MAPS OF THE UNKNOWN: Phases of the Wildman

After Nessie, now we're on the trail of Chinese Wildmen, ranging afar from Tibet to Hubei to Jiulong Mountain. From The Four Major Mysteries of Mainland China by Paul Dong.

Courtesy Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1984.

THE PLANTS by Kenneth McKenney

It happened ... because of THE PLANTS! Author Kenneth McKenney delivers a very English apocalypse in the classic vein of Wyndham and Roberts, wherein some cosmic quirk overturns our complacency in our not-so-solid civilization. Here it's in the small village of Brandling, nestled in the southern country of Somerset. Place is always important in these English affairs - Brandling isn't too far away from the Mendip Hills where Keith Roberts' survivors take shelter in The Furies. It's a sleepy sort of town, with but a single pub and no traffic to speak of save the locals, fixed in lifelong circuits, wearing ruts through the social space of Brandling.

As Brandling's citizens go about their days as best they can, numbed by the record breaking heat, a riot of life is growing around them. Some are overjoyed at the profligate growth of their roses and gardens, some are irritated at the explosion of weeds and thorns, but all anyone can really do at first is make small talk in the pub. Until Charlie Crump smashes up his own prize winning squash in a fit of drunken paranoia. And then old Ted Wilkes finds Charlie's crumpled body lodged in a rose bush. And then something pulls the phone lines down, leaving the town cut off. And then suddenly the patrons in The Bunch of Grapes have a lot more to talk about.

Some of the more straightforward urgency of McKenney's volcano thriller The Fire Cloud might have been helpful here, as he's maybe a little too effective at conjuring the anesthetizing atmosphere of the dog days of summer. The feeling is enough to put you to sleep at times, and THE PLANTS themselves are in no hurry, moving at their own alien, inexorable pace. The result is honestly a bit of a bore! We know where things are going, we know something is wrong in Brandling, so just get on with it! Our human characters finally get with the program and piece together the plan of the plants: coexistence, at a price. McKenney's a strong writer and the conclusion of the story is satisfactory, but it feels like we took an afternoon snooze in the middle. 

The cover blurb doesn't help things, as this is more of a thoughtful science fiction piece than outright horror. The Plants earn 2/4 for their rather languid assault on humanity.

This book was owned by Cathy and Dick.

Golden Apple Books, 1984 (original pub 1976)

SHADOW OF THE BEAST by Gerald DiPego

We're closing out the year with some Bigfoot terror! Prolific screenwriter and author Gerald DiPego brings us this backwoods Bigfoot survival thriller, which despite the blurb falls far short of Deliverance but still provides some interesting grist for the Bigfoot mill. Modern author Grady Hendrix has an in-depth review which makes note that this is the rare Bigfoot novel that keeps the sex strictly between Homo sapiens, though it's just as sleazy or more so than something like The Beast or the infamous Nights With Sasquatch, chock full as it is of rape and abuse. DiPego himself doesn't list the novel on his website. You've been warned!

Our protagonist Ruth Cassen is an anthropologist from Illinois with a wild pet theory - that the extinct prehistoric ape Gigantopithecus actually survived into the present day, accounting for modern sightings of Bigfoot. Author DiPego borrowed this idea from real life anthropologist Grover Krantz, who spent the latter half of his career using his technical knowledge to bolster the existence of Bigfoot as a prehistoric survivor. The Giganto theory stands as the most dominant "scientific" model for Bigfoot, as opposed to spiritual or occultic explanations for the beast which seem to have eclipsed stuffy old pseudoscientists like Krantz nowadays. Cassen joins a trek into the Oregon wilderness led by sleazoid guide Jack Lillion, who never met a man he couldn't lick or a woman he couldn't rape. In a hypothetical film adaptation, Cassen could be played by Brooke Adams or Karen Allen, while Lillion is just the type of rotten SOB that Leslie Nielsen perfected before his overwhelming comic turn in Airplane! There's plenty of disposable supporting characters along for the expedition, though DiPego pulls a neat trick and cuts the party down to its bare essentials midway through, after one of them suffers an accident and the majority quest on over the mountain, leaving Cassen, Lillion, the photographer Barthes and teenager Henry to face the Bigfoot and themselves in the deep woods in the middle of a raging storm. Barthes is another sleazebag character, abusing his model girlfriend as he taunts her with his industry connections, while Henry is a confused young man who develops a crush on the good Dr. Cassen. Ruth is hard up for a decent man and guides young Henry into manhood, an arc which wavers between touching, silly, and uncomfortable - perhaps like the real thing.

DiPego can be sensitive while sketching character interactions, but most of the time he prefers to brute force things with his creeps Lillion and Barthes. You'll be begging Bigfoot to show up and take these bastards apart, and thankfully (despite the back copy playing coy with whether the monster will be real or not) we finally do get some Bigfoot action at the climax. DiPego clearly did his research and took the subject seriously for the sake of his story, and it's a nice touch when Cassen sniffs out a phony footprint owing to its arch: Krantz said Bigfoot lacked one! It's another nice touch when Cassen realizes that, far from some prehistoric throwback, these Bigfoot have evolved into the Homo superior. Of course we're meant to contrast the savage Lillion and Barthes against these gentle forest people, and reflect on the greed and stupidity that leads all of our characters into this futile quest. Results are so-so, and the narrative feels truncated and underbaked.

The cover looks like it should be a stepback, but it isn't. This copy belonged to the U.S. Air Force. For a technically well done but unpleasant and underwhelming thriller, Shadow of the Beast earns two faked footprints out of four.

Signet Books, 1984

TSUNAMI by Crawford Kilian

Canadian author Crawford Kilian brings us this all-American near future sci-fi/disaster thriller. The ozone layer's been shredded and the Earth's magnetic field has faded away, requiring people to wear protective gear just to go outside. The government's at a loss, the economy's in a depression, and the academy's holed up in its ivory tower, "shaking out" any radical voices in preemptive, neutering self defense. Sleazy Hollywood moguls work with the Pentagon to shovel out ultra-violent jingoist fantasy as a distraction from the long emergency. Sound familiar?

"Still, they'll have to do something. They can't just let everything fall apart."

Sound familiar?

And then, just one more damn thing. An 8.0 earthquake in Antarctica sends the mother of all tsunamis screaming up the Pacific, slamming into San Francisco and blasting society apart like a cheap storefront in front of the storm surge. Now the shit has really hit the fan, and it's not going to shake out how everyone might like:

These would-be survivalists had been foolish and unlucky. They'd prepared for the end of the old order, but not for the beginning of the new. They'd thought that violence would protect them during the brief period before other people obligingly died off, like some disaster novel; then they'd inherit the earth.

Like most disaster stories, this isn't just about the big wave, big rock, or bad bug on the loose, but about the paper thin barrier between our supposedly rock solid establishment society and pure, roiling anarchy. After a false start with the crime wave caper of Martin Wallace Tyler's Tidal Wave, it's good to get rolling with some real tsunami action in a real disaster epic, especially one that runs counter to the reactionary impulses that frequently play out in this genre. The post-Vietnam black and chicano soldiers who became savage cannibal raiders in Lucifer's Hammer, fit only to be cut down by heroic homesteaders, here find themselves ... everywhere, like everyone. Who knows who you'll become when faced with the ultimate choice of life or death, but it's a messy affair regardless.

John Berkey's original art for the cover. Sourced from the Paperback
Palette article on watery disaster stories: It's all water over the bridge.

Kilian isn't interested in settling scores against the wrong type of people, and even his "bad" characters like the nasty Hollywood producer are drawn with a sensitive hand. His writing is best in the more intimate moments, such as producer Anthony Allison's fraught relationship with his starlet Shauna, or scientist Kirstie Kennard's pained reflections on the academy's impotence in the face of unfurling history. Kilian's focus, after the big waves, is on how things get put back together by people shattered by their experiences, truthfully, and not in the fascistic play-acting pantomime of Niven and Pournelle. It's a tight story at just over 200 pages and though it sometimes yaws uncomfortably in the inter-genre spaces, Kilian steers it home true in the end.

3/4

Bantam Books, 1984

COSMIC DEBRIS: Leo Sprinkle's Saucer Dreams

Authors Kagan and Summers run headlong into the shaky foundations holding up hypnotic regression as used by Ufology. From Mute Evidence by Daniel Kagan and Ian Summers, Bantam Books, 1984.

COSMIC DEBRIS: Witch Hunt

"Become a WITCH armed with authentic EARTH MAGIC of the times!" And how! The game and its contents can be found listed under "Miscellanea" at Wayne's Books RPG Reference:

From Fate, Volume 37 - Number 4, April 1984.

COSMIC DEBRIS: UFOs - Nazi Secret Weapon?

Eye catching ad elides any authorship for a reason: this was one of Holocaust denier Ernst Zundel's esoteric ploys for readership!

"I realized that North Americans were not interested in being educated. They want to be entertained. The book was for fun. With a picture of the Führer on the cover and flying saucers coming out of Antarctica it was a chance to get on radio and TV talk shows. For about 15 minutes of an hour program I'd talk about that esoteric stuff. Then I would start talking about all those Jewish scientists in concentration camps, working on these secret weapons. And that was my chance to talk about what I wanted to talk about."

Other titles from Zundel's one-man neo-Nazi publishing house Samisdat Publishers included:

The Hitler We Loved and Why
The Hoax of the Twentieth Century
A Straight Look at the Third Reich and The Six Million Swindle
Auschwitz, Dachau, Buchenwald: The Greatest Fraud in History
Secret Nazi Polar Expeditions
Hitler at the South Pole

From Fate, Volume 37 - Number 4, April 1984.

MAPS OF THE UNKNOWN: Britain's Phantom Cats

What rough sketch slouches toward Kilmaurs? From an article by Michael Goss: "Britain's Phantom Cats." Featured in Fate, Volume 37 - Number 4, April 1984.