The Totem by David Morrell (1979): Run from the Hills, Run for Your Lives

Chosen as an entry for Horror: 100 Best Books by none other than notorious gore-king Shaun Hutson, the nature thriller The Totem is the third novel from David Morrell, and his first in the horror genre. Morrell isn't a huge figure in modern horror fiction - although he wrote one of my favorite horror stories ever, "Orange is for Anguish, Blue for Insanity" - but he created one of the '80s hugest and most recognizable pop-culture fictional figures, one John Rambo, the protagonist of his 1971 debut title, First Blood. Although I've never read that, I know you can dig this first edition paperback of it:

The Totem is another one of those books that was edited down greatly from its original manuscript form, then republished years later (in this case, 1995) with all edits restored. I read the 1985 Ballantine books paperback (seen below; at top is the first paperback, Fawcett Crest August 1980 with cover art by Richard Courtney, thanks to Secondhand Horror) so I don't know first hand what was "missing," and don't think the book needed much more than it had: it's a dour, no-nonsense, single-minded tale that grimly presents flawed and frightened men trying to forget past failures as they confront... well, somethings from the hilly wilds just above a small Wyoming town, something making mincemeat, and more, of innocent citizens. There is disease running through the veins of these somethings, a new kind of rabies - but it brings the same old kind of death.

Opening with a cinematic and suspenseful scene in a working-man's bar, The Totem wastes no time introducing us to Potter's Field, that small Wyoming town residing beneath a gorgeous mountain range. The usual cast of characters show up: the police chief, Slaughter, newish in town from back east; the old coroner, Markle, who'll be dispatched promptly; the younger medical examiner, Accum, who'll replace him, but who hides a hideous secret; Parsons, the wily, oily mayor/newspaper publisher; Dunlap, the alcoholic journalist returning to town after disgrace; and various other cops and love interest and town-folk and their children. Potter's Field comes complete with its own dark past: once in the early '70s a caravan of back-to-nature types, under the aegis of rich and eccentric Quiller, took to the unforgiving mountains to live in their own compound. But: They didn't know what every six-year-old around here knows instinctively. You try to take on nature. It'll kill you.

Morrell, in this version of the book, has made what might be a reduction of prose and character and motivation from his original manuscript that might take some getting used to; he has a habit of referring to people simply as "he" or "she" and even "it" when describing the monstrous and possibly inhuman creatures. His prose also has that weird mix of clarity and obscurity favored, I feel, by writers influenced by Hemingway. But none of this affects the power of scenes dealing with Dunlap's drinking, Slaughter's guilt about something that happened to him back in Detroit, or especially a terrifying and saddening scenario with a little boy beset by disease. The account of Accum's moment of weakness years before is deftly and quickly told, but leaves a real chill. Action scenes come thick and fast, but that's where Morrell's talents are (you can see that element highlighted in the '90s reprint below).

The Totem isn't truly original - time and again I was reminded of other books and movies (Rabid, Raw Meat, 'Salem's Lot, even Morrell's own First Blood). The climax is underwritten but believably chaotic and satisfyingly weird - evolutionary atavisms and ancient religious iconography figure in. It's a gripping read, mostly, even in this apparently "edited" version, and while I don't agree with Hutson that it is one of horror's 100 best novels, The Totem definitely deserves to be tracked down and read.

The Woodwitch by Stephen Gregory (1988): There's Fever in the Funkhouse Now

Well, there's nothing for it: another vintage horror novel read in 2017 that promised much but delivered little. Despite the endless reservoir of talent that Stephen Gregory shows with his ability to craft a tasty line of prose or pinpoint an indelicate bit of human psychology, The Woodwitch (St Martin's Press paperback/Nov 1989) is a frustratingly narrow story, insular to the point of absolute zero, and disagreeably disgusting. Gregory's first novel, 1986's The Cormorant, was a doom-laden, penetrating work of deep obsession. Woodwitch is that too, but less as well. Sure, there are lots of quoted encomiums printed front and back, accurate, sure, but what they leave out is that the book is mostly a grimy slog of a read. 

Our protagonist is uber-clueless buffoon Andrew Pinkney, guilty of the worst kind of turd-human behavior: smacking his date in the head for laughing at his limp penis. And that's it: that's the impetus for this shortish novel about a man's spiraling descent into madness (and where it stops, nobody know—er I mean you can probably guess). I suppose for many men that would be plenty enough reason, penile humiliation is the worst thing ever of course, but reading a whole book about it? Whew. I mean there's no room to breathe, and every breath one can draw is poisoned by enough rot and maggoty decay as to test any reader's tolerance.

The tale begins in a Welsh forest with Andrew traipsing about with his dog, a small collie called Phoebe. Phoebe is his only companion, an eager, bright, sometimes willful dog (but I just described a dog, didn't I, any dog); together they discover a badger corpse in the woods. Of course Andrew picks it up and takes it back to the cottage they're staying in and hangs it in the work shed. "You're perfect," he says to it as it drips maggots. Of course. Next, a jog back to the beginning so we can get a full dose of the square courtship between Andrew and his solicitor colleague Jennifer, a severe older woman, an amateur artist and naturalist who, on their romantic walks together, likes to point out various flora and fauna in their Latin scientific names. Hot stuff! No, it's rather charming.

Finally they get down to it, miserably, and Andrew fails at being a man, because that's what a man is of course ("Was that it?" the woman asked. That was it. "Heavens! What a lot of fuss about nothing!") and she sees his failure and begins to laugh. And Andrew simply punches her right in the mouth. Horrified at what he's done, Andrew calls cops and an ambulance; Jennifer is whisked away (no damage which a little dentistry could not repair), while their boss vouches for Andrew's good name and behavior so he is not charged. Boss suggests time off for both, which angers Jennifer, but Andrew takes him up on the offer of using the boss's holiday cottage so "then he could come back whenever he liked, refreshed and wholly recovered from the shock he had had." Well I am certainly glad of that, imagine how awful and oppressive and traumatizing it must be to have to punch a woman in the mouth, you totally need a vacay after that shit.

1989 UK paperback

As for Jennifer, who knows, she disappears from this madness. She will only continue to exist as a fantasy in Andrew's mind... because he's got this great idea about how to win her back. Her fascination with flora and fauna has subtly influenced his own behavior. How about a little joke at his expense, to show her he's not such a bad guy? He'll give her the gift of fungus! He'll grow it himself out of a blooming animal carcass. And not just any fungus, but the stinkhorn, or Phallus impudicus, a wretched-smelling thing sticking six inches up out of the earth, oozing oil-green and viscous black... the forest's unashamed caricature of the human phallus, at which the ancient peoples of the mountains had marveled for century after century... the object of their wonder and witchcraft, a totem, a thing to be prized and loathed and feared... What a great idea! Send her one of those, ha-ha, see I'm a fella can laugh at himself!

You won't believe how much mileage Gregory gets from describing the lewd, dripping stinkhorn fungus, the busy little maggots burrowing inside the badger and (later, after a trip to the grim seaside) the swan corpses, the damp, suffocating weather. It's overwhelming, it's disgusting (not in any moral sense, but literally so) and ultimately: boring. As. Hell. Even when Gregory turns an apt phrase about one of these aspects, the reaction is "Oh, well done," not "Holy shit, the implications of this for the character's mental state is now clearer and scarier!" Just page after page of this obsession, All there was in the world, in the entire universe, was the man and his dog, enveloped by the night. Sure, there are creepy sheep about, staring at them through the dense overgrowth, sheep that haunt Andrew's dreams like marauding women...

1989 US hardcover

Things get more interesting when Andrews meets a teenage brother and sister who live on a nearby farm caring for the sheep and kennel with hounds for fox-hunting. They mock him to his face in Welsh, but the girl, Shan, calls him "Pinkie" and seems amenable to conversation. They have a few pints in a woodsy lodge bar, something seems off. The novel's best sequence takes place on Halloween night, a party at this hotel bar, and the drunken, hallucinatory chaos which ensues. Told prior by Shan that folks would be in costume, Andrew bedecks himself in the weakest, lamest excuse for a vampire outfit ever, then with Phoebe at his side he trods in his wellies through the woods to the bar. Shan is flirty, her brother moody, the crowd oddly desultory. Phoebe becomes pathetically sick, distressing and angering the other drinkers and the barkeep asks them to leave. This leads to a bizarre attempt at a tryst with young Shan back at Pinkie's cabin, encrusted in dirt and soot, enticing Andrew on; there's wine, drunkeness, mockery, humiliation, even animal cruelty, I mean really. You can imagine the outcome of this seduction.

In the firelight, it looked as though some disgusting torture had been practised on the girl and was about to be resumed, for her body, skeletal and black, appeared to have been burned, branded and charred by the naked man who once again loomed over her

2015 Valancourt Books trade paperback

This whole sequence is very unsettling, I mean even the fungus gets a voice: In its effortlessness, its arrogance, its brazen lewdness, the stinkhorn sneered at him and said, "Look at me, Andrew Pinkney, and compare your flaccid maggot of a cock with mine!" The story continues on, I put the book down for weeks, ugh, same thing, then when it all wraps up there's hardly a surprise. Sure, with novels of obsession (Campbell's Face That Must Die, Tessier's Rapture, McDowell's Toplin, Koja's Cipher) that's often the case. I guess this time I was just exhausted by the literalness.

Once I read a rock critic who said something like the double-entendre lyrics of AC/DC were so obvious they were single entendres. That's the issue here too: Gregory is so on-the-nose with the symbolism of the fungus it's not even symbolism any longer; his conceit takes away any work on the reader's part: In Wales, Andrew Pinkney, having failed dismally in his last attempt to rear a home-grown erection, could sit back and enjoy these surrogates as he relaxed beside the fire. The sexual psychology here is all too obvious. This book isn't truly terrible, it has its moments like many horror novels I've overall disliked, but wow is it a bleak, dismal, dreary read with little payoff. I still recommend The Cormorant, but The Woodwitch left me unsatisfied. Traipse this dank darkness at your own peril.

Somewhere in the gloom, it seemed that something had crawled away to die and now was being dismantled by the silently working teeth of the maggots. The smell arose like a vapour exhaled by the earth itself, and then it was gone again, as if Andrew had imagined it, as though the stink were conjured in the darkest recesses of his own mind, to appear and disappear like a memory.

Nightlife by Brian Hodge (1991): Tonight in Jungleland

Another novel that I loved when I first read it and have been looking forward to rereading for this blog is Brian Hodge's Nightlife (May 1991), the second title from the Dell/Abyss line of paperback originals (which had begun with Kathe Koja's The Cipher). At the time, I'd never read anything by Hodge, but I was sufficiently impressed by the goals set by Dell for this supposedly new style of horror - one of more psychological realism and fewer supernatural cliches - that I bought it almost immediately upon publication. Nightlife was Hodge's third novel and it did mine a rather new landscape for horror: the South American rain forest and its psychoactive plants , which the native tribes use as part of their ritualistic communions with hekura, the demon-spirit underworld.

Hodge imagines a monstrous mind- and body-altering entheogenic drug stolen by a drug kingpin from a primitive and violent Venezuelan tribe, the Yanomamo, who've kept it from modern civilization for ages. It doesn't just cause hallucinations; it melds bodies into flesh-and-bone animal hybrids, which is why the tribe who cultivated the drug are the most feared in the jungle. An ambitious drug dealer dubs it "skullflush" and launches into the "city-soft bodies" (as the back cover puts it) of the denizens of Florida's, er, nightlife. But then one young male native, Kerebawa, trained in civilization's ways and language by a doomed missionary who was actually converted to the Yanomamo's beliefs, comes to Tampa to retrieve it before it can wreak its demonic havoc on us American pussies who never engage our, you know, spirit animals.

Pan UK paperback 1993

Now, this kind of human transformation is in one sense familiar horror territory: Jekyll and Hyde and werewolves reside near one another on this mythic map, but Hodge goes Schultes instead of Stevenson; it's more Chagnon than Chaney Jr, Huxley more than Henry Hull. You can tell Hodge did his anthropological research, if at times a little too obviously since incorporating facts about the infamous Yanomamo tribe is tricky in a narrative. The flights of infinite metaphorical fantasy when characters snort the drug seem underwritten, or rather perhaps too earnest and literal - people seeing to the edge of the cosmos or getting in touch with their own personal demon-animal inside them, that sort of thing; peering into the broken places and seeing what a modern world cannot heal.

Like a lot of splatterpunk stories - which this novel definitely is not - Hodge is concerned with the betrayers and the betrayed and the wounds his characters carry around like a totem. But I could only take so many "soulful" and "desperate" confrontations between Justin and April, the new lovers on the run from the skullflush-addicted drug dealer, and ruminations upon "what went wrong" in the past. Tightening this baby up by 50 or 75 pages I think would not have hurt at all.

Hodge's next two novels, Deathgrip (1992) and The Darker Saints (1993), were also published by Dell. I know I read and enjoyed them but can't recall much, but I always remembered Hodge fondly. For years I wondered what he had been in up to as I never saw any of his books again; once I was able to find info about him on the internet it turns out he began writing crime novels around 2000. Rereading Nightlife, that now makes sense: it's not scary at all, there is the detailed drug trade and narco cops, the attendant thugs and bodyguards with quirky tastes befitting more educated men, the last-ditch machinations of losers trying to get their lives back together, and then there's Kerebewa, that resourceful Yanomamo warrior. I don't think Hodge ever actually met a Yanomamo warrior, but Kerebewa's culture-clash moments and his loyalty are at once corny and endearing.

Current ebook

These aspects seems more like something you'd find in a Elmore Leonard, Carl Hiaasen, or Donald Westlake crime novel than in horror fiction. I'm not saying Hodge is anywhere near as good as those guys - god, who is? - just that today I can see who his inspirations probably were. His action set pieces are maybe overdone but I think he should get points for the set-ups, and the whiz-bang climax is good. And I found a 1990 interview from just before Nightlife was published, and I had one of those "oh shit" flashbacks: I recalled that I'd read this same interview back in the day and read my first Hiaasen novel because of Hodge's recommendation. I knew I remembered Hodge fondly for a reason.