Snakes... Why'd It Have to Be Snakes?

 

 

 

 

 

 

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.

Feral by Berton Roueché (1974): Stray Cat Blues

This sleek, efficient little thriller won't let go once it gets its claws in ya! I read Feral (Pocket Books, 1975/Avon reprint, 1983) in one lazy, sunny, mildly hungover afternoon, eagerly eating up every gruesome morsel Berton Roueché was serving. First time I ever heard of it was in King's Danse Macabre, in which he writes it's "one of that select handful [of books] that I have given to people, envying them the experience of the first reading." Indeed. Feral is a soufflé of a suspense/horror novel, barely 125 pages in paperback, offering light, satisfying entertainment with little cause for regret.  It's got some butt-clenching scenes of feline violence, but not too many, although you can still practically feel those claws slashing and razoring your flesh. Ouch.

Boy, do I like horror novels written by people who know how to really write, and don't need to show off. Roueché was a writerly dude, employed by The New Yorker mag for 50 years, also penning medical mysteries, and one of those books inspired early episodes of the hugely popular TV show "House." Huh, whaddya know? His clean, plain, unencumbered prose is disarming, with a natural flow to it that's a pleasure to read, which lends a quiet believability to unbelievable events--even the characters can hardly believe what's happening before them.

Feral also gave me the kind of setting I enjoy more and more in my vintage horror, that of the vacation home in an idyllic locale--here, we're in Amagansett, Long Island (where Roueché himself lived), a little seaside community for the well-to-do. City folks come up for the summer, then head home as autumn arrives. The novel begins a bit like a travelogue as Jack and Amy Bishop buy a 1920s farmhouse near the ocean (but ick! There's a dead cat in the bedroom closet. Bad omen!). Turns out to be a huge mistake. 

Many of those summer vacay-ers ditch new pets on the side of the road before leaving the town, unwilling to bring the animal with them into the city. I know it's pretty difficult to imagine today, but yep. In fact, the otherwise likeable Jack and Amy do the same thing with a kitten they're given, reluctantly, but Jack rationalizes to his wife, "What else can we do? We sure can't take her into town. That would be awful. She's a country cat. She'd die penned up in that apartment." So they drop it off near homes obviously inhabited with families, and hope for the best. We don't see little Sneakers again, but when countless cats are left roadside this way, what else can be expected to happen? They return to their natural state. This action also makes the couple complicit in the horror that's coming.

The next year, Jack and Amy come to like Amagansett and their home so much they decide to stay year-round, to the envy of their friends who have to work in the city (Jack is a science magazine editor). They find a stray dog and name it Sam, and at the vet's are given a guilt-inducing earful by him about vacationers who ditch their pets:

"But you can't exactly blame the cats. I'm more inclined to blame the people that put them there. I mean the folks that come down here for the summer and get a little kitten for the kids, and then when it's time to go back to the city, they dump it off at the side of the road. Sink or swim. And the trouble is, it usually manages to swim. Those people make me really mad." ... Amy gave me an anguished look. I knew how she felt. I felt a little sick myself... We hadn't just dumped Sneakers. Not really. And yet, of course, we had. It was just that we hadn't realized.

But they begin to notice cats around their home, while they're driving down a deserted road at night, then during the day, and not just one or two mangy strays; there are usually three or more, mistaken for dogs at first because of their size, and often seen gorging on dead animals in a field or by the side of the road. Locals begin commenting that no one can find birds to watch on the nature trails, and a stable owner notes he has no rats creeping about his property this season. The first real note of terror happens off-screen, as it were, when Jack and Amy hear of a friend nearby who's bitten by a stray cat she tried to feed and falls seriously ill... then dies several days later. One fall day Jack goes out to cut down a tree for firewood with Sam and:

I sensed a movement... it was a dirty white cat with a missing ear, and it sat watching me from behind a screen of lopped-off branches. There was something odd about its gaze. It was a natural look. It was too steady, too fixed, too tensely concentrated. It held my eye. I stared compulsively back--and saw another cat... the tumble of branches was full of cats. I counted seven. I counted eight of them. I counted eleven crouching cats watching me through the branches....

With his skilled pen, Roueché quietly ratchets up suspense here, and I swear I could sense those yellowy eyes glaring at me too. And Sam is nowhere to be found, so you know that's not gonna turn out well.

1977 Pan Books, UK, retitled The Cats

Jack casts around for help, accessing some scientific literature that's of little use, contacting the police department with the same results. They put him in touch with the dog warden, who doesn't know how to handle cats. He does inform Jack there's no law against shooting 'em, but Jack does not relish this idea. Still, he buys a small-bore shotgun: There was something about a gun. It made a difference. It made all the difference. I wondered what I would do without it. Even the thought of it was a little scary. Jack shoots a few cats but this only scares the others off for awhile, and they return, in larger numbers, their yowling filling the air at night. And then one day it happens: countless cats have flowed out of the woods and essentially have the Bishops trapped in their home. He calls the police for help, and they send one young lone rookie...

Original 1974 hardcover 

The final chapters are filled with a sort of despairing tone as the men of Amagansett fight the crazed animals, whose numbers seem to impossibly increase; one might think of James Herbert's The Rats, from the same year, but Roueché is a much more tasteful and restrained writer (no tawdry sex scenes here!) so the climax has no pulp hysteria, but it's still unsettling because it's matter-of-factly written--as I said, you can still practically feel those slashing claws, writhing bodies, piercing fangs. The subtle implication is that humans are at fault for this nightmare scenario, but the point is not belabored, yet it is obvious. The ending at first seems cliched but I think it speaks more to newfound paranoia than generic trickery.

Feral isn't a forgotten horror masterpiece or anything, but it's a gripping high point of the "animals gone amok" subgenre, and probably better written than any others. You can find copies for cheap and I definitely recommend you do. Set aside a free afternoon for Feral--but put Fluffy away first.

When the Dying Calls: The Cover Art of Tom Hallman

Recently a TMHF reader hipped me to Tom Hallman, an artist I was unfamiliar with by name but several of whose books I've featured here before. Really effective artwork on a lot of these - the old lady's blank orbs and jutting cheekbones on The Dying (1987), a two-faced headphoned horror on Beyond (1980), superb serpent shock on Fangs (1980), a vintage James Herbert Shrine...

Blood Child, Judgment Day (both 1982), and Limbo (1988), not much to say about 'em except they're '80s through and through, scary baby carriage, boobs, creepy kid, and... uh, menacing music box?

A Personal Demon (1985): dark fantasy dorkery? Maybe so, but I kinda dig the flaming pentagram.

Winter Wolves (1989): Hmm... reminds of that Twilight Zone rabbit.

Paperback perennial Robert McCammon's first Pocket Books hardcover was Mine (1990); Hallman's art was used for this 1991 mass market edition as well. Hallman has been very prolific and still produces book covers today, both in and out of genre fiction.

Out of the Cellar

Saul on Fire

 

The Cormorant by Stephen Gregory (1986): Everybody Knows That the Bird is the Word

A novel not much talked about in horror fiction circles but which deserves to be, and  which fortunately is in print and readily available today, The Cormorant (paperback St. Martin's Press, Dec 1988) is a work of relentless obsession, with an ever-spiraling narrative that deepens dangerously right before the reader's eyes. British-born author Stephen Gregory, in his first novel, has produced a work that is beautifully written, daring in execution, and horrific in a literate, intimate way. There's a sense of unavoidable disaster looming over everything that happens - something I always find quite appealing in my horror fiction. I had the book read in two days, beginning it practically the moment I tore it out of its mailing package!

 

The unlikeliness of the drama only adds to its verisimilitude, and Gregory's abilities as a writer give The Cormorant an earthy believability. That title is no metaphor or poetic allusion: the story concerns a man who inherits from his dead uncle an actual cormorant, a coastal bird of prey that is not quite goose, not quite crow, not quite gull. There is chaos and disbelief at first when the bird explodes out of its crate in the dramatic opening pages, honking and rasping, awkwardly spreading its oily wings, reeking of dead sea life and squirting shit all over the family living room. Like other animals that invade our domestic tranquility, this avian has an identity all its own, and isn't afraid of asserting it with ominous authority - no surprise when early on the narrator states the cormorant was a Heathcliff, a Rasputin, a Dracula...

1996 White Wolf reprint, great cover by John Van Fleet

The condition that this city family inherit their late Uncle Ian's Welsh cottage rests upon their caring for his cormorant. While narrator's wife Ann shudders at the cormorant's demonic arrogance, their baby Harry giggles, gurgles bright-eyed, and reaches out for the bizarre bird. And after awhile, the narrator and the bird form a reluctant companionship, even possibly an admiring one, as the bird made an art out of being vile, [and] it was somehow endearing, such candour. He builds an enclosure for his inheritance - named, in a moment of flashing insight, Archie - at the bottom of the garden, and it seems to find him an acceptable part of its environment... Archie was thriving, growing into a sleek and haughty creature.

1980s UK paperback

The narrator must be haunted by an image we see only pages in, even as he and Archie learn to fish together -  a mutually beneficial partnership seen since time immemorial - and the family begins to mold their lives around such an unruly, malodorous beast. Early on the reader learns how Uncle Ian died, ostensibly from a heart attack on his boat, and it was not pretty, not with Archie nearby, cleaning a few soft morsels of flesh from its beak. Slowly author Gregory builds his atmosphere of dank unease, chilly foreshadowing, and grey, shadowy dreams in which the narrator gets only a glimpse of Uncle at family funerals. One night the couple finds little Harry standing in his crib, concentrating on their back yard, oblivious to his astonished parents standing behind him:

Archie too was awake. The cormorant stood in the full silver beams of the moon, head and beak erect, wings outstretched. Utterly motionless. Utterly black. Not a tip of a feather trembled. It was an iron statue, a scarecrow. It was a torn and broken umbrella, a charred skeleton.

St Martin's Press hardcover, 1988

There are many vivid and unsettling scenes of the family (and neighbor)  strife that Archie causes, partly because of his outrageous behavior, partly because Ann resents the narrator's growing eccentricities, partly because baby Harry seems somehow obsessed with the bird. The reader might have the feeling at times that perhaps old Uncle Ian somehow resides within the cantankerous Archie, gaining pleasure from his épater le bourgeois attitude, loutish manners, arrogant squirts of shit out his tailfeathers. Over and over a whiff of Uncle's ugly cigar smoke, a gray man's shadow hanging about, and Harry becoming mesmerized in a creepy way by Archie as he preens in the back yard, by the lights of the Christmas tree, by the flames of the fireplace...

I thought these hints might lead to a moment of revelatory horror; the bird might be a sort of revenant of working-class Uncle Ian, terrorizing this middle-class family for pleasures he never had; or the uncle could even be a spirit that comes to inhabit little Harry. But this ambiguity never clears (which is why I suppose the novel won a literary award, the *clears throat* Somerset Maugham, for best book by a writer under 35). No matter, really; perhaps the horror is heightened this way.

Current Valancourt Press edition

Gregory is a skilled writer (and author of at least two other novels I'd love to read, The Woodwitch and The Blood of Angels), and his depiction of the cormorant's physical nature and appetite is done with a poet's pen and a zoologist's eye. Building his story carefully and grounding it with effective passages about the landscape, the weather, the sea, its tang and its scent and its eternal return, he never lets us forget that  nature is ever-present, bearing down its indifferent powers upon all earth's creatures. An occasional moment of  uncomfortable sexual suggestion will rise to the surface as well, usually between man and wife, but other places too, the connection between man and beast, owner and the owned. The family bath scene alone...!

No, this author isn't afraid of his terrors, which are quietly obsessive, compelling, bewitching, moody, all weaving a spell over the reader without "resorting" to any kind of bloodshed or graphic violence. Chills are applied masterfully; we are drawn along as the narrator is consumed by his fascination with the bird. The Cormorant is wholly an original novel, building to a fiery climax of overwhelming, heart-rending horror. It's so, so pleasurable to let an author take the reins and lead you down a dark and sinister path, a writer fully in control of the experience, taking you to a point you could feel coming the moment you began reading. I guarantee it: readers won't soon forget Archie the beastly cormorant.

Hell Hound by Ken Greenhall (1977): I Wanna Be Your Dog

By appearances, Hell Hound (Zebra Books, Oct 1977) seems to be a cheap, tawdry knockoff thriller, just another nature-gone-amok horror novel in the wake of Jaws, except this one is exploiting an animal near and dear to the human heart. The name Ken Greenhall is familiar to no one, there are no blurbs from famous authors or reviewers, and those eyes, those demonically crimson canine eyes, oh man, that is just the cheesiest, just the worst, appearing stuck in lazily as the cover went to print. So you can't be blamed for thinking Hell Hound is bottom-of-the-barrell Zebra garbage. You'd be wrong though. Hell Hound is a revelation: dog as sociopath (that tagline A thriller of the surreal and the supernatural is just an irrelevant Zebra add-on). In fewer than 200 pages, we get a thoughtful, chilling, penetrating glimpse into the mind of man's so-called best friend. Baxter the bull terrier makes Cujo seem like a clumsy amateur.

First, a behind-the-scenes note: the book was published in the US under Greenhall's name with the title Hell Hound, while in the UK, it was titled Baxter and credited to his pseudonym Jessica Hamilton, under which he'd written the utterly marvelous Elizabeth, out the previous year. I believe both editions were pub'd in Oct '77. Also in the UK it was published in actual hardcover with the subtitle A Novel of Inhuman Evil, and a dustjacket that looks more like a mainstream pop thriller (I don't get the can image - dog food?) than its tacky American drugstore rack paperback. The book is not easy to come by for cheap. However last summer I finally found a used copy on Abebooks, for $3.95 and free shipping, even. It was pure random blind luck, I know that, so don't lose heart, horror fiction fans - be diligent in your book searches!

Now onto the book itself. Greenhall tells this story with the utmost conviction, and that's why you won't be able to put Hell Hound down, even though you'll want it to last and last. What is it about Greenhall’s style that I find irresistible? That I find so true and authentic? Beneath the cadence of Baxter’s thoughts there is the insistent rhythm of madness, the madness of pure unfettered rationality, unencumbered by the human emotional palette. Baxter regards humans with an almost contemptuous wonder:

Pity is not something I want to encourage in myself. It is something for humans to feel, one of the jumble of odd sentiments they burden themselves with. Their emotions are like diseases, I think; diseases that can spread among those who try to understand them. Let their feelings be a mystery, like the dozens of other strange traits they have... The ways in which they deceive themselves are endless.

Fright.com's review - I recommend Z7's review as well, the only reviews I found online - perceptively notes that Hell Hound is akin to such powerful unique novels as JG Ballard's Crash (1973) and Iain Banks's The Wasp Factory (1984). Like those works, the narrative voice is detached but brilliant, its psychological insights deft and razor-sharp, its originality startling.

*spoilers ahead so skip to the bottom* 

One of my favorite things about Hell Hound is how the worst scenarios play out: there are no surprises, only a sense of fate predetermined. In a way the story is tragedy, the seeds sewn within our very natures, beast and man alike. Baxter’s interior monologues gird the novel; every eight or 10 or 12 pages we have one or two pages of his italicized ruminations on the inscrutability of humans and how his life interacts with theirs, among other things. So when we meet Baxter, he is lamenting his exhausted and uninteresting and unbearable first owner, the widow Mrs. Prescott, and showing a keen interest in the young, vibrant, almost erotically-charged couple across the street, and wondering this passage we find on the back cover:

What if...? What if...? The dispassion in Baxter's voice is electrifying. Life in Mrs. Prescott’s perhaps lower middle-class home is a dreary affair. A widow whose daughter’s husband breeds dogs, of which Baxter is one and given to her after her husbands dies, Prescott is distrustful and uptight, withholding of affection, and feels neither one way or the other about the bull terrier: She had never been able to decipher his expressions. He had always looked either impassive or malevolent to her. Baxter is intrigued by his own conflicting feelings about her; the first time he pushes her at the head of the staircase he pulls her back in time using his powerful jaws. He tries to escape to the couple across the street - I need their joy - but of course he is brought right back. Baxter has no choice, and her death seems foretold for her: She had given her affection to another creature: an act she had all her life been convinced was dangerous. Now she knew she had not been wrong to mistrust affection... and as her head hits the floor at the bottom of the stairs: There was a faint aroma of floor polish. She smiled. "I was not wrong," she whispered.

Now Baxter is taken up by the Graftons across the street, after Florence, Mrs. Prescott's bitter, alcoholic daughter with repressed lesbian tendencies (many a character is repressed or a failure or a fool), offers them the creature. Greenhall's economic, precision-point insight into even the human psyche cuts deep and true, as Florence regards the upwardly-mobile John and Nancy as something probably like liberal do-gooders (there is a mildly discernible undercurrent of class satire throughout the novel). Those familiar bitter disappointments that rise from our lives and poison us:
 

Take the beast, she thought, take the people, the houses, the trees. Have as many pregnancies and ideals as you can manage; you won't save any of it. Something or someone will defeat you.

My pleasure increases endlessly... She has learned to feed me fresh, raw meat. She brings me large, mysterious bones, which I crack fiercely, feeling pride and pleasure in the strength of my teeth and jaws.

Once ensconced in the Grafton home, Baxter feels satisfaction and control, and knows the man and woman rely on him. There is order, a place for everyone. And then the inevitable: the woman is changing. Her body is becoming thicker and thicker, and there is an added scent about her that I find unpleasant. It is almost as if she had the scent of two people. Uh-oh. And it all plays out precisely as you think, which makes it all the scarier. The newborn’s mindlessness and many stupidities offend Baxter’s notions of power and weakness, and he resents the parents’ dotage on the offspring, and he now waits for an opportunity to - well, you know. And after Baxter realizes too late, their love has turned to fear.

Baxter is next given to another neighbor family. The son is Carl Fine, a 13-year-old loner who spends time in a bunker-like hideaway he's built in the junkyard. Carl is fond of - wait for it! - Hitler, as well as Eva Braun, their dogs and their final days in a bunker of their own. His idea of flirting with a neighbor girl, Veronica Bartnik, who shows interest in him is to tell her about ol' Adolf and his dog Blondie:

"He had these cyanide capsules he was going to use to kill himself and Eva. But he wasn't sure they would work - he didn't rust the people that gave them to him. So he gave one to Blondie. He watched her die. Then he had her puppies shot."

What a charmer! It's no surprise Baxter and Carl hit it off, and their relationship is a push and pull of authority and understanding. Baxter mates with Veronica's father's hunting spaniel (Mr. Bartnik has his own set of special problems); Carl starts staging junkyard dogfights with Baxter; Carl begins having an intimate relationship with Veronica. When Carl tries to sic Baxter on a 10-year-old boy - which Baxter refuses to do - Baxter sees treachery, a misunderstanding of their relationship, and wonders if the day will come when the respect will no longer be there. I wonder whether he could ever be so foolish. That day will come, spurred by the death of Baxter's offspring and Carl's own growing sociopathy... The final chapters are a masterwork of unmitigated malice, of spiraling doom, of existential purity, even. Greenhall comes full circle with his story and ends it the only honest way: I have a strength and knowledge that they have never known...

This long review doesn't even touch on everything I loved about Hell Hound. Definitely one of the best novels I've read for TMHF, and one that deserves to be much more well-known and not simply as a "cult classic." It's obvious: I cannot recommend it highly enough! It is the kind of “horror” novel that makes you look askance at the genre’s hallmarks - at the flamboyant excesses of blood and gore streaked across the pages and the faces of psychotic killers, of the bizarre monstrosities conjured up, of the contrivances of plot and circumstance, character and dialogue, the elaborate fantasies of evil and demons and gods beyond space and time. Who needs 'em? Not Greenhall; he dispenses with all that and gives us the dispassion of a creature which beggars our belief in good and in compassion. This is horror found in one of our most recognized and beloved animals, one with which countless millions have bonded daily for millennia, one which seems to exist in our world but is more like an utter alien, staying its power till that moment in which we innocently bare our hairless throats to its ivoried jaws, and then revealing what its instinct has been since birth.

I'm Warning You, I'll Put a Knife Right in You

The snarling ferocity on display, while awesome in its paperback pulp horror perfection, perplexes me: why on earth would a creature with such fanged and frightening jaws ever feel a need to pick up a butcher knife?! Is he unaware of his supernatured gift? Perhaps he likes his humans fileted? Reminds me of this idiot creature.