FATAL EXPOSURE by Michael Tobias

Environmentalist/author Michael Tobias delivers a would-be searing sermon on ozone depletion and the fate of the planet, but things fall flat in FATAL EXPOSURE! We're off to a roaring start on an Antarctic expedition, as some scientists doing routine monitoring find a wasteland of death and suffering. As one little baby penguin shits and pukes itself to death right at the feet of Dr. Willard, we receive the message loud and clear: something is wrong! Tobias writes with a cynical but clear eyed attitude, rendering these initial horrors all the more striking.

Flash forward a few years later. That mysterious ozone phenomena has reappeared over Seattle! Once Tobias gets into the capital-P Plotting of the story, things get sticky. The horror and dread of the opening scenes are replaced with bathos and pure silliness: witness the tragic fate of a cameraman, knocked out of a helicopter, onto another helicopter, getting chopped into a thousand pieces and causing a crash, all above a rotten ocean of dead whales, fish, plankton, done in by ozone depletion! By the final 50 pages we've been reduced to stock survivalist scenarios as civilization breaks down in the PNW. It's just too much, a cavalcade of misery, stock conspiracy plotting, and wannabe Grand Guignol that leaves us feeling nothing but vague dissatisfaction.

For a strong start followed by nothing in particular, Fatal Exposure earns one UV ray warning out of four:

Dig that Art Deco cover art though.

Pocket Books, 1991

GENESIS by W.A. Harbinson

Very little fruit is forbidden

Sometimes we wobble, sometimes we're strong

But you know evil is an exact science

Being carefully, correctly wrong

Author W.A. Harbinson delivers us this "true story" treatment of the flying saucer phenomena, starting with the mystery airships of the 1890s, on through foo fighters and saucer crashes, cattle mutilations and saucer cults, culminating with wunderwaffe and secret Antarctic bases revealing the terrible secret of GENESIS!

It's all very clever and meticulous but eventually collapses under its own weight, as every bit of UFO trivia must be incorporated into the increasingly top heavy narrative. What's left is less of a story and more a bullet list, and once we grasp the structure the whole enterprise is rendered plodding and turgid. Major spoilers follow, so be warned!

Our antagonist, it turns out, is a mad scientist from the 19th century, the inventor of those mysterious airships. As the years rolled on, he perfected his flying machines, ultimately making the sociopathic choice to work for Hitler's reich to reach even greater heights. His flying saucer wunderwaffe predate the now common modern formulation of Die Glocke, but as we know Nazi UFOs were nothing new in the subculture. 

From money making schemes by
run-of-the-mill neo-nazis ... 

... to poorly thought out products by model makers!

Following the fall of Berlin, our mad scientist flees to New Swabia and sets himself up with some robotized Nazi slaves and a fleet of flying saucers. Complicating things, the US government is also engineering their own crude saucers, which is a nice touch that adds some depth - no wonder UFO reports are so varied and strange, if multiple culprits are to blame. By the by, our villain has also unlocked anti-aging treatments, and a good thing too because he's coming up on 120 now! The early atmosphere of paranoia that Harbinson stokes degrades into nihilistic boredom - what horrific evil will our villain unveil next? Ho hum.

We are no monsters, we're moral people
And yet we have the strength to do this
This is the splendor of our achievement
Call in the air strike with a poison kiss

Harbinson includes an author's note and source appendix after the story, drawing heavily on the unreliable Renato Vesco, Italian ex-NASA contractor who assembled a UFOlogical history in his Intercept UFO which parallels many of the tacks taken in Genesis. Harbinson admits that much of Vesco's narrative is unsupported but no matter, it makes a good tale. He recommends a swath of UFO titles as well as WWII texts and some psi titles. Ol' Brad Steiger sneaks in with his edition of Project Blue Book - one of his stronger titles due to simply being the released Blue Book papers. His inclusion shows how the high and low mix in UFOlogy, purported hard facts mixing with innuendo and fantasy.

Over the years Harbinson has expanded his Genesis into a series, titled Projekt Saucer. For an ambitious misfire, Genesis earns one wunderwaffe out of four:

Dell Publishing, 1982 (original pub. 1980)

BLIZZARD by George Stone

Here's a disaster novel with an outstandingly simple idea: what if it didn't stop snowing? The entire eastern seaboard is about to find out, as the flakes just keep coming down, day after day, week after week, until the Boston/NYC/DC megalopolis is buried under TONS of fluffy, freezing DEATH! The Soviets have parked some satellites over the scene and a fleet of perfectly innocent fishing trawlers off shore, but are they just curious snoopers, or sinister appraisers of some sci-fi weather control scheme? It's making the boys in the State Department nervous, and someone's liable to do something reckless if we don't get to the bottom of this BLIZZARD and fast!

It's a breezy, cynical, slightly sleazy '70s thrill ride we're in for, with plenty of post-Watergate apathy and an entropic inevitability around the big blitz - of course this is happening, what should we expect? Author George Stone writes with a light touch around CIA assassinations and black budget skulduggery, and his characters are the standard neurotic '70s horn dogs. Thank God for that! This is a fine, fun time, starting with the gimmick cover where the actual title is inside on a spread. Imagine that kind of ballyhoo for a novel nowadays.

My only real complaint is that there isn't enough snow! We get a snowmobile chase through the flurried streets of NYC and our sexy journalista heroine cross country skies her way through DC, but otherwise we truly don't get enough of a sense of the BLIZZARD'S scale. It's all over before we know it, and while the pace and economy are appreciated we could have done with just a little bit more. Blizzard might not go over the top to a world beater but that's just fine, it's enough that it's competent and satisfying.

Corgi Books edition, 1979

For a very pleasant disaster thriller, BLIZZARD earns three snowflakes out of four:

Dell Publishing, 1979 (original pub. 1977)

COVER UPDATES: WISDOM OF THE ANCIENTS and LIVING WITH THE LAMA

A double dose of T. Lobsang Rampa today, beginning with the Bantam Books edition of Rampa's occult guide from 1978 (original pub. 1970). "He survived torture, imprisonment, starvation," but not really.

And another Corgi edition of Living With The Lama from 1968, which plays coy with the concept of Rampa translating his cat's biography from "the Siamese Cat language" (original pub. 1964).

Cute logo!

FIRESPILL by Ian Slater

The ocean is on fire. The ocean is on fire! Off the coast of British Columbia, two supertankers have collided, spilling a combined 600 million gallons of oil that ignites into an unstoppable inferno. As the conflagration rages, the rickety diesel trainer sub HMCS Swordfish is given an impossible task: rescue the Vice President of the United States of America, currently stranded on a 30 foot fishing trawler directly in the path of the FIRESPILL!

This is pure, sublime disaster fiction: our modern, interconnected world, which we're uniquely poised through our high technology to burn to ash. American and Soviet oil tankers, an out-of-order collision radar, a surly crew of post-Vietnam submariners and a cast of Presidents, Prime Ministers, and sheiks, all of us like children playing house with our finger on the button. It isn't just one broken link, one failed piece that brings destruction, it's the whole rotten edifice, the whole out-of-control monster we call civilization. It's inevitable, it's inescapable, it's the final judgment for guilty and innocent alike! There's no special dispensation for main characters, no plot-armor for heroes, no - these, then, are the damned.

It's a very Canadian disaster as well, dealing as it does with the nexus of superpowers and global trade, of stiff upper lip fait accompli decisions made to save face in the face of the unthinkable. A fierce debut novel from author Ian Slater, who would later find his niche writing a series of WWIII thrillers.

Armageddon on the brain ...

For its killing heat and a searing finish, Firespill earns four flames out of four:

This isn't the only book Elaine Hartsock owned.

McClelland & Stewart-Bantam Limited, 1977

COVER UPDATES: THE BERMUDA TRIANGLE

Original 1973 paperback edition of Adi-Kent Thomas Jeffrey's smash hit The Bermuda Triangle, from regional publisher New Hope Publishing Co., of PA. Complete with an info spread on Ms. Adi-Kent, the "Mistress of the Macabre!"

 

THE BEAST by Walter J. Sheldon

Carnal hunger! Horny Bigfoot has a long pedigree going back to the original "Sasquatch" people of British Columbia, who were said to abduct mates from neighboring tribes, and as Bigfoot evolved into a subhuman apeman in the '50s he kept his lust for human women, as can be attested by a multitude of stories from Men's Adventure magazines. The fine folks at The Men's Adventure Library have collected an indispensable volume of classic stories about Bigfoot, Yeti, and other cryptozoological monsters:

These stories were an ephemeral connection in the web of Bigfoot mythology, mostly forgotten until The Men's Adventure Library came along. Bask in this small representative gallery of horny Bigfoot taken from their Cryptozoology Anthology:

Suffice to say, Bigfoot smut is part and parcel of Bigfoot at large, which brings us to today's novel. A mountain man finds something unbelievable in a wilderness cave: bones, massive bones. Bones too fresh to be prehistoric, too massive to be human. The only thing he can take along is a gigantic molar, but it's enough. It's proof! Meanwhile, one special Bigfoot is having a crisis of consciousness in a mountain valley. Her name is Self, and she's starting to realize that she thinks, therefore she is. She's also starting to get some ideas about all the funny business going around the Bigfoot family unit, as Big Male chooses mates without regard to how any of the Bigfoot ladies feel. The Old One and Giver of Milk both say she should accept this as the way things are, but Self is already groping her way down a whole new path of being.

Like I said, horny Bigfoot is nothing new, but it's rare to see lady Bigfoot's perspective. Self makes for an engaging character. The same can't be said for the humans - "pink skins" as Self and her family call them - who organize a trek to bag a live Bigfoot. Sheldon loses his grace with these characters and their paint-by-numbers trials, which is just too bad. There's a lot of promise in the setup but the big Bigfoot action never quite arrives. Really, it's not the humans' story at all, which is fine, we might as well just jettison their deadweight!

How embarrassing!

This was Walter J. Sheldon's only novel after a career of SF short stories in the '50s. Still, I'm glad I read it. For a fair cop at a horny Bigfoot thriller, The Beast earns two massive molars out of four:

A Fawcett Gold Medal Book, 1980