FIREWIND by Hank Searls

He'd spent too long sniffing like a bloodhound in the toyon bush, had isolated himself on the landward side by a ring of fire around the city. He was sure that the wild, howling gusts would prevent helicopter rescue, even if he called for one.

He'd violated the rule of firemen and burglars: never close a door behind you.

He had a sinking sensation in his belly. It was not fear of the encircling fire. He knew back-country topography, roads, and fire trails crisscrossing the Santa Ynez and San Rafael mountains as well as any man alive, and had lived all his life in Santa Ana winds. It was from fear of the firebug trapped somewhere with him, in the brush-covered hills to the north.

Fear of the firebug - he's on everyone's minds, from Nisei fire spotter Hash Ono lost in the toyon, to Chicano cop Shawn Ortega torn between two lovers, to every firefighter white, black, and brown from up and down the state brought in to battle the encroaching blaze. He may walk among the firefighters with stolen valor, like a criminal obsessed with the police, laughing and boasting in their favored watering holes, picking up chicks with tales stolen from another life ... or he may actually be two or three or more perpetrators. Ortega's got a profile on him, but it may be worth less than the paper it's printed on. Everyone's sure that he's a he, at least.

And if they don't find him fast, the 70,000+ souls in Santa Barbara are doomed.

Son, you're playing with fire 

The kid will live and learn

As he watches his bridges burn

To the point of no return

Author Hank Searls delivers an overstuffed would-be epic disaster story that, sadly, gets bogged down in its own unfolding minutiae. Race hate, domestic strife, office politicking, and the requisite crash course on wildfire fighting all compete for oxygen, along with some unconvincing psych work on the firebug - would you believe he's got the voice of an old shrink in his head that he keeps up a dialogue with, complete with dated counterculture and psych jargon about society and the man, maaaaan?

Author Hank Searls (1922-2017)

If I, a humble blogger, were to try to fix up this novel, I'd trim it down by about 100 pages, probably by axing some minor character arcs (but NOT Hash Ono's, as he's aces), and either make the firebug more of a cipher, or more of a grounded personality. Either way, I'd ditch the Shrink, as these sections are the least convincing of Searls' otherwise very well written story, to the point where the otherwise exciting climax is slightly deflated by some cheesy dialogue from the firebug.

The detective work chasing after the firebug also drags on, with the cops and firefighters one step behind him maybe one too many times. As it is, we're busy enough with the domestic drama: married Ortega is mixed up with a white woman up on the hill, who's mixed up with Ortega's best white friend, whose ranch is right in the path of the wildfire. There's almost not enough room for the fire itself!

Searls cheekily references his own Jaws 2 near the end, which is a rookie move for such a veteran writer: never remind the audience of another, better book they could be reading. His Jaws 2 novelization is rightfully held as an excellent work of adaption, I would say better than Benchley's original even. That Searls could construct such a killer novel out of such a lamented sequel makes it all the more disappointing that he whiffs it with Firewind.

Here come those Santa Ana winds again ... Searls is (mostly) more than capable, but his Firewind smolders for too long, earning a truly disappointing 2/4 rating.

Berkley Books, 1982 (original pub. 1981)

THE SNAKE by John Godey

The rivers are full of crocodile nasties 

And he who made kittens, put snakes in the grass

The urban jungle's about to meet the real thing, when a fully grown black mamba escapes into Central Park! Author John Godey was hot off his smash hit novel The Taking of Pelham 123, and a gritty horror thriller about a killer snake in NYC must have seemed like another surefire success.

All the pieces are there, including a charming herpetologist lead who understands all too well how the rest of humanity views his charges. And Godey unfolds the opening action with admirable ease, giving us that wonderful frisson of impending doom as everyone is one step behind our newly escaped snake ... but just as with Maryk and Monahan's Death Bite, the pacing turns sluggish, like a snake resting up between meals, and we find ourselves yearning for a bit more of the ol' blood and guts. Godey is too reserved, too realistic at times, whereas Maryk and Monahan at least went delightfully overboard with their giant Island Taipan and its bloodcurdling bite. Godey's attempt at colorful drama, the Jesus People freakshow cult that shows up near the end, feels underbaked. And the rather obvious twist at the end is hardly "the ultimate in horror," as the San Francisco Examiner claims. All in all, we could have used a touch of Mr. Brown and friends' sociopathy from Godey's much celebrated heist novel.

Hardcover edition

That's not to say it's all bad - just not as great as it could have been. Godey delivers the requisite city politics and panic just fine, and his characters are all finely drawn and relatably sad sack in that wonderful '70s way. Too, his use of Central Park is masterful (we're given those maps for a reason). There's just something missing in the final tally, and it feels like a letdown coming from Godey.

Dramatic NEL edition

He's a lover of life but a player of pawns

Yes, the King on His sunset lies waiting for dawn 

To light up His Jungle as play is resumed 

The monkeys seem willing to strike up the tune

This game that we animals play is a winner, but The Snake struggles with a 2/4 rating! For a second opinion, Will Errickson over at Too Much Horror Fiction offers a more positive appraisal.

As we finish 2025, man is STILL the prey!

A Berkley Book, 1979 (original pub. 1978)

THE NIGHT OF THE TOY DRAGONS by Barney Cohen

Albino mutant pygmy alligators! They're massing beneath NYC, their appetite rising to a fever pitch ... will we be prepared when they rise, and we face THE NIGHT OF THE TOY DRAGONS? And after slogging through Cohen's turgid technothriller drivel, will we care? Probably not!

Cohen's first victim is a sewer worker named Boggs, in a strange bit of synchronicity with David Hagberg's far superior Croc. Was there something in the water? The killer alligators act like cartoon piranhas, stripping bodies to the bone in minutes. At one point, they decapitate a police dog and somehow throw the head back at their human pursuers ... why? These cartoonish antics don't mesh with Cohen's wannabe verisimilitude of computer tooth analysis and bureaucratic infighting, and both aspects are crowded out by too much filler of midcentury character drama: home life, hookups, and the battle of the sexes. Cohen doesn't excel at any of these threads and the final effect is supreme dissatisfaction.

Eventually we get a final battle of flamethrowers vs alligators, but it's too little too late, and the story ends on a promise of more to come as the surviving characters gear up for yet another wave of invincible super-gators which simply elicits an eye roll. David Lippincott's comparable disaster dud Tremor Violet ended the same way, with more violence to come, but that was the one successful play in Lippincott's book. Here it's just another disappointment.

Author Cohen also wrote a couple science fiction thrillers, and ... a puff piece on Sting?

Pure terror ...

How doth the little crocodile improve his shining tail fail? Cohen's crocodilian cockup earns a 1/4 rating ... boo, hiss!

A Berkley Medallion Book, 1977

THE FURIES by Keith Roberts

The USA and USSR have cocked things up again in their struggle for world domination, this time detonating dual nuclear tests that blast a crack in the world and set the poor old UK on a collision course with intelligences from the outer spheres, energy beings that materialize in the form of gigantic wasps and immediately set about conquering our shattered planet. This is illustrator and ad-man Keith Roberts' first novel, and a helluva debut it is! He blends high concept cosmic slop with painful portraits of characters like Bill Sampson (also an illustrator in advertising) who should be living up the bachelor life but now finds himself thrown into the apocalypse, grasping out for others like poor little rich girl Jane and cockney slattern Pete, two female characters imbued with depth and power far beyond the usual genre standards of the time, or our time for that matter. Roberts does not shy away from human ugliness but he also approaches everything with a reserved humanism, and Bill's first person narration reflects a witty, understated understanding of our foibles and of life and death among the new rulers, the wasps. Yesterday Bill had a fancy flat, a dynamite sports car, and a loyal Doberman - but now it's all gone to pot, the car and flat smashed to bits and the hero dog just one more victim of the Furies. Communications from overseas are cut off, the government's dissolved, and would-be military saviors are reduced to scavengers along with the other survivors, as Britain slides into a new dark age under an alien dictatorship. Roberts writes with grit and emotion as Bill and company navigate this new nightmare world, jacking lorries and ransacking drug stores to survive while holed up in a cave, reduced to savagery while feeding off the corpse of the old world.

Comparisons to Ballard and Wyndham are inevitable and accurate, but Roberts does Wyndham's cosy catastrophe one better. The triffids merely reflected our self-inflicted impotence back at us - in the country of the blind, the crawling plant is king. The Furies, meanwhile, are truly a superior species, swarming in incalculable numbers as they sting and shred our soft, yielding bodies to pieces, dragging us from our boltholes and barricades, stopping at nothing in their alien quest to dominate. Part computer, part demon, so near to us and yet so far beyond our imagining, not simply a monstrous threat but the indicators of a paradigm shift so jarring that there simply may not be a place for us in the new universe. The wasps quickly enslave the remaining humans for menial labor in the massive hives now splattered across the English countyside, but Bill and the rest wonder how long this is going to last before they're expediently put out of their misery and endeavor to go out fighting instead. A perceptive review by Leonard at Goodreads notes that "the uppermost goal of our little band of resistance fighters is the destruction of edifices made of *pulp*. No SF critic in nearly a half-century has noticed this?!" Indeed, Roberts is operating on levels far above simple pulp SF action, and his Furies are at once stunningly phenomenologically plausible and also almost besides the point. In the same way that the grinding of the earth's crust may explode into an earthquake that leaves thousands dead, so too did some obscure cosmic twitch beget these Furies, who sever our gossamer thread of civilization in an instant between their vicious jaws.

Above, a Pan edition from 1969 with a lo-fi cover that seems to call forth the creature features that would swamp the UK market a few years later in the wake of James Herbert's The Rats - a story with its own bleak but simpler vision.

"The Keepers still haunt the conscience of mankind; I think in the end they justified the name we gave them so lightly. To us, they were the Furies."

The Furies rates 4/4, a masterpiece.

A Berkley Medallion Book, 1966

SHARK ATTACK by H. David Baldridge

SHARK ATTACK! Two of the most terrifying words together in the English language: a short, sharp stab of panic, of unthinkable misfortune and doom inevitable. Even before Jaws' block busting summer run in 1975 there was something in the water that decade, and it seemed like sharks were having their moment, thrusting out of the shadows of legend into our new jet age of science and reason, surging out into daylight but still draped in their mythic finery as demons of the deep. Scads of exploitation films and documentaries before and after Jaws were showcasing one of man's oldest, most implacable monsters in the most outrageous ways they could: 

 

Keeping with the dual traditions of fish tales and filmmaking, some of them couldn't help but sweeten the pot: the Burt Reynolds vehicle Shark! from 1969 for instance made promotional chum out of the supposed maiming of a diver during filming. Thankfully, it seems that it was all just typical exploitation ballyhoo for an otherwise mediocre (and shark-lite) film. For more examples of sharks in the popular culture of the time, the fine folks of the Men's Adventure Library have published an excellent collection of shark stories, succinctly titled Maneaters:

Amid all this overheated myth making and outright confabulation, enter H. David Baldridge, naval scientist and writer, who undertook the Herculean task of sifting through the International Shark Attack File in order to bring some order to the protean mass of Carcharian terror. The result was this book, possibly the densest and most factual of the many, many shark books released through the '60s and '70s. One previous entry of ours, Shark: The Killer of the Deep edited by Loren Grey, name drops Baldridge's work here for good reason. Baldridge's text is readable, his prose personable, and above all he is careful in his weighing of evidence and interpretation of fish tales - despite the cover blurb's invocation of Benchley's novel, not yet adapted into film at the time of this book's publication. 

For starters, we should know that the ISAF is a frustratingly fragmented resource, being as it can only contain reported attacks. Baldridge laments that documentation outside the former imperial core is thin on the ground, but he does the best he can with the fleeting news items and occasional rumors. On the other hand, American files yield many gruesome encounters, as do the Australian and South African archives. When you're inland in South Africa, by the by, beware the Zambezi sharks, so named for their habit of swimming hundreds of miles up the Zambezi River to occasionally attack the unsuspecting! Iran and Nicaragua also feature freshwater shark attacks, as does India's famous Ganges, the site of many religious water burials said to attract scavenging sharks. The question of sharks eating carrion is considered and answered in the positive, whereas many other concerns remain murky - would you guess that we don't actually know how well sharks can smell blood in the water, if at all? Again, Baldridge is thoroughly scientific in his approach and is always honest as to the limits of our current knowledge. The infamous New Jersey shark attacks of 1916 get a sober overview as well, adding to the freshwater carnage.

Unlike a lot of the trashier paperbacks on the subject, Baldridge avoids bloody victim photos and writes with dry appraisal of shark/human interactions. One humorous anecdote he relates involves the US Navy's "shark chaser" formula, an anti-shark liquid supplied to pilots in the event of a water landing. Baldridge reveals that the Navy had quickly deduced that shark chaser had little to no effect on sharks (its primary target mind you), but that the psychological value to downed pilots was so valuable as to necessitate its continued kitting. Sharks attacks are, after all, exceedingly rare, as Baldridge reminds us often through the text, and so the practical uselessness of the formula was actually a very small kink in the face of its overall effectiveness. And surprisingly or not, more often than not, poor relations are a direct result of provocation from Homo sapiens, as Baldridge relates of many people who thought it great fun to grab a little shark by the tail, or toss grenades overboard, and found themselves gnawed or exploded for their troubles - the grenades were courtesy some GIs disposing of old stock, and their intended victims swam directly under their boat after ingesting the explosives, sending all involved sky high. Baldridge can't resist gloating a little at these just desserts: all the sharks are doing, after all, is living their best lives, as they've lived for hundreds of millions of years.

We stop over in Florida to visit ichthyologist Eugenie Clark, working at her lab on cutting edge shark research. Clark is an appealing figure, taking scientific research into the primal realm of her subjects. In her own memoir she dubbed herself the "lady with a spear." A modern article on Clark yields these great photos:

Our global tour of shark attacks doesn't just list the heavy hitting man eaters like the massive Great White or the voracious Tiger, but plenty of dark horses and also rans such as the Bull Shark (a frequent freshwater interloper), the small and scruffy Wobbegong (scourge to Australian fishermen caught in its tenacious jaws) and Zane Grey's old fishing foe the zippy, snippy Mako. The variety and range of shark species and their spectrum of interactions with humans, sometimes banal, sometimes horrific, is as much a part of Baldridge's story as any of the "classic" images of what a shark attack entails. Australian and South African beaches do their best developing anti-shark measures, testing nets and lookout guards as well as kooky electronic systems. Pearl and abalone divers in California and the South Pacific may or may not carry bang sticks or spears, but they learn not to dawdle with their catch regardless, and here Baldridge does conclude pretty solidly that keeping dead fish on your person underwater is a surefire way to initiate a close encounter with sharks! Various islanders and coastal peoples around the world deal with maddened sharks who seem obsessed with ramming their dingys and canoes, and here Baldridge isn't quite sure what the sharks are thinking. But whether or not he has the answers, he's asking the right questions, and with that, there's not much else to say! 

For its methodology and historical value, Shark Attack proves fascinating reading almost 50 years on and a worthwhile addition to any curious reader's library. It's available to read and download at archive dot org.

A Berkley Medallion Book, 1974