MAN IS THE PREY by James Clarke

Danger from above, danger from below, danger from every living thing ... for our final entry of the year author James Clarke lays down the law: MAN IS THE PREY!

A beefy book with a simple concept: animals that kill people. All of 'em, all over the world, but especially Africa as that was Clarke's remit. Clarke horrifies with tales of killer beasts, but he also equivocates when necessary. Consider his thoughts on the gila monster, a controversial "man killer" in the literature:

A number of people who ridicule the idea of the gila monster's [bite] being lethal to man claim that those who died after its bite were all alcoholic or sick. Curiously it seems a great many of them were, but then if an alcoholic is knocked down by a bus did the bus kill him or did the alcohol?

The "deadly" aspect of an animal may be variable, and down to circumstance. Is the elephant more dangerous than the lion, than the hippo, than the croc? Do raw numbers of victims tell it all, and do we even know the true numbers? Does any of that matter when you're the one getting chomped? 

Above, the original hardcover edition with a back cover cameo from a chacma baboon. Clarke's careful treading elevates his book above a simple chronicle of misery and helps us think about our place in nature, as a part of nature despite our best efforts. Owing to its era, much of the color comes from big game hunters and safari tales. Goodreads reviewer Brett Dulle has an insightful review which helps put certain parts of the book in context:

The book has two clear biases:

1. The author is an ex-pat living in South Africa and as a result the book is more focused on African wildlife than other countries dangerous animals. For example, his chapter on crocodiles is almost exclusively about the Nile crocodile. It's hard to criticize him for this because it is obviously much easier to write about what you have a personal experience with and these firsthand accounts are the most interesting parts of the book.

2. The author has a strong interest in big game hunting. My estimate is that over half of the information in the book comes from big game hunter's memoirs or conversations with big game hunters. This effects the coverage of different animals. The crocodile, an animal the author admits is probably the most voracious man-eater, gets 10 pages while the elephant gets 20 pages of coverage. As the book moves away from the big game animals, it feels more like he's simply listing off facts about these animals and the book starts to drag. Again, it's hard to complain since the stories of the big game hunters are usually quite exciting.

These foundational biases aside, the author also takes sides with some of the animals. Bears are depicted as practically harmless while wolves are ravenous hellhounds that, according to a story he reprints, almost ate an entire village in one night.

Another example of Clarke's personal views coming through is his treatment of the killer whale. Despite no real hard data about orcas eating or killing humans, he takes it as read from anecdote and reputation that the fearsome predator is a known, guaranteed killer. After all, no less an authority than the US Navy says that orcas "will attack human beings at every opportunity." And would you want to test that out yourself?

James Frederick Clarke (1934 -)

The final chapter details the most dangerous animal to man: himself. The second to last chapter covers insects and arachnids, and delves into disease and famine - we know the mosquito is one of the deadliest creatures on earth, due to its transmission of a multitude of diseases. Bees and wasps can kill through swarming by the thousands or from one single sting on someone unlucky enough to be allergic. How does this stack up against a tiger's fangs or a shark's jaws? How much does public health and policy factor into a focus on deadly animals? It's not so easy as a top ten list but the journey is rewarding.

That ol' showman Ivan T. Sanderson shows up in Clarke's bibliography with a book on elephants, The Dynasty of Abu. Famous tiger man Jim Corbett features as well ... of course! It wouldn't be much of a book on killer animals without the hunter who bagged the Man-Eaters of Kumaon among many others!

More of man against nature ...

Lions, tigers, bears ... sharks, snakes, and things that sting! Killers from legend and in the laboratory, who kill for food, for self defense, or just for the hell of it! Clarke catalogs them all, and we're all the better for it! Man is the Prey is well worth picking up even today, as both a snapshot of an era and a thoughtful, expansive exploration of its subject. Grrr, hisss, ahhh!

Panther Books edition

Another hardcover, with a goofy snapshot!

Clarke's excellent text is available to borrow at archive dot org.

Pocket Books, 1970 (original pub. 1969)

RAZORBACK by Peter Brennan

The kid called Dicko never knew when to keep his mouth shut. "What she needs to get is one of the Big Reds grab 'er by the tits and she'll forget about what she came for," the kid was saying as Cullen pulled himself onto the stool. "Then she'll soon forget about savin' the kangaroo."

Dicko's brother Benny chuckled a bit for his kin's sake, but none of the other shooters and graziers propped over their drinks bothered to look up. Like Cullen, they didn't appreciate talk about the Winters woman or the problem unless it was important, and no one among them could remember the kid Dicko ever saying anything that qualified.

Have a drink, mate? Have a fight, mate? There's nothing else out here, except the killing. Killing roos, killing boars, killing anything that'll turn a profit and sometimes just for the hell of it anyways. 

Killing anything that gets in your way. But as we're about to learn, this killer instinct extends from the beasts of the Outback to the warehouses of Sydney and clear across the ocean to the New York mob and Madison Avenue. And now author Peter Brennan has summoned THE RAZORBACK, and nothing on two or four legs is safe!

Thicko Dicko and his brother Benny are two of the most hateable yobbos you'd ever be unfortunate enough to meet, but they're just the bottom rung of a long and crooked ladder that reaches near all the way to the top. Their atavistic sadism as they "butt shoot" scores of kangaroos (for easier butchery come morning, as the animals won't expire prematurely, stiffening in rigor mortis) is stoked by the simple logic of business, and their cruelty comes in handy when the bosses need a little problem solving to cover up some dirty business that the scabrous Baker boys won't ever see a penny from.

Author Brennan makes ready comparison between the struggle for survival for animals and human beings, whether we're on the razor's edge in the unforgiving Outback or navigating the perhaps equally dangerous modern "civilized" world. Death is sometimes quick, sometimes slow, but when it comes to Brennan's titular monster, a true freak of nature, it's all there is. The razorback, we're informed, only becomes more enraged the more it kills, and its gargantuan body hosts a litany of parasites - maggots, botflies, lung worm, stomach worm, tapeworm, plus unidentified creatures incubating under its skin and clouding up its eyes - that drive it further into painful rage.

This thrice-cursed halfbreed cross shouldn't exist, but it does, and that's everybody's problem. It's hard enough for the sheep graziers keeping the regular boars out of their wells (the only water for miles around) and the roos from devouring every last shoot of growth meant for their sheep. Now the razorback threatens to ruin them totally. Dicko and Benny's lazy method of "butt shooting" doesn't help either, as crippled roos are left out overnight for the pigs to feast upon, drawing even more trouble upon the beleaguered ranchers.

You may have caught on that nature's casual indifference to human affairs looms large here. The men (and it is men, in this world) who kill so easily, whether with guns and axes or with a word and a nod, are not prepared to be on the other side of the equation. Brennan gives us some savage instances of this turnabout, and here he maybe belabors the point a little, as we sit through perhaps just a little too much back and forth over the crime syndicate that owns the Petpak pet food company going about its dirty deeds. Come halfway through the story we realize there's about a half dozen subplots going over men named Wallace and Scully and Briggs and Wagstaff and Grabow ... somewhere we lose the sublime focus of the Outback scenery. Brennan zips us in tight for the ending though, as the final fifty pages trim the fat and knock off characters left and right. This is what we came for! The slaughter!

Above, the Fontana edition. Contra the synopsis, Gene Taylor is a New York adman and not a lawyer, by the way. Brennan works fast and tight with his characters, laying their neuroses bare under the hot Outback sun and fraying their nerves to the breaking point. Everybody's got an angle, and questions of heroics and justice are quickly abandoned for the overriding fact of survival ... although we might have some room for a little bit of simple, primal vengeance before the final curtain.

Some movie tie-in editions

Readers may be more familiar with the stylish film adaptation of this story from 1984, which ditches most of the crime angle to focus on the Outback action. If you haven't seen it, well, it's pretty damn good!

Some pig ... Brennan's freak of nature earns a nasty 3/4 rating for engrossing brutality amidst some loopy plotting.

Jovian Publications, 1981

SHARK! UNPREDICTABLE KILLER OF THE SEA by Thomas Helm

We're not out of the water yet! In fact, we've got a full blown feeding frenzy on our hands, as author Thomas Helm throws in some more bloody chum with SHARK! UNPREDICTABLE KILLER OF THE SEA!

This is pre-Jaws sharking, with Helm plunging the murky depths of myth and midcentury neurosis - he tells one story of being aboard a sport fishing boat that came upon some friendly porpoises. Some he-men with him took it upon themselves to spear a curious visitor! Ultimately only one man could finish the deed, and afterwards Helm says his boasting fell on deaf ears. Elsewhere he describes the "diabolical" method of drano poisoning sharks. We haven't even gotten to post-Jaws supercharged shark mania and we can see the era's blunt, singleminded hatred of the natural world, the need to kill, maim, destroy!

Our author, Thomas Helm (1919-1993)

Helm peppers his work with plenty of salty dog tales and sport fishing, but works hard against the anti-shark, anti-nature attitude, some of it via an appeal to the shark's place in human commerce similar to Captain Hal Scharp in Shark Safari. Helm's species guide section benefits from his drawings, putting it ahead of Captain Scharp's similar rundown.

The photo spread in the middle of the book is a fun mix of gruesome shark pics, other sea friends like octopus and porpoises, and Captain Bill Gray of the Miami Seaquarium posing with dead fish and only sometimes with a shirt.

Helm describes other killers of the deep like sawfish, swordfish, octopus, Portuguese man-of-war, stonefish, sea urchins, moray eels, and the deadly orca! Helms calls the orca the most dangerous animal in the sea and relates a tale from Zane Grey of seeing a pod of orcas slaughter porpoises until the water turned red. The humble stingray (or stingaree), meanwhile, is Helm's admitted least favorite sea killer, while manta rays are (of course) completely harmless and so undeserving of a bad reputation. The fearsome barracuda, meanwhile, gets his own chapter to himself!

Helm ends his book with a record of shark attacks in the USA, a form to report new attacks to the Smithsonian, and a brief bibliography:

Helm's acknowledgments and bibliography credit George A. Llano, who would later pen his own paperback shark attack!

Hardcover edition

Sea serpent/monster text by Helm from 1962

Collier Books, 1971 (original pub. 1961)

SHARK SAFARI by Captain Hal Scharp

Man is STILL the prey! This time, we're taking a SHARK SAFARI with "the incredible true story of nature's most perfectly constructed death machine!" Captain Hal Scharp offers scurvy sea dog wisdom alongside cutting edge scientific updates and 16 PAGES OF TERRIFYING PHOTOGRAPHS!

Right off the bat Scharp throws a little shade at Peter Benchley and others who write exaggerated stories of sharks without ever having been face to face with them. Salty Scharp takes us through a charmingly roughhewn history of sharkdom, claiming that these killers of the sea disprove Darwin's survival of the fittest due to their long success despite having tiny brains! It's more of a rhetorical flourish anyways but it's typical of Scharp's engaged, sometimes bewildering style. Elsewhere he gleefully estimates the prehistoric megalodon as maxing out at possibly 200 feet long! This is back when megalodon was theorized as a direct ancestor to the great white.

There's a long section of species descriptions which could have benefited from illustrations. The "terrifying" pictures included are sort of a grab bag, with a few live sharks, lots of dead ones, and lots of gory chewed up limbs.

Scharp also covers famous shark scientist Eugenie Clark, who was also profiled in H. David Baldridge's Shark Attack from 1974. The anti-shark spray developed by the Navy gets a passing grade from Scharp, despite Baldridge's assertion that it was effectively a placebo for stranded seamen. The International Shark Attack file is referenced, with Scharp instructing anyone who's attacked by a shark (and lives!) to write their experience to Baldridge, who also turns up in the bibliography at the end of the book. The 11 life saving steps to avoid shark attack are taken from Baldridge's research and Scharp is responsible enough to emphasize our current uncertainty as to shark behavior. Forewarned is forearmed, and better safe than sorry.

Sport fishing and commercial/industrial uses for sharks fill some pages. True to the book's era, Scharp assures us that "sharks are NOT worthless!" After all that beefy writing Scharp includes a glossary of shark terms and a very thorough bibliography, making this a welome addition to any layman's midcentury shark library.

This Award Books edition is an abridged version of the hardcover from the previous year:

This specific copy included a cool bookmark from a previous reader:

Award leaves us with a potpourri of ads: JFK's assassination, a spread of movie novelizations, and the Lusitania:

Award Books, 1976 (original pub. 1975)