EARTHSOUND by Arthur Herzog

The DISASTERTHON smashes on! Tonite, we feel the earth move under our feet as disaster maven Arthur Herzog scribes us the EARTHSOUND!

Your name is Harry Vail. You have a tragic backstory involving the Good Friday earthquake of 1964 which struck Alaska with a vengeance - maybe this would have been a gripping story on its own, but you've moved to Rhode Island with your new wife and live a quiet life as a geological surveyor, mixing with the beautiful people and secure in the knowledge that the East Coast's staid tectonics won't reignite your trauma ...

Or won't they?

Herzog makes a bold play here, eschewing LA, Japan, or even NYC in favor of a small town tableau, mixing folk horror with the classic disaster formula. The results are uneven but interesting, as Harry Vail must navigate the treacherous ground of an insular New England community as he tries to unravel the burgeoning threat from below. Midcentury bourgeois angst blends uneasily with the frisson of nature's fury, as nasty party games lead to domestic paranoia and some Stephen King-style conflict with the local dead end youths ... what's the difference, really, between the physical upheaval of an earthquake and the shifting ground of a failing marriage, a failing life?

Sadly, Herzog's juicy mixture doesn't quite land on solid ground. There's too many loose ends and dead ends, and the final quake is (rather realistically) limited in scope: there's only so much destruction an isolated peninsula can endure. Threads of poltergeists and Edgar Cayce (Cay-cee, not Case, Herzog helpfully informs us) clutter up the scene without adding much suspense.

Above, the Pan edition, for Commonwealth readers.

Herzog's Earthsound earns 2/4 for an uneven ride with tremors of feeling. Anything is better than nothing!

Signet Books, 1976 (original pub. 1975)

COLISEUM by Barney Cohen

Fire, flood, famine! Man's endless capacity for violence and the knife's edge of survival between us and the abyss, filtered through the best midcentury pulp entertainment! This is the DISASTERTHON, and it's on all November long!

First up: an assassin in the Astrodome! Or at least, a thinly veiled version thereof, in the best disaster fiction tradition ...

It's a pungent midcentury milieu here, with the Coliseum booked for a wild weekend featuring superstar rocker Skanky Baggs (not "Shanky," as the inside cover typos), superstar Swami Daktananda, and a Sunday, Sunday, SUNDAY blowout game featuring superstar quarterback Bo Detwiler! Of course, someone has other plans for the 100,000 plus souls packed into the techno-wonder stadium.

Plans written in blood.

Referencing Black Sunday and The Towering Inferno on the cover takes some cojones. Can author Barney Cohen redeem himself, after the awful crocodile schlock he'd put out two years later in '77? Well, almost.

There's a little bit of technothriller grist around the huge stadium's air conditioning system, and the psychological architecture that went into planning for mass panic and stampedes, but Cohen (unfortunately) puts most of the focus on the stadium staff's detective work around the sniper's deadly plans. This is truly unfortunate for an American audience 50 years later, as the staff scratch their heads over spent shells, bullet holes in seats, and cryptic notes ... not to mention straight up threats of a mass shooting, written on office stationary! At some point we gotta say c'mon guys, get it together!

I guess it was a different time.

Digressions into the hot dog racket by sleazy vendor Israel "Fuzzi" Nussbaum are a welcome respite, as is the color Cohen puts into the Swami's cult, who swarm the stadium for a mass love-in/flower sale. Skanky Baggs gets less detail but this also works well - there's nothing worse than square authors trying to write hip rockstars, so we can fill in our own blanks on what makes Baggs and the Family Dawg such a phenomenon.

The stadium's staff are a little overstaffed, so to speak, with one too many Dannys and Davids and Jasons barking orders and stalking the halls with purpose and so on, but Cohen does manage a successful unspooling of the sniper's identity - even as we're screaming at the cast to do something, for God's sake, we're still unsure of who the would-be assassin is until Cohen decides to reveal all.

The killer gets some good psychology too, and his "game plan for disaster" is a disturbingly half assed plot which only makes things tenser. We know things won't go to anybody's plan, and this psycho's about to be trapped in a packed stadium with 100,000 targets and a complacent command structure.

More filler: the romance between default protagonist Danny Haber and secretary Sandy is a total dud. Give us Fuzzi's sausage swindle any day!

Dell stuffed this title with ads for mainstream titles, including thrillers from Robert Ludlum and William Goldman, and nonfiction titles about James Dean and Charles Bronson.

If the likes of Basil Jackson could nourish you on your long trip to some beautiful vacation destination, then Cohen's work here is equivalent to a soggy egg salad sandwich you bought at the train station. It's edible, technically, and you'll finish it, but it could have been a little fresher, had a little more flavor. Cohen's Coliseum earns an undistinguished two star rating for some low level thrills.

Dell Publishing, 1975