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 is it the Superdome? In any case, at least, a thinly veiled version, in the best disaster fiction tradition ...
It's a hard ridin' 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.
Coliseum is available to read and download at archive dot org.
Dell Publishing, 1975
