The year is 1999. The Gulf Stream has died. The UK has fallen into a dark winter, with Scotland locked in ice. Down from the frozen highlands, they come. The wolves. Not seen in England since Henry VII, some 500 years ago. Now they've returned, to new hunting grounds, to a land that lays ripe for the taking. And now, huddled in their snowbound villages, the people of Scotland will know true terror, when they hear THE BLOOD SNARL ...
That cartoonish cover hides a high tension terror tale, one that navigates its near-future setting (published in 1980, set in 1999) with admirable restraint. The institutional rot visible in the UK in 1980 has simply progressed, and now the climate has shifted to accelerate the decay. Typical of most futuristic stories of the time the USSR is still intact, though it's also dealing with entropic slowdown. Those wolves are ravenous, and they're devilishly intelligent. None more so than Darkmind - his name tells it all, a cracked actor if there ever was, twisted with some dark perversion of nature. His fevered mind is uniquely suited to tracking human prey, and he's pushing his pack to greater and greater heights (and lower and lower latitudes) to feed their hunger, egged on by the wildcard scrounger Slackjaw. Wolves are social animals, after all, maybe more in tune with their communal needs than the poor humans in their path.
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| An undated photo of the author |
Our English and Scottish characters are in dire straits, trapped on the ground and helpless in their command centers. Enter the Russian wolf hunter, Bukhanovich. His superiors have informed him that his wife will remain in psychiatric hospital until he completes his impossible mission. His minder Spassky will shadow him to ensure compliance. With his rifle, his wits, and his two beautiful, doomed borzois, Bukhanovich must outwit Darkmind. His slavic fatalism may prove the attribute most key to his survival, just as the phlegmatic set of the Scots characters might just save them while the suits in London dither and Spassky obsesses over his own asinine mission. Typical of these English affairs is Watkins' focus on class and status: from the ivory towered intellectuals who set the UK on its mad course to slaughter, to the beige government men born to (mis)rule, down to the granular level of local bigwigs, lackeys, and then ... the rest of us. Eventually, as in all the best man-vs-nature stories, it comes down to the blood and the blade, our civilized veneers stripped apart in the final fatal moments as everything falls away except pure survival. Somewhere within our weak bodies and our muddled minds we must draw the power to live, to overcome these perfect killing machines ...
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| A slightly better cover, from Signet |
The Blood Snarl earns a full 4/4 for its harrowing near-future horror.
Futura, 1980
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