THE SLIME BEAST by Guy N. Smith (1976)

Guy N. Smith is a hack writer mostly known for his Crabs series. And when one says hack writer in conjunction with Guy Smith, it means precisely that: the guy hacks his stories out of the typewriter with the panache of the proverbial 1000 blind monkeys trying to compose a Shakespearean sonnet. Fear not. He won’t do it, even if the monkeys succeed.

Truth to tell, Mr. Smith writes to recipe: select a monster on the rampage (it needn’t be an original one), add a loony scientist, a hunk hero, a sex interest dumb girl, mix in some violence, a lot of gore and a modicum of sex, shake it up in short sentences composing short chapters and you’ll have a short fun book to read.

And that is also the recipe for the book at hand. The Slime Beast is how the dimwits that pass for the heroes of this short novel treat the smelly abomination they’ve found buried beneath the bogs of the Wash, in the Eastern Coast of Britain.

Well, these dimwits are Professor Lowson, who doesn’t do much but shuffle papers and books on his quarters, and lit a pipe every time he’s described as an archaeologist; Gavin Royle, the hunky Assistant-curator of the British Museum, who doesn’t do nothing much but look the hero, utter short sentences and profess anti-science views, and, of course, lusting over Liz Beck, the professor’s niece (yeap, you read it right, it is that clichéd) who doesn’t do much but sex up the story, allowing Gavin to ejaculate his seed over her thighs as a contraceptive method, and serve as the target for two rape attempts, one of them by the entire village of Sutton (don’t get your hopes high, it sounds more fun than it reads).

Now, please consider that these three form the entire expedition that tries to uncover the location of King John’s lost treasure, and you’ll have the full extent of how ludicrous the story gets. True to Susan Sontag’s purported structure of the 50’s science fiction movies (read, please, Sontag’s Against Interpretation, 1962), this “expedition” accidentally bop into a strange reptilian creature of unknown origin, buried in the mud flats, and quickly all hell breaks loose. It has to be said that it only happens because our dimwit heroes seem not to share a whole brain between them, managing to do the silliest things all the time (like leaving the creature where they find it, never informing the authorities even after it had started killing people, and not even after the whole village of Sutton tries to kill them on the counts that they had awakened the spirit intended to protect the treasure. Yes, they are all dimwits in this book.

Of particular interest to our purposes, there are two staples of the damsel in distress pulp genre narrative in use here: first, the expedition to the uncharted wilderness. Well, maybe we can’t refer to the eastern coast of England as uncharted, but the way Smith describes it, it works as an embodiment of the lost or primitive world’s savage village, where the natives can not be trusted. We find it in every Tarzan movie, as well as in The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974), The Hills Have Eyes (1977), Wrong Turn (2002) or any other adventure movie you can think of. In fact, observe how Smith describes it: “The rows of cottages and houses were reminders of a past era, of primitiveness, and poverty. Even in this affluent age they had not move with the times. That was the way these people of the Wash wanted it” (p.76).

The operating concepts here are “primitiveness”, “poverty” and “will”(to remain so). That’s what makes them dangerous, even when the monster is killing them one by one. It dates back to the Roman Empire, when an edict from Adrian forbid the rural inhabitants of entering Rome, on account of noisiness, uncleanness and improper behaviour. Obviously, it is the age old riff between primitive and civilized, rural and urban, archaic and modern. Primitiveness bellies a proximity to animals, a closeness to nature, an identity between the animal in man and the self. It speaks of implied bestiality.

And, if the creature doesn’t lust after Liz (as so many Bug Eyed Monsters did in the old pulp covers), the villagers surely do. They are almost as dangerous to our heroes as the beast. When they try to kill them one night, they are eager to rape Liz en masse. And when Mallard Glover, the hermit wildfowler and an unexpected local ally is entrusted with taking care of Liz, he can’t resist his animal instincts, and tries to rape her as well, while she sleeps.

“She was lying on top of the sleeping bag eyes closed, asleep. There were a couple of buttons on her blouse undone. She wasn’t even wearing a bra. He leaned forward in order to obtain a better view. Now he could see a nipple”. I must confess I am a big fan of this kind of scene where the heroine is defenceless in her sleep, being watched, undressed, groped. It speaks of a second level of exploration: also the female body is uncharted territory, daring to be braved, mapped, explored. And, just like the primitive territories that are exploited by civilized capitalism, it can be either admired, enjoyed or raped. It echoes the main theme of the expedition, of the savage in us.

And the sleeping female, the sleeping beauty, can only be awakened by a sweet kiss (as in the fairy tale) or by ravaging, like Anne Rice’s take on it in her The Claiming of Sleeping Beauty. The innocence of sleep can be spoiled by the outside world. And this is the second staple I’ve mentioned before, the unconscious female, standing for nature against nurture.

I'll get back to this theme later.

THE GLASS BOOKS OF THE DREAM EATERS by Gordon Dahlquist

I cannot recommend strongly enough this wonderful book by Mr. Gordon Dahlquist. If it has all the ingredients to please the fans of several literary genres from steampunk to dark fantasy, its first chapter - Temple - is a tour de force in successfully adopting the tone of a Victorian novel.

The eponymous character, Miss Temple, is a young wealthy lady of 25 ("too old to be single") who, when receiving a letter from her fiancee ending their relationship, is determined to follow him in order to learn the dreaded reason why. It is not clear if she feels more afraid of finding out that the culprit was another woman (one can always slap her) or just the fastidious aim to ascension inside the boring duties of the Ministry.

Her investigation will lead her to a sinister ride on a mostly empty train boarded only by masked men and women who assemble in a not less sinister mansion for a purpose that is not immediately clear to the reader or to Miss Temple. One thing that seems clear is that some of the women are prostitutes, there to entertain part of the guests while real business is carried somewhere else.

Well, the reader's heart must be beating by now. In true pulp sleazy style, Miss Temple is able to pass herself as one of a group of prostitutes, and is immediately led to a changing room, where she's expected to don some very sexy and revealing white silk corset. I must say it is a hell of an erotic read.

Miss Temple is a truly Victorian heroine, not much dissimilar from Catherine Morlan of Northanger Abbey fame, although a lot more smart. And Mr. Dahlquist clearly knows his gothic novels, as he smoothly parades before the reader a succession of horror cliches, from the steps approaching in the dark, through some macabre medical cabinet to a very touchable atmosphere of dread and menace. The shadows are rich with innuendo, as are some of the weird characters that cross this brief section (of around 70 unforgettable pages).

Before the section ends, we'll see Miss Temple at the receiving end of a fairly graphic rape attempt; but the high point must be the scene when she is changing clothes to a more revealing outfit in front of a mirror. As she dons the sexy corset, breathing fast, pink nipples visible above the cloth, it's not only wardrobes being changed. We assist to a profound change in the demeanor of the young (virgin) Victorian girl, and it speaks sociological volumes of an era when even the table legs had to be covered.

I'll return to this novel as I progress in its reading.

INTO THE FIRE by Richard Laymon

What’s Richard Laymon’s secret? What is it that makes his novels unputdownable? First of all, it’s the sheer strangeness that he imbues in everyday occurrences. He can see, and make us see, the familiar through the naïve – but oh so resilient – eyes of youth. For him, every thing is new. With his characters, we’re just exploring the world for the first time, minds overflowing with heroic and erotic ideals. Even when we find out we’re living in a world of overflowing nightmares.

True, there’s much not to like in his books: the bad guys are usually fat, ugly, filthy and mean; usually they are bums or homeless people. But so are the good guys. Filthy and mean, that is. Remember, they are living the hormone fuelled years of youth. That means meanness, callousness, indifference, larger than life antics and dastardly daring dos.

It’s Laymon’s female characters that are the richest. They are at the same time Justine and Julliette, the virgin and the whore in one single beautiful body. They may be simple wish-fulfilling ideals of a middle age author living an eternal teenage. But they are the lights that attract the moth-readers to the raging fires of his books.

Richard Laymon died five years ago, too soon. His first published novel, The Cellar (1980) was a huge success. And deservedly so. The final chapter, written as an uninterrupted dialog that sheds light on what is going on, should be read in every writing class around the world. His second, The Woods Are Dark (1981) was a not less deservedly flop that almost ended his career then and there. It surely kept him away from the American radars while his reputation grew overseas. The experience was enriching. It helped him find the balance between weirdness and outright pornography. He might have written to formula, but few did it as well as he did.

Into the Fire (2006) is his latest posthumous novel. I confess I don’t really know when it was written or, if unfinished, who did the final writing. The reader who comes to it as a Laymon fan, will find here much familiar territory. Fortunately he won’t find such an abrupt change of style as in No Sanctuary (2003), clearly an unfinished draft completed by a hack, or an hopscotch of earlier writings like Amara (2005).

And, in some ways, Laymon have risen the stakes of weirdness when telling three parallel stories that will intermingle with disastrous results. He treats us to an American geography of madness and meanness, as Pamela (escaping from a mad rapist that has just killed her husband and abducted her to the desert, is saved by a strange and sinister man who drives around in a ancient school bus filled with mannequins) and Duke, Boots and Norman (three teenage hoodlums), converge into the desert ghost town of Pits, where a new breed of cannibals thrive. It is a topography populated with eccentric characters, where the victims are as guilty as the perpetrators, and where minds get twisted by fate.

And, as should be when opening a Laymon book, it oozes sex (here perhaps more openly and unashamedly than in previous novels) and eroticism intermingled with all the violence. It sometimes gets to moments of twisted surrealism, as when Pamela falls asleep having her hurt feet massaged by blonde nordic Nicki: “Her eyes snapped open. The trailer was in near darkness. Peppermint scented the air. Her feet were still being massaged, only… Only differently now. Raising her head a little. She looked down he length of her body. Nicki still knelt by the sofa. She’d removed her sweater. Holding Pamela’s feet by the ankles, she rubbed her big, soft breasts against the soles of her feet. The nipples felt like fingertips” (p.121).

It is not a novel at the same level as The Stake, Bite, Night Games or Funland, but it is pure unadulterated fun with a punch that’s Laymon’s own.

Catchphrase: “He sweated like a pig that’d learned the truth about bacon".