Book Review: Heat

Book Review: 'Heat' by Arthur Herzog

4 / 5 Stars

Arthur Herzog III (1927 - 2010) saw considerable success as a novelist in the 1970s and 1980s. 'The Swarm' (1974) and 'Orca' (1977) are perhaps his best-known books, as they were made into feature films.

Herzog emulated the success of Michael Crichton by producing scientific thrillers that combined an educative, straightforward prose style with themes that were topical during the postwar era. While 'The Swarm' dealt with Africanized honeybees, and 'Orca' with malevolent killer whales, 'Earthsound' (1975) featured earthquakes, and 'The Craving' (1982) took aim at the American preoccupation with dieting.

'Heat', which was published by Signet in August, 1978, bucked the trend during the 1970s in which Global Cooling was the existential environmental threat, focusing instead on the threat from Global Warming. 

The opening chapter of 'Heat' adumbrates the coming catastrophe, before focusing on lead character Lawrence Pick, an engineer who works for the federal thinktank CRISES (Crisis Research Investigation and Systems Evaluation Service). It's a quasi-clandestine agency headquartered at Fort Davis, an elaborate underground complex located outside of Washington, D.C.

After a freak tornado levels the Virginia suburb of Huntsboro, Pick begins to grow alarmed over evidence from many quarters that the Earth's oceans rapidly are warming, a phenomenon that will lead to more chaotic, and catastrophic, weather. Assembling a team of top scientists at the CRISES redoubt (in much the same manner as Crichton had expert researchers assembling at the Wildfire complex in 'The Andromeda Strain'), Pick comes to the grim conclusion that, without drastic measures to reduce global warming, soon civilization will collapse and the planet will become uninhabitable.

But the bureaucrats running CRISES, and serving as science advisors to the President, are reluctant to sound any alarms prior to the conclusion of next year's presidential election. Pick finds himself sidelined as politics take precedent over action. As Americans puzzle over the strange excesses of heat and wind buffeting their neighborhoods, it will be up to Lawrence Pick to shake the bureaucracy from its lethargy........even if so doing gets him imprisoned by the government he has sworn to serve...........

At only 195 pages in length, author Herzog had little superfluous space for crafting his narrative in 'Heat', and his prose style has a crisp, declaratory quality that I find appealing in this day and age of lumbering, 500-plus page novels. The outcome of the book remains uncertain until the very last paragraph. The only reason I settled for a Four-Star Rating, instead of Five, is that some of the final chapters indulge in some action-movie sequences that I found a little too contrived.

Needless to say, as a 1970s 'disaster' novel, 'Heat' retains considerable relevance in the year 2023, and those who believe in Global Warming will find the novel to have a legitimately minatory quality. They, and those who appreciate a good scientific thriller, will want to have a copy of the book on their shelves.

Creepy Archives Volume One

Creepy Archives Volume One

Dark Horse, May 2023

Starting in September 2008, the New Comic Company, an imprint of Dark Horse Books, began printing compilations of James Warren’s Creepy and Eerie black-and-white comic magazines in hardcover format. These ‘Archive’ books, which eventually reproduced all the content of the magazines from their first issues in 1964 / 1966 to their final issues in 1983, were well-produced volumes with state-of-the-art reproductions of the comics (and ancillary features, such as the letters columns and Captain Company advertisements) on heavy stock paper.

Unfortunately, each volume had a cover price of $50, which placed them out of reach all but the most affluent of purchasers. For my part, I was able to pick up a couple volumes for around $20, but that's as far as I went. Nowadays, used copies of these hardcover Creepy and Eerie Archives sell for considerably above $50 (some are well over $100).

So, it’s nice to see Dark Horse issuing the entire Creepy and Eerie Archives catalog as trade paperback editions, which are much more affordable at $25 each. The paperbacks are good-quality books, printed on glossy paper stock. These are the editions that are going to bring nostalgia, at a nice price point, to Baby Boomers.

Looking through the pages of the Creepy Volume 1 trade paperback, which was released tin May, I can see how impressive was the artwork from such talents as Reed Crandall, Grey Morrow, Angelo Torres, and Al Williamson, among others. 

Almost all the stories in Volume One were written by Archie Goodwin. Given that the stories are five to eight pages in length, Goodwin didn't have a whole lot of page space in which to tell a story, so he necessarily relied on highly compressed narratives that deliver 'shock' endings in the EC tradition.

I'm not sure what sort of reception these reprint editions will receive from the younger generation of comics readers. Right now the top-selling graphic novels in the United States overwhelmingly are the Dog Man and Cat Kid volumes by Dav Pilkey, and manga. Graphic novels from Marvel and DC are very low on the year-end sales charts. 

When the kids who now are reading Pilkey and manga look to graduate to something more sophisticated in a few years, they may or may not decide to investigate comics first published in the 1960s......

On the other hand, at the end of 2022, sales of vinyl eclipsed those of CDs, for the first time since 1987. This is being driven by newer releases, but the heavy patronage of used LP stores suggests that there is a market for older, 'archaic' media. Whether that will encompass the Creepy and Eerie inventory remains to be seen, but I am optimistic.....?!

National Lampoon August 1979

National Lampoon

August 1979

August, 1979, and the top song in the Billboard Hot 100 is 'Bad Girls' by Donna Summer.

The Led Zeppelin album 'In Through the Out Door' is released. As author Stephen Davis points out in his 1985 biography of the band, 'Hammer of the Gods', 'the album saves the U.S. record industry from bankruptcy.

The August issue of National Lampoon is out on the stands, and it's a special 'Travel' issue. With P. J. O'Rourke as editor, there is a more snide tenor to the contents, which meant that frequently I laughed out loud while reading this issue.

The Letters section satirizes a number of celebrities...........

Bruce McCall takes aim at wretched third-worlders...........

'Negroes of the World' likely would not be tolerated nowadays, but back in '79, the Lampoon could get away with it.

Ted Mann's 'A Girl's Letters Home from Europe' features a brilliant illustration by Marvin Mattelson, depicting an unsavory European male eyeing the naive Young American:

Particularly vicious is D. H. Pickering's 'Let's Went to Mexico', which depicts Mexico as land of squalor, misery, and corruption.

A 'Foto Funnies' entrant makes fun of Polish males, while 'The Appletons' observes mayhem in church.

Let's close with an advertisement for the Ramones film 'Rock n' Roll High School', which was released 44 years ago.........at the time, I didn't pay much attention to it. Only those few hipsters who were Ramones fans went to see the movie. Strange as it may seem, it wasn't until later in the 1980s that the Ramones began to get much attention from rock fans outside the punk world.

Book Review: 13 by Steve Wilson

Book Review: '13' by Steve Wilson

4 / 5 Stars

‘13’ (255 pp) was published by Panther / Granada in 1985; the cover artwork is by Chris Moore. As best as I can tell, this novel never was released in the U.S.

Steve Wilson (b. 1943) wrote the 1976 sci-fi biker novel The Lost Traveler, which I reviewed here. 

The 'Eight Miles Higher' website reviews 'Traveler' here. A somewhat less effusive review is available at the 'The Paperback Warrior' site. 

After ‘Traveler’, Wilson continued to write novels about bikers and outlaws, all of which are not sf. Wilson also has written a number of collector's guidebooks about motorcycles, particularly British-made bikes.

The ‘13’ of the title refers to a group of California bikers who, in 1967, form a gang based on their mutual love of motorcycles and cruising the open road together. The 13 are not an 'outlaw' biker gang in the sense of the Hell’s Angels, but rather, a disparate collection of men who find kinship in their mellow attitudes towards life (although the 13 are very capable at combat should they find themselves in a confrontation).

A series of flashback chapters in the opening pages of the novel cast the 13 and their camaraderie during the late 60s in an idyllic light, suffused with the glow of the counterculture era and its easy living based on drugs, wine, and groupies.

The golden era of the West Coast biker scene comes to an abrupt end in the early Fall of 1969, when member Duane persuades the 13 to make a run to the small Louisiana town of Badwater. What promised to be a rousing good time in the bayou country turns out to be a road trip gone very bad, and in its aftermath, the gang dissolves.

The narrative then segues into the present day, i.e., 1982, and John Cleaver, the former leader of the gang, has received disquieting news: Duane recklessly has returned to Badwater, run afoul of the law, and been imprisoned. 

Judge Andre Lafayette, the de facto ruler of the town, has given Cleaver an ultimatum: return with the 13 to Badwater and face the Judge’s vengeance for the events of 1969, or Duane will be killed.

The Judge knows that the 13 will come to try and rescue their comrade, no matter how stacked the odds are against their favor, and has prepared a lethal welcome for the bikers. 

But as John Cleaver assembles his gang for one last, desperate ride to Louisiana and a reckoning with the Judge, Cleaver knows he and his fellow bikers never run from a member in need……..and a war is going to be breaking out in the back woods, dirt roads, and swamps of Badwater…………

I found ‘13’ to be a better novel than The Lost Traveler. I’m not a biker myself, but author Wilson’s descriptions of riding and racing motorcycles have a sense of authenticity. Neither the heroes and the villains of the novel are cast so clearly in black and white as to impart a perfunctory air about their looming confrontation; as well, it’s by no means assured that the 13 will emerge unscathed.

That's not to say that ’13 doesn't have its weaknesses. The overly earnest philosophizing and metaphysical ruminations that slowed the action in The Lost Traveler are present in this novel, too, and some segments involving the musings of the gang’s resident poet, the Dude, strike boldly into the realm of the Corny. 

Other passages designed to showcase 'biker' life, such as one involving an excitable young woman named Cherry who wears leg warmers (this is an 80s novel, after all), come across as more than a little contrived - just how many shapely nymphomaniacs elect to hang out around a biker gang, anyway ?!

The plot takes its time getting underway, but '13' rewards the persevering reader with concluding chapters that have the frenetic quality of an Arnold Schwarzenegger action film of the 80s; here author Wilson shows a talent for pacing and suspense that never really was fulfilled in The Lost Traveler.

Summing up, ’13’ - having never been published in the US in paperback or hardback - is not easy to find, but if you should come across it, it’s worth picking up.

Social Fiction

'Social Fiction' by Chantal Montellier

New York Review Comics, July 2023

So, coincident with the demise of Heavy Metal magazine, we get the publication of some of the more memorable comics to be serialized in that magazine in the late 70s.

Chantal Montellier (b. 1947) is a French artist who began contributing to bandes dessinees in 1978 with the comic '1996' for Metal Hurlant. A year later, Heavy Metal began publishing the English translation.

'Social Fiction' (191 pp.) provides English translations of the complete '1996', as well as two other stories Montellier did for Metal Hurlant in the early 1980s, 'Wonder City' and 'Shelter'. 

'Social Fiction' is published by New York Review Comics, an imprint of the New York Review of Books, so it's being marketed to those with a Highbrow pedigree, as opposed to aging Baby Boomers and Stoners like myself. The dimensions of 'Social Fiction' are 7 x 9 inches, which I consider too small to do justice to the artwork and gives many of the panels a cramped appearance which makes the text difficult to read:

While 'Wonder City' is printed with a garish pink tone, 'Shelter' and '1996' stay with reassuring black-and-white.

In his Translator's Note, Geoffrey Brock makes clear something that I always had suspected; namely, that Heavy Metal editors Sean Kelly and Valerie Marchant took some of the '1996' episodes and replaced the French text with contrived, phonetic English, presumably in an effort to show how hip they were. In 'Social Fiction', all the '1996' entries thankfully are given a straight English translation:

Despite being reproduced in a smaller dimension, '1996' retains its impact as an offbeat, darkly humorous take on society.

'Wonder City' and 'Shelter' also are interesting reads, melding the satirical attitude of '1996' with a nihilistic, pro-feminist political advocacy.

Who will want a copy of 'Social Fiction' ? Well, if you are a fan of Heavy Metal and its early years then you'll likely find the book provides an easy, nostalgic trip back to that era, when '1996' was an effective contrast to the T & A sensibility that governed much of the magazine's content. 

I'm not so sure of its appeal to younger readers, as its satire is grounded very much in dissecting European / American society as it was more than 40 years ago. Indie comics hipsters may find the book interesting as a vehicle for enhancing their hipness, but they should take this path with the understanding that 'Social Fiction' is very.... French.