ORCA by Arthur Herzog

Peter Benchley couldn't have imagined the tidal wave of derivative terror he'd unleash after the publication of his Jaws in 1974, but in the wake of the blockbuster film adaptation in '75 a legion of Hollywood hacks and pulp fiction scribblers were soon swarming like ... well, like sharks, in a feeding frenzy over a newly revived genre based in an age old terror of the sea and handed down fishermen's tales of impossible, implacable monsters. And soon enough, among the schools of sharks, other denizens of the deep were being dredged up to serve as villains: piranha, giant octopus, plesiosaurs (and monster birds). 

Enter Italian mega-producer Dino de Laurentiis, who tasked his filmmakers to "find a fish tougher and more terrible than the great white" in order to take a bite of that boffo benthic box office.

Enter the killer whale. Truly an awesome beast, though some dramatic liberties were taken in adapting Orcinus orca for the big screen. To whit, the oft-repeated blurb about the orca's vengeance drive, featured in the film's trailer, poster, and on the back cover above, and some old fishwives' tales of orcas eating human prey. This was the Wild West era of marine biology, when myth still mingled with scientific methodology in the popular mind. All the more appropriate that the filmed version of Orca climaxes amid a patently phony landscape of styrofoam icebergs filmed in sunny, balmy Malta. But we're here for the novelization, and such budgetary shortfalls shouldn't concern us on the printed page. In fact, Herzog delivers a riveting climax for his novel, though there's some rough seas getting there.

If anyone could pull off a rote adaptation of a mercenary genre flick, it seems like it'd be author Arthur Herzog, previously responsible for the killer bee catastrophe The Swarm, which ended up adapted by Irwin Allen for one of his late-career bombs in 1978. But here he almost bungles things right out of the gate! The first chapter is a complete waste, pure filler with salty dog Jack Campbell, his sister Annie, and her beau Paul taking a trip to the aquarium to see a stuffed shark and a performance by a pair of orcas. It's a deadly dull way to begin a thriller about death on the high seas - we're stuck in suburban Miami, for Chrissakes, when we should be feeling the spray on our face and the ocean roll under our feet! Jack fantasizes about his sister's sex life with her boyfriend in some typical '70s weirdness, sizes up some unattractive tourists, and listens to a very unscientific spiel about orcas from the show trainers, complete with the invented orca vengeance drive and spurious tales of human consumption. We're also gifted some early editing gaffes, with a "great white" accidentally described as a "great whale" on page five. Things aren't looking good here.

But slowly, surely, Herzog builds up a head of steam. Once we're witness to a shark bitten in half (take that, Jaws!), the first, disposable crewman chowed down on, and an orca miscarriage all in one go, we're off to the races! I'm not sure if Herzog was working with an earlier script, or if he perhaps wrote Orca first and then had it snapped up by De Laurentiis for his killer whale movie, but there are a few differences between the book and film. The pointless first chapter in Miami is thankfully absent from the film, and the character of Annie (played by Bo Derek) isn't related to Campbell as in the book. The climax is different too, with a spoiler following for the book: the whale doesn't kill Campbell! The beast leaves him a broken man adrift on the ice, having lost everything in his futile pursuit - his ship, his crew, his sanity. Now this is some high drama, though the preceding pages were somewhat waterlogged.

3/4

Pocket Books, 1977

KILLER by Peter Tonkin

Our dramatic detour continues with a real KILLER story by Peter Tonkin plunging us into an icy ocean of Arctic terror! "As good as Jaws," says the Lewiston Journal, but I beg to differ because Tonkin's a far better writer than Peter Benchley, and his story is far more interesting than that famous bubblegum beach read. Benchley has since been very publicly remorseful of the shabby treatment he gave sharks in his breakout hit, and rightly so. Thankfully, Tonkin threads the needle for his subject much more successfully, and leaves no mistaken impressions of the mighty killer whale. First off, we have the simple fact that the orca, while a fearsome angel of death for seals, sea lions, and its larger cousins among Cetacea, has never been reliably documented hunting humans in the wild. Whereas Herzog and DeLaurentiis had to invent a mythical vengeance drive for their orca, Tonkin does them one better and puts the onus of his killer's bad attitude solely on humankind - specifically, a fictional extension to the very real and very disturbing "US Navy Marine Mammal Training Program" which trained dolphins in "anti-frogmen" techniques during Vietnam. Tonkin only has to stretch things a little bit to have the Navy attempting to train an awesome specimen of Orcinus orca in the same killer skillset, and he only needs a convenient jailbreak by this incredibly intelligent animal in order to kick off the action and put our cast of human characters in mortal peril. This small bit of dramatic license ends up giving us a much richer payoff than Benchley's unresearched, unnatural off-the-cuff writing: we already know how orcas react to the stresses of captivity, so imagine those dark impulses encouraged by a hubristic assassination program. We are the authors of our own misfortune.

And what of our human characters? A science team, stranded on an ice floe. Their guides, and only hope of survival: a giant of an Englishman and his Inuit soul brother, bound together as hard men gone through hard times. Digressions on Inuit mythology, a mythos grown from a spare, dangerous world of earth and air, blood and sky and the deep blue sea. Simple ingredients, just add one killer and shake them all together. Tonkin's naturalistic portrayal of danger brings to mind Alistair Maclean. Our killer may be trained in cetacean commando tactics, but he's hardly a Freddy or a Jason, unbound by time and space. Indeed, our survivors will find that the Arctic landscape can be even more treacherous than their hunter: there's a harrowing sequence mid-book where a panicked herd of walrus threaten to demolish the fragile ice floe. Hypothermia, frostbite, drowning, hungry polar bears, and one hungry, angry, homicidal orca ... but that's not all. Our killer has hooked up with a wild pod of orcas, and he's doing his damnedest to teach them some new tricks, to blood them in the same wretched business he's been forced into ... here is a perfect example of the thriller in action, the terror of implication, the second step to fear that we take ourselves, with only a gentle push from the author. A good writer like Tonkin can trust us to take that step, to throw ourselves into the abyss, even if there's a killer waiting in the blackness below.

 

An Italian edition

Above, some different covers. Killer crushes its way to an icy 4/4 rating.

Signet Books, 1979

THE WAVE by Christopher Hyde

What's worse than a tsunami? Try a nuclear tsunami! Actually, despite the fantastically flash cover art, THE WAVE isn't a tsunami at all, but a gigantic dam break wave surging down the Columbia River. And what's in its path but the aging Hanford Nuclear Waste site, which in this story is home to a brand spanking new breeder reactor - purely a fictional construct, thank goodness. The failure point is the Mica Dam in British Columbia, "one of the largest earthfill dams in the world" ... and different characters in this story fill us in on all the dangers this kind of dam construction entails, and all the corrupt/incompetent politicking that went on to get the Columbia River Treaty passed way back in 1961, which outlined Canada and the USA's hydroelectric responsibilities on said river. Author Christopher Hyde present a sadly all-too plausible disaster scenario in the best '70s thriller style, in line with the early work of Michael Chrichton. As the cover blurb says, THE WAVE isn't just fiction, it's tomorrow headlines!

Hyde does his best work around the circumstances of the creeping disaster, both physical and political. We get a crash course on the Vajont Dam disaster of 1963, which claimed over 2,000 souls in Italy, and the aforementioned outline on the political scene leading to the Mica Dam's construction. Meanwhile, simple passages on a single pebble rolling down hill or ripples lapping at the dam become sublime, loaded with the quiet threat of what we know to come. Hyde does less well with the requisite '70s thriller conspiracy elements, with clumsy references to the conspirators' membership in Skull and Bones, and the need to find "an Oswald" as a patsy to take care of our nosy protagonists. He still manages a paranoid atmosphere, but some of the skulduggery feels like filler on the way to the main event. And woo boy, once that water starts rolling ...

On our side of the pond, Playboy Paperbacks put out this attractive edition in 1981.

Spoilers (of a sort): the radioactive wave doesn't make it to the ocean, sparing us a precursor to the Fukushima nuclear disaster of 2011. But there's plenty of delicious destruction along the way, with floods and firestorms and a nuclear hostage situation. Half the fun of any random disaster thriller is learning about a brand new subject and all the horrible ways it can go wrong. A good thriller author takes us under their wing for a time, selling us on these awful visions. Hyde acquits himself well in that respect, even with some narrative speed bumps. A fake transcript of congressional hearings after the disaster is a penultimate dollop of verisimilitude, followed by a stinger of the conspiracy taking out its own trash, another realistic touch.

3/4

Coronet Books, 1982 (original pub. 1979)

TSUNAMI by Crawford Kilian

Canadian author Crawford Kilian brings us this all-American near future sci-fi/disaster thriller. The ozone layer's been shredded and the Earth's magnetic field has faded away, requiring people to wear protective gear just to go outside. The government's at a loss, the economy's in a depression, and the academy's holed up in its ivory tower, "shaking out" any radical voices in preemptive, neutering self defense. Sleazy Hollywood moguls work with the Pentagon to shovel out ultra-violent jingoist fantasy as a distraction from the long emergency. Sound familiar?

"Still, they'll have to do something. They can't just let everything fall apart."

Sound familiar?

And then, just one more damn thing. An 8.0 earthquake in Antarctica sends the mother of all tsunamis screaming up the Pacific, slamming into San Francisco and blasting society apart like a cheap storefront in front of the storm surge. Now the shit has really hit the fan, and it's not going to shake out how everyone might like:

These would-be survivalists had been foolish and unlucky. They'd prepared for the end of the old order, but not for the beginning of the new. They'd thought that violence would protect them during the brief period before other people obligingly died off, like some disaster novel; then they'd inherit the earth.

Like most disaster stories, this isn't just about the big wave, big rock, or bad bug on the loose, but about the paper thin barrier between our supposedly rock solid establishment society and pure, roiling anarchy. After a false start with the crime wave caper of Martin Wallace Tyler's Tidal Wave, it's good to get rolling with some real tsunami action in a real disaster epic, especially one that runs counter to the reactionary impulses that frequently play out in this genre. The post-Vietnam black and chicano soldiers who became savage cannibal raiders in Lucifer's Hammer, fit only to be cut down by heroic homesteaders, here find themselves ... everywhere, like everyone. Who knows who you'll become when faced with the ultimate choice of life or death, but it's a messy affair regardless. 

Kilian isn't interested in settling scores against the wrong type of people, and even his "bad" characters like the nasty Hollywood producer are drawn with a sensitive hand. His writing is best in the more intimate moments, such as producer Anthony Allison's fraught relationship with his starlet Shauna, or scientist Kirstie Kennard's pained reflections on the academy's impotence in the face of unfurling history. Kilian's focus, after the big waves, is on how things get put back together by people shattered by their experiences, truthfully, and not in the fascistic play-acting pantomime of Niven and Pournelle. It's a tight story at just over 200 pages and though it sometimes yaws uncomfortably in the inter-genre spaces, Kilian steers it home true in the end.

3/4

Bantam Books, 1984

THE ENCYCLOPEDIA OF ANCIENT AND FORBIDDEN KNOWLEDGE by Zolar

Here's a hefty tome that promises the COMPLETE guide to the occult, from Zolar ... of course! It's a mite more impressive than previous guides we've looked at, with Zolar offering a crash course in everything from crystal gazing to the Kabbalah. The handy table of contents gives the full rundown of what to expect.

As a neophyte to these occult practices, I'm practically bowled over by the density of text. Fortunately some quick googling reveals part of Zolar's secret - plagiarism! Over at the blog Learning Curve on the Ecliptic, commenter Stella had this to say:

As a teenager, I had Bruce King's (aka Zolar's) "The Encyclopedia of Ancient and Forbidden Knowledge" - one of those catch-all books with chapters on astrology, numerology, Tarot, etc.

Being young, I was very impressed with it. A friend and I even referred to it as "The Book", lol.

In later years, however, more books became available via the net. I can see now, for instance, that Zolar's crystal gazing chapter was cobbled together from bits of "A Course of Advanced Lessons in Clairvoyance and Occult Powers" by the wonderful C. Alexander (under the pseudonym "Swami Panchadasi", lol) John Melville's "Crystal Gazing and the Wonders of Clairvoyance". Entire passages are lifted almost word-for-word from both books.

It's possible that King was under pressure from the publisher to write an "occult encyclopedia", and his astrology writings may be his own, since that was his area of expertise. But I wouldn't be surprised to see them someplace else, in older books.

Stella has her own blog on card reading and fortune telling called Fate Keeps on Happening, which I recommend for her strong, eclectic perspective. You never know what you might miss if not for someone else's experience! I'll continue to dive into Zolar's encyclopedia and post excerpts as relevant in future. In the mean time, don't take any wooden nickels or xeroxed horoscopes!

Available to read and download at archive dot org.

Popular Library, 1970

MAPS OF THE UNKNOWN: Loch Ness III

We ought to have the lay of the land by now, with all these maps. This one is from The Loch Ness Story, by Nicholas Witchell. Courtesy Penguin Books, 1974.

COVER UPDATES: STRANGELY ENOUGH!

The popular Scholastic edition of Strangely Enough! by C.B. Colby, copyright 1963. Illustrations by David Lockhart.