TWISTER by David Hagberg

It's about time we kicked our DISASTERTHON into overdrive, and who better than master of disaster David Hagberg? Hagberg is back with a vengeance as he drops us into the roiling maelstrom of a small town blown apart by the TWISTER!

Hagberg deftly balances cutting edge weather forecasting and creeping disaster dread with the pungent small town milieu of Cambridge, WI. As the "hook" lines on the screen start to multiply, meteorologist Peter Geiger is faced with the nail biting decision: call a tornado warning? A false alarm could be devastating to Geiger's career, but if he hesitates ...

True to Hagberg's style, Geiger's conflict isn't easy, black and white genre grist. It'd be simple to cast Geiger as the villain of the piece, or a bumbling fool, but instead we're right there with him as he tries to thread a dangerous needle. Given the book's title we know how it's going to shake out but Hagberg's skill, as with all the best disaster stories, is in the unwinding of the inevitable.

The people of Cambridge are a motley lot: families and loners, Plain Folk and freakazoids, the doomed and the damned and the just plain unlucky. Hagberg structures the story into chapters named for each character, as paths cross and fates divert over the course of the big blowdown. It's a juicy cast just like in Hagberg's Blizzard, and everyone is drawn with Hagberg's typical skill and sensitivity. They feel like real people, thrown into an unbelievable horror. Hagberg dedicates his story to the people of Xenia, OH, who experienced a real life tornado disaster in 1974 that left 33 dead and 1,150 injured.

Smoke break! Poor Julia could sure use one right about now ...

Dell reuses the same back page ads from Barney Cohen's Coliseum, giving us a real snapshot of the zeitgeist.

Hagberg's Twister earns 4/4 for some sublimely satisfying drama and marks the highpoint of our DISASTERTHON thus far. Get twisted!

Dell Publishing, 1975

CROC by David James

"In the twenties it started," Boggs began, but then he stopped. Andrea was staring at him, disbelief in her eyes, but waiting for him to continue.

"All the rich bitches from uptown were raising hell, going to parties, driving their fast cars, putting in swimming pools in their penthouse places. But it got boring after awhile. No one was satisfied. They wanted something new, something different. So some of them began stocking their pools with baby alligators and crocodiles. Only the fad didn't last long, so they dumped the things down the sewers rather than kill them."

David Hagberg returns as David James for another pseudonymous thriller, following up his disaster novel Blizzard with some real creature feature carnage in Croc! NYC sewer worker Boggs loses his partner Fascetti to an impossible monster after probing a cave-in off the cross-town line, and after almost getting chomped himself he's press-ganged by Fascetti's widow into returning to the sewers with a .45 to kill the beast!

Things do not go as planned. In Hagberg's universe this is down to both institutional problems and the vagaries of the personalities involved - and boy does Croc have some characters! Boggs is a rummy lifer working the shit detail in the Sanitation Dept., and Hagberg spins some eloquent characterization as he contemplates what amounted to his life, staggering knee-deep through the pitch black sewers (with a shitty '70s flashlight, batteries draining fast) pursued by the monster croc - dreams, failures (many), and what-ifs and could-have-beens, some involving his dearly departed partner Fascetti, who almost (almost!) named Boggs his firstborn's godfather.

If you ever had to use these, you know Boggs is doomed ...

Andrea Fascetti, meanwhile, was all set for a good life as a good wife, and now has to clean up this fucking mess, which she splits 50/50 between the croc and Boggs. Her iron core - hidden inside a Talia Shire type beauty which the male characters are by turns enraptured, aroused, and a little frightened by - might never have come out if not for this tragedy, and makes one consider the multitude of invisible lives of midcentury housewives, forever standing behind their husbands. As things spin out of control, the authorities finally plunge into action, and here again Hagberg draws us in with a cast of cops, scientists, and bureaucrats who could have been cardboard cutouts but instead are all either a bunch of fuckups, barely holding it together, or just plain weird! His reptile expert Koch gives us just a light info dump on crocodilians, telling us that based on size and disposition our killer is most likely a saltwater crocodile - he's thriving down in the sewer, too, because they like brackish water! This quick rundown is typical of Hagberg's light touch - he never lingers on genre conventions when we've got enough of an idea to keep moving. In fact, even though his Croc ultimately has a low body count comparable to Katz's Alligator, Hagberg moves things so fast and furious that we never feel cheated. The setting, characters, and monster feel authentic without over explanation, and Croc can rest comfortably as an accomplished monster mash right next to John Sayles and co.'s 1980 film Alligator  - though Croc lacks that film's sharp satire, aiming for more resigned humor from Hagberg's cast of screwups and freaks. Hagberg does get some sly jabs in with Bremberger, the up-and-coming pol whose attempts at self-promotion through crocodilian crisis get shot down at every turn.

Croc (or Croc') was originally graced with the crackerjack man-vs-beast cover above, courtesy its 1976 debut from Belmont Tower Books. The New English Library edition lacks a certain dynamism by comparison, despite a decently fierce croc and a hard-to-see hand slipping beneath the sewage. NEL doesn't miss a trick plugging its moneymaking Crabs series from Guy N. Smith though!

Croc is available to read and download at archive dot org. For some lean, gritty thrills, Croc earns 4/4 stars.

New English Library, 1977 (original pub. 1976)

BLIZZARD by David James

White death in the frozen north! The city of Duluth, MN is on the brink of crisis as the storm of the century settles down in a smothering blanket of lethal chill, and author David James puts you there in the middle of the BLIZZARD!

Not to be confused with George Stone's 1977 technothriller of the same title, James' story is gritty slice of life stuff, as the citizens of Duluth find their routines suddenly interrupted by that most innocent of things, a November snow. Kids cheer for a day off school, but nothing doing, and so stolid, cancer riddled Ed Gerlowski slides into the driver's seat of his big yellow bus one last time and drives off into the white nothing ... Ed's not alone, there's a whole cast of solid midcentury characters with names like DeWurth, Jordan, Selzner, Polinski, and a delicious stew of '70s melodrama with adultery, workplace sexism, end-of-the-world parties, and more wracking at our characters' fragile nerves. That storm's worse than we thought, and suddenly Duluth is cut off from its natural gas lines, and then the power plant fails, and now thousands of people are facing the cold hard prospect of freezing to death in their own homes! James slaloms easily between his different threads, giving us the authorities, the media, city workers and the cops ... and US. What's to become of us? Like all the best disaster fiction, James sketches a believable portrait of failing systems and fractured people. There's no cheesy villains or out-of-this-world obstacles, just the implacable forces of nature arrayed against us, the living, and the terrifying simplicity of an all encompassing cold which numbs the body, slows the mind, and kills, kills, kills in ways both dramatic and banal, shocking and predictable. Duluth will be there after the thaw, but not everyone will have made it, and the survivors will be left with broken lives, new beginnings.

If James comes off as a capable author it should be no surprise, for he's actually one of several pseudonyms employed by writer David Hagberg over a long career that also included 20+ entries in the long running Nick Carter series of men's adventure pulp paperbacks, a successful series of technothrillers starring superspy Kirk McGarvey, and assorted other spy, tie-in, and thriller works. Blizzard was one of his first books but he writes with a sure hand here, making the story a pure pleasure to read. Hagberg was from Duluth, by the way, and it's always fun when an author socks it to their hometown.

The copious ad pages in the back feature a blurb for Rochelle Larkin's The Raging Flood featured on this blog just the other day, with an odd detail. For whatever reason, it looks like Larkin almost published her story under the pseudonym of John Pendleton Kennedy, a real American who served as Secretary of the Navy under Millard Fillmore and is notable for his abolitionism and early advocacy of the telegraph, as well as being a man of letters! Was this some kind of misprint, maybe a filler name chosen for pseudonyms not yet finalized and not meant to see print? I have no idea! The folks at cheapie publisher Belmont Tower were full of mysteries.

A final word should go to the cover art: it's simply beautiful, an evocative swirl of snow flurries nearly obscuring the blanketed countryside and Forrest Jordan's imperiled Cessna. Bravo all around for another winning disaster piece from Belmont Tower!

4/4

Belmont Tower Books, 1975