Some more Paperbacks from Hell I've read over the last few months
The Tribe (1981) turned out very good. A cabal of Jewish concentration camp survivors can conjure a Golem to destroy their (perceived) enemies. It’s an anti-racist tract woven into an entertaining horror story and is made all the more authentic by the author’s Jewish background. It unusually sets up the concentration camp survivors as the bad guys (although not wholly unsympathetic given their past) as they bump up against New York’s black and Hispanic communities with tragic consequences.
Up next was The Spirit (1977), which I’m reliably informed is the best of a glut of Big Foot novels from this period. Although the characters are strictly stock in nature (e.g. driven hunter, Native American spiritualist, greedy hotel owner and not very competent Sheriff) it is well written and moves with a decent pace culminating in a siege at a snowbound hotel and a stand-off in a deep mine. It plays out like one of the better TV movies of the period and I’m really surprised it was never filmed.
Nightblood (1990) is one of those rare things in my life – a book I didn’t finish. I tried really hard; I even almost made it to halfway but ultimately had to give up. It’s one of those ‘vampires take over a town’ novels and are battled by a very 80s action hero that you can only imagine from the description was modelled on Snake Plissken. Sounds good doesn’t it? Unfortunately it’s bogged down by the disease of 80s horror novels – bloat! Entire chapters are spent with characters musing about their lives with the plot moved for about 2-3 pages at the end of each chapter. It’s not that the author is a bad writer; I’m sure there is a good 150 page story in there somewhere but it’s buried in an avalanche of padding.
Moving on to the best of this bunch – Black Ambrosia (1988). It’s one of those ‘is she or isn’t she a vampire' stories and couldn’t be more different in approach to the above snorefest. Angelina is the young narrator, leaves her home in her teens and drifts from town to town across America picking off her victims. She takes on all the tropes of vampirism – only going out at night, sleeping in a coffin – but we also get the feeling that she might be an unreliable narrator. Ms Engstrom is a superb writer and can really get under your skin. Angelina’s psychology, reasoning and outlook are deeply disturbing and the killings brutal in their matter of factness. If there is a fault with the book it the few pages at the end of each chapter where the point of view of other characters who bump into Angelina are taken with one in particular coming to prominence. This takes you out of Angelina’s world and I don’t think the book needed it.
Let's Go Play at the Adams' (1974) is a book that seemed to me to stare at me from every bookshelf in every bookshop back in the 70s but I never felt like reading it. It looked a bit too disturbing even for my tastes, and even then had a reputation as being reprehensible. And boy, was I right! Five children kidnap the babysitter and do horrible things to her. That’s it. Whilst not being overly graphic except in the climax, it might be the most mean spirited, nihilistic book I’ve ever read. Even a cold shower won't rinse away the soiled feeling after you've read this one. When I’d finished my mind drifted back to the most famous horror kidnap book I’d read previously – Misery. Whilst at risk of spoiling the ending, all I can say is that Stephen King wimped out big time.
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