Book Review: The Mask of Cthulhu

Book Review: 'The Mask of Cthulhu' by August Derleth

2 / 5 Stars

‘The Mask of Cthulhu’ was first published in 1958 by Arkham House; this paperback version from Ballantine Books was published in May 1976 (a second printing; the first was in 1971). This Ballantine book has an underwhelming cover illustration of Cthulhu by Murray Tinkleman and, somewhat unusually, further portraits of our hero as halftone illustrations on the inside front and back covers as well. Interestingly, the front cover sports a stylish devil’s head colophon reading ‘Ballantine SF / Horror’; I’ve not seen this colophon on any other Ballantine books of this era so I suspect this was a one-time design effort.

‘Mask’ contains six short stories written by Derleth from a period spanning 1936 – 1953. All but the last story first appeared in ‘Weird Tales’.

‘The Return of Hastur’ involves a creepy old mansion (are there any other kind ?!) in Arkham; Amos Tuttle has passed away, with orders in his will that both his house, and his collection of forbidden books, be destroyed. When his nephew Paul Tuttle opposes these stipulations and moves into the mansion, he soon notices the sounds of something…. big…. walking around in the caverns underneath the house. Never a good sign in HPL country…

‘The Whippoorwills in the Hills’ takes place in the desolate rural areas outside Arkham. After his cousin Abel goes missing, Dan Harrop travels to his cousin’s abandoned house, seeking clues to the disappearance. It seems cousin Abel was dabbling in Forbidden Things; every night a massive flock of the eponymous birds congregates outside his house and chirps ‘til dawn. Dan Harrop is unable to learn much about his kin’s strange vanishing act, but before too long, corpses of men and cattle start to appear on the landscape….

‘Something in Wood’ deals with a music critic whose hobby of collecting primitive curios brings into his possession an eldritch figurine of an ‘octopoid’ deity of some kind. As HPL fans know, this never results in a happy ending…

In ‘The Sandwin Compact’, Eldon Sandwin and his eccentric father Asa find themselves victimized by an unholy agreement made between their ancestors and the Ancient Ones. When deities like Cthulhu and Lloigor come calling to collect their due, can Eldon and Asa hope to resist ?

‘The House in the Valley’ finds painter Jefferson Bates vacationing in a quaint rural farmhouse ouside Arkham. The former inhabitant, Seth Bishop, has mysteriously disappeared. Could his disappearance have something to do with passages below the earth littered with bones stripped clean of flesh ? Bishop’s collection of Unholy books ? The strange, late-night sounds of something moving about in the caverns below the house ?

In ‘The Seal of R’lyeh’ a younger member of the Phillips clan takes possession of Sylvan Phillips’s mansion near Innsmouth, near the coast of the Atlantic. The narrator befriends Ada Marsh, a young woman with a rather unusual appearance, and together they embark on a quest to learn why Sylvan Phillips was so interested in certain exotic, far-off places…and images of a monstrous creature called Cthulhu….

Derleth wasn’t the most accomplished of writers; many of his sentences go on too long, have what could politely be called an ‘awkward’ syntax, and often involve unseemly collisions of multiple verb tenses. Despite spanning nearly two decades of magazine publishing, the stories tend to recycle the same plot device and the same narrow collection of Lovecraftian motifs. It’s clear from the stories in ‘The Mask of Cthulhu’ that Derleth was content to adhere to the same formula over his career as a writer, and he was reluctant to make anything more than modest alterations to either his prose style or the creativity of his narratives.

A glance at amazon.com shows that several second-hand editions of this book, produced by various publishers, are available for a variety of prices. While I can’t recommend ‘The Mask of Cthulhu’ to readers of horror literature in general, true-blue HPL fans may want to pick up a copy to complete their collection.

Book Review: 'Ariel: The Book of Fantasy' by Thomas Durwood

3/5 Stars

'Ariel: The Book of Fantasy' (1978) was one of the more unusual experiments in retail fantasy literature and art publishing in the mid-70s. There were four issues (‘volumes’) printed between 1976 and 1978.

‘Ariel’ was a large (12 “ x 9 “, 80 – 100 pp), full-color magazine printed on quality paper stock, and featured illustrated fiction and comics from a number of well-known genre authors and artists. Ariel carried a steep cover price ($6.95) for the mid 70’s, which unfortunately placed it out of ready reach for the burgeoning, but young and poor, generation of SF and fantasy fans then starting to make their economic presence felt (albeit if only in a modest way). After four issues had been produced Ballantine decided to pull the plug on the magazine, and there really hasn’t been anything quite like it on the retail shelves since (perhaps a sign that this form of publication just doesn’t strike much of a chord with the US buying public).

It appears that Ballantine was trying to tap into the audience that had supported its Adult Fantasy paperbacks series (which ceased publishing in 1974, but continued in some fashion under the Del Rey imprint). It also may have been the case that Ballantine was trying to tap into the audience purchasing trade paperbacks on fantasy art, issued in the mid-70s, by rival publisher Bantam Books / Peacock Press. In any event, ‘Ariel’ was of sufficient quality and sophistication so as to avoid being (ill-)considered in retail circles as a ‘stoner’ publication, like Heavy Metal magazine (which started appearing in April of 1977).

Issue three of ‘Ariel’ (edited by Thomas Durwood) featured as its cover an arresting illustration (‘Devil’s Lake’) by the English artist Barry Windsor-Smith, who is the subject of an interview in the magazine. By 1978 Windsor-Smith had long since departed Marvel and ‘Conan’, and was making a living as a studio artist. The interview is an informative one and touches on the artist’s philosophy of the ‘New Romantic’ movement in art and illustration, and his admiration for the artists of the Victorian and Pre-Raphaelite eras.

Among the other entries in volume three is a new Elric story, ‘The Last Enchantment’, by Michael Moorcock, with illustrations by Tim Conrad; a poem by Robert E. Howard, ‘Musings’, with an illustration by Jack ‘King’ Kirby; an admirable comic adaption of Harlan Ellison’s story ‘Along the Scenic Route’ by Al Williamson; and a short story, ‘The Halls of the Frost Giants’, by Alexander Heart, with illustrations (in an Arthur Rackham style) by Michael Hague.

A nonfiction article is also featured; ‘A Visit With Frank Herbert’, by Paul Williams, who chatted with the famed SF author on a visit to Herbert's farm near Seattle. The profile focuses on the various eco-projects (wind power, methane from chicken manure, etc.) Herbert was engineering on his homestead. I can’t say I was ever a fervent fan of Herbert’s work, but the article is an interesting look at someone trying out a ‘green’ lifestyle back when such a thing was considered a pastime either of the comfortably affluent, or hippies trying to hold on to the fast-fading echoes of the 1960s.

The quality of the reproductions appearing in the magazine is quite good, particularly when one remembers that ‘Ariel’ appeared in the pre-computer-based typesetting and printing era.

Issues of 'Ariel' (ranging from ~ $10 to $20, depending on the book's condition) are available from a number of online vendors of used books and comics.

Book Review: 'Bloodshift' by Garfield Reeves-Stevens


3/5 Stars

‘Blood Shift’ (1981), by Garfield Reeves-Stevens is a suspense novel featuring contemporary vampires. These vampires are not the jaded decadents of an Anne Rice novel, but genuinely nasty creatures who delight in torturing and enslaving humans. They have lived in secret, as a kind of perverse European sub-aristocracy, for centuries. Aided by its human allies, the Undead Clan, from its position in the shadows of history, has manipulated the entirety of human affairs. But now the Clan has plans to emerge from hiding to conquer the world and turn mankind into their playthings.

Granger Helman is a retired assassin who finds himself hired by Diego y Rey, the leader of the vampires, to eliminate one Adrienne, a rouge vampire who opposes the Clan’s ambitions. Adrienne is on a desperate mission to alert the world to the menace of the Clan. Also in the mix is a special detachment of vampire hunters, created by the Vatican to destroy the Undead, and US covert operatives, who have their own reasons for not wanting to see the Clan gain control over America. All of these forces intersect in a violent struggle to determine the fate of the human race. Will Helman decide to serve the Undead, or ally himself with Adrienne ? Can the forces of the Vatican succeed in thwarting the vampires' goal of world domination ? Can the American covert ops forces be trusted, or do they have their own questionable agenda ?

‘Bloodshift’ features a cover blurb from Stephen King: ‘Garfield Reeves-Stevens is the Tom Clancy of horror’ and there is some truth to this marketing ploy. The novel has the pacing and character of a techno-thriller that happens to use vampires, rather than terrorists, as the primary antagonists. Helman and his allies are by no means superheroes, and Diego y Rey is a formidable adversary, so the outcome of the conflict is never tilted to the side of Good. In general, things move along at an engrossing clip all the way to the last of the book’s 280 pages.

There are some weaknesses to ‘Bloodshift’. There are a number of passages earlier in the book that suffer from too little exposition on the part of the author, and the identities and motives of the conflicting covert organizations are confusingly presented. Sub-plots dealing with scientists and their research programs into unusual infectious diseases pop up in a rather haphazard fashion and tie into the overall narrative in a clumsy manner at best. Some aspects of the storyline are more than a little contrived, and will have readers familiar with the Modern Vampire genre (think the ‘Blade’ and ‘Underworld’ movies) rolling their eyes.

But other parts of the book are well done; a flashback dealing with Adrienne’s initiation into vampirism is particularly harrowing. And while the middle third of the novel drags a bit, things pick up speed in the final thirty pages and the ending, while effective, is by no means telegraphed to the reader.

Overall, fans of action-oriented horror fiction, as well as thriller fans in general, will find something to like in ‘Bloodshift’. Those with a preference for a more subdued and slowly paced vampire story will probably not find it to their liking.

Book Review: The Lord's Pink Ocean

Book Review: 'The Lord's Pink Ocean' by David Walker

3/5 Stars
 

‘The Lord’s Pink Ocean’ (by David Walker) was published in hardcover in 1972. This DAW paperback edition (No. 67) was published in 1973. It has one of the better covers (by Josh Kirby) for a DAW book of that era, although I can’t say the cover illustration is particularly relevant to the novel.

‘Ocean’ takes place early in the 21^st century. The unremitting pollution of the late 20^th century has birthed a new strain of toxic, pink-colored algae which has taken over the salt and fresh waters of the planet. The landscape surrounding the contaminated waters is lifeless and gray, and the algae prevent any other plants from sprouting; indeed, any life trespassing on the contaminated zones is instantly poisoned and consumed. Most of the world’s population is dead. A few survivors eke out a primitive living in a rural area near Boston, where a spring feeds a lake located in a lush valley that has so far remained free of the algae. Two families, descendants of refugees from Boston, reside in the valley: the Parkers: James and Ruth, and their daughter Mary; and the Smiths: Robert and Janet, and their son Ian.

The two families have an uneasy alliance; nonetheless, they manage to overcome their mutual distrust in order to collaborate on crude construction and agricultural projects. As children, Mary Parker and Ian Smith are friends; but what will happen when they get older ? The Parkers are black, the Smiths white, and neither James Parker nor Robert Smith are over-inclined towards embracing racial harmony.

To complicate matters, there are strange sounds in the sky and glimpses of what appear to be flying machines. Are other survivors of the algal apocalypse present ? And what happens when they discover the unique oasis shared by the Parker and Smith families ?

‘Ocean’ is a short (160 pp) but well-paced and engaging psychological drama, rather than an SF novel per se. The algae are used as a plot device for Walker to set up his tale of youthful ambition conflicting with the staid ways of the elderly; very much a stylish topic in the early 70’s. In fact, the scientific background for the algal bloom isn’t introduced until later in the novel, and when it does appear it’s somewhat belatedly tossed into the plot.

The novel works because the author weaves suspense into the interpersonal conflicts between the two families, and also into the troubling prospect of contact with outside authorities. There’s never a sense that ‘good’ will triumph and the story necessarily will have a happy ending.

As an example of early 70’s Eco-Catastrophe SF, ‘Ocean’s' small scale and intimate setting don’t give it the overall scope and power of, say, Brunner’s ‘The Sheep Look Up’ or Harrison’s ‘Make Room ! Make Room !' But it’s an effective novel, and one of the better representations of this genre of speculative fiction.

Book Review: The Year 2000

Book Review: 'The Year 2000' by Harry Harrison

3 / 5 Stars

‘The Year 2000’ first was published in hardback by Doubleday in February 1970; this paperback edition was issued by Berkley Medallion in May, 1972, with cover art by Richard Powers.  As can be inferred from the title, it's an anthology of all-original stories that are centered on the world as it would be at the turn of the millennium. 

By 1970 the 1964/65 New York World’s Fair, which had embodied the more traditional, optimistic Futurism in US pop culture, was five years gone and starting to (literally and figuratively) go to seed. The Apollo moon landing, and films such as ‘2001: A Space Odyssey’, still presented technology as an exciting phenomenon. However, by 1970- the same year that Alvin Toffler’s book ‘Future Shock’ appeared - attitudes were rapidly changing, and technology (and its effects on society) was being regarded with considerably more ambivalence. 

Thus, the majority of the stories in this anthology have a downbeat, melancholy tenor, perhaps the reflecting the angst over the end of the 60’s and the dawning realization that the oncoming 70’s would be a much different decade in terms of Peace, Love, and Understanding.

Fritz Leiber’s ‘America the Beautiful’ sees a young British academic traveling to a United States that seems like something out of Tomorrowland; hypersonic shuttles from London to Dallas, automated cars and freeways, plenty of clean, cheap energy, social and racial harmony, etc., etc. But there’s an undercurrent of unease…something about The Commies (!?)…the story comes across as a limp effort at political commentary, and confirms my belief that Lieber was one of the more overrated authors of his day.

The next story, ‘Prometheus Rebound’, by Daniel F Galouye, was so poorly written that I thought at first it was a heavy-handed parody of the writing style of the pulp magazines of the 30’s. However, Galouye’s self-penned biographical sketch is written in the same style as his short story, leading me to believe he was indeed writing with a straight face….egad !.

Chad Oliver’s ‘Far From This Earth’ is a low-key but effective tale of a middle- aged Kenyan man confronting the advent of modernization in his country and with it, some Western-style spiritual anomie. Of course, given what’s actually going on in Kenya these past few years, such a scenario- steady employment, frame houses, flush toilets, a robust, tourist- fueled economy - cruelly seems ‘too good to be true’.

In Naomi Mitchison’s “After the Accident” an unspecified nuclear disaster has led to a world of mutants, chromosomal aberrations, and strict governance of reproduction. The nameless protagonist decides to advance space colonization via selective breeding. The story’s oblique writing style (and vague references to the issue of abortion) may have been very much ‘In Style’ in 1970, but upon reading it today, one can’t help but conclude that an interesting premise is wasted on a too-diffuse narrative.

Mack Reynolds’s ‘Utopian’ deals with an ardent revolutionary who wakes up from a session of suspended animation to find himself in 2000. The ideals he has fought for have all come true, but...in a world of universal brotherhood and abundance, what, exactly, is wrong ? A rather low-key, but engaging, take on the concept of whether a ‘perfect world’ is all it’s cracked up to be.

Brian Aldiss contributes ‘Orgy of the Living and the Dying’. Set in an impoverished region of India in the midst of severe drought and famine, the story serves as an apt bellwether for the Population Bomb / Eco-Catastrophe mood then a-rising in SF circles. The lead character is something of an Ugly European, offered a chance to be an unlikely hero. This is one of the more effective and well-paced entries in the anthology.

Bertram Chandler’s ‘Sea Change’ is really a nautical adventure with a thin coating of SF. If you’re like me and you aren’t all that thrilled by SF stories incorporating terms like ‘fo’c’sle’, ‘jib’, ‘tacking’, and ‘top’sil’, then you will find ‘Change’ to be a rather unremarkable entry.

‘Black is Beautiful’ by Robert Silverberg and ‘American Dead’ by editor Harrison are two stories dealing with race relations and the rise of Black Power. Back in 1970 it was considered very stylish for white intellectuals to sympathize with black revolutionaries – there was nothing more chic than mentioning at a cocktail party that you were ‘down’ with some Black Panthers. So both tales adopt an approving tone towards the Black Power scene. 

Silverberg’s story looks at New York city in 2000; it’s basically a majority-black metropolis, and one young brother isn’t too happy with the presence of the occasional white tourist. Harrison’s story posits a race war being carried out in the South, with the black protagonists akin to the Viet Cong insofar as waging a guerilla war against Whitey is concerned. Both stories are probably a bit too politically incorrect for the welfare of contemporary readers, but are interesting, effective portraits of racial ferment back in ’70.

‘Take It or Leave It ‘ by David Masson is essentially a mediocre pastiche of Anthony Burgess’s ‘A Clockwork Orange’; the story is set in a dystopian England, and the first-person narrator relates his adventures in a Nadsat-style argot. The storyline is obtuse and clumsily constructed – future events are disclosed to the reader as italics passages interweaved into the narrative proper- and the story collapses under the weight of trying too hard to be Hip and Edgy, a failing that would prove to be too common in future New Wave entries from many different authors.

Things are quite wacky in J. J. Coupling’s ‘To Be A Man’; a hero returning from a southeast Asian war is actually a cyborg whose entire body (save for his brain) is of artificial construction. His efforts to regain his old life in America ca. 2000 are related with some male chauvinistic, Penthouse Forum –style humor. Needless to say, such a tale wouldn’t be likely to appear in any modern compilations, particularly with the advent of a large female audience for SF.

‘The Lawgiver’ by Keith Laumer is a competent, if not very original, drama about a politician who must choose between aiding a family member, or compromising his integrity as a public servant, in a future US in the grip of a population control campaign.

‘Judas Fish’, by Thomas Scortia, also adheres to a Population Bomb theme; the world is in anarchy as too many people struggle for too little food. The narrator is manning a deep-sea laboratory where he manipulates schools of fish to freely swim into massive nets for easy harvesting; it appears some other denizens of the deeps aren’t happy with this arrangement and have malevolent intentions for the future of humanity.

Overall, 'The Year 2000' is an interesting, if uneven, look at the genre in the beginnings of what would soon be called the ‘New Wave’ era. If you find it on the shelf of your used bookstore and you're a fan of New Wave SF, you'll want to get a copy.

Christmas 1978: 'Bring on the Bad Guys' by Stan Lee

3 / 5 Stars

When ‘Origins of Marvel Comics” was published in 1974 by Simon and Schuster, there were no such things as ‘graphic novels’ on the store shelves. Indeed, comic books were still mostly relegated to appearing on the wire racks stationed in drug and ‘five and dime’ stores; the idea that a reputable book store would stock a healthy supply of comic books was quite unusual. The revolution in comics retailing that would result in the creation of small shops devoted to selling both new and old comics (as opposed to ripping off their covers, returning them for credit, and then tossing the coverless comics in the trash) was still several years away.

Comics companies and their publishers were aware that in Europe, ‘graphic novels’, in which several issues of comics were compiled between hardboard or trade paperback covers, were a very common form of retailing and such books were often handsomely produced. But most publishers in the US still considered comics to be a ‘kids’ publication, and the thought of devoting effort to reprinting them in a higher-priced, ‘legitimate’ book format didn’t generate much enthusiasm.

Somehow, Stan Lee was able to persuade Simon and Schuster to enter the field of ‘graphic novels’, if only under the guise of a sort of ‘nostalgia’ trip aimed at Baby Boomers entering their forties and fifties. And, by ’74, some weekly comic strips from the 1930s (or even earlier) were seeing print again in nice hardbound editions designed to appeal to the Nostalgia Craze market then existing in the US.

‘Origins of Marvel Comics’, which did nothing more complicated than reprinting some old Marvel ‘origin’ stories on quality paper stock, sold quite well; so well, that a ‘Son of Origins’ was soon issued. Next came ‘Bring on the Bad Guys’ (1976) which turned out to be one of my Christmas presents for 1978.

Things start off with some very early Fantastic Four issues (1962) and the first appearance of Doctor Doom; there’s a follow up short from 1964 that fleshes out Doom’s origins more fully. Next comes a classic Steve Ditko adventure for Dr. Strange as he meets the Dread Dormammu. Then there’s some classic Jack Kirby artwork for two Thor adventures, dealing with Loki and the Absorbing Man.

A Captain America story, involving the Red Skull, is another Kirby classic (how did that guy produce so many exemplary comics despite the fact he was illustrating three or four books a month ?!). Spider Man ‘s entry is a rather brief and underwhelming fight with the Green Goblin. The Hulk takes on The Abomination in a story drawn by Gil Kane. The book ends with the Silver Surfer taking on Mephisto; John Buscema does a great job with the art but, as happened all too often with this character, there’s so much over-emoting dripping from Lee’s script that the story tends to collapse under its atmosphere of fervid angst.

‘Bad Guys’ contains sections of text bracketing each story where Lee provides his comments on how the villains came to be; in a (rare ?!) contrite or conciliatory mood, he actually points out that many of the featured characters were joint creations. 

(By ’76 Jack Kirby had returned to doing some work for Marvel, so maybe Lee thought it prudent to give some credit to Jack, lest the atmosphere in the Marvel offices get too tense following the appearance of ‘Bad Guys’ on store shelves).

Within a few years after I got ‘Bad Guys’ for Christmas ‘78, you could see graphic novels starting to appear more frequently on the shelves at chain stores like Waldenbooks. Certainly not in the numbers and variety you see today, but it was a start.....

Panzerblitz and Christmas 1974

Christmas 1974 and 'Panzerblitz' by Avalon Hill

Christmas 1974. The concept of using a computer to play ‘video’ games is still something theoretical and esoteric, an idea entertained by a few visionary electrical engineers and programmers in university and corporate labs.

The idea of a ‘personal’ computer, while discussed in these same arenas, is also something possessing a ‘ what if ’ quality. Indeed, any computer smaller than a large IBM mainframe machine is labeled as a ‘microcomputer’, and buying a kit, building a microcomputer, and learning enough machine language to run it, is solely a job for hobbyists.

So, one of the bigger nerd hobbies remains that old standby, board gaming. And one of the biggest companies in the board gaming business is Baltimore’s Avalon Hill, maker of a large line of popular wargames, including Afrika Corps, Anzio, and Luftwaffe, among others.

Avalon Hill’s wargames are played on colorful mapboards overlaid with hexagonal grids, and the playing pieces are almost always small, fingernail-sized squares of cardboard with symbols or images printed on them. Battle outcomes are decided by rolls of dice, and consulting a chart providing the outcome of select rolls for select combinations of attacking and defending units.

The wargame I really want for Christmas is ‘Panzerblitz’. Like others in Avalon Hill’s ‘bookcase’ line of games, rather than a flat box akin to that of Risk or Monopoly, it comes packaged in a handsome slip-cased box designed to stand on one’s bookshelf. By the standards of the time it’s expensive, too, and with a bunch of siblings also clamoring for their presents of choice, it’s the only major present I’m going to get.

So it was a thrilling feeling to open the box up on Christmas morning ’74 and take out the thick cardboard sheets containing the rows of game pieces, all waiting to be carefully punched out and placed on the folding mapboards, which were so new they made a crinkling noise when you opened them up. Since Panzerblitz was based on the tank battles between the Russians and Germans during the second world war, many of the game pieces featured detailed silhouettes of all the various tanks, armored cars, and artillery pieces used in that front. The manual helpfully provided detailed information and statistics on each piece, so you knew that a Russian JS-III tank had a particular gun diameter, range, and armor rating. Poring over the descriptions of the tanks and vehicles you were entitled to command on the battlefield was an engrossing experience all on its own.

Unfortunately, for me at age 14, Panzerblitz was too complicated. It was really aimed at an audience of players or college age and older. My brother and I tried playing a few games using the ‘official’ rules and quickly gave up; even the most trivial of encounters was governed by a bewildering series of regulations. We settled for a very simple, basic set of rules, but this lost much of the game’s nuances and turned it into a kind of advanced ‘Risk’. Panzerblitz lost its appeal after a few weeks, and the excitement of Christmas faded as the lengthy upstate New York winter began to inexorably grind on through January.

I continued to be interested in wargames even if Panzerblitz was something of a dud, and over the ensuing years I took up playing a variety of titles from Avalon Hill and SPI. However, by the early 80s, as I went through college, I began to lose interest in wargaming and ceased playing. For its part, the industry was uncertain in its approaches to dealing with the advent of PCs and the glimmerings of computer-based gaming, and by the mid-80s the predominance of board-based wargaming was dwindling.

Nowadays I have a lot of fun playing the more casual PC games such as the ‘Command and Conquer’ series, and even some of ‘Total War’ games. But I still have that Christmas 1974 copy of Panzerblitz sitting in a box in my basement.

Book Review: 'Day of the Beasts' by John E. Muller (Robert Fanthorpe)

2/5 Stars

‘Day of the Beasts’ (1966) is a short (142 pp) pulp SF novel by ‘John E. Muller’, which is the pen name used by the British writer Robert Fanthorpe. According to the Wiki entry for Fanthorpe, he has written 250 books, many churned out on a monthly basis in the 50s and 60s for the schlocky British ‘Badger’ books imprint. This US paperback edition is rather low-budget in terms of cover illustration and production values, but in the spirit of investigating ‘vintage’ SF paperbacks I decided to pick it up.

‘Beasts’ takes place some time in the future, when the US and the USSR are engaged in a cold war competition to colonize the planets. The novel’s hero is one Brad Norton, a square-jawed American space pilot and scientist, who is investigating a top-secret government project taking place at an enormous installation in the southwest. The project is chaired by a Dr Mendel, and involves construction of a novel spaceship capable of interstellar flight. However, before the spacecraft can undergo its preliminary tests, a strange event takes place: a powerful tornado mysteriously appears in the nearby desert and, seemingly guided by some intelligence, pummels the test site.

Hardly have the dismayed scientists confronted the destruction of the spaceship when a monster resembling a giant spider (? !) is sighted in the surrounding landscape. Soon it becomes clear that earth is under attack from some alien force, and batches of supersize creatures are creating havoc in major metropolitan areas. Is the attack originating from the stars ? Or, as Brad Norton suspects, from earth’s future ? Will Brad be successful in divining the location of the enemy and putting a stop to their nefarious plans ?

‘Day of the Beasts’ is hardly a 60s SF classic, and as a low-carb pulp adventure, it sort of scrapes by. The writing isn’t great – practically every line of dialogue has an adverb appended to it (many characters can’t help but speak ‘tersely’ or ‘heavily’ or ‘thinly’ and carry out actions ‘feverishly’). Many passages suffer from poor syntax, and require several re-reads in order to figure out which subjects and objects given verbs are referencing. The monsters are vaguely described, and I had trouble believing them capable of physical destruction equivalent to that generated by nuclear bombs (!). The plot doesn’t expend too much effort in explaining why the earth is under attack in the first place, and a sub-plot involving a kind of alien doppellganger seems to be tossed in as a few pages' worth of filler before being abandoned.

However, the last 20 pages do succeed in generating some suspense, abetted somewhat by the author’s decision to keep the narrative sufficiently ambiguous in terms of an inevitable triumph of good over the forces of evil.

I can’t recommend ‘Day of the Beasts’ to readers looking for a particularly memorable SF book with old-school flavor, but those seeking light diversion may want to give it a try if they see it on the shelves.

Note: this book is not to be confused with another 'John E. Muller' / Fanthorpe title 'Mark of the Beast'

Marvel Comics magazine: 'Doc Savage: The Man of Bronze' (June 1975)

4/5 Stars

 

June 1975. Summer and its rising heat and humidity is arriving in the upstate New York town where I live. The radio at the house next door is playing Pilot’s ‘It’s Magic’. Also in heavy rotation is a song called ‘The Hustle’ by Van McCoy; it’s supposed to be getting a lot of attention in places called discotheques, where wealthy people go to dance and consume frou-frou drinks.

On the shelves at the drug store on Harry L. Drive in Johnson City is a Marvel magazine designed to cash in on the upcoming movie ‘Doc Savage: The Man of Bronze’. Since I’m a big fan of Doc, and the Bantam books are still coming out on a regular basis, well, I shell out my hard-earned dollar and grab it.

The first half of the magazine is taken up with a black and white comic titled ‘The Doom on Thunder Island’, illustrated by John Buscema and Tony DeZuniga and written by Doug Moench. 

It’s a well-written story (although there are a bit too many speech balloons for comfort) and, freed from the constraints of the Comics Code, more gritty and violent than a color comic book counterpart would be. The story starts in suitably ‘apocalyptic’ fashion as a NYC skyscraper is reduced to rubble by a mysterious lightning bolt. Doc and the Fabulous Five are recruited to investigate, and wind up dealing with a psychotic genius on his island redoubt.

The larger page size allowed by the magazine format also gives Buscema – one of Marvel’s more talented artists in that era- more freedom to compose the panels in a fashion designed to highlight some great action sequences. The Fabulous Five are integrated in the story and serve as more than simple window-dressing, and there’s even a few panels devoted to yet another squabble between Monk and Ham. There’s also a bit of pathos invested in a sub-plot that borrows a theme from ‘The Island of Dr. Moreau’. 

All in all, ‘Thunder Island’ is a very competent adventure and it’s too bad the magazine was a one-shot (Stan Lee was constantly tinkering with releasing various incarnations of b & w comic magazines throughout the 70s in a single-minded effort to encroach on James Warren’s territory – the one area of comic publishing Marvel never really succeeded in dominating).

The rest of the magazine is devoted to a text article (‘The Man Who Shot Doc Savage !’) in which George Pal is interviewed about the upcoming movie; it features some stills of Ron Ely as Doc; stills of the supporting cast; and some stills of various sets and production locales. In the interviews Pal comes across as articulate and well-versed in ‘Doc ‘ lore.

Unfortunately, when I actually did see the feature film ‘Doc Savage: The Man of Bronze’ later that summer, it was a real disappointment. The special effects were cheap and unconvincing, there was a surfeit of static, dialogue-heavy sequences in order to cover up the deficiencies of a too-low budget, and the entire production was steeped in a winking, ‘this-is-corny-as hell- but –we love –it’ attitude. 

In his book ‘James Bama: American Realist’ (2006; page 111) author Brian Kane cites a fanzine interview conducted with Ron Ely by Tahir Bhatti, in which Ely stated his belief that a new team of executives installed at Warner Bros. deliberately under-budgeted the production, in order to ensure the film would be a flop. This was presumably a strategy to discredit their predecessors at the studio, and to demonstrate how badly things were being handled at Warner. 

I must confess some skepticism at this theory; the fact of the matter was that Pal, and director Michael Anderson, show every evidence of having sought to create a jokey, ‘campy’ picture that tried and failed to leverage the Nostalgia craze then gripping popular culture. Whether a massive increase in the film's budget could have resulted in a memorable film is doubtful. Indeed, it was not until ‘Raiders of the Lost Ark’ was released some six years later that Spielberg and Lucas demonstrated how to make a film that referenced the thirties in a clever way, without sliding into parody.

Note: post updated on February 2, 2009 to include corrections, provided by B. M. Kane, regarding the 'Doc Savage' movie and Ely's thoughts on its production difficulties

When A Fanboy Goes Too Far No. 1

When a Fanboy Goes Too Far (1st in a series)

Those whacky Goreans !

(from the December 2, 2008 'Daily Mail' (UK))