CROC by David James

"In the twenties it started," Boggs began, but then he stopped. Andrea was staring at him, disbelief in her eyes, but waiting for him to continue.

"All the rich bitches from uptown were raising hell, going to parties, driving their fast cars, putting in swimming pools in their penthouse places. But it got boring after awhile. No one was satisfied. They wanted something new, something different. So some of them began stocking their pools with baby alligators and crocodiles. Only the fad didn't last long, so they dumped the things down the sewers rather than kill them."

David Hagberg returns as David James for another pseudonymous thriller, following up his disaster novel Blizzard with some real creature feature carnage in Croc! NYC sewer worker Boggs loses his partner Fascetti to an impossible monster after probing a cave-in off the cross-town line, and after almost getting chomped himself he's press-ganged by Fascetti's widow into returning to the sewers with a .45 to kill the beast!

Things do not go as planned. In Hagberg's universe this is down to both institutional problems and the vagaries of the personalities involved - and boy does Croc have some characters! Boggs is a rummy lifer working the shit detail in the Sanitation Dept., and Hagberg spins some eloquent characterization as he contemplates what amounted to his life, staggering knee-deep through the pitch black sewers (with a shitty '70s flashlight, batteries draining fast) pursued by the monster croc - dreams, failures (many), and what-ifs and could-have-beens, some involving his dearly departed partner Fascetti, who almost (almost!) named Boggs his firstborn's godfather.

If you ever had to use these, you know Boggs is doomed ...

Andrea Fascetti, meanwhile, was all set for a good life as a good wife, and now has to clean up this fucking mess, which she splits 50/50 between the croc and Boggs. Her iron core - hidden inside a Talia Shire type beauty which the male characters are by turns enraptured, aroused, and a little frightened by - might never have come out if not for this tragedy, and makes one consider the multitude of invisible lives of midcentury housewives, forever standing behind their husbands. As things spin out of control, the authorities finally plunge into action, and here again Hagberg draws us in with a cast of cops, scientists, and bureaucrats who could have been cardboard cutouts but instead are all either a bunch of fuckups, barely holding it together, or just plain weird! His reptile expert Koch gives us just a light info dump on crocodilians, telling us that based on size and disposition our killer is most likely a saltwater crocodile - he's thriving down in the sewer, too, because they like brackish water! This quick rundown is typical of Hagberg's light touch - he never lingers on genre conventions when we've got enough of an idea to keep moving. In fact, even though his Croc ultimately has a low body count comparable to Katz's Alligator, Hagberg moves things so fast and furious that we never feel cheated. The setting, characters, and monster feel authentic without over explanation, and Croc can rest comfortably as an accomplished monster mash right next to John Sayles and co.'s 1980 film Alligator  - though Croc lacks that film's sharp satire, aiming for more resigned humor from Hagberg's cast of screwups and freaks. Hagberg does get some sly jabs in with Bremberger, the up-and-coming pol whose attempts at self-promotion through crocodilian crisis get shot down at every turn.

Croc (or Croc') was originally graced with the crackerjack man-vs-beast cover above, courtesy its 1976 debut from Belmont Tower Books. The New English Library edition lacks a certain dynamism by comparison, despite a decently fierce croc and a hard-to-see hand slipping beneath the sewage. NEL doesn't miss a trick plugging its moneymaking Crabs series from Guy N. Smith though!

Croc is available to read and download at archive dot org. For some lean, gritty thrills, Croc earns 4/4 stars.

New English Library, 1977 (original pub. 1976)

MAPS OF THE UNKNOWN: Bermuda Triangle Redux

Another ephemeral entry from Max Toth's delirious, dizzying doorstopper Pyramid Prophecies. The Bermuda Triangle was a '70s hotspot for Atlantean shenanigans what with the mysterious Bimini Wall ... or was it the Bimini Road? In either case, the rocks were connected to predictions by Edgar Cayce on Atlantis' imminent resurgence off Bimini, in the far flung year 1969! Further developments detailed by Toth include the discovery of a gigantic underwater pyramid by one Ray Brown while diving off the Bahamas, who explored the pyramid and surrounding ruins in a dreamlike haze and managed to bring a "pyramid crystal" back to the surface with him! Tony O'Connell's Atlantipedia website is a fantastic resource for these and other Atlantean tall tales, and wouldn't you know it seems like ol' Brown wasn't quite on the up and up?

(Click to embiggen)

Toth didn't have any qualms about Brown's story though, and it makes for one more juicy tidbit in his righteous stew of Pyramid Prophecies. Ray Brown and "his famous crystal" were also featured (alongside Leonard Nimoy's season four fashion) in the 1980 In Search Of ... episode The Bimini Wall:

See the pyramids inside? I do!

Courtesy Warner Books, 1979.

ALLIGATOR by Shelley Katz

"Don't go," Luke said, "listen to me." His voice echoed in the quiet. Same had never heard three hundred people be that quiet. "I've lived a long time. I know the swamps better than any of you. You don't stand a chance against that alligator. He's too old and too tough. Nature is on his side, not yours. Take my advice, stay here where you belong. Stop now while you can. Don't you see? I can feel it. That ain't no gator you're courting. It's death."

Two gator poachers don't make it home after tangling with a 20 foot monster alligator. What's left of them sends the town of Glades, Florida into a panic and then a frenzy, as word travels and the outside world comes crashing in with rubberneckers galore and a select few men who aim to kill the beast. One of them is local boy made good Rye Whitman, now a high powered Miami real estate dealer, his own kind of apex predator. But if he's to survive the treacherous swamplands, he'll need local guide Lee Ferris. Lee made it out of Glades too ... to Vietnam. The things he did there followed him back to Glades, and he doesn't have much use for people in general. A shark like Whitman? Even less so ... Except something is drawing them together, into this doomed, mythical quest to kill the alligator, and they'll need all of Lee's bushcraft and Rye's animal cunning if they're both to survive. But after everything the everglades throws at them, they might not care.

There's strong writing here, with plenty of rich characterizations, pungent Southern melodrama, and a sense of fun that's often missing from so-called "elevated" or literary horror (dig that jello!) but Alligator also suffers from a slack middle and a monster star that's MIA for too much of the story! Katz even loads us up with a convoy of gator bait following leads Lee and Rye into the death glades, but then lets most of them off easy as they each eventually turn tail from the challenge. The bodycount is frustratingly low. Even so, you'll be carried along with Lee and Rye through an onslaught of stinging, biting insects, the burning sun, cutting sawgrass that grows 6 feet high, and always the stinking, sucking waters of the swamp  - Katz does a knockout job on the setting, both the rotting shithole town and the endless, trackless green hell beyond.

Alligator must have made a big splash, because there's multiple foreign editions. The Sphere editions are co-credited to husband Paul. There's also a handsome reprint from Centipede Press which came out last year, limited to 500 copies at $125 a pop - but only $95 if you're okay with an unsigned copy!

Variations on a theme ...

Shelley Katz is still writing today at her blog, and also recently edited a "crowd writing" collection of true stories from real people.

Our author

The cover on the classic Dell paperback looks like it should be a stepback, but it isn't, though the scales are embossed for a cool texture effect. The full gorgeous painting is confined to the back cover. 

Alligator still gets good reviews nowadays (note that this reviewer also mentions pacing issues), and its inclusion on a top ten list by David Foster Wallace may prejudice you one way or the other. Don't worry about that! For its fear-soaked atmosphere and sweaty Southern melodrama, Alligator earns a solid 3/4 stars.

Dell Publishing, 1977

COSMIC DEBRIS: The Hitler Cult Revealed!

Another ad in Fate from Holocaust denier/neonazi Ernst Zundel, here smuggling esoteric nazism to readers with the eye catching line THE HITLER CULT REVEALED! Zundel plays things cool with his ad copy, talking of Hitler's "manic" will to power and promising an expose on the "tangled roots" of nazism, but he tips his hand when he promises that "the clouds of evil [will] scatter under the lightning of Cosmic Justice and the son of Cosmic Truth" - that son is Hitler, baby! Zundel's subject Savitri Devi was one of the prime wellsprings of post-war esoteric nazism. In her book advertised here, The Lightning and the Sun, she claims Hitler to be an incarnation of Vishnu (!) and blends Hitlerism with Hindu cosmology. Just as with the UFO subject, Zundel saw this kooky approach as a perfect moneymaking opportunity to fund his Holocaust denial:

She was the first person to tell Zündel of her claim that the Nazi genocide of the Jews was untrue; he proposed a series of taped interviews (conducted in November 1978) and published a new illustrated edition of The Lightning and the Sun in 1979.

If you see modern online nazis making irreverent memes about the Kali Yuga, they got it from Savitri Devi. She also wrote an "autobiography" of two of her cats, just like that ol' fraud Lobsang Rampa. Hers was titled Long-Whiskers and the Two-Legged Goddess, or The True Story of a "Most Objectionable Nazi" and... half-a-dozen Cats. Minor points to Rampa for not heiling Hitler in his goofy cat story ...

No contest

Typical of Zundel's overheated spiel, Savitri Devi wasn't Hitler's personal guru as might be taken from the ad, but she did work for the Axis in WWII and was in contact postwar with the nazi underground and notable scumbags like Otto Skorzeny. She passed away not too long after this ad, in 1982 at the age of 77. Rest in piss, you nazi bitch!

From Fate, Volume 33 - Number 02, February 1980.

THE BERMUDA TRIANGLE CALENDAR: October 1975

Picking up where we left off some years ago, here's the Bermuda Triangle Calendar entry for October 1975! This month yields a handful of minor league mysteries like the Freya and Columbus' "strange light" that will be familiar to dedicated Triangle heads. Kusche had some fun with the Freya in his The Bermuda Triangle Mystery - Solved on account of that doomed vessel actually being lost and found in the Pacific!

Musicians Stefano DiCarlo and Mauro Ruvolo named a track for the Freya on their 1992 Deep House EP The Bermuda Triangle:

Lawrence David Kusche, 1974