PLAGUE by Graham Masterton

Working writer Graham Masterson throws out this disappointing disease thriller that offers up human misery and slack storytelling, as the whole Eastern Seaboard is ravaged by PLAGUE! Masterson is a titan of the horror field, responsible for the smash '70s hit The Manitou and still writing today in his 70s. Will Errickson of Too Much Horror Fiction has several entries concerning Masterson and his genre dominating horror output, but unfortunately it seems like this specific title was tossed off for an easy payday.

Handsome, divorced, wonderful Dr. Petrie (get it?) wakes up to a freaked out father with a sick little boy one fine Miami morning, and things degenerate from there. It seems there's a "super plague" that's been percolating in the raw sewage washing up on shore, and now it's cutting a swath through the city. This plague kills you in hours, which raises the question of how it manages to spread at all. This brings us to one of the glaring shortcomings of Masterson's thriller, the perfunctory plague menace. Neither the wild sci-fi speculation of The Omni Strain nor the grubby realism of The Black Death, this plague is blamed on some vague "radiation" as is the immunity of certain characters like Dr. Petrie (exposure to x-rays) and his daughter Priscilla (watching TV - for real). An unconvincing cast of supporting characters includes a hard nosed union boss, feuding bacteriologists, and washed up, gay as hell Golden Age actor Herbert Gaines, who gets recruited as a spokesman by some hardline New Righters to mount a racialist response blaming blacks and PRs for the plague. Plus ce change, plus c'est la meme chose, I suppose ... Petrie's daughter is referred to by the nauseating nickname "Prickles" throughout, and the back copy should warn you what you're in for here - half-baked, simpering prose about the father/daughter bond and Dr. Petrie's noble suffering through this pandemic that kills millions, as it spreads outside Miami despite the best efforts of the government in true cynical '70s fashion. One rare effective moment is when Dr. Petrie informs a National Guardsman that the "vaccination" he got is pure placebo and he's as doomed as any of the civvies he's threatening. But mostly we get miserable tableaus involving miserable people, from small business tyrant Edgar Paston and his love/hate relationship with young hood Shark MacManus, to Dr. Petrie's irritating, 19 year old girlfriend Adelaide who immediately gets gang-raped by Hell's Angels when she steps out of line and out of Petrie's protective custody. All these miserable people gradually make their way to NYC, some dropping dead along the way, until we congregate in a fancy high-rise and face the third act threat, some ravenous rats, and here we're in pure fantasy land, as any emotional truth or tactical realism has flown clear out the window.

It seems like everyone shits their pants after catching the plague, which is one of the few worthwhile bits throughout along with Gaines' recruitment by fascists. Not much else leaves an impression though. Masterson's writing is serviceable enough, delivering us from set-piece to set-piece until the abrupt, unsatisfying ending. For his miserable, empty end of the world, Masterson's Plague earns ZERO plague doctors out of four!

Ace Books, 1978

FIRE MOUNTAIN by Janet M. Cullen-Tanaka

Oh to live on FIRE MOUNTAIN, with the barkers and the colored balloons ...

Rainier over Tacoma

"Due to its high probability of eruption in the near future, Mount Rainier is considered one of the most dangerous volcanoes in the world." You better believe it, this mutha's about to blow! 

Cullen says in her foreword that she wrote the story on a lark way back in 1970, and sat on it until 1979 when Zebra picked it for their burgeoning disaster line. Suddenly, Mount St. Helens blew her top in March of 1980, and some last minute rewrites were in order! The story had suddenly taken on new timely import, though Cullen's adamant that it's meant as pure entertainment. As such, things don't get quite as dire as The Nightmare Factor or The Black Death - there's some government fuckups and media fuckery but despite the vintage there's a distinct lack of post-Watergate malaise and the characters all seem strangely child like, babes in the pyroclastically demolished woods. Here's one of the novel's weaknesses, as we meet too many characters who are too poorly drawn to compel our keeping track of all of them! Thankfully some are pure disaster cannon fodder, and Cullen isn't shy about wiping out whole boy scout troops or protesting American Indians. However, we send too much time navigating the volcanologist scene with flat characters like Ilyana the beautiful Russian, hotheaded young Martiniquais St. Jean, and regular American schmoes like Andy and Howard. A volcanologist named David fares better, as he feels a mystic connection with Takhoma and draws closer and closer to his adoptive mother goddess as the pressure builds.

And the pressure is intense! Here's the novel's strength, as Cullen gives us some lovely passages on the incredible, mind boggling natural forces building within the earth, power on a scale that renders all of us minuscule. Like Meteorite Track 291 we're faced with our true insignificance amidst an uncaring, unceasing universe. Our characters can only dance and strut around like toy soldiers as nature unrolls its implacable order.

It's so lonely at the fair, but all your friends are there ... For moments of near greatness and some rarefied volcanic grit, Fire Mountain earns three sleeping giants out of four:

Zebra Books, 1980

 

THE OMNI STRAIN by Cliff Patton, M.D.

It was supposed to be harmless. A beneficial bacteria, genetically engineered to subsist on oil. It could clean up toxic spills or sabotage an enemy's energy reserves. But now THE OMNI STRAIN is loose and nothing will ever be the same ...

Author Cliff Patton, M.D. brings his medical knowledge to bear with some engaging exposition on the rarefied world of lethal disease research, as his CDC characters go through the motions on this strange new bug that's cropped up dead center in their own archive! It seems the Army cut a deal to sit on some ... new strains, guaranteed access in exchange for no questions asked. But that doesn't cut it for Dr. Charlie Prentice, especially when old Sam the night janitor drops dead in the middle of a lab, along with a whole herd of guinea pigs. The Army claimed P-61 was "nonpathogenic" and they'd know, surely?

Meanwhile, the biggest oil tanker in the world, on her maiden voyage, is attacked by a mystery sub! History's largest oil spill! Here's some technothriller intrigue, and Patton manages well without getting bogged down into technical minutia, dated geopolitics, or dull exchanges between military men about nuclear options and so forth. It's a mildly convoluted setup but once the Navy borrows P-61 we just know things are going to spin out. And boy do they ever, just peep that back cover: millions dead! Things get a little rushed towards the end and Patton has to resort to a "Died in Vietnam" style postscript for his characters, doing a little world building in the process as the ravaged Mid-Atlantic states are reorganized into New Columbia. Patton doesn't quite reach the most sublime highs, but these are acceptable thrills and you have to appreciate his professionalism as the plot unfolds. He doesn't skimp on the gross-out factor, either, as the Omni Strain dispatches its victims with some nasty effects.

Zebra Books gave us a beautiful abstract cover for The Omni Strain, with some thematically appropriate obscuration of the title. For delivering the gruesome goods with a modicum of style, The Omni Strain earns three putrid Petri dishes out of four:

Zebra Books, 1980

STRANGE MEN AND WOMEN by Brad Steiger

Every day is fete day when Brad Steiger's back in town, delivering 34 quick hits in 128 pages for this above average entry about STRANGE MEN AND WOMEN! Steiger runs down a roster of "doers of good and agents of evil" throughout history, and although we might quibble with descriptors (does Charles Leale, the young doctor who tried to save Lincoln's life, really count as "strange" and not simply heroic?) Steiger manages a nice turn, avoiding the filler junk that piles up in so many of his other Popular Library entries. No folk remedies or biting bug eyed monsters here, just loads of historical weirdos and fakirs!

Steiger gives us some tried and true heavy hitters like the Countess Bathory, Burke and Hare, and William Yeats, who has turned up somewhere before in Steiger or Smith's work for his interest in the spirit realm. Psychic "thoughtographer" Ted Serios is another repeat offender, but Steiger can be forgiven for some minor recycling as he picks some real dynamite entries to repeat, like the one for Dr. Jeanne-Marie-Therese Koffman, the woman who hunts Abominable Snowmen! She's after Zana the Ape Woman, who long time readers will remember from multiple ABSM volumes by Smith, Steiger, and the rest. Here's Steiger's potpourri approach at its best, truly engaging and interesting as opposed to dull and deadening.

Steiger is deep in midcentury Lost Cause mythology when writing on Belle Boyd, infamous womanly spy for the Confederacy - she defends Southron honor by shooting a Union soldier dead and passing messages for Confederate generals, all while looking ravishing. Treason in defense of slavery is apparently no vice if you can make it sexy! To be fair, Steiger also includes a chapter on a heroic southern soldier, one Major Robert Anderson, who stayed true to his oath and defended Fort Sumter from Confederate cannon. More sexy ladies include the possibly apocryphal lady pirate Mary Anne Blythe, who cavorted with Blackbeard according to Steiger's telling, and the aforementioned Countess Bathory. 

That sickly orientalist haze creeps back in a chapter on Jean-Eugene Robert-Houdin, the famous French conjurer who was tasked with a "magic mission" to pacify the Marabouts of Algeria. It seems that the natives are restless, indeed they're downright "unpredictable and impulsive" for no discernible reason that civilized Europeans can see! This is a fascinating story, actually, and a shame that Steiger can only give us the white (magic) man's burden. We also get the usual washed up "psychic" stars like ol' Ted Serios, Gerard Croiset, and Peter Hurkos, with Steiger's usual credulous writing, plus spiritualist Mina Crandon who tussles with Houdini as "Margery of the Spirits" and, according to Steiger, proves her psychic mettle! About that ... "Investigators who studied Crandon concluded that she had no such paranormal ability, and others detected her in outright deception." Too bad. The same goes for psychic healing superstar "Dr. Tony of Manila" who Brad also puffs up as some sort of heroic figure. The prize winning dream of Dr. Otto Loewi gets reused from another volume by Steiger, though honestly I've forgotten which one. Ya gotta hit your page counts ya know!

Overall a good read, but as usual those jerks at the Paperback Library think they're too good to give us a table of contents:

1.  The Ghoul of Paris (5)

2.  The Four Year Life of a Genius (7)

3.  Water Dowser Deluxe (9)

4.  Escape Artist of the Korean War (12)

5.  The Doctor Who Kept Lincoln Alive (16)

6.  America's First Secret Agent (19)

7. The Dream That Won a Nobel Prize (23)

8.  John R. Brinkley, the Great Rejuvenator (25)

9.  Burke's the Butcher, Hare's the Thief, Knox the Boy Who Buys the Beef (30)

10. The Russian Woman Doctor Who Hunts Abominable Snowmen (35)

11. The Man Who Takes Pictures With His Head (37)

12. George Devol, King of the Mississippi (41)

13. The Woman Who Collected Coffins (49)

14. The Rebel Officer Who Defended Fort Sumter (52)

15. Rhymes From the Spirit World (57)

16. The Death Wind (60)

17. Belle Boyd, the Confederacy's Shapely Spy (64)

18. The One Man Lost and Found Department (73)

19. The Man Who Invented the Mickey (75)

20. Gerard Croiset, Clairvoyant Extraordinary (78)

21. The Sailor With Nine Lives (82)

22. The World's Greatest Athlete (84)

23. The Buccaneer Who Wore a Bikini (87)

24. The Psychic Who Solves Crimes (90)

25. The Countess Was a Vampire (94)

26. The Teen-Ager Who Fought Off Eighty Men (97)

27. Dr. Tony, Manila's Man With the Healing Hands (102)

28. The Spy Who Became a Monster (105)

29. Joseph Dunninger, Master Mentalist (109)

30. Simon Gerty, the White Savage (112)

31. Margery of the Spirits (116)

32. Cartouche, Emperor of Crime (120)

33. The Magician and the Marabouts (123)

34. The Scientist and His Pet Ghost (127)

Get in line boys, she's taken!

Paperback Library, 1967

INVADER by Albert Fay Hill and David Campbell Hill

Keep your electric eye on me babe

Put your ray gun to my head

Now what we got here is less a Moonage Daydream and more a throwback to the classic alien invasions of the '50s with handsome genius scientists, harrumphing military men and deluded peaceniks all facing certain annihilation from advanced invaders. Their miene may be inscrutable but their agenda is clear: total domination!

Things start with a bang when a flying saucer blasts a jet liner out of the sky, killing all aboard. Genius scientist Christian Nilstrom thinks the visitors are testing us, probing our defenses. More aggression follows, and it becomes apparent that there are three saucers working together, throwing hooks and jabs at hypersonic speed on a global scale. Then things get worse ...

These guys are just the scouting party. The real threat is coming in hot from 61 Cygni, a fleet of hundreds of ships, and they're gonna be here in just 14 short months from now. Our only hope? To rally behind Mr. Genius himself, Christian Nilstrom, and build a gigantic gamma ray gun that can exterminate the coming threat in one radioactive wipe. We get a lucky break when we knock one of the scouts down over the Canadian rockies - this is one of the better sequences in the book - and salvage some precious wreckage giving us that much more of an edge. Will it be enough?

Like I said, this is classic '50s style super science fiction, with all the ups and downs that entails. Characters are mostly cardboard, defined by their jobs/rank and nationalities. The Brits keep saying pip pip and right-o, the Germans call everyone Herr and Fraulein, the Japanese speak with halting deference, and so on. The Hills' near future world building is shaky, spending too much time describing how - for example - the new Prime Minister is a young Tory firebrand who rescued England's economy with fiscal responsibility. And here's another weakness for a near future technothriller: we're somewhere in the '80s but the political scene is totally divorced from the real world of 1981. You can play things a couple ways here. Smart authors just skip making heads of state main characters at all and give us people from the lower ranks. You can have real historical figures on the periphery of scenes, giving you some verisimilitude. Or you can invent fictional leaders as the Hills have here, which if bungled comes off as clumsy and unconvincing. Things get shakier still with some antagonist characters like the peacenik academic Knox - who "could explain away the Killing Fields as 'excesses of the Party' while lambasting America for defending itself" - and the cartoonishly awful Russian harpy Olga, unhappily married to one of the main Soviet characters yet trying to seduce every man in sight with her giant tits (really). Attempts at technical accuracy and hard SF extrapolations (all GRASER arrays and LOOTS telescopes) nestle uneasily with the goofy characterizations and naive geopolitics (dig Japan's new nuclear island complex!). Worst of all is how much space is wasted here when we could be riding the highs of rumination on the unknowable threat ...

There's a tissue sample recovered from that crash in the Rockies, and from all analysis the Cygnians are just like us biologically. Good thing too, because if they were a little more alien maybe we wouldn't be able to meet them on their level at all - they might just slam a swarm of asteroids into Earth and call it good. There's that tension of knowing the unknown, the mild letdown we feel when bit by bit things are clarified. Things are never as frightening, as interesting as we imagine they could be. By novels end the Hills have almost got us there though, with our genius cast pondering the defeated fleet's voyage out of the solar system into the abyss after our lethal gamma ray burst. A ghost fleet, manned by a dead crew for infinity. Here's the stuff! Too bad it's so thin on the ground. Cool cover though.

Our cornball Invader gets two flying saucer scouts out of four:

Jovian Publications, 1981

METEORITE TRACK 291 by Gary Paulsen

Some of us of a certain age will have read Gary Paulsen's Hatchet in school, a wilderness survival young adult novel which spawned several sequels and represented a type for author Gary Paulsen's (1939-2021) work. How interesting then, to find that before all that YA guff he had dipped his toe into the '70s disaster pool with a sleazy, cynical, impacting read. We've twigged onto METEORITE TRACK 291, and we've got one hundred hours until the fall!

Paulsen and his most well known title

The opening is pure technothriller bliss, with satellite tracker Richard Foreman and his crew drawing us deep into their wyrd world, based on Greenwich Mean Time and the movements of unknowable celestial objects. This deep dive puts us into the perfect frame of mind to feel the creeping heebie jeebies when Foreman finds something on his track that shouldn't be there, something that is locked onto a projected course that will TERMINATE EARTH. All Foreman can do is kick it upstairs, but that's when the trouble really begins in true '70 conspiracy style. And here Paulsen excells, as the nameless General and his faceless goons bring their considerable resources to bear in silencing Foreman. We don't get any scenes of General so-and-so browbeating Secretary what's-his-face in the war room, and we're the better for it. All we get is the grounds eye view of a massive structure lashing out even if it kills it and us, endless resources and skills brought to bear for the most asinine, bass-ackwards ends.

Spoilers here, nothing stops the traveller (as Paulsen calls the meteor) from obliterating Chicago. And here the narrative becomes truly Biblical, coming full circle with the prehistoric prologue of a troubled tribesman witnessing another cataclysmic fall. In this totally earthbound thriller, without any astronaut heroics or Star Wars shenanigans, Paulsen outlines how truly small we are in the universe and how utterly pointless our living or dying is in the long run.

For his ruthless honesty, Paulsen earns four blasted craters out of four:

For an alternate perspective, Amazon reviewer Bruce takes the novel to task for geographical sloppiness (I-70 does NOT take you to Chicago) and what he judges as two dimensional characters. Your mileage may vary!

Dell Publishing, 1979

THE BLACK DEATH by Gwyneth Cravens and John S. Marr

Here shall we live

In this terrible town

Where the price for our eyes

Shall squeeze them tight like a fist

And who knows? Echoes in tenement halls ... but it's in a very high class high-rise that our horror begins, when a poor little rich girl returns from her western getaway feeling a little blue. And before you know it she's taken a turn for the worst, and winds up a Jane Doe on the morgue slab. And the chain of infection has already begun. Before it's all finished, it'll burn through Harlem, Uptown, 42nd Street, every rat-infested slum and every other glittering high-rise in the whole of NYC. It's THE BLACK DEATH, and it's gonna knock us back to the Dark Ages!

There's fear overhead, there's fear overground.

Lookit that cover! One nasty rat, ready to take on the Big Apple! Much better than the usual sterile test tubes and petri dishes and microscopes that festoon a lot of disease thrillers. And that's the kind of story we get inside - gritty, dirty, centered on the streets and the people. Cravens and Marr use some eloquent interiors of Yersinia pestis at war within its human hosts as contrast to the outer reality of medicine and science as human practices, bound in by a myriad of human structures. Later on, when things have gotten truly bad, our protagonist Dr. David Hart reflects on how impossible it was to see exactly how things were going to break down ... but then, he realizes, there was always that fear, that foreknowledge, that something was wrong. His health department tried its best, but they're overloaded and underfunded when they catch this new blip on their radar. Maybe it's nothing, the bureaucrats and politicians hope ... but we know better, oh yes.

For minor spoilers, there's an excellent shift halfway through the novel wherein Dr. Hart is incapacitated by the plague. When he wakes up it's in an abandoned hospital. Weak, addled, alone, he ventures outside and finds a whole new world - or rather, the end of the world. And the novel kicks into high gear, with a new, apocalyptic churn of horrors. Our gossamer civilization is burning at both ends and the stage is set for scenes more depraved than the worst phantasmagoria from Bosch.

Meanwhile, in the bowels of Washington a different kind of vermin are scuttling around. The current crisis has whipped them into their own fevered frenzy, desperate to cement their positions in the "permanent state" that runs deeper than any elected position, including the president. These paranoid ciphers trust no one and love nothing, and there's no depravity they won't indulge for national security: witness their calm debate over "full neutralization of all non-rodent carriers" ... they're talking about us, baby! Here the authors give us more historical background of the kind we got in The Nightmare Factor: Operation Sea-Spray again, biowarfare in Vietnam, and the myriad chemical/biological/ballistic assassination plots against Castro. In yet another example of their cynical nihilism, our DC demons wonder whether they can frame the NYC plague as a Cuban plot in order to finally pull off the invasion/counterrevolution they've been slavering at for decades now. Some are afraid the plague may be traced back to their own dark doings, and in another example of the authors' grounded realism there is no smoking gun to prove or disprove this. We all must live with uncertainty, including the possible conspirators. 

The authors don't skimp on any aspect of the story. The horror is bloody disgusting, the tension ratcheted to nerve wracking tightness. From Dr. Hart's nighttime walks - an escape from himself and the frantic pace of modern life - to Nurse Dolores Rodriguez and her quietly carried torch for the good doctor there isn't a false character note. Rodriguez is sketched as a believably, beautifully strange person, one of those who move through life silently, never complaining nor hinting at the vast reserves of strength within. She isn't the only one who gets quick, professional description that sticks with us whether they live, die, or disappear into the unknown. Our supporting cast include the "Blackhawks" nurses of the health department: a team of Black, hispanic and "oriental" gals beating feet through the worst neighborhoods in the city tracking down bugs. Thankless, dangerous, necessary work. Cravens and Marr effortlessly illustrate one of the major contradictions of modern life: we're all individuals but we can't escape our boxes of race, class, sex, the lines that sort us out into the whole stinking mix of humanity, even as we yearn to be recognized for ourselves and to fulfill our roles the best we can. These invisible lines can have catastrophic effects during a crisis, for individuals and outwards.

By the time this whole bloody business is over we'll be witness to extermination squads, nerve gas delivered by top secret "monopod" drones, the ultimate heights of the human spirit and depths of its depravity. For a historic scale and soul shattering horror, Cravens and Marr's The Black Death earns a full four suppurating buboes out of four!

Highly recommended. 

Ballantine Books, 1978 (original pub. 1977)

STAR BRIGHT by Martin Caidin

Now here's an author who's long overdue at POTG, Mr. Martin Caidin! A glance at his author blurb will be enough to elucidate, but let's go on anyway: Caidin was a naval/aviation buff and prolific author of subjects fiction and nonfiction, including coauthoring Japanese flying ace Saburo Sakai's autobiography and penning multiple tie-in novels including the source novel for the hit TV show The Six Million Dollar Man and the novelization of the '80s time travel sci-fi actioner The Final Countdown. Other works integrated UFOs and the Bermuda Triangle, making Caidin the perfect author for this blog! It just so happens that his debut here is a slightly sideways apocalyptic techno thriller, is all.

Marty! Lookin' sharp bud!

Once again, mortal man has been mucking about with powers beyond his ken. This time it's a project for fusion power, which has spiraled out of control and spawned a voracious black hole smack dab in the foothills of picturesque Cumberland County, Tennessee. If somebody doesn't do something fast this hungry little bastard is gonna gobble up the entire planet!

Caidin gets off on the wrong foot with a cutesy action opening that dredges up memories of yesterday's limp-dicked wannabe "action" novel The Big One, as some super secret special forces guys get absolutely owned by scientist/warrior Dr. Owen Kimberly while attempting to shanghai him as a trouble shooter for Project Star Bright. This opener could have been scrapped without losing anything of value. It's one of several missteps along the way that make me wonder if Star Bright was some kind of fix-up novel - there's no background info really available on the web but the herky jerk pacing coupled with some archaic science fiction prose style leads me down that path. Neutron stars and black holes were cutting edge maybe a decade before this novel's publication date which is another odd note. Anyways, moving on to the actual story ...

It's alright. There are some truly beautiful moments of "hard SF" poetry, descriptions of powers and forces beyond anything we could imagine if they weren't staring us in the face, but there's also a lot of clunky dialogue and broad characterizations to sit through getting there. Once shit truly hits the fan we're home free to a crackerjack finale. At his best, Caidin achieves some sublime levels of existential terror. To go back to The Big One again, in Star Bright we're treated to thousands of casualties off screen, as end times cultists and martial law rack up the body count. Where in The Big One we felt cheated by the glib mentions of mega-death, here the effect is to heighten the tension as our scientist characters are locked off from the rest of the world, truly alone and solely responsible for the fate of the planet.

A former owner made a note of Sodium Penethol (sic) on the inside frontis, possibly referencing another book they were reading. For a modest but sometimes effective little apocalypse, Caidin's Star Bright earns two swirling black holes out of four:

We'll see more Caidin in the future ... Bantam Books was kind enough to also give us a sneak peek at the first few pages of a crummy political thriller called The Elijah Conspiracy at the end of it all. Thanks fellas!

Bantam Books, 1980