Eat Them Alive by Pierce Nace (1977): Green Hell

They were monsters—greedy green monsters! 

They looked as if they would eat anything they could catch, chewing it to bits in their enormous jaws... One of the mantises had cornered a man... who couldn't run enough to escape the wildly dashing insect. It flopped him onto the ground and began eating him as if he were a fish, a hunk of meat, anything edible. 

And it did not bother to kill him before devouring him. 

He lay kicking, and no doubt screaming, as the green monster ate him alive.

From a mind deranged springs this ludicrous, bat-shit bonkers sleaze-horror novel about giant people-eating praying mantises. This is the book that's either the zenith or the nadir of paperback pulp-horror fiction. In fact I feel guilty selling it as either because as of today, this book is impossible to obtain for less than $300, and it is not worth that no matter where it stands on the horror scale. Eat Them Alive—its title alone appealing to our basest fears, crude and simplistic as a tabloid headline, humanity reduced to food—is truly garbage. There's no percentage in arguing otherwise. And yet...

First published by Manor Books in 1977 and then by New English Library (with cover art by Tim White), Alive is amateurish, moronic, thoughtless, sadistic, repetitive schlock with no redeeming value whatsoever. What enjoyment there is comes in the form of disbelief. You'll be amazed at the lack of any attempt at realism in any aspect. You'll be astounded at the depraved depths to which the author can descend! Pierce Nace (more on this person later) piles one outrageously graphic scene on top of another like a pulp writer suffering a fever dream.

They were clambering over each other to escape their caves or undersea holes or wherever else they had lived. They must have dwelt beneath the island for thousands of years. They must be a throw back to the dinosaurs...

Our main guy Dyke Mellis is just the worst, a craven, cowardly, ultra-violent crook. He's been living on the island in exile for 11 years, since being tortured almost to death by the criminal gang he tried to double-cross. This back-story in Chapter Two is torn right from dimestore crime stories, akin to the sere, spare, nihilistic works of David Goodis, Jim Thompson, Dan J. Marlowe, or Richard Stark—only in attitude, not in execution, good god no—in which men outside the law are betrayed (or as in this case, are the betrayer), beaten, and abandoned for dead by their (justifiably angry) crew. Dyke Mellis is almost superhumanly equipped with a taste for vengeance that keeps him alive despite coming so close to death; he bears hideous scars, poor vision, constant headaches.

Nace shoves in your face and smashes in your mouth what other pulp writers hinted at and around, that Dyke is hardly a man, as he was castrated by the four men he tried to rip off ("No, no! Don't cut me there! Slice off anything else, but leave me that!"). You won't forget this because Nace will lapse into repetition at a moment's notice. It's hilarious how Nace has Dyke talk to himself about his lust for vengeance, reiterating his personal motivation, as if Nace is writing a work of such complexity and nuance that the reader may have become unclear on the basics: "It's the only thing I've got to live for, because it'll further my plan for revenge on those four guys for making me what I am, an impotent no-man... I want to watch... as the giant mantises eat them alive!" Oh shit, how about that, that's the title of the book, wow, it totally slipped my mind. Way to bring it all back home, Pierce Nace!

Anyway, Dyke sees the destruction on that island from the safety of his fishing boat, he thinks: If he could tame this one insect, teach it to respect and follow his commands, then he could tame others, make them a powerful force to do his bidding. And par for the course in landscape of illogicality, Dyke does train the biggest mantis. Nace goes into lots of spurious logistics about how he goes about this without getting eaten. He paints its head red to tell it apart and then mutters to himself:

A name. The thing's got to have a name... But what will it be? How do you name a beast whose sole purpose is acting as your instrument of boiling revenge, of mind-racking torture, of slow and horrendous death? Well, how about "Slayer"? This man-sized bug is going to slay for me... Slayer will be the torturer, but I'll be the watcher, the enjoyer, the cheerer-on. I'll love watching my great green mantis as he rips into bodies, as he eats them part by part. I'll feel excited, obsessed, I'll grow tall in the feeling...

Manor Books, 1977, with accurate cover art (by artist unknown alas) so that's something

"Good boy, Slayer, You're the biggest of them all—and the only one with a red head. 

You will command them as I will command you!"

Somebody please tell me Kerry King read this book back in the early '80s. The story plods on, as thin as the paper it's printed on, with lots of gore and nonsense (the beasts lovingly devour women's breasts), till yes, he tracks down each of the men who tortured him... they all happen to live nearby. How fortuitous!

The unsparing of any detail in depicting the creatures' ravenous appetite and the ease with which they tear part the "human food" has a dehumanizing effect on the reader if one tries to imagine such a scene in the real world. And yet violence never gets next level: for all its intensity, the same descriptions of gore are used over and over again. Sure, the monsters do love eating the stomach contents of other mantises, and squeezing out human intestines for a dipping sauce. But when describing the massive trauma of tearing off of limbs and heads you won't read vocabulary like ligament, cartilage, tissue, or anything that would require any knowledge besides a child's understanding of anatomy. No one ever vomits or shits their pants in fear—why, that would be too far!

Many times Slayer ran his claws inside the pieces of skull, as if to be sure hew as getting every edible bite...

Next the beast pulled the arms from the man as Dyke had done to grasshoppers a thousand times when he was a boy. The arms came out of their sockets like paper in the mantis's pull. While the man screamed on, the enormous insect ate his hands, his wrists, his elbows, the whole of his arms...

Before the mantis rent the organs from the chest and stomach cavities, he bent low over the girl and filled his great maw with all that stamped the body as female. Watching, Dyke thought, God, I think I could eat that part myself. I could never touch a woman's privacy otherwise. Perhaps sometime I can share such a part with one of the beasts when he eats it...

Slayer crouched beside his master, eating babies and children almost whole, not bothering to tear them to bits—and finding his ultimate joy in the women he stripped and slit and ate.

One redeeming factor is that since Dyke is castrated, he can't really get erotically aroused by watching these monster consume human meat; I mean he almost gets there but it's one place the author stops short—on purpose? As he ponders to himself watching an old man he knew become mantis prey:

I'm not sure Nace even gets the biology of the mantis correct. The descriptions don't get more than "the mantis broke off a leg with its hands" and I don't think mantises even have hands but that's the word Nace keeps using. I don't think Nace ever mentions "mandibles," only "jaws," which doesn't sound right either. Nor does Nace seem to have familiarity with human speech. Cringe-worthy dialogue from Dyke's targets like "Don't let them eat her to death!" and "Are they really... eating my... folks?" and "I'm not going to stand here and see those prehistoric animals eat my wife and kids!" is nothing anyone would ever say, you have to laugh. Don't you?! Like when Dyke and his creepy-crawlies show up at a victim's home at breakfast and he sits down and devours the carefully laid-out meal, á la Vlad the Impaler, while watching the bugs slaughter the man and his family. I had to give points on that scene.

Now, about Nace. For a long time there was doubt and debate about who Nace really was, but according to various internet sources who have really done some legwork, it seems near-certain the author was one Evelyn Pierce Nace, a part-time insurance secretary who published in men's crime magazines under "Pierce Nace." I wonder how many people who knew her in real life were aware that she wrote one of the sleaziest, most heartless works of horror fiction of all time?

Would not Dyke's four enemies beg pitifully, on their abject knees, if he came marching at the head of a hungry horde of praying mantises that were commanded to devour Dyke's torturers? God, what a devil's joy that would be!

To wrap up: not one of the books I've read by other sewage-purveyors like Guy N. Smith, Shaun Hutson, or Richard Laymon can compare with the trashtastic lunacy on display here. But it is obsessed with human degradation, humiliation, emotional torment, and the limits of physical pain while understanding none of it. Nace has produced a work that is the creative equivalent of pulling wings off flies, a childish cruelty that is virtually sociopathic in its divorce from actual human comprehension. As I said, there's no attempt to present the events realistically. I guess it's like reading porn written by someone who's never had sex.

Unlike other pulp-horror novels, which are often mediocre and boring in the extreme, Alive at least is hilariously inept; so poor and idiotic and unrelenting, going along for the ride offers sick thrills one doesn't get often. You will keep reading no matter what! For fans of that style of bottom-of-the-barrel horror fiction, Alive will provide the tackiest, most tasteless of delights.

I read Eat Them Alive in one day, finishing it up alone in my library on a Saturday night, my head buzzing pleasantly from beer and smoke, and my god, I found I was enjoying this degrading, damnable book! I actually couldn't put it down. When we get to the culmination of Dyke's vengeance, it's a delirious surreal kaleidoscope of bloody, gut-wrenching yet utterly ridiculous violence. The final chapter has the feel and the logic of an eight-year-old, tired of playing make-believe, crashing all his toys together at once in an apocalyptic blow-out. Those final sentences are a weird satisfaction.

Yes, this novel beggars all critical approach. I know it sounds irresistible, but I still don't know if I can recommend Eat Them Alive, and like I said it is not worth $300! I mean, I bought a copy, the New English Library edition maybe a year and a half ago, for $5 plus $10 shipping from the UK; is that luck, or something else? But it is part of the paperback horror boom so I feel duty-bound to write about it... such is my lot, my curse, my devil's joy.

The Flesh Eaters by L.A. Morse (1979): Eat 'Em and Smile

Behold the Frazetta glory that adorns this paperback! Inhuman brutes, their flesh gone grey-green from their ghastly diet (yet somehow they're ripped as hell), drag along another hapless victim to their lair hidden by great rocks in a misty, nightmarish landscape—what self-respecting horror fan could resist reading this book? Why it promises terrors beyond imagining! Slim, grim, and altogether grimy, The Flesh Eaters (Warner Books, Dec 1979), an unheralded vintage title by one L.A. Morse, operates in that unwholesome arena of dead-eyed depiction of graphic, taboo-obliterating violence with not a whiff of concern for taste or restraint. As you'll see, this is an altogether good thing.

This story of legendary Sawney Beane and his unholy clan is a master class in unsettling the unwary reader. Me, I had some idea of what I was getting into, but even so I was somewhat astonished—and impressed—at the darker turns the narrative took. A straightforward tale of supposedly historical events: a preface declares the factual (meh) basis of the novel, and Morse spares no ugly detail in describing the sheer shittiness of life in 15th-century Edinburgh. There are the houses basically made of mud and straw, the miasma of garbage and human waste, the scavenging creatures animal and man alike, the cathedral filled with light and wealth. The townspeople have no experience of any alternatives. If a clean town does not exist for them, then this town is not dirty.... This filth is merely one of the necessary accompaniments of progress.

We're introduced to Sawney and the other townspeople as they're watching the merciless executions of several prisoners, a momentous event that breaks the monotony of daily life. Of course after watching the men killed in vile ways he feels a tingling throughout his body, a pleasant warmth in his groin. He even sniffs blood from the ground and totally gets off on it. Then it's off to work in the blacksmith's, a horrible abusive guy, known as Master, but he's got this hot teenage daughter, Meg, who hates being her father's slave. Meg and Sawney develop I guess a "relationship." One night the blacksmith is drinking with a pal, and they humiliate Sawney and grope Meg. After being rejected by Meg, the pal leaves, and the blacksmith then attempts to rape his own daughter—till Sawney steps in to stop him. You can guess what happens:

At last Sawney Beane and Meg become exhausted and stop. There is blood all over them. Sawney Beane puts his hand in a wound on the Master's chest and brings it out covered with blood. He licks his hand, then holds it in front of Meg's face. She licks one finger slowly with the tip of her tongue; and then takes each of the other fingers into her mouth and sucks them greedily. Her lips are swollen, as though with passion.

They begin to laugh maniacally. 

ebook cover 2014

Two kids have killed the father, now they've gotta be on the run. That they do. Before, Sawney Beane was practically mute, a cipher, a dullard, a nothing, barely existing, barely thinking, barely feeling. Post-murder he is in touch with desires and sensations that before had only moved about him like beckoning shadows. Oh he has solved the sweet mystery of life, Sawney Beane has! He explains to Meg as they leave that dirty old town:

"We will become hunters. We will be like the great wolves of the forest. Only we will not attack cows and sheep and deer. We will hunt men... Aye, eat them! Feed upon them..."

Well all right! Now we're talkin'. The two self-imposed exiles trudge through spooky forest and across lonely beach and lo and behold, Sawney finds a tiny crevasse in a cliff face which he explores, finding that it turns into a dry, lofty cavern: the perfect home for he and his carnal bride, virtually invisible to any human eye. Here will be their hearth from which they will venture only to kill unsuspecting travelers on the road above. What follows are simple, sometimes gut-wrenching depictions of remorseless killers at work and the enjoyment they find in overpowering the weak things. To wit:

  They are the hunters and it is natural to hunt; anything else would be unnatural. Eating the flesh of their victims no longer has special significance. It is natural for hunters to eat what they kill. They feel no connection between themselves and their victims, no common humanity... they stand over their fallen victims, yelling at the corpses, cursing them, kicking them, spitting on them, dancing in triumph over their bodies

Then the inevitable occurs: Meg becomes pregnant. The baby's birth makes Sawney squeamish; he can't watch and he certainly can't cut the umbilical cord! Even looking at this mewling creature is beyond him... till he realizes: their numbers can increase. So will their strength. And so then will the fear they can cause in the others. Our numbers will increase.... We have only begun.

Once the Beanes start to procreate, things get sketch as eff. Meg gives birth yearly. The children have no names but their jaws are strong. They function almost as one organism, moving and breathing in harmony. The children know no life other than that of the cave; they accept it as normal. Sawney rules as patriarch, of course, teaching his loathsome offspring that "the things are stupid.... It is very funny when they know they are dead." To his clan he spins a myth of the grey wolf of the forest, a tale he remembers from his hazy youth: the wolf is both his own father and he, the supreme predator of the dark woods. The children lie in wait in lonely roads, one pretending to be injured, perhaps, to lure the unsuspecting travelers to aid; then father pounces. The eldest son wants dearly to be a hunter like his father, and the younger children want to partake in the kills on their own. Sawney is not sure if they're ready... but he is willing to let them try.

(Maybe skip this section if you want to experience the book for yourself) If you thought murder and cannibalism were the deepest depravities Flesh Eaters was going to plumb then you've thought wrong. There is rape and incest, and, in one dizzying moment of pure outsider horror, Morse notes the undercurrent of sexuality in the family... sexual energy crackles through the cave; the smell of lust is heavy. Like a pack of wild dogs, the family couples at every opportunity. All but the youngest children are involved, and these imitate their elders, pressing their naked loins together, thrusting their hips in a parody of the sexual act. Holy Jeezus.

They exist apart from human notions of morality or value; again and again Morse notes the uselessness of money and clothes and other "booty" accrued from their victims. "It's shit," Sawney Beane says more than once, tossing away gold coins and fine clothing, "all that belongs to them is shit. This is why they are weak." Morse crafts these scenarios for maximum impact with minimum stylized force: he doesn't overwrite or oversell his disturbing visions; his plain, unadorned prose simply documents horrific events but does not comment on them. Victims rarely have identity; those that do serve a larger purpose to the plot.

The only image of author Morse found

There is more to the novel than these grotesqueries of appetite and destruction:  the townspeople hear of more and more traveler disappearances (the story takes place over two decades). Their idiot Sheriff is lazy, not very smart except when it comes to avoiding difficulties, cowardly, and inordinately fond of his own voice. Perhaps it is a demon responsible? A priest is called. No luck. Several innocent men are accused of devil worship and human sacrifice after a rotted arm is found washed ashore; the men are tortured to confess and executed (the classic "throw the accused in the water, if he drowns he is innocent" is employed to sad effect). Morse gets good mileage out of dry political satire in these instances. Finally the King is involved, a search party started, and the noose begins to tighten around the Sawney Beane clan.

This brief work—just over 200 pages—has power and pull; you'll read it quick as Morse goes straight for the jugular with his clean prose shaved to the bone (he was also the author of several hard-boiled crime novels and won an Edgar Award). Don't let that Frazetta cover fool you: this is no tale of dark fantasy or thrilling adventure; it is all too prosaically real. Like Jack Ketchum, whose own landmark work of stark yet extreme horror Off Season (1981) was almost surely inspired by this novel, Morse notes depravity with clarity but does not linger or cheapen. Flesh Eaters is perhaps not a book for every horror fan, but it is a must for every horror fan who likes horror fiction nasty, brutish, and short. Get your hands on this book, devour and enjoy.

By Bizarre Hands by Joe R. Lansdale (1989): Apocalypse Wow

If you were a horror fiction reader in the late 1980s and paid attention to such things, you knew that Joe R. Lansdale was being marketed, if that's not too strong a word, in a manner not seen since probably Clive Barker. Their respective publishers knew, even if they couldn't put their finger on it exactly, that these writers were incredibly special (this has nothing to do with the individual styles of Barker and Lansdale, which are markedly different, only that they both went further, deeper, harder, than other even very good writers of that age did) and deserved to be widely read. Check out the cover copy, front and back, of By Bizarre Hands (Avon Books, Sept 1991): "Renegade Nightmare King"?! "May Be Hazardous to Your Health"?! These types of superlatives reach higher than the usual boilerplate encomium, and worked to entice readers who wanted more than just the latest humdrum hack horror.

I was ecstatic to be reading Lansdale for the first time in various anthologies; like many readers I'd never read anything like him. Sure there was the Vonnegut and the Twain, the Mencken and the Joe Bob Briggs, the King and the Matheson and the Bradbury, here and there a whiff of Elmore Leonard and Harry Crews (I noted these last two much later as I had not read them on my first encounter with Lansdale). But still there was something original, tough and sure and daring that sang beneath those familiar notes... and I wanted more.

Around '90 or so I paid big bucks for a signed copy of Joe's short story collection, the 1989 hardcover edition from specialty publisher Mark V. Ziesing. Consisting of his earliest as well as his major stories, I devoured it, loved it, but sometime later, during a bleak broke span during my college years, I had to sell off a major chunk of my limited-edition horror collection, so it was bye-bye By Bizarre. Ah well. Then a month or so ago a TMHF pal emailed a link to this Avon paperback edition from 1991, adorned with the same illustration as the hardcover, thanks to usual suspect JK Potter; it was in good shape and at a fair price, who doesn't love that. Sold! So it's great to have By Bizarre Hands back on my shelves. Couldn't wait to revisit Lansdale's singular landscape of horror, black humor, science fiction, crime, and whatever the hell else he puts in.

Lansdale often succeeds at impossible tasks, with setups that would make lesser writers blanch (or not even realize what deep waters they were in), and pulls them off with a tough, vulgar, self-conscious but not arch energy. He may wink at you but it's not a cute wink of "Hey we both know this is ridiculous" but a wink of devilish glee, acrobatic mischief, "You can't believe I'm getting away with this, can you?!" Like a sort of Tarzan swinging through the jungle hoping a vine will appear in the nick of time, you can't fault him because it all kinda takes your breath away even when his moves are occasionally clumsy or crude. His confidence and his trust in his own instincts, talent, character sketches, and unique vision thrills the reader, makes the reader forgive those tacky lapses scattered about (as if Lansdale were afraid of upsetting social niceties in the first place). YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED!

Let's get to the goods, right from the opener. "Fish Night," hearkens back to Bradbury's love of dinosaurs and other creatures of our earth's past, but lacks any wide-eyed nostalgic innocence. Nostalgic for the ravenous extinct monstrous creatures which swam that prehistoric sea, perhaps... "Duck Hunt" satirizes male camaraderie and companionship, machismo and violence masquerading as such. The terrific title story was also published in the first Borderlands (1990); I wrote a little about it here. It's tasteless, sure, sometimes you think, "Jeez, Joe, I didn't need to know all that," but that's just Joe: he's gonna give it to you straight, maybe chase it with pickle juice and gasoline. Then light the match.

Ever read any of the Black Lizard pulp reprints from the 1980s? Not just Jim Thompson, but Dan J. Marlowe, David Goodis, Charles Willeford? Written with pulp muscle and refusal to sugar coat with any moralizing, Lansdale presents the criminal lifestyle as-is, no returns, no refunds. More than one tale here reminds me of those stark, sere, brutal crime novels, particularly "The Steel Valentine" and "The Pit." "I Tell You It's Love" revels in the romantic sadomasochism of James M. Cain. "Down By the Sea Near the Great Big Rock" is almost whimsical, a Gahan Wilson cartoon come to life. And three stories became three novels: "Boys Will Be Boys" part of The Nightrunners; "Hell Through a Windshield" is the beginnning of The Drive-In; "The Windstorm Passes" became The Magic Wagon. All are must-reads, both the stories here and the actual novels themselves.

One of the very best stories included is "Tight Little Stitches in a Dead Man's Back," the title alone which has bounced around in my head for 25 years even as the details faded, is a mean little masterpiece. It's funny, sad, disgusting, outrageous, insightful, empathetic, painful, humiliating, gory, unsettling, a near-effortless melange of SF and horror tropes. His weirdo SF is kinda mind-blowing. I'm not sure what apocalyptic authors Lansdale read—John Brunner? JG Ballard? John Wyndham?—but it's just powerhouse stuff nobody else could've written. Guilt, hatred, regret, only these human emotions survive the apocalypse, along with monstrous thorny vines and mutated animals. Behold the surreality:

The collection concludes with two of Joe's most infamous stories, late 1980s classics that made a splash then and still retain their power decades later: "Night They Missed the Horror Show" and "On the Far Side of the Cadillac Desert with Dead Folk." The former contains some of the ugliest, most blistering imagery and dialogue for its time, and isn't even really a "horror" story in the generic sense; it's the blackest of noir, maybe. Scorched earth policy here, a glimpse of unfettered human depravity and ignorance, outcast kin to the blistering art and exploitation of, say, Taxi Driver or Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer or James Ellroy's LA Quartet. If you haven't read "Night They Missed the Horror Show," I can't say you've missed a treat but you have missed a milestone in extreme fiction. The latter tale, from the zombie universe of George A. Romero (RIP!), is a long rambling road story of bounty hunters and the undead, plus lots of Bible talk (a staple of many a Lansdale), gunplay, and gore. You won't be scared but you will be impressed by its colorful energy.

New English Library, 1992

We all are aware of how unique voices can be forgotten, or become cult/fringe favorites, and never find a broader audience. Not so with Joe.  It's satisfying to know that today he has a bigger following than ever, with a movie and TV series adapted from his work (Cold in July and Hap & Leonard, respectively), and more and more award-winning novels. He is a friendly and supportive online presence as well. Reading Joe Lansdale is a free-for-all. For the adventurous, unsatisfied reader who demands more, more, more, I can say get your hands on By Bizarre Hands; it is an essential and uncompromising read.

The Orpheus Process by Daniel H. Gower (1992): Death Machine Infest My Corpse to Be

Occasionally I read a horror novel that buggers my critical facilities, and I must ask myself that age-old question: is it so bad it's good, or is it so bad it's simply terrible? I know what I like and what I don't, but what if those things are wrapped up together? Which aspect outweighs the other? Is it so important that I know? Take the first novel by Daniel H. Gower, a paperback original from the fabled Dell/Abyss line entitled The Orpheus Process (Feb 1992). A story of medical horror and reanimated corpses, it features one cliche after another, with impossible dialogue, unbelievable motivations, iffy characterization, leaden attempts at black humor, tasteless over-the-top gore, wonky "science," and an exhausting climax that seems to go on and on. But. But.

I cannot tell you the last time a novel kept me reading more (I kind of agree with the various blurbs on the paperback; it is compulsively readable!). I enjoyed the hell out of it, good and bad alike. Gower's style has energy, conviction, and forward thrust, even accounting for lapses into amateur psychology, weak analogies, telling and not showing: first-novel flaws all present and accounted for. Orpheus Process goes to dark places of nihilistic blasphemy, and often what it finds there is unbearably silly, other times it touches on real existential dreads, plumbing deep into nightmare psyches. I loved the over-the-topness of it even when wrong-headed, its death-in-the-midst of life scenario, and all the sickening metaphysics of a biochemist playing God with his "reanimants." Welcome to the abyss indeed.

Dr. Len Helmond turns his family life into a hellish hash and the reader is along for the ride. There's lots of family drama in Orpheus Process, believable on the face of it but Gower's depiction of conflicts strains credibility. Helmond's relationship with wife Janice is somewhat rocky; his teen daughter Ally is going through a Goth phase; his beautiful lab assistant Sharon has the serious hots for him; and his experiments with reanimating animals in a university lab have been gross failures. Then one rhesus monkey, all-too-obviously named Lazarus, comes back seemingly normal...

Laz is so normal in fact Helmond does then what any good scientist would do and takes the creature home to his family. I mean what. His two younger children, seven-year-old Eunice and five-year-old Andy of course love the monkey. But its mind, its incomprehensible little monkey mind, has seen things on the other side that will destroy its sanity, and its body is changing in all kinds of incomprehensible ways due to that fancy violet amniotic fluid Helmond's created. Things take a turn for the worse: Ally is involved in a car accident with her boyfriend; we meet deranged Vietnam vet Cully Detwiler; and Helmond reanimates Osiris (duh!), a chimpanzee. None of this, you can expect, goes well at all. I mean, it all turns to absolute shit. There's even an impossible decapitation!

Little Eunice is killed on Halloween night when Detwiler goes on a maddened shooting rampage at an ice cream shop. Improbably Helmond is able to grab up her bullet-riddled body and toss her in the trunk... then zooms off to his lab to reanimate her. But of course! The rest of the family is away visiting grandma so isn't that convenient? Helmond successfully revives Eunice, the energized solution heals her wounds, and Helmond hopes his wife won't notice anything amiss with her reanimant daughter. This is not to be: Eunice's necromorphosis, however, is not into living death, but into hyperlife. She is becoming a totally new kind of life-form...

In her new state Eunice has gone beyond madness after peering into the reality that lurks beyond death; she out-Goths her sister Ally with her disturbing sketches (She must be watching a lot of horror movies the older sister muses) and Helmond finds the little girl's notebook, filled with mind-chilling philosophy:

I have experienced the unity and tranquility of nothingness, the absolute knowledge of the universal abyss... I have tasted the annihilation of all human feeling... I have been on that darkest of all levels of existence, the complete void of mind and soul... I know that supreme unbearable truth, have seen the agonizing revelation when the thin veil of materiality is pulled back, when the skin of the night is torn open to expose the pulsing primal core of the universe...

Gower doesn't quite seem to realize the enormity of his own creation; a few moments of levity or a better understanding of the horror and taking it even more seriously would've been welcome. When confused, horrified townspeople and police confront Helmond about, well, all the blown-up zombie parts outside his house, his response is "Look folks, it was an accident." That kind of incongruity—and there are plenty—really grates on me as a reader. After Laz the reanimated monkey nearly kills Janice, she says to her husband "You almost killed me, you know?" and he responds "It was an honest mistake." I mean WTF: this is not how humans in extremis talk, think, or behave (an all-too common flaw in the genre). For horror to work, the characters have to react realistically; otherwise it is all just a barrage of nonsense.

But I loved the lair Eunice builds for herself in a graveyard, a necropolis of noxious fog and reassembled corpses beneath the earth:

It was a chapel... dozens of empty caskets arranged like pews, and against the far wall Eunice luxuriated on a throne made of human bones surrounded by an altar constructed of the decomposing parts of a hundred corpses, torn apart and jumbled together in a collage of carnage... "Nothing in the world seems quite alive, but nothing in the world seems really dead, either." 

To emphasize her point, she casually waved the back of her right hand at the mural of twisted, decaying shapes behind her, momentarily infusing them with a violet corposant glow, and several eyeless skulls chattered like novelty teeth while intestinal tendrils flailed around them.

French paperback, accurate cover art

I've still only summarized about half of the events in the novel. The climax is so over-the-top it's proto-bizarro, evoking the nightmarish landscapes of Lovecraft's darkest fantasies, the cosmic nihilism of Ligotti, but with a dour tone that some may find off-putting (his appropriation of Ligottian themes is unsubtle, crude, even banal in places: "Did God fall asleep and have a nightmare?"). Eunice's reanimated monstrosities, demented and deformed, could be out of Barker but are described without his deft touch; ideas about death and resurrection read like Pet Sematary on cheap speed and weed (was Jesus the Nazarene a hypervital reanimant?!); Helmond's weapon of choice when attempting to kill Eunice is played straight by actually belongs in an Evil Dead sequel.

In spite of all the novel's faults, I feel justified in recommending it. There's just something so batshit crazy here, reminding me of that Masterton style of not letting plausibility factor into the storytelling. Ambition is part of it; Gower goes for broke, unleashing a farrago of grotesqueries parading by in an endless loop of madness (you won't forget Janice's midnight walk to find Eunice). As the title implies, elements of Greek tragedy are shoehorned in, as are references to Frankenstein and Repulsion. The final chapter, how could it compete with what's gone before, but I think it kinda worked in a redemptive manner: Her father had been an ingenious, doomed man, and she still loved him in spite of everything...

Gower, who published only one other novel, Harrowgate, also from Abyss, in 1993, now apparently self-publishes science fiction on Amazon with hand-drawn cover art.

Clive Barker's Books of Blood: The Berkley Editions, 1986

June 1986 saw the first American paperback edition of the first volume of Clive Barker's unparalleled short-story collection Books of Blood. Vols. II and III followed later in the year (for those keeping score, August and October respectively). Sure, the covers were adorned with rubbery face-masks but there's no denying the power within, and the sober back-cover copy still delights. These are essential horror reads. As fellow Liverpudlian Ramsey Campbell writes in his intro:  

When it comes to the imagination, the only rules should be one's own instincts, 

and Clive Barker's never falters.

The Nightrunners by Joe R. Lansdale (1987): Head-On Collision Smashing in Your Guts

Everybody remembers their first Joe R. Lansdale story.

Mine was "Night They Missed the Horror Show," which I read in the 1990 anthology Splatterpunks in January 1991 (its first appearance was in 1988's Silver Scream but I must've missed it somehow). To say I was unprepared for this black-hearted tale of Texas high-school hellraisers who inadvertently stumble upon real-life horrors is an understatement. Like a sucker punch to a soft belly or a club to the base of the skull, "Horror Show" leaves you stunned, out of breath, a hurt growing inside you that you know won't be leaving any time soon. Hasn't left me this quarter-century later. I know Lansdale (b. 1951, Gladewater TX) would have it no other way. 

Funny thing was, I craved that feeling. Sought it out. So within a couple months I'd tracked down Lansdale's 1987 novel The Nightrunners (Dark Harvest hardcover 1987, paperback by Tor, March 1989). I recall coming home one afternoon from the bookstore I worked at with my brand-new copy, going into my room, locking the door and then reading it in one white-hot unputdownable session. That had never happened to me before; I usually savored my horror fiction over several late nights. But The Nightrunners wouldn't let go. Lansdale's skill in doling out suspense and the threat/promise of the horrible things to come was unbeatable, evident from the first. He even tells you flat-out, after quoting a newspaper article about victims of a "Rapist Ripper," that "no one knew there was a connection between the two savaged bodies and what was going to happen to Montgomery and Becky Jones." You know you got to keep reading after that! 

The Joneses are a young married couple, living in Galveston, Texas, whose lives are shattered when Becky, a teacher, is raped by young men who were once her students in high school. She is haunted by the event, months later, can't even bear her husband's Montgomery touch. The nightmares are horrific re-enactments, almost as if her rapists are living in her head. Monty is a pacifist professor and he can't deal with how ineffectual the crime makes him feel; it throws his entire life philosophy into doubt. A conscientious objector to the Vietnam war, he worries that it's cowardice, not conviction, that may be his main motivation. Becky is horrified rather than being relieved when Clyde Edson, the teenage scumbag sociopath who led the attack and the only one caught by police, hangs himself in his jail cell: she'd seen his death in a vision. Monty, with his "sociological thinking," and a therapist try to explain it away, a result of her trauma, but Becky knows something worse is waiting. Monty's plan? Take her away to their friends' isolated cabin in the woods. Surely, they'll be safe there!

 Kindle edition, 2011

Honorable, stand-up guy Clyde never named his accomplices, and so they're still out there, tooling around the night streets in a black '66 Chevy, eating up the lonesome Texas highways ("Its lights were gold scalpels ripping apart the delicate womb of night, pushing forward through the viscera and allowing it to heal tightly behind it"), looking for trouble, always first to draw when it shows up. Like a mini-Manson, Clyde drew the disaffected to him, into his poisonous orbit; a crew of violent losers with nothing to lose. His best bud Brian Blackwood, however, is different:  together the two of them fancy themselves Nietzschean "supermen" (or, as Blackwood writes in a journal, "It's sort of like this guy I read about once, this philospher whose name I can't remember, but who said something about becoming a Superman. Not the guy with the cape"), ready, willing, and able to topple civilized society and live by muscle and wit, appetite and anger. AKA rape and murder, of course. And revenge.

1987 Dark Harvest hardcover

Here's where things get strange: one night Brian dreams, dreams of a god shambling up a black alley "and somehow Brian knew the shape was a demon-god and the demon-god was called the God of the Razor." Lansdale shifts from his tale of gritty crime and violence into something surreal and grotesque. It is, in its way, absurdly beautiful.

...tall, with shattered starlight eyes and teeth like thirty-two polished, silver stickpins. He had on a top hat that winked of chrome razor blades molded into a bright hatband. His coat (and Brian was not sure how he knew this, but he did) was the skinned flesh of an ancient Aztec warrior... out of nowhere he popped out a chair made of human leg bones with a seat of woven ribs, hunks of flesh, hanks of hair, and he seated himself, crossed his legs and produced from thin air a dummy and put it on his knee... the face the wood-carved, ridiculously red-cheeked face of Clyde Edson. 

(You can see that the cover artists--Joanie Schwarz and Gary Smith--actually read the book! God how I love that Tor cover) Brian learns that Clyde is possessed by this God of the Razor, and now Clyde is going to inhabit Brian and together they're going to find Becky and, in Clyde's charming parlance, "cut the bitch's heart out." With the God of the Razor there to guide their hand. And if Brian fucks up, there's a razor to be ridden on the Dark Side... forever. Idiot minions in tow as well as a bored teenage couple looking for kicks, Brian/Clyde begin their night run, rumbling through the countryside in that black Chevy, laying waste to any and all who get in their way. No one will be spared.

Woeful cover art for Carrol & Graf 1995 reprint

I haven't mentioned the many characters that inhabit the novel, men and women living the hardscrabble Texas country life Lansdale knows so well, using humor and sex to ease pain and poverty. Some of the folks seem like stereotypes but Lansdale always invests a knowing detail into them. He doesn't belabor characterization, but he knows it hurts the reader more when he hurts characters we care about. The teenagers are irredeemable evil, yes, smart yet deluded or stupid and easily led. Monty continually questions his manhood; Becky struggles to contain her fears and begin a normal life again. Despite the depths of sexual violence that Lansdale plumbs here--and make no mistake, he plumbs deep, disturbingly, humiliatingly deep, and there are moments where you'll want to put the book down and try to shake out an image from your head that he's put there--there is always an element of humanity; he balances his cold steel razor fear with an understanding of people in extreme situations. We can survive, if we fight. And if we can get our hands on a frog gig, all the better.

2013 trade reprint, dig the '70s color scheme

Don't get me wrong: The Nightrunners is not a noble book; it is mean, it is nasty, it is ugly as hell in places and it doesn't flinch, ever. It's also vulgar and crude and clumsy--the less said about a flashback to Monty and Becky's "meet cute" scene the better--obviously the work of a writer not yet in command of his craft. But beneath its exploitative surface beats an energetic heart. In cinematic terms, the novel is kind of a hodge-podge of '70s and '80s horror, thriller, and crime entertainment. Peckinpah's Straw Dogs is the obvious inspiration, I think, but one can also sense young Wes Craven and Sam Raimi nodding approval, while the Coen Brothers hang around in the background. Richard Stark and Elmore Leonard peek in every once in a while too. Going back to the '60s you can sense an AIP "wild youth" vibe when Lansdale describes that rumbling black Chevy and the teenage troublemakers inside.

1992 French edition: Children of the Razor!

Lansdale likes his humor icy black, Texas-corny, and in the direst of situations. While not as effortless as it would be in later novels, his bleak sarcasm and smart-ass attitude is threaded throughout Nightrunners. Doesn't always work; this attitude can seem callous, particularly in the humor the teens find in hurting people. Some readers might find this a turn-off. Still, it's what distinguishes him from a couple other extreme writers of horror from the same era, Jack Ketchum and Richard Laymon. He's not as dour as the former or as dreary as the latter. He's unclassifiable. Joe R. Lansdale is his ownself, as he's always said, and I believe him. You will too. 

In the years since this early novel, Lansdale has become more and more prolific (and even better at this writing thing), moving out of the cult ghetto, winning major awards (2000's The Bottoms took the Best Novel Edgar Award) and having film adaptations made (2002's Bubba Ho-Tep and 2014's indie crime flick Cold in July, based on his 1989 book). His personal Facebook page is filled with his terrific and honest advice about writing and the writing life. I've read quite a few of his '80s and early '90s novels and stories (try The Drive-In from '88, the short story collection By Bizarre Hands from '89, or Mucho Mojo from '94) and enjoyed them, but it is The Nightrunners that has stayed with me best: it is pulp '80s horror fiction at its rawest, nastiest, most unforgiving, most relentless. Behold the God of the Razor... but don't say I didn't warn you.

This post originally appeared on Tor.com in slightly altered form.

The Nest by Gregory A. Douglas (1980): Loathsome, Ornery and Mean

The nicotine-yellow fingertip tapped the paperback cover. "Scary fuckin' book," said the grizzled old bookstore owner, grinning, "scare the shit outta ya!" When I set my stack of horror paperbacks on the counter of that used bookstore in Utah I was not expecting such an encomium about any of them, much less one of the sleazier-looking titles. But nope: this guy was jazzed I'd found a copy of The Nest, a Zebra paperback published in 1980, written by an utterly undistinguished Gregory A. Douglas (actually the pseudonym of one Eli Cantor; more on him later). Don't remember where I first heard of this one, but I'd been searching for it quite awhile. Imagine my surprise when I found out it was totally worth the wait!

Yep--The Nest is powerhouse pulp horror, written with enthusiasm and tasteless know-how, a creepy-crawly scarefest that assaults the reader with one revolting sensation after another. If everyday roaches are disgusting, six-inch-long roaches with mandibles of chewing death are immeasurably more disgusting! A swarm of mutated cockroaches have somehow "organized" themselves by some unknowable miracle of evolution into a thinking organism, each individual creature a cell in the larger mass. Get used to that wave of shivers across your neck and shoulders, because this writer doesn't skimp on the gory details (like how the insects eat through the victim's eyes into the brain!). All-out over-the-top '80s schlock-horror doesn't get much better.

Oddly understated New English Library edition

You can learn the set-up by the front and back cover copy, so I won't get into that. Just know there are plenty of characters that Douglas handles well enough so they each have an identity other than just as roach repast, while the setting itself of fictional Yarkie Island off Cape Cod is depicted as if by someone who's actually been to a Cape Cod town and knows a little of its seafaring history, which adds notes of local color. Happily for the reader, he lays out truly suspenseful scenes of terror and unbelievable tragedy with a professional pulp writer's commitment. I don't know if he was literally getting paid a penny a word, but Douglas sure could stretch a dollar:

Dimly, Bo Leslie saw himself in a mad magician's crate, with sharpened swords slashing his viscera. Or, he was a side of beef on a butcher hook, and cleavers were hacking his carcass into small chunks. The man wanted to curse and howl, but there was no sound except hissing air because his throat was gone. It happened so quickly that the man's body was still shuddering with his orgasm when his final breath issued, a crimson foam out of his decapitated torso... The Yarkie cockroaches, in obedience to commands encoded in their preternatural genes, mounted the new food supply Nature had bounteously furnished again...

You got your town authorities stymied by this surge of Nature at its most nastiest, so they call in Harvard help and big-city scientists show up. Various Yarkies end up victims, and the rag-tag team of heroes can scarcely believe what they're up against, even after seeing it with their own eyes, these swarms of cockroaches that advance like a "living brown carpet" over everything in their path. The creatures' preternatural behavior seems insurmountable; they are piranha-like in their appetite and aggression (and some can even fly!).  

The Nest is a bit of an overwhelming story, emotionally, despite its ridiculousness. Gregory repeatedly notes the character's states of mind, their anger and despair and grief and sadness and fear, but his attempts at humor fall flat and don't lighten the mood. The constant descriptions of the repulsive roaches wears the reader down too, increasing not just horror but hopelessness, which is almost worse. After one particularly unsettling lecture from scientist Hubbard:

When the scientist stopped, the room was silent. Elizabeth and all the men were stunned. Peter Hubbard and Wanda Lindstrom had moved them into a world so alien, ogreish, and alarming that they had no way to formulate their reaction. The ghastliness was in the blood, beyond the reach of words or horror or comradely comfort. A strange, raw wind was blowing up from a biological nether world of phantasmagoric claws, fangs, and mindlessness.

Behind the Douglas pseudonym is Eli Cantor, a man of some erudition--like many pulp writers--so he is easily able to infuse his story with science, history, character detail and motivation, etc. His style is muscular and verbose, which makes The Nest a more effective read than many other pulp-horror paperbacks--because don't get me wrong, this book is definitely pulp, but somehow I can see Mr. Cantor just running hell-for-leather over good taste and restraint with a grin on his face as he pounds out page after page of hellish delight!

For example: a little over halfway through the book, he sets up a harrowing sequence in which children must face the ravening insect hordes; your tolerance for such a scene will depend on how you feel about animals and children being killed in horror fiction. Me, I found it kinda ballsy; maybe he didn't know better; more likely he thought, Fuck it, they want a cheap pulpy horror novel, I'm gonna give 'em one! It's shocking stuff, no matter what.

The boy dropped his own body over his sister's, trying to shield her. The bloodthirsty insects crawled between them, now tearing and ripping at both juvenile bodies. Kim's silken corn hair was ropy with her blood and her brother's. Their empty-socketed eyes stared at each other face to face as  they perished... It was not a field of battle, only a rapine slaughter of innocents, because there had been no way to fight back.

Sure, there are mis-steps: for one, the book is about 100 pages too long! Tightening this baby up would have done wonders, made it a lean and mean machine, and I think readers would agree that much of the scientific speeches/lectures should've been whittled down. Asides spent on character development needed more economic skill, while virtually every attempt at humor is leaden, obvious, and painfully cornball. The conversation isn't exactly scintillating, mostly blocky chunks of wooden exposition and exclamation ("Goshdarn critters!"). So with all this excess verbiage, the narrative drags in spots. Maybe Cantor really was being paid a penny a word! I skimmed some sections if I didn't see the words "roach" or "bloodthirsty" or "vomit."

Cantor's only other horror novel, 1981. Woah.

On the plus side: there are just too many amazing passages in The Nest, purple and ripe and rotting even, for me to quote them all!

Having partaken of human meat and drunk human blood, the new cockroach breed was ravenous for more... they could not get enough of the human taste and would seek it endlessly, implacably, and with many more victories... While she could see out of one eye, Deirdre Laidlaw had to live with the inconceivable sight of great cockroaches coating her husband's face, a vicious, quivering crust of filth...

All that and more (even a well-earned sex scene near the end)! Hoo boy. No doubt, I highly recommend The Nest, despite its length, and because of its delirious lapses in taste and good sense, and a climax which, while straining scientific credibility, makes a bizarre kind of sense. With its well-turned out cover art of moody, moonlit menace, The Nest might appear to be another forgettable piece of Zebra flotsam, another derivative vintage animals-attack bit of trash fiction, but I'm here to tell ya: it'll scare the shit outta ya!

Her horror enclosed the whole space of her life; it came to her that there was another meaning to "the fourth dimension." In addition to time and space there was a dimension of terror, a world of its own, for dying in.

Guy N. Smith Sucks

Well, he doesn't really. But you know what I mean.

I had such high hopes for October - a classic King review, a classic Bradbury review, some vintage pulps and '80s anthologies - but alas, they will not be. Instead, I'll postpone them till after the Halloween party the GF and I are preparing, which is occupying most of my time this month. So for now, enjoy these lurid and lovely Guy N. Smith covers!