Killer Crabs by Guy N. Smith (1978): Death Comes Clicking

Prolific British pulp-horror writer Guy N. Smith's second novel in his infamous Crabs saga - although the first published in the United States - is a slim and fast-moving account of seriously gigantic, man-eating crabs invading a resort island off Australia's Great Barrier Reef. Now you may not believe me and it may disappoint you to hear it, but Killer Crabs (Signet Dec 1979) is not the outrageously trashy and poorly-written horror novel I'd expected. Yes, it is trashy and yes, there's a lot of bad writing, but at no point did I practically exclaim aloud, "Get the fuck outta here with this shit!" or "You gotta be kidding me!" or some other bit of disbelief. Nope, Killer Crabs is just a run-of-the-mill '70s horror novel in the "giant monster" or "nature running amok" traditions. Pincers sever limbs, entrails are devoured, buildings destroyed, watch out, here they come: Click, click, clickety-click...

I can only imagine these books became "famous" because Smith kept the shtick going over half a dozen novels and a few short stories. Maybe as the years went on he became a better bad writer so as to make reading the books guilty pleasures; the handful of boner lines in this volume are bad, but they're not so bad that they're entertaining. No, they're mostly kind of dull and drab. For your suspect delectation I noted a few of the better lines:

An aura of evil emanated from the crab, a force that was far in excess of its physical atrocities. It was a reincarnation of the Ancient Mariner, compelling an audience.

It was hunting - for human victims!... Once again the giant crabs had proven their supremacy over mankind. This was just the beginning.

She reached down and fondled him, her fingers demonstrating their expertise even on a morning following a night which had seen one of the most terrifying battles in history.

Mercifully he passed out before the razor-sharp incisors which had amputated both his legs found hold on his neck and beheaded him.

1989 Dell Books reprint

Compared to two other pulp horror '70s classics that I enjoyed, Killer Crabs is unremarkable. Unlike The Manitou, which has the utter conviction of Graham Masterton at the helm no matter how ridiculous the story gets, or The Rats, which has James Herbert's colorful, gritty vignettes of everyday English life, Smith's novel just sorta hangs around, going through the motions with a desultory air. The plot is banal simplicity itself, the "characterization" de rigueur: the fearless, seasoned fisherman, the oversexed female with a secret, the ex-con with a secret, the big-game hunter with a secret, the scientist with the hot wife (but of course!). There are a couple cool moments however: a drunk discovers a severed head; various politically-incorrect sex scenes; an exploration of a coral reef cave that houses not the monster crabs but dozens of venomous sea snakes. That was creepy.

 Original UK edition, New English Library, May 1978

Alas, Killer Crabs is not particularly gripping, with no surprise or "what the fuck" moments; it is more by-the-numbers than a cult classic should be. If you can find it for cheap, as I did - the Signet '79 edition is readily available, but the Dell reprint is pricey - pick it up if you like creature horror. Of course, my lack of enthusiasm about the novel will not stop me from picking up more of the series when I can, if only for the cover art alone.

Lair by James Herbert (1979): The Rats, the Rats in the... Trees

More mutant rodent mayhem from one of England's most famous purveyors of pulp horror, James Herbert. In the first sequel to The Rats, his repellent 1974 shocker, Lair is both more of the same and less of the same. Set five years later, the graphic scenes of rats attacking helpless humans are intensified while the aspect that made the first book really uniquely enjoyable - colorful snapshots of the various social classes of England in the 1970s - has mostly been jettisoned.

UK paperback 1979

Rather, we get what I thought were quite boring meetings of various political factions: there are forest keepers and ratcatchers and scientists and law enforcement and commissioners and secretaries and ministers who bicker and fight over 1) whether the detestable, enormous black rats have returned or not, and 2) whether to do anything about the threat, if it exists, at first or not. You know, because it's such a pain in the ass to take precautions against two-foot long voracious rats with razor-sharp fangs and claws who love to burrow into the meat inside human skulls. That's gonna be expensive.

UK hardcover 1979 New English Library

This time, the vermin that have overtaken the enormous wilderness preserve of Epping Forest, 6,000 acres of woodland just outside London, and are better at hiding themselves after an attack. For awhile, many officials remain skeptical of the danger in the woods of Epping. It's all too much like Chief Brody and Hooper trying convince Mayor Vaughn there is a hungry shark in Amity's waters. I find this is a common problem with "creature horror" post Jaws.

1990 Signet reprint

Despite some well-orchestrated scenes of epic rat violence against our fellows - a troop of Boy Scouts, entwined lovers, a faithless vicar, a squad of soldiers - the kind of thing Herbert does so well, I found myself skimming the final chapters, waiting for the twist I expected, but with no emotional investment whatsoever. The second half is one gory attack after another, so much so that they become numbing and inconsequential, grim and meaningless. Herbert throws in ridiculously graphic sex for (what was once known as) the raincoat brigade and adds a love triangle, but not out of any feeling for human relationships: this is simply for the dictates of pulp. Which is fine, but overall Lair is a bleak, callous affair; Herbert doesn't seem to be having any fun. And that, of course, means no fun for the reader - well, at least this reader.

Cutting Edge, edited by Dennis Etchison (1986): You Gotta Be Cruel to Be Kind

The 1980s saw plenty of horror anthologies that sought to broaden the scope of the genre, to encourage its growth both as a literary force as well as a mode of delivering fear as entertainment. Horror fans will well recall anthologies like Dark Forces (1980), The Dark Descent (1987), and Prime Evil (1988) as some of the most prominent and well-respected of their day; in 1986, editor Dennis Etchison presented Cutting Edge, which can stand near and perhaps above some of that heralded class.

Thoughtful and ambitious horror writers wanted their works to become more real, more penetrating, more relevant, and therefore more terrifying, than ever before and Cutting Edge illustrates that effort. The stories Etchison collected subtly explore very adult concerns and are not much for the supernatural; serial killers and car crashes, drug trips and gender confusion, sexual abuse and Vietnam PTSD wend their way through all the stories. When I first read them as a teenager this approach perplexed me a little, but this reread was much more satisfying.

Etchison's longish yet insightful introduction serves as a shorthand lesson in the failures of genre fiction during the modern era: Tolkien, Heinlein, and Lovecraft impersonators who refused to engage with the fracturing world around them. It's obvious he sees this anthology as "explorations of the inscape," bold new writers unwilling to look backwards, who wish to forge unafraid into untamed territory without regard for genre limitations or, indeed, monetary reward. These stories fall through publication cracks: too raw and intense for the mainstream; not supernatural enough, perhaps, for horror fans bred on "haunted houses and fetid graveyards," as Etchison disparages. He is dead serious; there is none of that obnoxious chumminess that mars so many other anthology introductions. It's this dead seriousness that could seem to be pretension; this may be nearly unavoidable when writers try to class up any genre.

1986 Doubleday hardcover

Just what is "cutting edge"? Besides the obvious reference to mutilation and murder, it's about a style of horror that wants to explore human fear and pain without the typical generic conventions. It can be an experiment in language, as in Richard Christian Matheson's unique "Vampire," a two-page story made up of one-word sentences; it can be the extreme sexual dysfunctions of Karl Edward Wagner's "Lacunae" or Roberta Lannes's "Goodbye, Dark Love"; or it can be the detonated bombscape psyche of Vietnam vets in Peter Straub's excellent, sad, disturbing "Blue Rose" and The Forever War author Joe Haldeman's (pic below) "The Monster." Straub's long story deals with the worst kind of child death and its shattering effect on an already distant and emotionally volatile family and is part of a character cycle that includes his novels Koko (1988), Mystery (1990) and The Throat (1993). His prodigious literary skill is part and parcel of this "cutting edge."

In one of the few stories to use a supernatural creature - Clive Barker's "Lost Souls," with his noir-ish detective Harry D'Amour - the demon is dismissed with a curt "Manhattan's seen worse," meaning, the horrors of a modern world belittle otherworldly chaos, not pale before them. Leave it to old grandmaster Robert Bloch (pic below) to feature the Grim Reaper himself in "Reaper," in which an aging man attempts to deny the final disgrace of death. Classic Bloch, but also fitting in here, in that it confronts a man dismayed by growing old and who'll do anything to miss that last and final appointment.


Lots of us are mixed on Ramsey Campbell but I found "The Hands" to be very good, albeit a bit dense. It's a tense, claustrophobic tale of a man who, after stepping into an old church to get out of the rain, is tricked into "a test of perceptions" by a strange woman with a clipboard, always a sign of officialdom. He's given a pamphlet with the most appalling image of violence he had ever seen. With that vision spinning in his head as well as childhood fears of a vengeful deity, he tries to leave but gets lost in a nameless building and stumbles upon horror.

Drugs and sex figure largely in Wagner's "Lacunae," which is unsurprising, as he often wrote of the dangers of both in a way that spoke of real experience and not just a pose. There's a new drug that fills in the gaps of our conscious minds, all those lost moments finally regained, but perhaps we need those gaps to retain sanity, to keep apart dangerous, contradictory aspects of our most intimate selves. A few years after first appearing in Cutting Edge, "Goodbye, Dark Love" by Lannes was collected in Splatterpunks (1990), and for good reason: it's a short but extremely graphic story of a young woman exorcising the abuse she suffered at the hands of her father. Mixing this kind of psychological insight with unflinching sex and violence was splatterpunk's specialty; hoping for a catharsis instead of just the gross-out. I believe Lannes, and her female protagonist, succeeded.


In both "Lapses" and "The Transfer," by Chelsea Quinn Yarbro and Edward Bryant respectively, women try to deal bravely with random moments in life that open up to unexpected violence and our capacity for both committing and enduring it. There is darkest humor, however, in "They're Coming for You" by Les Daniels and "Muzak for Torso Murderers" by Marc Laidlaw. Other stories, by luminaries such as Charles L. Grant, George Clayton Johnson, and original Playboy associate editor Ray Russell, as well as newcomers like W.H. Pugmire and Nicholas Royle, are all worthwhile.

 
Steve Rasnic Tem (pictured) contributes "Little Cruelties," one of my favorites, which "excavates" the everyday hurts that we visit upon loved ones. But a father regrets more and more the pain he's caused, and reflects how anonymous cities have almost bred this carelessness inside us. Tem writes strongly and suggestively, with an affectlessness that heightens the prosaic horror.

The final story, "Pain," is Whitley Strieber's mix of tinfoil-hat crankdom - UFOs, the Vril Society, pagan mythology - with a clear-eyed glimpse into the depths of a different kind of S&M. Waxing rather philosophical about death, "Pain" is one of the best stories in Cutting Edge and the perfect end to the anthology, encapsulating as it does all that has come before it. A writer meets a fetching young woman who knows a thing or two about pain:

I wait as she comes scything down the rows of autumn. Although her call will mark the last stroke of my life, it will also say that my suffering is not particular, and in that there is a kindness. She comes not only for me but for those yet unborn, for the old upon their final beds, and the millions from the harvest of war. She comes for me, but also for you, as in the end for us all.

A Perpetual Halloween: Charles L. Grant's Oxrun Station Paperback Covers

While not as well-known as Lovecraft's Arkham and Innsmouth or King's 'Salem's Lot and Castle Rock, the fictional town of Oxrun Station created by Charles L. Grant was the setting for his many tales of quiet horror and dark fantasy. Beginning in 1979, when The Hour of the Oxrun Dead (1977) was published in paperback, the various editions of the series show an interesting evolution in the marketing of horror fiction. The first three were put out in hardcover by Doubleday, but as ever, it's only the paperbacks I'm interested in.

At the top you can see the Popular Library edition with the requisite comparison to 'Salem's Lot, and with artwork that combines then-popular Gothic and occult imagery as well as the gender-free author attribution "C.L. Grant," thus (I'm assuming) appealing to male and female readers alike.

1987 Tor Books

Throughout the late 1980s, the early Oxrun books were republished in paperback by Tor Books, with cover art by David Mann. These covers are a perpetual Halloween of old-timey scares: pumpkin-orange title fonts, full moons, inky night skies, swirling mists, dead trees, imposing old houses, and graveyards...

The second novel in the series, The Sound of Midnight (1978), we get a young woman on fire - flames were popular post-Audrey Rose - and another reference to a bestselling King novel. Now Charles gets his first name on the cover!

1979 Popular Library

1987 Tor Books

The ever-present King blurb now on a Nancy Drew-ish cover for The Last Call of Mourning (1979). I like the Tor edition, with a woman looking - expectantly? - out into the night and the growing fog...

1980 Fawcett Popular Library

1988 Tor Books

The Grave (1981) is a reductionist horror title if I ever heard one! Note the name on the tombstone of the Tor edition.

1981 Popular Library

1988 Tor Books

Now I dig this '82 cover for The Bloodwind: demonic face hovering over a quaint little town, quite a common image for horror paperbacks. The Tor edition is kinda cool as well, hinting at children gone missing into a creepy... well, bloodwind, I guess. Way to keep it literal!

1982 Fawcett Popular Library

1989 Tor Books

From my research it seems that Nightmare Seasons (1982) was the first Oxrun title that Tor published, though it was the sixth in series; we can assume this was the beginning of that stylized cover art. This one is actually a collection of several novellas set in Oxrun Station. The next book was The Orchard (1986), also a collection of novellas, which I read last year and reviewed here.

1983 Tor Books

And we start to move out of the vintage horror era with the two last books in the series, Tor's Dialing the Wind (1989) and The Black Carousel (1994), the latter boasting of Grant's "X-Files" novelizations. Can anyone explain why his middle initial would be excised?

These final three titles seem like a treat: Grant haunted his fictional town with the Universal Monsters! These first came out in hardcover from long-time specialty genre publisher Donald M. Grant, and then in paperback by Berkley Books. None are without a King blurb, of course. The artwork is a little on the nose for my tastes, perhaps, and Dracula doesn't look scary at all (is there perhaps a copyright on Lugosi's image?). They are: The Soft Whisper of the Dead (1982/1987), The Dark Cry of the Moon (1986/1987) and The Long Night of the Grave (1986/1988). A perpetual Halloween indeed!

The Tenant by Roland Topor (1964): Personality Crisis

The Tenant by French artist Roland Topor is the first foreign-language work I've reviewed for Too Much Horror Fiction. And while I wouldn't necessarily call it a straight horror novel, I think its quiet, creepy coldness would hold some interest for many horror-fiction fans. After all, the cover blurb sells it as A novel of nightmare evil... I have the 1976 movie tie-in from Bantam Books; I used all my Google-fu to find the original American paperback, but to no avail. The copyright page states that Bantam published it originally in 1967. Ah well.

New English Library edition

Trelkovsky is an anonymous young Parisian man who is put upon by everything; despite trying to stand up for himself he seems a hapless, perpetual victim: absurdity was an essential part of him. It was probably the most basic element of his personality. After finagling with a landlord to let him stay in a recently vacated apartment for just under the asking price - a superhuman feat for someone as fearful as Trelkovsky - he learns of the horrible suicide attempt by Simone Choule, the woman who lived in the room previously. After leaping from the apartment window and crashing through a glass roof below, Simone is now laid up in the hospital, completely bandaged, gravely injured, except for one staring eye and a wounded, screaming mouth.

Topor (1938 - 1997)

Then Trelkovsky embarks on an awkward romance with Stella, the woman's younger friend. But his new neighbors seem to be irritated beyond belief by Trelkovsky, unjustifiably so, always banging on his walls and ceiling for him to be quiet when he makes the slightest sound. Trelkovsky slowly begins to fear he is at the center of a diabolical plot orchestrated by the other tenants in the building. He wakes one morning to find one of his teeth is missing and, on another, that women's makeup has been applied to his face...

Original US hardcover from Doubleday, 1966

At a slim 130-some pages it's a day's read (although I highly recommend reading it alone in your dark room of an evening). It's a tale told in unadorned language - or is that just the translation? - that is deceptively simple. Taking the great themes of classic world literature, it distills them down to novella-length and presents them in the form of a psychological horror/mystery with flashes of bizarre surrealism (Topor was part of the Panic Movement). There's alienation, humiliation and embarrassment, pervasive loneliness and the struggle to reach out, feelings of worthlessness and spite, of indignity and pride, of being trapped in a tightening noose of unavoidable social obligation, awash in suspicion and paranoia.

He caught a glimpse of his own reflection in a shop window. He was no different. Identical, exactly the same likeness as that of the monsters. He belonged to their species, but for some unknown reason he had been banished form their company. They had no confidence in him. All they wanted from him was obedience to their incongruous rules and their ridiculous laws, ridiculous only to him, because he could never fathom their intricacy and their subtlety.

So it's Dostoevsky, Kafka, Camus, Poe, and more all thrown together into a hell of a puzzle of an identity crisis. That should make you feel better after reading all those cheap paperbacks with bloody fangs and foil-stamped titles on the cover. And if it doesn't, here's Isabelle Adjani from Roman Polanski's film adaptation.

Ahh, now that's much better.

Books of Blood, Vol. 4 by Clive Barker (1985): The Inhuman Condition

When the final three volumes of Clive Barker's Books of Blood were published in the United States, they were each retitled for a (seemingly random) story in the collection, and so Vol. IV became The Inhuman Condition. I assume it was because a different publisher, Poseidon Press, had the rights to those books and wanted to put them out in fancy little hardcover editions; no more of those déclassé paperbacks that cluttered up spinning metal racks at the local drugstore (although I'm sure that's still exactly where the above 1987 Pocket Books - art by Jim Warren - edition ended up).

No, it was high time for Barker to step up to the bestseller world of Stephen King, Anne Rice, and Peter Straub, get him into the all-important literary and fantasy book clubs of the day. This was how he became not just another acclaimed paperback horror writer with a King-size blurb, but a brand-name author with huge publisher promotions behind him and TV and radio appearances - which Barker, not unaware of the origin of his name, took to like a natural.

Poseidon Press hardcover, 1986

I well recall the excitement I felt when I saw Barker's latest was in hardcover; the intent to build prestige for him worked on me and I started to really see him as a serious writer - or more importantly, that other people saw him as a serious writer. And the stories themselves are a solid, inventive, original bunch that more than justified the hardcover and the wider-spread readership that would bring. Right after this would come his major bestselling novels The Damnation Game (1986) and Weaveworld (1987).

With hints of Hellraiser, Weaveworld and The Great and Secret Show (1990), the title story is an enigma ultimately about, of all things, evolution. A puzzling cord of knots stolen from a vagrant mesmerizes a young criminal; their unloosening begets raw-fleshed monsters. Classic Barkerian moment: when the first of the monsters hides in shadowed trees, the criminal says to it, "Show yourself... I'm not afraid. I want to know what you are." The playful and absurd "The Body Politic" is referenced on the dust-jacket for both editions of Condition: human hands take up arms against their oppressors and cleave themselves to freedom, scuttling in the darkness like errant crabs, eager to be away with their leader. Neat imagery - the fires escape [was] solid with hands, like aphids clustered on the stalk of a flower - and a cool twist ending; a good example of the author's more lighthearted weirdness.

Barker's own painting is featured on the paperback from his UK publisher Sphere; this happy fellow is obviously from "The Age of Desire," in which an experimental aphrodisiac maddens and arouses at once; no nook or cranny or cop is safe from this man's advances. This was one of Barker's tales that I read with glee in high school, passing it along to a couple other friends who bothered to read at all. Barker's repertoire has always included an unflinching and perverse sexuality but his approach is more Georges Bataille than the juvenile or mainstream t-n'-a that one usually finds in horror fiction.

It was a new kind of life he was living, and the thought, though frightening, exulted him. Not once did it occur to his spinning, eroticized brain that this new kind of life would, in time, demand a new kind of death.

Rather an odd one in the entire Books of Blood, "Down, Satan!" is a story only a few pages long, no dialogue, no characterization really. This one is more like a fable, a fable of Gregorius, a sickeningly wealthy man who has lost his faith and is determined to meet the Dark Prince face-to-face, and has built a suitable palace of horrors for just such a happening. Surely the Devil could not resist such a roost to call his own, hopes Gregorius. For God was rotting in Paradise, and Satan in the Abyss, and who was to stop him?

Set in the hinterlands of Texas, "Revelations" reveals the prosaic banality of the afterlife: no cosmic justice, just the shades of a murderess and her husband the victim who, on the anniversary of death, return to the scene of her crime. But that motel room is now occupied by an evangelist obsessed with (the comic-book terrors, fit to scare children with) St. John the Divine, and his suffering wife. In Clive Barker's imaginings, arousal extends into eternity...

2001 Pocket Books trade paperback

Barker's writing here shows much growth from earlier volumes of Blood; there is a more assured quality overall, his sentences are elegant, crackling with dry humor, and his tone is ironic, poetic, knowing. Characters witness strange and beautiful horrors that no metaphor can contain, or they are horrified to learn that a trite sentiment such as Give me your heart can become literal in a deadly flash. Barker upends horror tropes and brings new ones to the genre and demands readers keep up with his ideas. I say happily that The Inhuman Condition is an integral part of what made Clive Barker one of the premier horror writers of the '80s and '90s.

You never can tell what Barker's been smoking.

The Wolfen by Whitley Strieber (1978): Werewolf? There Wolf!

How does it feel to be ripped to pieces: will there be desperate agony or will some mechanism of the brain provide relief?

Total coincidence, but here's yet another novel that works in both the crime and the horror genres. Less well-known than its loose 1981 film adaptation with Albert Finney, Whitley Strieber's The Wolfen is a mainstream thriller through and through but with a strong evocation of, and rational explanation for, vampire and werewolf myths throughout history. The Wolfen are a superior species of wolf-like creatures who have till now hidden themselves from civilization. While certainly not evil by any means, the ferocity and intelligence with which they dispatch of their human victims lends them a malevolent yet fascinating nobility and grace.

Avon 1988 reprint

The police procedural aspects are in full effect from the start: detective partners George Wilson and Becky Neff are total opposites, a veritable Felix and Oscar of the police force who are much resented by their superiors; Wilson is an aging lazy slob with a real attitude problem, and Becky - well, Becky's a woman. And for mid-1970s New York City cops, that's practically a crime itself. Even Wilson seems to resent her, when he's not falling for her. The novel begins with two hapless police officers finding themselves face-to-face with the terrifying Wolfen in a city impound lot, and then torn apart before they can barely reach their weapons. The grisly attack baffles and sickens the police force, and Wilson and Neff get down to the exhausting business of tracking the killer. Of course they have no idea what they're up against.

Strieber

At a loss, Wilson and Neff enlist Ferguson, a zoologist from the Museum of Natural History; he does some serious research based on the clues they've given him and realizes these creatures were the impetus for the werewolf legend. More primitive people, coming into contact with the Wolfen, couldn't believe that animals so smart weren't part human... Ferguson begins to respect the Wolfen, and thinks he can communicate with them peacefully. You know how that's gonna go.

Now, if you can believe that these super-wolves can exist alongside mankind and yet not leave behind any trace of themselves, you're probably really gonna love The Wolfen. In fact I had a bit of a hard time suspending disbelief at first, but Strieber is skilled and convincing in presenting a fairly believable pack of intelligent and cooperative creatures and their thought processes. What makes the novel unique is this depiction of their furtive lives on the fringes of human society. There are some terrifically suspenseful moments when Wilson and Neff inadvertently come close to the Wolfen's lair in an abandoned building. Lots of police department and city politics may detract from the eerie fact that the two cops are now being stalked through the city by these "monsters," and high-rise apartment buildings are no protection. These animals know that the two humans are aware of them and it angers them. When the Wolfen ambush on Neff and Wilson fails, they go after Dr. Evans, the medical examiner to whom the cops revealed their suspicions:

Then they were on him, pulling and tearing, ripping full of rage, spitting the bloody bits out , angry that the two important ones had been missed, angry that this one also dared confront them with his evil knowledge. They had cracked open the head and plunged their claws into the brains, plunged and torn to utterly and completely destroy the filthy knowledge.

The paperback at the top (Bantam 1981) seems like the movie tie-in edition, while this bland and amateurish cover, the first-edition paperback (my copy, Bantam July 1979) basically meant the publisher was trying to appeal to the widest possible audience, people who wouldn't buy one of those down-market trashy-looking horror novels with their lurid paperback cover art. The Wolfen simply don't go after screaming blonde ladies as the pupils of those stupid cut-out eyes insist. That said, the book should still find a pretty wide audience because it is definitely a gripping, suspenseful, scary read; I found it compulsively readable. Strieber's first novel has a good balance between pulpy creature horror and investigative police procedural, between awe and wonder at the predatory perfection of the Wolfen and the stark inescapable fear their kind will always engender in that weaker and stupider species, mankind.