Even Clive Barker Would Flinch: The Horror Paperbacks of Gene Lazuta

Late '80s and early '90s horror writer Gene Lazuta was born on this date in 1959. Lazuta wrote several paperback originals under pseudonyms (as well as a mystery series), but did not continue his career as a horror author; indeed, you can see his professional bio here. While the cover art is striking and in keeping with totemic pulp horror imagery—drippy typeface, fangs, skulls, hands crawling out of eyes—I haven't read any of these titles, and I don't think I've seen any in the wild when I'm out haunting used bookstores, so I can't tell you whether Barker would actually flinch or not! Bloodshot Books reprinted 1992's Vyrmin in 2016.

 

 

The Fawcett Gold Medal Paperbacks of Robert Arthur Smith

British horror novelist Robert Arthur Smith, born on this date in 1944, produced these paperback originals between 1977 and 1991. He lives in Toronto today but other than that I could find out no real biographical info about him. I own copies of The Prey and Vampire Notes but have not read them; the latter book notes "by the author of The Leopard" but I could find no cover image for that title. The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction says Vampire Notes is "an unusually intricate take on Vampire topoi" and I thought "topoi" was a typo of "topics" till I looked it up and learned it is the plural of a new-to-me, and quite relevant, word! Weird, don't know how that escaped me all these years...

Feast by Graham Masterton (1988): Stay Hungry

Published as a Pinnacle paperback original in 1988 with some fanfuckingtastic cover/stepback art by comic book artist Bob Larkin, Feast is today one of the more sought-after books of its era, usually going for close to $100, alas. Graham Masterton, an author who churned out—who still churns out!—reliably gruesome and fast-paced horror novels, presents a tale about a cult of enormous proportions, and a man and his teenage son who become mixed up in it. I was able to find a copy online four or five years ago for only a few dollars—diligence and patience is the key in collecting these vintage horror paperbacks—in very good condition. It's a sturdy one too, the spine held up and didn't crack while I read it. O huzzah!

Charlie and Martin are father and teen son and not, as their names would suggest, two late-middle-aged men, eating in a palate-displeasing restaurant when the novel begins. Charlie, the father, is a 40-year-old divorced restaurant reviewer for a traveling salesman guidebook, and let me tell you, Masterton really gets his digs in when it comes to subpar cookery and presentation; I think it's personal. Martin, 15, is along for the roadtrip, but he's been living with his mother and estranged from Charlie, so said roadtrip has not been a roaring success. It's about to get worse, though, a whole lot worse than just a gloppy sauce on dried-out schnitzel.

 All my friends are gonna be there too

While dining in The Iron Kettle, a dire New England restaurant with dismal food, their waitress casually mentions a rival spot called Le Reposoir. But Kettle proprietress Mrs. Foss  takes much offense—"Don't you even whisper that name! Don't even breathe it!" Le Reposoir is actually the headquarters of a religious/mystical organization known as The Célèstines, or The Heavenly People. It's "a secret eating society," Charlie is told, made up of folks who eat what "they're not supposed to." Uh-oh. And they don't let in just anybody.

Run by our villains, the refined M. and Mme. Musette, this "dinner club" is in a Gothic-y old house out of an Edward Gorey illustration, a place spoken of with distaste and barely-disguised fear. In this town of Allen's Corner, teens have been going missing, and while people suspect the Musettes and their various hangers-on and acolytes having something to do with it, there are no hard facts for the police to investigate.

Intrigued, fascinated despite himself (and in a fit of pique because he may not be allowed in), Charlie and Martin find this disreputable restaurant and are promptly rebuffed at the gated entrance by M. Musette himself—who already knows who Charlie is: "We are a very exclusive society, and I am afraid that the presence of a restaurant reviewer would not by our membership with any particular warmth." Father and son go back to their hotel. After a desultory meal alone in the dining room, Charlie finds himself in the dimly-lit hotel lounge being chatted up by a woman named Velma, who is exactly the kind of woman you expect to find in dimly-lit hotel lounges:

She sat down and crossed her legs. Her shiny black dress rode high on her thighs. He recognized her scent: Calvin Klein's "Obsession." She blew smoke over him but he wasn't sure he particularly minded. The top three buttons of her blouse were unfastened and Charlie could see a very deep cleavage indeed. White breasts with a single beckoning mole between them.

After a night of torrid porno foreshadowing action with Velma—recall that Masterton wrote popular paperback sex guides in the 1970s!—Charlie returns to his room and finds Martin... gone. And no one he enlists to help him, neither desk clerk nor manager, neither maitre d' nor waiter, have any memory of seeing a teenage boy with Charlie. Two useless deputies arrive and one tells him that perhaps his son was "only riding along with you inside of your mind." Being a restaurant critic is exhausting work, maybe you overtaxed your brain and imagined your son with you, sure, it happens! Charlie suspects that he knows someplace where there'll be answers... and heads back to Le Reposoir.

Storming into the building, Charlie learns much: not just about his son, but about the believers themselves. As the beautiful yet near-fingerless Mme. Musette explains, in the most rational of tones, how the Célèstines came to believe that true communion with God could only be consummated by the eating of human flesh and the drinking of human blood... one's own, and others' freely given. Dig:

"Did not Jesus say 'Take, eat, this is My body.' And did he not say 'Drink, for this is the blood of My covenant.' The whole essence of Christianity is concerned with the sharing of flesh and blood. Not murderously, of course, but voluntarily—the devoted giving of one's body for the greater glory of all..."

 

That's right: people are eating themselves to get closer to God! In a twist everyone saw coming, Charles finds Martin holed up in the Célèstine compound and wants nothing more than to self-sacrifice himself and become one of the auto-cannibals. Even more disturbing, they are convinced the Second Coming is at hand, and Martin is an essential component to bringing it about. Convinced he's been brainwashed or worse, Charlie is hellbent on getting his estranged son out of the clutches of these crazies. He even begins to blame himself, surmising that these fanatics have appeal for young people because their parents' way of life holds no appeal... "I mean, what have we given our children that has any spiritual value whatsoever?" Masterton is trading on the '70s phenomenon of Manson, Jesus freaks, and teenage runaways, perhaps a bit of stale sociology by the late '80s when kids were besotted with MTV and home video games.

To get Martin out, Charlie enlists the help of Robyn Harris, a smart, capable, oh yes and beautiful, hot-to-trot local reporter. Events conspire, gruesome and graphic, that put the two on an escape route out of Allen's Corners, which includes a delightful reference to an Elliott Gould movie. Although the two lovebirds get in some quality banging while on the run and get to take a leisurely walk around lovely New Orleans, ground zero for the Célèstines, Charlie may have to commit the ultimate sacrifice himself to save his beloved son.

Writing with more control and restraint than one would think in a book about a cannibal cult, Masterton's traditional over-the-top approach has been corralled into a sleeker format. I've read some reviews and comments on Feast about it being "bonkers" and "outrageous" but I did not find it so; scenes of ritual self-destruction and consumption are depicted with clean, austere, I guess you'd say a spiritual precision. I was reminded of the films Dead Ringers and, especially, Martyrs:

A young naked girl was... sawing through her own arm at the elbow. Her eyes were fixed and wild-looking. Her teeth were clenched on a rubber wedge to prevent her from biting her tongue. She had cut through the skin and muscle of her forearm with a surgical scalpel, and now she was rasping her way through the bones, radius, and ulna—bone dust mushing white into her bright leaking blood.

Sphere UK paperback, Aug 1989

Masterton is as always more than adept at keeping his story and characters trucking right along, always introducing a new threat or character or situation at the right moment—he's a pulp pro, and you'll enjoy the various skirmishes, confrontations, and well-described American settings (yet American characters still speak in British). But he never tries to scare you or present you with an eerie chill; all the "horror" here is (mostly) limited to scenes of cannibalism, or more accurately, self-cannibalism. What's more, this is a novel featuring skeletons on its cover and cannibalism inside, but is not exactly, I feel, a horror novel. Hear me out. 

Thriller from Tor looks almost like a horror paperback

Feast reads more like a paranoid suspense thriller (a genre in which he's written many novels) about a religious cult that's taken the Eucharist to its literal end. There is an ostensible kidnapping, fugitives on the run, a worldwide conspiracy angle competently executed but that's about all: Masterton's blocky explanations, his usual awkward dialogue, and exposition without any sense of humor or irony, actually undermine his setup, clever though it is. I wanted, like one of the cult acolytes, more.

Ira Levin would've used this scenario as comment on, say, faddish food trends, or cult-like psychologies, or the young generation's desire to escape their parents' hypocrisies and failures... but would have given us some real creeps and scares included in the recipe. And who can forget The Happy Man, the Eric Higgs novel that is surely the apex of '80s cannibal horror fiction that understands the bones beneath this flesh.

German paperback, 1988

If Masterton had acknowledged the absurdity of his cult creation I think the fear quotient would've been great: what's scarier than something ridiculous that's dangerous (there's a psycho "dwarf" stomping around who hearkens back to Masterton's ludicrously horrific monstrosities in minor form)? And what about the ultimate irony (a delicious irony, one could even say), a restaurant getting back at a food critic by kidnapping his son and getting him to believe that cannibalizing himself is the ultimate act of achieving godhood?! Masterton moves so fast, as is his M.O., that he doesn't let himself ponder this concept.

I wish he had engaged with the satire/parody of religion, Christianity, and doomsday cults that seems to suggest itself from the start. Unfortunately, for this reader, he leaves all that untouched, which gives the book a half-baked feeling in its scenes about the beliefs and behaviors of the cult. Masterton plays it straight, almost too straight, po-faced and literal. The twist at the end comes from a misreading of Célèstines scripture, something Charlie alone figures out, but Masterton implies no larger irony in that. Which is fine, I guess, because everything still works as it is. The climax is fiery, explosive, satisfying... but there is of course more to come after. I'm not sure how much I was into that.

Severn House UK hardcover, 1988

Oh, one biblographic fact that may help in your search for this work: Feast is the American title; in the UK it's known as Ritual, a distinction I feel is not much of a difference. I myself prefer this glorious Feast edition, not least because of that Larkin cover art and the presence of ITC Benguiat typeface, the premier horror typeface of the '80s. Either way, it might not be the tastiest Masterton treat you'll ever eat, but if you can find an inexpensive copy, dig right in.

Koko by Peter Straub (1988): Born Down in a Dead Man's Town

In a way the Vietnam War was an Eighties war, much as we revisited it in that decade and as its after-effects began to be confronted in our most popular culture. After 1975, people weren't eager to talk about it; the wound still fresh, the stitches still in place. Of course there had been books and movies in the previous decade, like The Deer Hunter and Dispatches, Going After Cacciato and Coming Home, but an Eighties character such as Rambo (and even a performer like Bruce Springsteen from that era) more embodied a perfect wish fulfillment fantasy for the decade of excess, as the damaged national psyche transformed itself into oiled, striated, male musculature pushed to the limit of human endurance. We're back, baby! Nothing's gonna stop us now.

Peter Straub's entry into this cultural reckoning of the conflict was his ambitious 1988 novel Koko (Signet Books paperback, July 1989, cover by Robert Korn). One of the most ubiquitous of all 1980s paperback novels found in many a used bookstore's horror section, Koko's cover art of primary colors and thick, high-contrast spine has captured my eye for years. It wasn't ever very high on my to-read list, however, as I knew it was more mainstream thriller and that it dealt with Vietnam, which was not my thing at all when I was in my early twenties (despite the fact that I was devouring films like the aforementioned Deer Hunter and Apocalypse Now, but that was because they happened to be great '70s movies, not because they were about Vietnam). How glad I am that I finally took the leap and read it!

 

 Straub in 1988

Straub's book is about four men, Vietnam vets who served together, on a journey, circling around a secret, a secret unknowable and unimaginable, a secret that may not even have happened: a Schrodinger's cat event of battletime horror. Michael Poole, Harry Beevers, Tina Pumo, Conor Linklater: a children's doctor whose marriage is breaking up, an asshole lawyer, a NYC restaurateur in over his head, an unambitious carpenter. In shades of Straub's horror breakthrough Ghost Story (1979), these men live their lives around a horrible event; in this case, something that happened in a cave in the Vietnamese village of Ia Thuc during the war, akin to the real-life My Lai massacre. Koko opens with a powerful, resonant, emotional scene of the men reuniting after more than a decade in Washington DC to visit the Vietnam Memorial:

For Poole, the actual country of Vietnam was now just another place... its history and culture had briefly, disastrously intersected ours. But the actual country of Vietnam was not Vietnam; that was here, in these American names and faces.

 

Having learned of a serial killer named Koko in southeast Asia who may be one of their fellow vets from their old combat unit, the four men begin an international search: Beevers, Poole, and Linklater travel to Asia to track him down; Pumo remains in New York and deals with the demons of restaurant management and a one-night stand that goes horribly wrong. Visiting Singapore and Bangkok, the three men begin searching for answers no one can give them, carousing East Asian bars and whorehouses, being taken to secret shows in dingy basements where humans are killed for expensive thrills, plumbing their own natures in that Heart of Darkness manner. These colorful travelogue sequences are interspersed with scenes from the war, and we meet the other soldiers in their unit: Manuel Dengler, Tim Underhill, Victor Spitalny... who is Koko? What is Koko? Fortunate reader, you will learn.

In the eerie and violent chapters featuring the title character, Koko's psychic state reminds me very much of Francis Dollarhyde in Red Dragon: the cunning, the mania, the grandiosity, the sick poetry of it, and this bit about "the nearness of ultimate things." It's a dead-eyed glare, an interiorized fantasy world so powerful that he must remake the real world in trauma. While Straub does not trade in the same forensic ingenuity as that Thomas Harris title, the madnesses of men and its origins are kindred: "God's hand hung in the air, pointing at him."

By far my favorite sequence—in a novel filled with great sequences—is a trip to Milwaukee to track down Spitalny's and Dengler's families. This visit to a sad, broken, gloomy town to speak with sad, broken, gloomy people is a glimpse into a part of America that isn't a beacon of shining hope: these are people with petty approaches to life, who exile themselves from the main street of life and gloat over past pain, who never seem to grow out of the small-minded provincialites, who cripple themselves and indulge in the small sick sadistic voice that whispers of their inadequacy and vanity. Small-town America, as horror reminds us over and over and over, is rife with the evil of banality.

One of the criticisms/complaints I hear against Straub is that he is long-winded, pretentious, ponderous, boring. I mean, I guess I can see that. He writes big books and he's not just writing scary ones; he's after bigger prey. So yes, Straub, for all his expansive depiction of human nature in its deeps and valleys, also often obscures certain details from the reader, leaving them to ponder if they missed a sentence or phrase or snatch of dialogue somewhere along the line. No, that's not it: Straub uses implication, a shaded eye, to keep some aspects of the narrative in doubt. And indeed, the central trauma at the center—that village massacre involving these men when they were young soldiers—is open to interpretation.

What I'm saying is: Straub doesn't always tell you everything you need to know. Is this a literary pretense? Is it lazy writing? Or is it because the truth, for all we venerate it, is unknowable, unfixed, changeable through the stories we tell? Not for nothing has Straub created a character who has written the short stories Straub has already written ("Blue Rose" and "The Juniper Tree") and published. Meta-fiction has been hot for a long time now, authors winking at us from inside the pages of their own work, but Straub's version is not whimsical, ironic, jokey, or cute; it simply is. We write our stories every day; this is as commonplace an idea as the fact that sometimes an author doesn't even know what his story is about. So let's keep things interesting by keeping some things in the dark. But illumination can come from an unexpected source: as one character thinks to himself while reading a paperback novel called The Dead Zone during his travels: "Improbability and violence overflowed flowed from everyday life, and Stephen King seemed to know that." That's good stuff.

To readers who like their horror graphic and nasty, I'd say there's nothing here for you; this is not that kind of novel. To readers who like to step off into a larger landscape of human tragedy, Koko is recommended. Straub is not trying to scare the reader; there are no attempts at jump scares or spine chills. These fears dissipate in the morning light. "The nearness of ultimate things" he notes again and again, an existential mantra that implies a whole host of misery and revelation: those are frightening things in and of themselves.

 

 

This is the kind of full-on novel that takes up a lot of space in your head; this review has touched on only a portion of what it offers. Straub's fine and thoughtful prose, rich vein of humanity, eye and ear for marital discord, and ability to launch widescreen emotional horrors of deep, profound impact, will satisfy the discerning reader. For such a thick tome (600 pages), the story moves along weightlessly, fleet-footed yet penetrating, disturbing but empathetic, never bogged down in useless detail or dialogue, everything in its right place. The climax is in another unlit cavern in a modern American city, where everything meets one final time, where "eternity happened all at once, backwards and forward."

Reviews found online range from "masterpiece" to "meh," but I can tell from some of those "meh"s that the readers were expecting a giant feast of guttural horror—which Koko surely is not. Two volumes follow in a very loose trilogy: Mystery (1990) and The Throat (1993), and I know little about either, but I've added them to my must-read list. Koko might not be a perfect novel—perhaps its sights are sometimes beyond its reach—which is not even something that needs to be said, but for the adventurous horror fan who doesn't mind the occasional foray into non-supernatural madness, a huge armored tank of a book that looks into one of America's darker eras... Koko is singing a song you'll want to hear.

Couldn't believe Straub himself retweeted me...!

Twins by Bari Wood & John Geasland (1977): I Against I

In the old country, they say twins are cursed... 

not one person, yet less than two...

 that's what they say. 

But we believe in escaping curses, don't we?... 

Two such fine boys... 

you want them to grow up to be individuals; 

husbands, fathers, menschen... 

separate them now, as much as possible

—or they won't grow up...

Several years before her wonderful novel The Tribe, Bari Wood wrote a different book about a small band of outsiders who form an insiders' bond for the sake of survival in an uncomprehending world. With medical writer Jack Geasland, she gave us Twins (Signet, May 1978), a deft and sure-handed shocker that became the basis for David Cronenberg's masterpiece 1988 movie Dead Ringers. Forget what you know about that film,  because Cronenberg used only the very basic concept: two men, twin gynecologists and their symbiotic relationship and gradual self-destruction (based, again loosely, on a true story). A horror-adjacent thriller, its penetrating portrait of these two (?) men will appeal to anyone who appreciates a deep dive into the genetic swamp and its attendant creep factor.

What makes Twins such a gripping read is the authors' expert plumbing of the labyrinthine psychological, emotional, and sexual underpinnings of the Ross brothers, David and Michael. Born in New York City in what is probably the late 1940s, the twins experience a blooming adolescence with the usual signposts of Jewish youth of the era: summer camp in the Catskills, tentative discussions with sympathetic dad about college and career, fumbling sexual encounters with promiscuous girls ("You're just little babies, ain't you?"), and being weirded out by old Jewish men who make frightening prophetic pronouncements to young boys, as in the quote at top. There's also the little matter of David and Michael being entirely too close: "When David guided Michael's hand inside his pajamas, Michael stroked David the way he wanted him to."  

Anyone who reads 1970s and '80s horror/thriller paperbacks is aware of their unsettling prevalence of incest, and in Twins we have the dreaded twincest. Generally I grit my teeth and plow through this kind of thing, but in Twins, the Rosses are so emotionally and psychologically twined together that their physical intimacy is a foregone conclusion: the scene I just quoted from is on pages 30-31, and it's hinted at on the back cover above: more-than-brotherly love.
 

Pan Books UK, 1978, cover artist unknown

The authors use subtle clues to the similar-yet-different natures of Michael and David, yet it is still apparent that David is the dominant brother and Michael the more sensitive—yet it is Michael who wants to live a life free of his lineage. It is Michael to whom that old man speaks; it is David who never though their identities "were a curse"; and it is David who sabotages Michael's attempts at attending a different medical school while Michael is ill. While in their early 20s, their relationships with women are, to put it mildly, rather sleazy, and the two very good-looking brothers develop an unsavory reputation for fucking... Everybody and anybody.

When Kathy Field, the girlfriend of a medical colleague piques Michael's interest, David is wary: "Still thinking about the shiksa? Anders' girlfriend could mean trouble for us, Michael..." But Kathy is fascinated by the twins, how could men look like that? and when Michael asks her out despite her boyfriend and despite David, she is delighted. Thus begins a romantic relationship between Kathy and Michael, and David can't stand the thought of his brother being alone with a woman (neither has ever been alone with a woman—that's their kink, being with women together or as couples). What's David do? Starts a homosexual relationship (David was impressed with the neatness of the experience) with another doctor, Romer, who wants David to go to Boston with him and open a practice. You can't stay with your brother your whole life, Romer tells him...

All this I've described is simply the beginning. There is a lot to unpack in Twins, which is what I really enjoyed about the book—the twisting betrayals, the complex interplay of David's possessive instinct, Michael's growing anxiety and his use and abuse of drugs and alcohol. The sexual aspect isn't erotic but it is a very strong undercurrent in the lives of everyone involved. Twins is an adult novel, which I found refreshing: there are hospital politics, medical discoveries, an awareness of class and sophistication and religion in the characters' lives, in how they speak and interact and navigate the wealthy New York and Boston worlds. We are shown that these are ambitious, intelligent, emotional people.

At one point, Michael becomes obsessed with the quietness of the cancer ward, and even begins an affair with one of the dying women. It is heartbreaking. Wood and Geasland get inside these complicated people in that smooth mainstream manner that is a balm to my often pulp-horror-addled brain. At one point David and Romer are staying at a Cape Ann beach home, and David muses at what a perfect gentile vacation spot it is, and recalls his father's words about how "gentiles are a different breed, the goyim never enjoy themselves unless they're uncomfortable... It'll be the same way with women, with your patients..."

French edition, 1990, cover by Marc Demoulin

So then Twins is not exactly a horror novel, but there is suspense and dread, for we know what is going to happen to these men. Kathy leaves Michael, who spirals into drug abuse, and it's hinted that David is orchestrating his brother's downfall. These men were doomed from the womb, a tragedy neither could have avoided but one tried and failed. Wood and Geasland have written a satisfying psychological thriller that I recommend to those who enjoyed The Tribe, the Cronenberg film adaptation, and also to fans of the chilly Neiderman novel Pin. If you can get past the utter squickiness of David and Michael's relationship, as I did because of the exceptional skill the authors used in telling their twisted story, you'll find Twins, in the parlance of the day, unputdownable.

Me reading Twins at Wallowa Lake

Carnosaur by Harry Adam Knight (1984): Bang a Gong Get It On

I can't imagine it'd surprise you to learn that I was a pretty mean dinosaur fanatic when I was a kid in the 1970s. Visits to the local library were never complete without a stack of books on these fantastic creatures. Most of these titles were from the '50s and '60s and out of date by the time I was reading them, illustrated by timid little black-and-white pencil sketches of tail-dragging creatures, but I still recall with great fondness two from that actual decade:

A family trip to New York's American Museum of Natural History when I was in second or third grade allowed me to see the immense fossils in person. Relatives would ask me to name the various dinos, which I could rattle off pretty easily (I could also do the same with classic monster movies thanks to the infamous Crestwood series). There was this early '70s model kit. Lots of plastic toys. Factor in the original King Kong, movies like The Land that Time Forgot, oh and especially the bottom-of-the-barrel TV movie The Last Dinosaur, with a drunk Richard Boone battling a Tyrannosaurus and other baddies in a land at the center of the earth. Or how about the actual Journey to the Center of the Earth? Or The Lost World? And who can forget Bradbury's "A Sound of Thunder"? So. Yeah. Dinosaurs.

 

In 1993 I went to see Spielberg's adaptation of Jurassic Park twice the weekend it opened and was well rewarded: yep, that's the stuff I've been wanting to see since I was a kid. I even went to the mall afterwards and bought the T. Rex, the toy I had dreamed of all my childhood (just the right size have battled an alien or eaten a rebel!) and proudly displayed it in all my homes for over 20 years. All of this brings me to...

Harry Adam Knight was a pseudonym used for a small handful of pulp novels by John Brosnan (sometimes with the assist of Leroy Kettle), a prolific Australian author who also wrote nonfiction genre studies. A fleet-footed, old-fashioned thriller with plenty of gore, in the tradition of James Herbert, Carnosaur (Star Books, June 1984 UK/Bart Books, Feb 1989 US) is as solid a trashy paperback horror novel as one could want. Knight ticks all the boxes and doesn't muck about with the unnecessaries. This is pulp horror done right: mean, nasty, brutish, and short. Sometimes every character is so glum and rude you kinda think, Jeez, doesn't anyone have a nice polite word to say? Everyone's all Johnny Rotten all the time. Kill the lot of 'em. Unpleasant, ungrateful, folk fodder for the dinosaur. Right... now.

Our tale begins at 2:17 a.m. sharp when a poultry farmer is woken by his wife ("fat lazy cow" he thinks. See what I mean? What a turd) because their chickens are squawking up a ruckus. Of course, you're reading a book called Carnosaur so you know what's about to happen when Rudie McRuderson goes out to investigate. And it does. Then the action switches to two teens doing it in the backseat and it's more of the same, with some class-consciousness woven in as British pulp fiction seems to always do: "She'd been flattered to have been picked up by someone who was so upper-class. Well, sort of upper class."

Daytime: David Pascal is a late 20s guy working as a "journalist" at a newspaper that's barely a newspaper in the small English town of Warchester, "where nothing exciting ever happened." He's just dumped his wonderful girlfriend, a coworker named Jenny, because of his dreams of leaving for a job on a Fleet Street scandal rag. Who knows when that'll happen since those papers keep ignoring his applications. So here Pascal is, still working on a paper that's practically a local business flyer and having awkward moments with Jenny in the office. But you're reading a book called Carnosaur, so you know that Warchester is gonna offer up something soon that Fleet Street dared never dream.

Sir Darren Penward (erroneously referred to as "Sir Penward" throughout the novel) is Warchester's wealthy eccentric, the big-game hunter with his own personal zoo on his vast estate, filled with exotic and dangerous animals—including his ravenous nympho wife, Lady Jane. But again, you're reading a book called Carnosaur, and you know that Warchester will soon be under siege by animals much more exotic and dangerous than *yawn* tigers and panthers. The police begin their investigation, and "Sir Penward" blames the attacks on an escaped Siberian tiger. Pascal suspects a cover-up, and along with a reluctant Jenny, begins some investigation of his own. This leads him into the clutches of Lady Jane (aka Lady Fang, and looking "like something out of The Story of O"), well-known amongst the locals for her penchant of seducing younger men while her husband tends to his menagerie. Pascal realizes he can use her to get inside the zoo to peek around. That can't be a bad idea, can it?

Pascal has a confrontation with Penward in which all is revealed about how these extinct monsters are suddenly alive again: the painstaking genetic process that the obsessed Penward explains almost like a Bond villain, which leaves Pascal muttering, "Incredible. Chickens into dinosaurs." Brosnan's science when it comes to dinos sounds pretty spot-on to me from what I recall of more modern paleontology books, and the distinction between dinosaurs—terrestrial prehistoric creatures—and other ancient reptiles will prove more important than anyone but an actual scientist could imagine. But you're reading a book called Carnosaur so that shouldn't surprise you. I don't need to rehash the rest: Brosnan does nothing new with the plot—but that's entirely beside the point. This baby zips along with a confident rhythm and pacing precisely because the author doesn't try to add new twists or turns to his narrative (indeed I could have done with less "You've got to believe me, dinosaurs are in the streets, there's no time to explain!" but that is to quibble). Pulp is, in essence, comfort reading.

Brosnan, 1947-2005

Okay, okay, I'm getting to it: the "carno" part of the title. Well, gentle reader, you won't be disappointed. The residents of Warchester—the ones still alive—woke up to a world that was vastly different to the one they'd gone to sleep in. Brosnan serves up the grue that satisfies. Behold: Tarbosaurus, a T. Rex in everything but name, wreaks delightful havoc wherever it goes; Deinonychus, with its scythe-clawed foot that it uses like a prehistoric exponent of Kung-Fu, guts hapless farmers and other locals from neck to groin; and a plesiosaur joins a boating party that none of the invitees will soon forget: After a long, stunned silence a man's voice said, with an edge of hysteria to it, "Well, you've got to say one thing for good old Dickie; he sure throws a hell of a party..." Brosnan doesn't quite take it to ridiculous Dinosaur Attacks! levels, but pulp fans should still have plenty to chew on. Sex, violence, nerdy dino facts: Carnosaur has it all.

Above I mentioned Jurassic Park, and I can't leave this review without mentioning that Carnosaur features many facets that would become famous, indeed iconic, when Spielberg adapted Crichton's 1990 bestseller: chase scenes, close calls, and especially the scientific basis of resurrecting dinos are all first seen in this novel (itself adapted into a post-JP cheapie by Roger Corman). While I've never had much interest in Crichton's fiction, after reading this I feel I need to see if Crichton really did read a book called Carnosaur... or if it's simply a case of a great idea whose time had, like the dinosaurs, come again.

Eternities Lost to Darkness

I had never heard of Emergence (Avon Books, July 1981) when I found it in a bookstore a few months back, but I recognized the cover art as by the hand of Don Brautigam and bought it solely for that. Author Robert D. San Souci was an award-winning children's writer; he died in a sad accident just a few years ago. I held out some hope for the book because of his reputation, and while this work of Native American vengeance is told with lots of local New Mexico color and characterization, the mythological/horror elements don't have quite the power implied. I was more than halfway through when I realized nothing was happening.

Skipping ahead to the final chapters reveal an epic apocalyptic climax that is somehow muted, albeit a touch creepy. Just not enough of a touch. Emergence really could have been a work of overwhelming ancient horror, I really am fascinated by goddesses of death and destruction and the scholarly pursuit thereof, but San Souci couldn't quite twist the knife where it counts.

Despite a knowing depiction of teenage homosexuality and punk rock house parties, The Lake (Avon Books, Aug 1989, cover art by Jim Warren) is a YA novel—something about the back-cover typeface style screams it—and folks that is just not my jam. It was John Peyton Cooke's first novel, and he eventually moved on to crime writing. Again, it's not terrible: he writes clear, more than competent prose, but the witch story was one-dimensional and simplistic and could not keep my engagement very long. First few chapters were fine, teenage relationships are believable, but I absolutely have no interest in middle-school dialogue or shenanigans.

That said, other horror readers more sympathetic to this style might dig The Lake. Points for its nicely self-aware moments ("You tell me, you're the one that reads all those Stephen King novels") and especially the punk party held in a suburban home while the parents are away, man that really took me back. Too bad about the puke on that Clash t-shirt, now that's a collector's item.