Successful author Spencer Torrence has arrived with his family at the Hotel Holroyd for a mysterious writer's convention. His friend the "science expert" Dan Lloyd is there, along with some real life big names, but nobody seems to know who's running things, and people start experiencing hackneyed horror scrapes from the very start - Spencer's daughter Lauren sees her doppelgänger behind a curtain, Spencer himself notices that the furniture's been moved all around the lobby, and everyone is on edge with an impending feeling of doom. They're right to be afraid, because the convention is actually a trap laid by EXTRATERRESTRIAL visitors who have some unearthly, unthinkable plans for their guests!
Our aliens? A male and female pilot, and their offspring. Humanoid, just like you and me really. But the fourth member of the crew? A hideous being, a biological computer called the Selector, which suffers a parody of life submerged in a chemical bathtub and grants its crewmates glimpses of future probabilities through its psychic powers. Scanners may live in vain, but the Selector lives for pain, inflicting the purest nerve shredding agony on any being unlucky enough to touch minds with it - turns out, telepathy is an exquisitely awful experience. The female pilot suffers greater indignity still as the Selector mentally manipulates her "erotic centers," forcing her to enjoy their interactions and "filling her with a transient urge to mate." This grotesquerie is a highlight of the story, and too bad we've peaked on page 12 ... it's all downhill from there.
Author "Julian Shock" was actually a pseudonym for one J.N. Williamson (1932-2005), a prolific writer, editor, and old horror hand who also acted as a mentor for authors starting out in the field. Those who knew him have nothing but kind words, while readers of his books have more mixed opinions. Extraterrestrial suffers from slack writing, slapdash storytelling, and the overriding feeling that Williamson just didn't care that much! The tone throughout is of shrill cynicism, with occasional, awkward stabs of cornball cuteness thanks to young daughter Lauren and her adorable kitten named Puck. Williamson loads his story up with literary references like J.D. Salinger and portentous quotations from the likes of Carl Sagan, Alvin Toffler, and the Epic of Gilgamesh - I'm usually a sucker for that sort of thing, but none of the text that follows really seems to engage with the heavy framing. The aliens (minus the Selector) are straight out of '50s comic books, 100% human except for their high technology and their alien cuss words: francle striv! The male pilot is a real dickhead, and a dullard besides as he makes the same old ET observations about how much we look like ants from up here and how pathetic and dumb we are, blah blah blah! The female pilot gets some deeper characterization as she's fully engaged with the (im)moral questions of their mission, and maybe if their plan wasn't so goofy it'd make for some righteous sturm und drang ... but again, it all seems like something out of a '50s comic book, with the aliens setting up a writer's convention to brainwash/replace these influential members of society, terrorizing them with cliched horror jump scares in the process ... and how silly does that sound nowadays in 2023, by the way, targeting novelists for a culture war campaign? Williamson is extremely self-indulgent throughout, playing lots of games with his doppelgänger theme and having fun with UFOlogy and hoary old sci-fi tropes, but it's all for naught on the reader's end. I'm sure there's also lots of clever references to writer friends and inside jokes about the industry peppered through the text.
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| The author ... |
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| ... and some of his work |
Zebra Books did a nice job packaging this dud, at least. The front and back page ads let you know the audience they were trying to entice - he-man readers of The Survivalist series and spy novels where "video joy games" become deadly SPY GAMES, plus desperate horror junkies willing to try another Williamson joint, Death-Coach (this one released under his own name).
Despite the slick presentation, Extraterrestrial earns a limp 1/4 rating for brief flashes of cosmic angst amidst a pedestrian horror tale.
Zebra Books, 1982
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