TREMOR VIOLET by David Lippincott

There's blood in the streets

It's up to my ankles

Blood in the streets 

It's up to my knees

Here it comes, for the umpteenth time. Los Angeles is gonna get the Big One, the one that's gonna knock California into the sea, a 9 on the Richter scale and worse to come ... Tremor Violet. A lyrical title, and one hell of an explosive cover, but does author David Lippincott bring the noise? Does he ring in the apocalypse in style?

Blood in my love
In the terrible summer
Bloody red sun of
Fantastic L.A.

Let's just say, he gets an awful lot of mileage going over well tread ground. The plotting is paint by numbers, with concerned scientists, crooked public servants, and oblivious private citizens all lined up to say their lines and get put through the cataclysmic wringer. Lippincott's prose is belabored: 

To the outsider, this section of Beverly Hills is both awesome and puzzling; there is no way to be certain whether the gates are meant to keep strangers out or the strangers who live behind them in.

And his characters are contrived, right down to their names: Digit Vorhees, Adam Mosely, Mishi and Addie, Oskie and Pokress, a cast of dozens who fail to convince, neither compelling or realistic enough to become anything more than a parade of thin '70s stereotypes, mere meat for the grinder. Some of it is just plain distracting: why is 15 year old Mishi's dialogue written as if she were a precocious 8 year old? She's a Japanese living in the Hills and speaking ESL, but Lippincott's cutesy rendering of her speech - she learned colloquial English, we're told, by watching old movies - cements her firmly as a stereotype in our minds, and not the awkward adolescent fumbling through her sexual awakening that the author is clearly attempting. None of Lippincott's attempts at a grand tapestry of disaster hold together, leaving us with disconnected episodes which seem even more unsatisfying in their disunity. And the main event? Tremor Violet herself, the "tremendous wallop" that promises to upend LA with her big, scary, epic violence?

It's alright.

Nothing special, really. Less Earthquake and more Smash-Up on Interstate 5 -  a made-for-TV apocalypse. Lippincott manages a decent set piece when some of his victims must rappel down a collapsed penthouse restaurant's glass elevator shaft, but he falls flat with his other scenes of destruction. His main problem seems to be pacing, as scenes and characters are built up interminably over the book, only to sputter out when called upon for their big moment. Wild animals loosed from a zoo, eating earthquake survivors? Sounds horrible, I'll take it! But that bit's over before it even really begins. The dams at the Van Norman Reservoir have blown, flooding the valley? Ditto, it's over and done with. Lather rinse repeat, and Lippincott's big one is a big flop.

And as if to make up for this quaalude of a quake, near the end of things out of nowhere Lippincott springs a brutal rape scene upon us, as poor, alienated Mishi is sodomized with a shotgun by the pervert jailbird Pokress. Pokress gets his head blown off for his troubles, but Lippincott lavishes entirely too much detail on Mishi's ordeal and has done nothing in the preceding 250 pages to earn this savage shock value. It's a Hail Mary pass that lands somewhere south of good taste and nowhere near successful. Just about the only successful piece of this work is the end - I'm not being a wag, Lippincott ends things on a cliffhanger with another tremor imminent, and the suspense works. It'd work even better though, if he hadn't fumbled everything else.

Lippincott's paint by numbers apocalypse gets a miserable rating of one seismograph out of four.

Signet Books, 1975