The Bridge by John Skipp & Craig Spector (1991): The Ultimate Sin

The horror genre isn't generally thought of as being socially conscious, and historically was often seen as just the opposite. This has changed most notably in the last few years, but back in the Eighties and into the Nineties, horror entertainment was more a place to indulge in anti-social behaviors than in healthy ones. Famed splatterpunk duo John Skipp and Craig Spector, those "bad boys" of horror novelists, however, evinced an awareness of societal ills along with their penchant for depicting scenes of no-holds-barred graphic gore and violence in Eighties classicks like The Scream (1988) and The Light at the End (1986).

This aspect grew to the forefront by the time they published their ambitious second-to-last novel, The Bridge (Bantam Books/October1991/cover art by Lisa Falkenstern). This was adult, eyes-open horror, the guys were saying, writing about the here-and-now and not looking to horror for escape any longer: humans were no longer the sole items on the menu, for Earth itself (her self?) was on the chopping block. It was time to acknowledge that, ecologically, the planet was in dire straits.

Ecological horror stories were more a part of science fiction than horror (Skipp has often name-checked The Sheep Look Up, a 1972 dystopian novel by John Brunner, which depicts a world so polluted by human endeavors it is almost uninhabitable), but The Bridge is eco-horror in high gear. An impassioned plea for the state of our very planet that pulls no punches, it is an apotheosis of the authors' combined talents. That is, it has most of what's good about their work and some of what's bad, but it's all delivered with an earnest intensity. Dig the back-cover copy, which gives only a hint of what's lurking inside:

 

The good times start when two young redneck cousins, Boonie and Drew, working for Boonie's dad's dumping company, furtively chuck barrels of toxic waste into a nice secluded area in the Pennsylvania hinterlands, from the Black Bridge, a spot in the Codorus Creek (yes, a real place!). This is the breaking point, as S&S tell us in the pretentious italics that will run rampant throughout the novel, "a sin-eater since the Industrial Revolution, a chemical cessway" choked (illegally, of course) with the runoff of modern convenience: now a primordial stew giving birth to a new form of life, which S&S will dub "Overmind." And boy are we in trouble.

What results is so awful, so mind-bendingly terrifying, so rarefied and beyond man's ken that S&S have no choice but to revert to free verse poetry to describe it: 

born of poison
raised in poison
claiming poison for its own
it rose
a miracle of raw creation
hot black howl of life and
death intertwined and converted to
some third new option

 

2010 reprint, Leisure Books

And so on. It's "an enormous oily serpent" that "fractures physics, disembowels logic." It is made of rotting fish and broken barrels, the sludge and slurry of the creek, and it—the Overmind—wants the bodies and souls of us hapless littering mall-dwelling gas-guzzling dullards to wreak its vengeance. Host and parasite in one. Puppets of this sentient sludge. It devours and expels, creating a misshapen, oozing, zombie horde to act as avatars of our own destruction. It is the literal embodiment of the processes that created it: the greedy, insatiable eating machine. Shoveling resources in the one end, shitting poison out the other. A fat, blind, dying carcass, smothering all as it wallowed in its own excrement.

These grotesqueries on display are beyond reproach, offered up with spunky elan, gloopy and disgusting. This roiling mass of deformed life, "toxic ground zero," is eager to ingest everything it comes into contact with, to make it one with the Overmind. Reanimated bodies, human and helpless animal alike, march—or, more accurately, drive trucks filled with nuclear waste barrels—upon the unsuspecting small town of Paradise, PA: At the center of the only Hell that mattered. The Hell that mankind had created on Earth.

Our cast of characters is large, varied, as S&S dip down and then back up the social ladder. There are the aforementioned rednecks, duplicitous businessmen, young couples in love, a pregnant woman in crisis and her New Age friend, television reporters and crew, nuclear power plant workers, hazmat crew members, and teenage punk rockers. S&S keep things on the move, never lingering too long on any one narrative thread, spiking the wobbly narrative with odes to pain like a raggedy ratcheting metal fist, a screaming bonesaw violation so far beyond ordinary pain it boiled down endorphins and tortured the steam... blowtorching her mind into into crisp hyperclarity.

The Bridge is a perfect work of splatterpunk. And splatterpunk is not simply outrageous gore—it has heart, it has a conscience, an adolescent energy; it has raw primal emotions about injustice and disparity (y'know: punk) and the ironic confluence of the two is what made splatterpunk a thing. And if The Bridge has one thing, it's that: an emotional core of outrage, betrayal, injustice surrounded by a spiky, unruly, deeply pissed off surface eager to scrap, bringing mucilaginous pustular rotting amorphous tentacled things to a gunfight.

 

Our old buddy Harlan Ellison is surely one of the fathers of this righteous screed, as S&S shift into full-throttle, Deathbird Stories-style jeremiad mode, a kaleidoscopic apocalypse harrowing our souls, a beast screaming at the heart of the world. I was also reminded of the infernal parade in works like Clive  Barker's "Skins of the Fathers" and  Stephen King's "The Mist." Timely, modern movies like The China Syndrome, Network, and the soul-deadening BBC-TV movie Threads—which I first heard of when Spector mentioned it in Silver Scream—also have deep echoes here; I'm sure that was intentional, and it was all cool with me.

this bad boy had a soundtrack

The novel has faults, though, many. I read it when it came out, and the only thing I recalled before this reread was an awkward, lopsided vibe. This vibe remained: the set-up is bold and powerful, but there's no plot, only the one-way-ticket to oblivion, a downbound train doomed to destruction, peopled solely with folks in service to it. Hysteria and mania are at fever pitch; some readers may tire of the terse, melodramatic single-sentence paragraphs, or the overly earnest emotional outbursts, the endless fucking italics, or the glib, smart-alecky, even dated approach to violence, with a phrase like "Vlad the Impaler on a Funny Car Saturday" clunking in. None of the characters is the protagonist, per se, and none really come to life except when they're about to die, if even then. And the less said about the garden gnome orgy (pp. 260-261), the better! (Also: do not read past Chapter 60. Two very, very short pages follow, and they are from hunger and add not a drop to what you've just read.)

What we have then is a polemic aimed at the people who dump and poison without a backward glance or a twinge of remorse, who would use our environment, our home, as a dumping ground so they can fill their pockets. This ain't rocket science; S&S aren't saying anything particularly new. But that's not the point. The point is to deliver this oft-ignored message to the masses with a white-hot flaming sword, and that sword is The Bridge. It's not fully a novel; it's "a warnin' sign on the road ahead," as Neil Young once sang. But those people at fault will never read a book like this (although I wouldn't be surprised if some were Neil Young fans), and so S&S are left to include a long appendix filled with environmental tips n' tricks and the addresses of ecological organizations. It's (still, alas) up to us, and us only. 

It was a ring of thorns rising high into the viscid swirling fog... ten thousand barbed biting tendrils... taking on the appearance of armor. there were easily a hundred thousand bristling, glistening spikes pointing menacingly... pulling themselves up...

Despite those enumerated faults, I quite enjoyed my revisit to The Bridge; I was most often captivated by the book's gleeful passion, the commitment to its monstrous, unavoidable finale. And there’s no doubt eco-horror is more relevant than ever, which only added more sting to the proceedings. John Skipp and Craig Spector would only write one more novel after this, then quit for reasons I've never been able to ascertain—personal fallout? The waning of the paperback horror era? Creative differences? No matter, really. With one of the best, literally explosive, most disheartening climaxes in horror fiction of the era, The Bridge is an apex of the "new," early Nineties horror, delivered unto you without a care in the world—except saving it.

Horror was love, in this Brave New Hell: the capacity for caring, and for sharing pain.
To find oneself both in love and in Hell was more than torture, worse than madness.
It was tantamount to sin.

Gwen, in Green by Hugh Zachary (1974): Every Time I Eat Vegetables It Makes Me Think of You

Is erotic eco-horror a thing? I'm trying to think...

One of my favorite paperback covers since I first came across it on one website or another, George Ziel's sensual, provocative, darkly luscious art here strikes a potential reader immediately. Who can penetrate the mystery of this woman's skyward gaze, full of awe and perhaps understanding, in thrall to some mysterious force, naked and exposed to the swamp flora crawling up her flesh as if claiming her for its own purposes? Fortunately, author Hugh Zachary is up to the task of solving this mystery; and Gwen, in Green (Fawcett Gold Medal, July 1974) is a quiet and bewitching little work that provides a bit of sexy '70s fun and fright. Ziel's cover perfectly captures the tone and texture of Zachary's tale - and you know what a special treat it is when cover art and content align in harmony.

Zachary in late Sixties

 

Some spoilers ahead. The back cover gives the basics. Our lovely Gwen has been married to electrical engineer George Ferrier for seven years when the story begins. After coming into family money, he's just bought a plot undeveloped land on an island on the Cape Fear River; nearby a nuclear power plant is being built (George's research shows the danger of radioactivity is, apparently, nil). So in come the developers, earth movers, bulldozers, and crewmen to clear away the swamp and brush and undergrowth and build the Ferriers' new home. Here they indulge in a full and healthy sex life (a large part of the novel which Zachary delights in) but Gwen, whose childhood was one of misfortune and neglect, still feels twinges of shame and guilt: her widowed mother was a loose woman who wasn't careful about keeping the bedroom door closed. A complex grew, encouraged by the teasing by Gwen's schoolmates, and so as an adult Gwen considers herself a prude, a nut - in the parlance of the day, frigid.

But gentle and patient he-man paramour George has coaxed Gwen into experiencing much sexual pleasure (no way this modern man's wife is gonna be frigid! All she needs is a real man's touch seems to be his motto):  

She lay in total darkness, limply submitting to his touch, his obscene kiss, his fast, labored breathing. And her clitoris swelled. A tendril of something went shooting down, down, centered there. She jerked her eyes open, shocked. A stiffening in her legs, an almost imperceptible lifting of her loins... She found that certain body movements are instinctive.

And so it goes. Husband and wife now engage in playful banter (which of course includes some rape references that will bemuse today's reader) and a newfound happiness. Gwen begins painting trees and caring for lush African violets, and becomes enamored of the Venus fly-trap plants she finds at a nearby lake and begins feeding raw hamburger. But creeping into this domestic bliss are her nightmares: the mass roared down on her, huge teeth snapping at her. The mouth closed, clashing metal teeth, and she screamed once before she felt the tender flesh being punctured and rendered. Her upper body fell, being ripped from her legs and stomach and hips...

 

These dreams continue till one afternoon while George is at work, Gwen seduces a meter reader. Yep, you read right; the classic porn scenario. It's rather an out-of-body experience for Gwen, and she's shocked and mortified by the physical act she's shared with a stranger.  

She held her arms out, smiling. No question of morality. No right. No wrong.  It was the way things were. Fertile, ripe, passive, she accepted him, eased his fevered haste, and bathed him in the sweet juices of her body.

1976 Coronet UK w/ art by Jim Burns

(I blacked out spoiler tagline) 

This is some serious '70s softcore! Sadly a suicide attempt is next. George and their doctor set her up with elderly psychiatrist Dr. Irving King - a Freudian by training, who had developed some rather independent ideas in thirty-five years of practice in an area of the country where psychiatry was not fully understood - and the required questioning begins, and we can begin to fathom Gwen's disordered mind. "Have you ever killed anything, Gwen?" "No. Oh, insects. Plants." "Plants?" "Isn't that silly?" And off we go! Gwen is slowly but surely identifying, in her mind, with the flora all about her on their spot of land, the Venus fly-traps, the African violets, the giant trees, the slimy green things beneath the water - all of which are being torn asunder by the developers and even her husband. Gwen feels mad, invaded, but by what? The painful dreams continue... and so do the illicit trysts. Only sex can ease the horrific sensation of dismemberment. Happy George has no idea that his wanton, sexy, endlessly hungry woman is truly not herself any longer.

And so sex and death commence to commingle. The men who drive the bulldozers come one by one to Gwen (sometimes not even one by one). They don't return to drive the bulldozers. Dr. King suspects, researches, finds, confronts. We get a crazy, nutty explanation for Gwen's "possession" that could be real or could be her own sexual, perhaps even maternal, guilt turning round on her and eating her up. Zachary hints one way, then the other, then the tale ends as the sharp reader will have predicted. It couldn't go any other way, and do I love doomy downward spirals. She continued to chop, breathing in sobbing agony. The strap to her bikini top had broken. The small scrap of material hung from her neck, flapping with her movements. Water and perspiration and blood beaded her lower legs.

Zachary wrote under pseudonym Zach Hughes. Dig Tide 1975!

I found Gwen to be a mild and relaxing read; nothing earth-shattering, but confidently written and just odd enough (and oh-so-'70s enough) to keep me reading happily. I liked the cozy, isolated forested locale; Zachary puts in lots of detail about how rewarding working your own land is. Characters have specific natures and interior thoughts that ring true. The plentiful sex scenes were done well, Zachary knowing when to be graphic and when to leave us to fill in the blanks. Even Gwen's dalliances with teen boys were more hilariously dated than ickily offensive (again, the anything-goes vibe of the '70s !). The sexism that pops up in the book raises a chuckle and can be forgiven; after their first meeting, Dr. King says to Gwen, "You are much too pretty to be eaten by nightmare things," or when she tells George her bizarre dreams and he chides her, "You are one spooky broad." And yes, good death scenes that have bite, reminding me some of Michael McDowell: a nice leisurely story carrying you along then boom, a short sharp shock of violence.

Gwen, in Green, is a satisfying work of smart, fun, pulp horror that could only have been written in the early 1970s. Which is one of my highest compliments! Find a copy, admire its magnificent cover, and read while sipping a gin & tonic under the summer sun near a crystal-clear lake beneath towering, creeping greenery. Shouldn't take you more than an afternoon or two to read it, but you just might feel differently about that vegetation when you're done.

Postscript: Some background on what surely inspired the novel. In 1973 the nonfiction book The Secret Life of Plants was first published. A bestselling and highly popular book of its day, it even became a film documentary (with a soundtrack by Stevie Wonder!). However it was speculative pseudoscience, appealing to hippies and to folks amenable to proto-New Age ideals filtering into the mainstream, swept along in the same current as astrology, crystal healing powers, and the lost continent of Mu. Secret Life's bubble-headed thesis was that plants have sentience and emotion, even telepathic powers, all girded by laughable "scientific" "experiments" like attaching polygraph electrodes to plant leaves. I know, I know! Whether he meant to satirize the theory or not, Zachary uses it as the launching pad for Gwen. In horror fiction, that sort of nonsense is a plus. Had I not worked in a used bookstore in the late 1980s and saw old copies of Secret Life, I wouldn't have been aware of it as the novel's impetus. It won't really affect your enjoyment of Gwen, but I myself dig the dated context.