against Lacy and the thing, felt its hair brush his face, stinking of dust and drains and new blood.  He crawled away from it and scrambled on his belly across the floor.  Across the room Mark cracked against something he’d run into in the darkness and yipped, then wailed, hurt bad and scared crazy.  He was whooping like he'd forgotten how to breathe.

    Sam tried to stand up; the darkness was so total he couldn’t even be sure he was vertical.  Reaching out, he tried to find Kate.  He touched her and she shrieked and slapped at him.  “It’s me!” he yelled, and then she grabbed him and clung too tight, screaming in his face.

    Can’t run, he thought.  Can’t see.  Have to move carefully.  Back through the living room, into the hall.  Find the ladder.  Get Kate and me out of here.  Maybe Mark, but only if he stops panicking.  Can’t panic.  Have to remember where the ladder is.  Have to think.

    It was an impossible task, though.  Terror was squeezing his chest so tightly he felt like he’d burst with it.  He wanted to run into the dark and just hope he didn’t hit anything.  That hadn’t worked well for Mark, though, who was still groaning and thrashing around.  He must have hurt himself seriously.

    They needed light.  But the extra batteries were in Lacy’s pocket, and they might as well be on the moon.  The sounds of the thing tearing at her stopped, and he heard sliding.  A crawling noise.

    It was coming after them.

    Pulling Kate, Sam stumbled forward, waving a hand in the dark.  He wanted to tell Kate to stop yelling and Mark to stop groaning so he could listen for the thing, but his throat was too closed up, and he was afraid to make a sound.  The thing would have no trouble finding him, anyway, with Kate clinging to him and babbling.  Nothing she was saying made sense, anyway, it was mostly “oh god oh god oh god” over and over.   He just kept moving, flinching in expectation of the thing grabbing them.  Any second now it would.

    His knee slammed something and knocked it over, and as he stumbled from that his broken hand hit something else and the pain made him hiss.  But he kept moving because worse pain was waiting.  Being eaten alive.

    Poor Lacy.  How could it have gotten Lacy?  If it got her the rest of us, her baby ducklings, don’t stand a chance.

    There was a sound behind them, and it was enough to make Kate freeze and go quiet.  They listened, the silence smooth as the blackness.  Deaf and blind.

    Then, a board creaked.  Something rustled.  Dried-up skin rasping carpet, bone grating on bone, stiffened tendons creaking.

    Sam ran, dragging Kate.  Mark yelled and there was another scrambling noise as he ran, shoving past them.  The thing ran, too, or crawled.  They heard it go by, passing them to go after Mark.  Sam got a whiff of filthy death and blood like wet rust.

    “We have to get out of here, Sam,” Kate whispered.

    “I know,” he said.  “We’ll keep going forward.  The hallway's this way.  We can’t miss the ladder, it’s...”

    From the hallway came a horrible twang-twang-twang and a slam.

    The thing had put the ladder up and closed the attic.  They’d never find the way out in the dark now.  Even if he could find the door, he’d never reach the ceiling to pry it down.

    From somewhere far back in the house, Mark was sobbing in terror.  From elsewhere, a floorboard creaked.

    It was playing hide and seek.

    “How can that thing be alive, Sam?  It was all dried up!  How can it be alive?” Kate whispered.

    “I don’t know,” he breathed.  “It’s not a normal kid.  Maybe it could hibernate.  Go dormant.  I don’t know.  This is all crazy, it’s a nightmare.”

    “That’s it,” Kate said.  “This fungus.  We breathed it in and we’re hallucinating.  Like mushrooms.  I did shrooms once, did I ever tell you that?  Me and Ambrose.”

    “Kate, that’s...”

    “You wouldn’t think we would, would you?  We’re not druggies.  It was a one-time thing.  Ambrose’s cousin from Florida was visiting.  He had some.  We tried them.  In Kool Aid.”  She laughed, too loud.  "Groovy grape!  Gah-rooovy graaape, duuuude!"  She shrieked with laughter, horrible in the dark.

    “Kate, be quiet,” Sam whispered.

    “That’s all this is.  Bad trip.  Real bad trip.”  She laughed again.  “Bad trip in a bad place.  That’s how it goes.”  She clucked her tongue.

    In the depths of the house, Mark called for them.  Kate yelled back.

    “Kate, shut up!” Sam whispered.  He was trying walking again.  Why, he didn’t know.  With that attic door shut there was nowhere to go now.  No plan to make.  Just waiting to be found.  Trying to delay it.

    “Why be quiet?  None of this is real!  It can’t be real, can it?  You guys set it all up, didn’t you?  Playing a trick on me.  You got me good!”  Kate laughed.  Sam heard water pattering on the carpet and smelled urine; Kate was pissing herself, too crazy to even notice anymore.  She was going to get him killed with all this noise, but he couldn’t stand just leaving her here.  For one thing it was unlikely she’d let him -- her fingers were tearing into his arm -- and for another, even a crazed Kate was better than being alone in the dark with that thing.

    Mark yelled again, something incoherent and mad, ghosts and God.  He was worse off than Kate and never should have come down here in the first place; fear had power-surged his system and tripped all the mental breakers and now he was smashing things back here, breaking glass, maybe trying to dig his way out through one of the windows, probably hurting himself in the process.  Not that it mattered.  The thing was sure to get him.

    In less than a minute, it did.  Mark’s yelling turned into frantic shrieks of “Get off me GETOFF GETOFF GETOFF!”   Kate yelled again and suddenly she was running into the dark.  Sam tried to grab her but his hand had no grip and all he got was pain.  He curled up, holding his hand to his chest, yelling for Kate to stop, come back.

    Kate was trying to save Mark, he supposed. Already too late for that.  He heard stumbling around in the dark, her calling Mark’s name, Mark still screaming, so loud it took over everything, filled the darkness, made it vibrate.  Sam wanted him to die, just to get it over with and bring the silence back, just for a minute.  He couldn’t take this, it was too much, he’d lose his mind like Kate.  Then the screams turned into a loud wheezing and coughing, like Mark was trying to bring something up.  Then the sound became wet and drowned itself. 

    The quiet, now that he had it, was somehow worse. 

    Kate?  She must be waiting out there, in the dark.  He had to find her.  So he wouldn't die alone, if for no other reason.

    Moving as fast as he could through the dark, cradling his broken hand and reaching out with the other, Sam entered the hallway.  Everything was silent.  He whispered "Kate?" and listened. 

    Nothing.

    He hated making noise because he knew the thing was listening for him, too, but he had to find her.  She couldn't be dead yet, he'd have heard her dying.

    Floorboards creaked and something squished.

    His teeth wanted to chatter.  It was cold down here, and his clothes were damp from his falls onto the floor.  And fear was shaking him.  "Kate?" he hissed.

    Nothing.

    A bedspring creaked, ahead to the left.  Mark must have tried to hide in the room with the muddy bed and that's where he died.  The thing would probably still be in there with him, paused in its feeding to listen.

    Maybe it's as scared as we are, having its home invaded, he thought.  It was just a kid.  But it was dead.  Could dead things feel fear?  If they could crawl around and kill, he supposed it was possible.  Or maybe Kate was right and this was all a hallucination.  That made the most sense, really, because all other possibilities were insane. 

    As he stared at the darkness it seemed to throb and swirl with colors.  Probably just the blood pressure in my eyes.   My heart's going to blow out like a bad tire any second now.  It's not made to beat this hard.

    Something in that room was trickling, like a faucet was running.  Mark's blood, he realized.  He could smell it, almost feel the heat of it.  The room must be sodden with it.

    He stepped past the doorway, flinching, certain something would rush out and grab him.  Where was Kate?  She had to be here somewhere.

    Sam thought he knew.  The bedroom, with the bodies.  Of course!  The kid had taped that room shut, trying to block out the bad memories.  It wouldn't want to go back in there, and so that's where Kate was hiding.  Hope surged inside him.   They could hide in there and wait for Ambrose to bring help.  As nervous as he was he'd probably gone for the cops already, even if he hadn't been able to hear all the screaming through the hole in the roof... and Sam thought it was a good bet that he had, as hellish as it'd been.  Maybe there was a way out of this.

    Something in the bedroom to the left made a sliding sound and a squishy thump.

    Something trying to sneak off the bed and come for him.

    He hugged the wall and ran.  The tape-covered door was open and he ducked inside, hearing the thing scrambling right behind him and making a tubercular sound halfway between a squeal and wheeze.  Sam found the door and shut it and locked it, then stepped away into the dark.  Trying to remember what furniture he'd seen in the room, he drew a blank.  He couldn't remember seeing anything else but the bed and the bodies on it.

    "Kate?" he whispered.

    "Sam?  You made it!"

    "Yeah.  I figure it won't want to come in here.  That tape and all."  He crouched and reached in the dark, wanting to find her but not wanting to touch what was on the bed.  Just knowing he was in the room with it was almost too much to bear.  "We can wait in here until Ambrose sends someone down after us."

    "He will, won't he?  Probably gone to get them already."

    "Probably so."  Sam laughed, even though laughing felt crazy.  "Now I'm glad your boyfriend's such a nervous twerp about things."

    "He was right.  We never should've come down here."  Kate's voice sounded like it was coming from across the room, on the other side of the bed.  God, he'd have to go around those bodies.  "Pretty sure Mark's dead."  She laughed.  "I heard noises.  Bad, bad noises.  I got sick, in the hallway."  She giggled.

    "We'll get out of here.  When that attic door slammed, I thought we wouldn't, but now... yeah, Ambrose will come through for us."

    "I hope he sends somebody else.  I don't want him to come down here."  She sounded closer.

    "I hope he sends in a S.W.A.T. team.  Seal Team Six.  Fucking Ghostbusters.  Where are you?"

    "Right here."

    Sam was annoyed at such useless directions but then thought, what else could she say?  In this pitch black there was only 'right here' and god-knows-where.  There were no specifics.  He reached toward where he thought she was, and something touched him and took his hand.

    But as soon as he gripped it he knew it wasn't Kate's.  Too small, too thin, too withered, too slicked with something.  But it gripped him back and that was the worst part.

    He yelled in revulsion and kicked away from it, and the thing hissed, maybe trying to scream, too.  "IT'S IN HERE!" Sam yelled.  "IT'S IN HERE WITH US!  IT FOLLOWED ME IN!"

    "No!  NO!" Kate yelled, and there was a scrambling noise, a rattle of disturbed bones, and then Kate's screaming intensified, kicked up from terror to pain.  "Get it away from me, GET IT OFF ME!" she wailed, and those were the last words Sam could make out; the rest was shrieking and babble.

    And tearing.  The sickening whisper of flesh parting.  Then, bleeding.  Bleeding sounds.  Splattering.  Gnawing.

    He backed away, unable to breathe.  He was sitting on the floor now, unsure how he'd gotten there.

    Kate's screaming trailed off into strange sighs, then nothing.

    And the nothing went on, seemingly forever.

    He sat there as minutes passed.  Just he and that malformed half-dead thing now, quiet in the dark, listening for each other.

    Should he even run?  Was there any point?  He could hear his heart beating, cursed it for masking possible creeping sounds, and he was aware of every breath.  How many of those did he have left?  The future was a question of seconds.  Maybe the fear would kill him, save him from worse.  His mind wanted to break; he could feel it trying.  He could barely remember words.  He wanted to faint.  Maybe then it could kill him in his sleep and he wouldn't have to feel anything or know what it was doing.

    Somewhere off in the house, past the door, he heard something.  A clump.  Maybe just the house settling.

    Or maybe it was Lacy or Mark, rising from the dead.  If there was one living-dead thing in this moldy house maybe there could be others.  Maybe what was in the room with him wasn't even the kid, but one of the chewed-up parents.  Mark or Lacy, all bloody, walking down the hall, coming for him...

    It was an insane thought but no more insane than anything else that had happened.  He waited, tense, listening.  There were sounds out there, but there were sounds in here, too.

    Around the doorframe he saw a glimpse of light.  Someone shining a flashlight.  Someone called out, "You here?  Where are you?"


    YES!  They were here!  Ambrose had sent someone!  He was going to get out of this after all!

    Sam started to laugh, but then a dark shape rose between him and the light, and his mouth was filled with fingers.








                                                                     THE END






Copyright 2013 by me, so don't get stealy.




Want more?  Maybe not right now 'cuz that was yay-long, but later, maybe?  There's more horror fiction on this blog, so here's links to it:  Please peruse.

My stuff:
Scribblebones
Long Tall Sally
Shik-Chuff
The Damp Basements of Heaven
Up The Stairs Where The Windows Are Painted Black
and little descriptions of actual nightmares I've had.

KickerOfElves' stuff:
Men With Knives

Profbolt's stuff:
 East of Rulesville

 Now, to paraphrase Randy "Bisquit" Turner... go write your own horror story!

Yell at me on Twitter.

Hola, amigos.  Been a long time since I rapped at ya, but my reading's been slow and eclectic lately, so I haven't read in a specific genre in any sufficient number to make a worthy blog-post from.  Plus, there's the I'm-a-lazy-douchebag thing, too, which is hard to get around.

But, I had a very weird dream-experience this weekend that I think will creep you out something heavy, and if there's anything I really love doing, it's creeping people out, so I figured I'd share it.

First, a little background.  I'm prone to dreams-within-dreams.  It's not uncommon to spend a whole night dreaming something, then dreaming I wake up from it and am telling somebody about the dream I just had... only to find out that's a dream, too, and then I wake up from that... into yet another dream.  Over and over.  I'll sometimes chain a dozen dreams together like that, and I'll even become aware that I'm doing it and wonder when I'll actually wake up.  It'll get ya to stop trusting reality for a while.   It may be because I spend so much time thinking of plots for things, but a lot of my dreams have plots to them... sometimes even complicated ones.  Which is good, because I can use those to write stories or whatever.

So, okay, around four or five months ago I had a night of these dream-within-dream things about this pretty blonde girl in a white nightgown, who was missing her two front teeth.  Other than the missing teeth, she was beautiful... but, she hated my guts for some reason.  And she kept harassing me through these dreams until I figured out I was dreaming, so she led me out into my back yard in the middle of the night and explained that she wasn't a dream, she was real, and we were really out in my back yard, and she was never going to stop trying to wreck my life -- she was going to kill all my friends, kill my pets, wreck my bank account, trash my house, destroy my stuff, screw up my job, wreck my health, etc.  Just sheer, calm, matter-of-fact malevolence.  And through the dream she was very adamant that she was real, and she'd try over and over again to prove it by leaving something from a dream in my house so I'd find it when I woke up... but, o' course, those things I found when I "woke up" were just another in the chain of dreams I was having that night.

Anyway, pretty freaky stuff, but I quickly forgot about the dream(s) and only vaguely remember it.

So, four or five months later - this Saturday morning - I went to bed about 4 a.m. after trying to watch a movie all night (Relentless with Judd Nelson, if you're curious) and sleeping through it (I'm bad about that).   Then I started having some dumb dream about having to take a test that I wasn't ready for, and I was trying to study for it but I didn't really know what it was about.  And it was being given at a radio station where I used to work.  The dream had several ridiculous sub-plots, one of which was that a bunch of weird animals were gathering around the pen where my dogs live.  My dogs are really old (like 17) and creaky so I was kinda worried these animals might hurt them, but they seemed peaceful enough, and they were outside the fence.  There were a couple of German Shepherds, a big yellow long-haired cat I thought might be a lynx, a fox, and a Siamese cat that was completely insane -- it kept rolling its eyes and biting at the air, and it was simultaneously scary and hilarious.

Anyway, after dealing with this weird test, I looked out and all the animals had gone except the fox and the lynx... and the lynx was now inside the dog pen.  It was laying on top of an air-conditioner unit, being peaceful, but I worried it might hurt my dogs so I grabbed a pellet gun (totally inadequate but the only weapon handy at the time) and went out, yelling at it and trying to chase it off.  The lynx looked very amused and jumped down off the air conditioner unit and went over to my dogs, and I start screaming at it, thinking it's going to hurt them.  But, it started playing with them.

I'm still yelling at it that I'm going to kill it, and it suddenly turns into this blonde girl in a white nightgown, who looked vaguely familiar.  Then she smiles at me and says, "Oops!  Broken teeth!  Remember?"   And she's missing her two front teeth, and suddenly I remembered the dream I had months ago and get this massive chill.  She jumps over the fence and runs away with the fox, laughing like crazy.

I woke up, glad the sun was already up when I woke up, or I'd've probably been a little scared to turn on the light because she might've been sitting there.





The freaky thing is, I'm not sure I actually dreamed the stuff months ago... in fact, I'm pretty certain it was a vague false-memory that the dream I had this weekend implanted right at the end, just so that "Remember?" punchline would work.  Usually I write down any dreams I have because I can use 'em, and I never wrote down that first dream... so, I'm thinking it's a fake memory.  But, I appreciate my subconscious throwing me a swerve like that, because I actually like a good nightmare...

...unless I have another dream where the girl with the missing front teeth shows up.  Now that I've documented it, I'd really have to be disturbed that some evil dream-chick is playing sleep-games with me...

Weird drone track by me...

Mirror of Abominations - The Mighty Blowhole

I honestly didn't mean to take so long to put up a new blog post, but my internet service has been having some issues.  See, my house got struck by lightning several months ago (just as all the church-going folks in my town have been predicting it would) and it blitzed a few things.  I got off pretty lucky and only had to replace a few DVD-recorders and telephones, but it also whacked my modem.  I got a new one, but for some reason that I'm way too non-tech to understand, my computer doesn't like it much.  So, I hardly ever have the internet at my house.  And I get so sick of looking at it at work all day that I haven't been in a huge rush to get it fixed.   I'm pretty much a luddite, anyway -- I kinda hate the internet, even though I use it a lot.  But, in any case, a friend of mine who's far more net-savvy than me was at the house this afternoon and he played around and got it working.  Will it work next time I turn the computer on?  That's something no one can predict.  Honestly, I'm kind of doubting it... but, since it's on tonight, I figured, better put up a blog post while I can!  My reading's been a little slower than usual lately, and I've been doing more horror than action books, but I had more than enough to make a decent post, so, I figured I'd do one of those. I could probably wrangle a way to get some text up from work, but what fun are these posts without the cover scans?  So, anyway, here goes... sorry for the wait!

Some of these are not technically "series books," but I take a wide approach to that -- it's the same kind of fiction, so the difference between a John Clarkson or Lee Child or Donald Hamilton book and a Revenger book is pretty much just presentation.  If you're into the kind that are more pulpy and number them, you'll almost assuredly like the glossier, un-numbered kind, too, if you give them a chance.


============================




And Justice For One - John Clarkson   (Jove, 1992)
Tough, violent, uncompromising revenge story pitting a hard-ass security expert against a rich bastard's army of enforcers, who beat his brother into a coma.  Getting some help from a trained martial artist, our hero, Jack Devlin, ferrets out who did the deed and brings down the whole connected-to-the-cops criminal organization, mostly with his bare fists and a couple of martial arts fighting sticks.  Excellent hard-edged modern noir with as much shooting, fighting, and action as you can put into a book and have it remain plausible.  Any more and it'd be in Executioner-novel turf.   Clarkson knows how to write fight scenes, and puts his hero through a meat grinder.  The fights get really brutal and even when Devlin wins he takes a ton of punishment... but always manages to deal out more than he takes.  Great read.








One Man's Law - John Clarkson  (Berkley, 1994)
Second book about Jack Devlin has him still nursing the bruises from all the brawls in the first book, while going to Hawaii to go on a whole new revenge rampage.  A war buddy who'd been through hell with him in Vietnam has been found sliced open and half-eaten by wild pigs, and Devlin wants to put the hurt on whoever's responsible.  So does his buddy's beautiful sister, Leilani, who immediately starts an affair with Devlin just so we can have plenty of sex mixed in with all the violence.  A big Samoan bruiser named Tuli joins them as Devlin hunts down the killer, a vicious psychopath who's been dealing in guns stolen from the army and planning a race war to kick all the haoles (whites) out of Hawaii.  Clarkson is great at setting up situations that land Devlin in some major fight every thirty pages or so;  there's plenty of plot to hold it all together, but you know it's never going to be long because Devlin's throwing down with somebody, be it in brutal street brawls, gun battles, or, often, both.  There's lots of maiming, and Devlin takes a beating himself, but, as in the first book, no matter how banged up he gets it's never enough to stop him from handling another vicious fight; sometimes I pictured him as Marv from Sin City.  He and Tuli even duke it out with wild boars at one point.  The sex is as graphic as the violence, including some pretty hardcore dominatrix stuff that one of the bad guys is into.  It's a little long at over 350 small-print pages, but you can't fault it for pacing -- it never lets up.





                                All these books have practically the same cover... which ain't good.




 Gunships #1 : The Killing Zone - Jack Hamilton Teed   (Zebra, 1981)
First in a Vietnam war series.  Your hero is Col. John Hardin, a tough but weary Special Forces vet who's pretty sick of the war, especially the brass, and isn't adverse to doing things like smoking opium.   He's sent out on a mission he tries to refuse (even telling a general to go fuck himself) and the whole thing's a set-up to get him killed.  But even though the helicopter flying him in gets shot down, he survives and is taken prisoner by the Viet Cong.  A team of murderous misfits -- each explained by a chapter devoted to them -- are sent to recover him.  There's a guy who shot his own men so the helicopter he was in wouldn't have to risk enemy fire picking them up.  Another shot his fellow soldiers while hallucinating on LSD.  Another's a black guy who killed a sadistic prison guard to avoid being raped by him.  Another fragged an officer.  These guys are forced to go after Hardin, and meanwhile Hardin's being waterboarded and beaten.  There's a lot of action and it's not badly written, but there are so many characters that it all goes by in one big non-absorbing blur, like you've just turned on a war movie long enough to see a battle scene;   it's not boring but there are just too many personalities  to deal with in a large-print 250 page book.  Oddly, the book doesn't have much to do with helicopters.  I'm wondering if Teed (whose writing style has quirks that make me suspect he might be British) got handed the series title and was told to work up something around it, and, not wanting to be stuck writing about helicopters, had a grunt lamely compare every man in Vietnam to a "gunship."  It's not a gung-ho or jingoistic book;  the war is presented as pretty much of a life-wasting mistake and the soldiers don't want to be there -- they're just stuck in a bad situation and doing what they have to to survive the day.  The cynicism helps elevate the book above just another pulp book, but in the end it gets lost under its own action scenes.







                                  Don't worry, nobody in the book actually sports a frat-boy haircut like that.



Storm Rider #2: River of Fire - Robert Baron  (Jove, 1993)
Post-apocalypse biker action that's uncomfortably closer to being a fantasy novel than Road Warrior stuff. It has its biker knowledge down tight, but blends it all with something a little too sword-and-sorcery for me.   The world's been wrecked by what sounds like a meteor strike, and biker gangs rule the plains.  The gangs are divided into two main factions, the High Free Folk and their enemies, the Cathead Nation.  Vaguely allied with the Catheads is some mystical quasi-religious cult called The Fusion, complete with Fusion Priests and such.  Our main hero is a High Free Folk dude who in the first book had the cool name of Outlaw One but now is going by the lame Dungeons & Dragons moniker, Tristan Burningskull.  He's the only survivor of a big gang called The Hardriders, who were known as "Storm Riders" because they liked to ride around the tornados that plagued the plains.  The bikers are all mingled with Indian tribes and it's very complex and, frankly, not interesting enough to keep track of, although if you're into fantasy novels that  clan/tribe shit'll probably fascinate your gooberish Game-of-Thrones ass.  The plot is pretty incidental, with the legendary Tristan going to a big gathering of bikers, where he gets in a power struggle with a biker leader named John Hammerhand.  Most believe Tristan is fated to be the new leader because there's a new star in Taurus or some astrological bullshit.  He tangles with some Sons of Thor and defends the gang he's riding with, The Jokers, who catch a lot of flack for having a female president (which the "Man Lodge" can't handle).  Another legendary biker, a little guy in a metal mask named The Black Avenger, shows up and puts a whupping on Tristan with some kung fu stuff (and a metal foot).   Then they have a big battle with the Catheads, where Tristan gets to use his new sword (a lot of the fighting is done with swords, chains, and clubs, because they have guns but ammo's kinda scarce).  Then Tristan goes on a quest to retrieve his father's legendary bike, Wildfyre, from some ugly mutants in the "shaking lands" -- an earthquake-prone zone where people live in tunnels even though that's the least sensible place to live in a fault zone.  Just in case the story isn't fantasy-crap enough for you, Tristan has to get the bike by battling a "dragon" -- a tyrannosaurus that's alive for some reason.    Then he leads another battle against the Catheads.  It's all crazy and whacky, but also has enough biker grit to keep it from floating completely away into  mural-on-the-side-of-a-van land.  The action scenes are too few and aren't terribly strong, which could make a 236-pages-of-small-print book a tedious trip, but the book survives on better-than-usual writing... which is quirky enough to stay interesting.  This is one of those books that's practically written in its own language, which you have to figure out by context (it's usually not that hard, especially if you have some knowledge of biker culture).  The post-apocalypse biker/Indian/mutant/hippie slang is pervasive and some of it is kinda badass, even if a lot of it is silly, too.  It's definitely fantasy-style stuff, though, with wandering bards and such -- it wouldn't surprise me if it was written by a moonlighting Elfquest-type author.  It has shortcomings, it has strengths, it may irritate you but it's still worth reading.  An odd one for sure.





The Devil's Dozen - Nick Carter  (Martin Cruz Smith)   Award - 1973
Killmaster is disguised as a Turkish drug dealer so he can make a sale to the Mafia overseas and get the skinny on who's importing junk into the U.S. -- an assignment that's already killed off another AXE operative.  The Mafia assigns a girl to handle the deal (just so the book can have the required sex scenes), but Nick is dealing in such high amounts of opium that the mob's not sure they wouldn't rather just bump him off so he can't sell to the competition if they don't want to pay the high prices he's demanding.  Escaping the hits means fights and car chases (which are very well-written -- Smith knows his way around defensive driving).  Nick smuggles opium out of Europe by disguising it as marzipan candy; either this would actually work or Smith is a great bullshitter because as silly as that sounds, the details are convincing.   His ingenuity gets him invited to a top-secret Mafia fortress (which sounds like the Nazi headquarters in Where Eagles Dare), which is what AXE was trying to target.   Nick learns that they have  a method of destroying any army that might be sent to save him... and then his cover's blown.  Wall-to-wall slam-bang action that manages to maintain a fairly complex plot without a letup, and it's very well-written.  Nick fights a huge wrestler, tries to out-ski a helicopter gunship, gets caught in an avalanche, and Bond, James Bond, can just go fuck himself.  The only weird things are I have no idea what the title has to do with the story, and the motorcycle chase depicted on the cover doesn't happen.  I have no problem forgiving that, though, because this is one of the good ones, regardless. 







Spykiller - Nick Carter #238  (David Hagberg)  (Jove, 1988)
The plot is a bit like the James Bond Skyfall flick -- a thief steals a list of espionage agents in the Mediterranean area.  The Russians send men after the thief, and America sends out Nick Carter.  It should be great but even though I usually love the Nick Carter books, I really couldn't get into this one at all.  So much time is spent following this not-very-interesting thief around that Nick becomes a bit player in his own book (this is one of the third-person ones, if you haven't guessed).  The action scenes aren't bad and there's some fairly graphic sex, and overall the writing is more than competent, but somehow it doesn't hang together and I couldn't stay interested in it.  Even with all the action going on, it remains uninvolving and dull.  Ah well, with over 250 books, you're bound to get a dud once in a while. 





Confirmed Kill #1 - Mike Morris  (Diamond, 1992)
The government drags top sniper Con Duggan out of retirement because a tech wizard named Stephen Dye has developed a super-gun weapons system known as the See It Kill It Multiple Skill 1000 (SIKIM-1000, affectionately known as the "sic 'em") and they need Duggan's sniper skill.  Why they need a skilled sniper is unclear, because from the way the gun's described it can aim itself and kill anything that's on its screen.  It also seems to fire like a machine gun most of the time, or works as a grenade launcher -- it's not really portrayed as a sniper rifle (although the author is touted as a former Marine sniper himself).  Honestly, I couldn't really make much sense out of the damn gun, which is one of the problems with the book:  it sounds like it has some kind of death-ray function -- an "energy depletion" thing that's described as a "round of pure heat."  A round is a physical bullet -- how can it be "pure heat" then?  It's described as a shell that looks like a dildo (there's some honest gun-porn for ya!) but also only works about half the time.  At times it sounds like a sniper rifle, but they also talk about mounting it on a plane.  It needs Duggan's sniper skill but acquires its own targets and has a fire button instead of a trigger.  You want to know a secret?  Technology isn't very interesting.  In fact, it makes things boring.  During fights these guys are programming this gizmo and it lacks immediacy, tension, and good ol' fashioned oomph!  I'd rather the dude struggle with a rusty ol' M-1 than this death-dealing Dude-You're Getting-A-Dell contraption.  but, it is what it is, I guess... whatever it is.  Anyhow, our two heroes - older grouchy tough guy Duggan and smartass oddball Dye -- form a team (they hate each other for about an hour and spend the rest of the book as BFF's) and are hit-men for the USA.  Their first target is eveil sumbitched Peter Coy Booker, who's planning to kill the President of France and the Prime Minister of England.  Duggan and Booker have a bad history.  Anyway, after some skullduggery of variable interest, they fight it out with the aid of a quirky British girl and her old double-decker bush that they use as a shooting platform.  Morris's prose is good, yet somehow he doesn't draw very clear pictures, and while a lot rests on the interplay between our buddy-team, neither of them are particularly witty or interesting, so it all falls kinda flat without ever actually getting bad.  There's a sex scene or two and the battle scenes aren't bad, but I remain pretty meh on the whole thing and don't feel like it's the "sniper" book it's advertised to be.  There were three more, which I won't avoid but will be in no rush to read, either.





                                                          Pose stolen from Malcolm X


The Revenger #1 - Jon Messman  (Signet, 1973)
Yet another Executioner clone.  A businessman, Ben Martin, resists the Mafia's protection racket, and when they try getting pushy he pushes back, sticking one torpedo's hand to the table with a bayonet.  Even if you're a tough guy -- which Martin definitely is, having been a top trained assassin in Vietnam -- this isn't really a wise thing to do, because the Mafia operates on its reputation and can't let such a thing slide.  So they kidnap Martin's son (who at various points sounds like he's anything from an infant to a first grader).  They don't intend to hurt him but mistakes are made and the kid gets away from them and falls off a roof and dies.  Ben's wife is devastated and leaves him and Ben -- who's an extremely stubborn man who honestly causes a lot of his own problems -- is vengeance-crazed and starts hunting the mob with high-powered rifles.  It's written with more care than most (it's certainly no Sharpshooter or Marksman book) but Messman's style is off-putting for a reason I can't quite put my finger on, since the prose is far from bad.  There's a fair amount of mayhem and it's held together with drama, but it comes across as a little slower than it should be and it's a bit dry.  Martin's not quite a cardboard character, though, coming across as so hardheaded he sometimes undermines himself, but he's also not just some nihilistic psychopathic trigger-puller -- he's careful and follows his training so he gets in as little danger as possible while taking out his targets.  It's not a bad book, just not quite what it could have been.

For more on this book and the second volume, please visit the excellent Glorious Trash blog... which, if you like this post, should be one of your main internet hang-outs, anyway - I know it's one of mine!














Omega Sub #1 - J. D. Cameron  (Avon, 1991)
While the super-secret, top-of-the-line nuclear submarine U.S.S. Liberator is on maneuvers under the polar ice cap, the rest of the world gets decimated by nuclear war.  Thinking they may be the last people alive on the planet, the Liberator heads out to see if there's anyone else to rescue (the first, through AMAAAAAAZING good luck, is the captain's brother in a lifeboat, after his helicopter was shot down by another super-sub, possibly Russian).   Everywhere they go they find devastation and "white shirts" -- people gone homicidally deranged by radiation madness who -- for some bizarre and bewildering reason -- all wear white dress shirts.  The white-shirts are homicidal maniacs but don't seem to make very worthy opponents, trying to fight against the crew's machine guns using scythes and such.    The crew find survivors in San Francisco (where the author thinks the World Trade Center was located!), including a pretty lady scientist so we can get an awkward romantic interest going with Donovan, the sub's captain.  Donovan decides the best way to deal with the radiation-maddened white shirt is to blow them up with one of the sub's missiles, so you get a what-the-fuck? scene of a sub nuking part of an already-nuked American city.   Adding to the rather lunkheaded thought process is the mention of a "Quayle administration"  - I guess the author thought a moron who couldn't spell "potato" actually had a shot at being president.  Then again, there was George W. Bush, so maybe he wasn't too far off the mark with the Quayle thing.  Anyway,  there's more wrangling with survivors about who'll join the sub's crew and more non-eventful confrontations with the enemy sub, which I'm sure will figure into later volumes, and hopefully be more interesting (if the copyrights are any indicator, this one was written by Michael Jahn while the second was by David Robbins).  It's an interesting idea, packed with lots of technological details which might excite somebody who isn't me, but overall it's kind of dry, too timid, and tediously by-the-number.









The Wrecking Crew - Donald Hamilton (Gold Medal, 1960)
Second Matt Helm book has a supposedly out-of-shape Matt being officially brought back into the spying business and given the assignment to find and kill a notorious agent known as Caselius, who's killed off the last several agents who went after him.  Matt is supposed to pose as a photographer taking pictures in Sweden for a hunting magazine, and, since he's supposed to just be an average citizen, if he gets provoked by enemy agents he's supposed to just take the beating, rather than blow his cover by showing how well-trained he is at defending himself.  His contact is a woman but she's not very trustworthy and may be working for the other side, setting him up for the kill.   Forget (as in completely) the Dean Martin movie of the same name -- there is absolutely zero goofiness in this book and Matt is a killing machine who's ruthless about getting his job done.  Everything is kept very realistic so the body count is relatively small, but the kills pack much more punch because of it.  Great stuff. 



                         Please don't judge this book by its cover.  Seriously, what a boring, shit cover.
   It's maybe the dullest cover for a book imaginable, and somebody actually got paid for designing it.

Die Trying - Lee Child  (Jove, 1998)
With Jack Reacher's uncanny knack for the highly improbable, he ends up accidentally kidnapped by crazy militia thugs because he just happened to be helping their target (a woman named Holly Johnson) with her dry-cleaning because she had a bad leg.  This woman, who Reacher never saw before, is not only a highly trained FBI agent, she's also the daughter of the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and the militia wants to use her as a bargaining chip so they can start their own country in a part of Montana... or inspire other militia groups around the country to rebel by seeing government forces massacre them all.  If you can buy it that Reacher would just end up in such a dire situation by complete happenstance, then you should have little problem with the rest of it.  Child does a great job keeping Reacher and his evenly-matched new girlfriend/fellow captive in seemingly-hopeless situations against a very formidable enemy (the head of the militia is especially evil, fanatical, ruthless, and capable enough to be a problem even for the almost-superpowered Reacher) and there are plenty of tense situations.  Holly ends up in an escape-proof building whose walls are insulated with dynamite that'll go off if it's hit by a stray bullet.  Reacher has to escape by squeezing himself through a narrow cavern infested with rats in total darkness -- it's likely a nod to what Rambo had to do in First Blood but even more harrowing;  it's enough to throw even Reacher into a state of near-panic.  And there are plenty of fights and battle scenes, interspersed with detailed lectures on ballistics that remain interesting enough not to slow down the action even though that's exactly what they're doing -- Child's telling you where bullets are and what they're doing on a thousandth-of-a-second timeline.  It's not quite as "coincidental" as the first book, but also doesn't move quite as fast since Reacher's a captive for most of it, but it's still a good surviving-a-seemingly-hopeless-situation-through-skill-and-wits tale that's hard to put down. 


Now, hopefully the internet connection will hold up and the next post won't be six months from now, but, we'll have to see how it goes. 

Even lightning didn't stop me from Twittering, so you can always find me there.

And if you'd like more, we have a veritable smorgasbord for you.  KickerOfElves put up an excellent one just last week, and if you haven't read it yet, you should do so right away.  So, please, peruse our menu: