Paperbacks from Hell The Nest by Gregory A. Douglas A Book review by Richard Martin Horror was doing big business in the bookstores in the 1960s. This was largely thanks to occult and gothic literature which promised gentle tales of haunted manors and melancholy spirits on their covers. Things took a more devilish turn towards the end of the decade with the release of ‘Rosemary’s Baby’ in 1967, followed by William Peter Blatty’s ‘The Exorcist’ and Thomas Tryon’s ‘The Other in 1971, but the real fun began in 1974 with the release of two books that would open the floodgate for pulp horror. Jaws (Peter Benchley) and The Rats (James Herbert) proved that there was an appetite out there for books that weren’t ashamed to go all-out horror. The publishing industry took note and throughout the 1970s and 1980s, companies such as Zebra, Tor and Pinnacle published a seemingly endless supply of books promising unspeakable terrors and sporting covers that had to be seen to be believed. Sometimes the content was great, other times… not so much, but one thing that you could always be guaranteed was a fun and entertaining read. By the mid-90s, horror paperbacks were seemingly out, and thrillers were in. Gone were the lurid covers of skeletons, evil dolls, creepy kids and flesh-hungry critters. The horror was still there, it just wasn’t marketed as such, treated like a shameful secret. As titles fell quickly out of print, many of the horror authors and their work became increasingly forgotten by all but the most avid fans and collectors. Enter Will Errickson, Grady Hendrix and ‘Paperbacks From Hell’. In 2017 Hendrix and Errickson released their seminal love letter to the horror paperbacks of a bygone era, shining a light on some long-forgotten classics and renewing interest in the mass market horror paperbacks of the 1970s and 80s. Not content to simply share their passion for these oft-maligned but much-missed books, thanks to their partnership with Valancourt Books, we are being treated to new reprints of the best of these decades-old, forgotten gems. To date, thirteen reprints have been published (with a fourteenth on the way), retaining the original cover art and boasting brand new and insightful introductions from Hendrix and Errickson. In this series, I’ll be reading each and every one and posting articles at Ginger Nuts of Horror looking back at the best books two decades of horror has to offer. Kicking off this series is ‘The Nest’ by Gregory A. Douglas. Originally published in 1980 and written under a pseudonym by Eli Cantor (a businessman, composer, novelist, playwright and poet who deserves an article all of his own. Seriously, Google him). The Nest epitomises what the common consensus of a Paperback From Hell should be; gory, silly, over the top nonsense. It is also a pretty damn good book. Set on a small island off the coast of Cape Cod that is home to a small number of families and small communities of desirable holiday homes, the picturesque Massachusetts getaway becomes the breeding ground for a deadly new strain of cockroach that grows to abnormal size and gains a taste for human flesh. When a pair of scientists are called in to investigate strange animal behaviours and various unexplained phenomena, what they discover is a hive mind capable of taking down and devouring a human being within seconds. The body count is rising and it becomes a race against time to save the island and its inhabitants before they find themselves tumbling down the food chain. I’m going to hold my hands up and confess that I have an absolute bias toward any horror book, particularly those from this era, that could fall under the ‘When Nature Attacks’ category. The more outlandish the creature the better! Crabs (Guy N Smith), Cormorants (Stephen Gregory), Pike (Cliff Twemlow), Jellyfish (John Halkin), Worms (John Halkin again) and even Caterpillars (God bless John Halkin), if there is a creature that doesn’t have a Paperback From Hell dedicated to it, then somebody needs to right that wrong. As a self-confessed fanatic of this kind of book, I can confidently say that this is one of the better ones I have read. While rampaging cockroaches sounds a little off-putting, scary is hardly the first word that would come to mind, but this book can certainly ratchet up the tension, and the creatures are a genuinely unsettling presence. A big part of this is the amount of research that has clearly gone into this book. Douglas certainly did his homework and for such a silly premise, his treating things seriously and providing real scientific detail does go a long way into making this more deep and immersive than a book about man-eating cockroaches really has any right to be. The books biggest strength is also its undoing to some extent, in that Douglas is given absolute free reign to do whatever he likes and as a result seems torn as to whether it is a literary novel or pure gory entertainment, and switching wildly between both. The author namechecks Maxfield Parrish’s artwork (yes, I had to Google him too) and quotes Shakespeare on one page (I’m not joking, a character actually quotes Shakespeare, at length) but bookends these nods to high art with gleeful descriptions of eyeball feasting and cockroaches entering the human body via the most painful sounding route imaginable. The thing is though, both totally work. Douglas sure knows how to turn a phrase. One of my favourites in the opening chapter read; “The rats were cloaked in sequins of death; a nightmare scene out of an animal hell”. If there’s another book that contains a more beautiful and eloquent description of cockroaches eating rats, then I’ve never read it. The Nest is chock full of great lines like this but when it comes to the carnage and mayhem, he’s all business. There’s blood, bones and fluids aplenty and nobody is safe. I mean it. Any moral rules that big screen horror follows about the kids and the animals making it to the credits unscathed goes out the window here. If anything, the kids and the animals get it worse. The more adorable, the worse their ultimate fate. The Nest is exactly the kind of book that the phrase “they don’t make ‘em like this anymore” was created for. It is WAY too long and so incredibly self-indulgent that you can’t imagine an editor was even allowed in the same room as the manuscript prior to publication, but at no point is it ever a boring book. The level of research that’s gone into making a cockroach apocalypse at least be a scientifically sound one is very impressive and despite being overly long the pacing is set to ‘breakneck’ throughout and never fails to keep you engrossed. Highly recommended to fans of these type of man vs nature stories, and a killer start to this series of rereleases. Join me next time when I’ll be sharing my thoughts on When Darkness Loves Us by Elizabeth Engstrom. If you’d like to read along with this series and want to pick up copies of the books, or learn more about Valancourts’ Paperbacks From Hell line, visit their site at www.valancourtbooks.com/paperbacksfromhell The Nest (Paperbacks from Hell Book 1) |
Archives
May 2023
|
RSS Feed
|
|