MYSTERIES OF OUR WORLD by Peter Briggs

Not a mystery mongering text, but a solid pop-sci volume covering the cutting edge in earth science c.1969. Author Peter Briggs lays out the debates and scientific developments leading to our new knowledge of the world around us, from the ocean depths to the mountain tops, atmospheric heights, and beyond! There's a healthy dose of natural disasters, with volcanos and earthquakes making for engaging reading. Oceanic investigation is another exciting subject, with plenty of ships dredging and scanning and netting all around the seven seas - the Glomar Challenger is here, a few years before the Explorer would launch its now infamous secret mission. 

Reading on through Briggs' explorations, dense but smoothly flowing, it makes me think. We only just saw the announcement of the phasing out of "pocket" paperbacks, and here's a relic of that soon-to-be-bygone age: a portable, dependable, entertaining science primer, readable by anyone, anytime, anywhere, packed with references and sources - put out by a relatively sleazy/lowbrow publisher, even. Nowadays google is just as likely to give you a completely hallucinated "AI summary" for your search terms as a straightforward URL ... maybe I'm just being cranky, I don't know! Google also doesn't offer as many cigarette ads as vintage paperbacks:

Briggs appears to have been a prolific nonfiction writer - here's a spread of titles including Water, The Vital Essence, which Briggs references in this current text, and a title on the Glomar Challenger.

"And if California falls into the ocean/
Like the mystics and statistics say it will"

 

True to their rough and tumble image, Belmont Tower included a two page spread of mafia books as part of their nonfiction advertising. "You liked reading about volcanos, Billy? Well how about Lucky Luciano?"

This educational title is available to read and download at archive dot org.

Belmont Tower Books, 1969

EARTHSOUND by Arthur Herzog

The DISASTERTHON smashes on! Tonite, we feel the earth move under our feet as disaster maven Arthur Herzog scribes us the EARTHSOUND!

Your name is Harry Vail. You have a tragic backstory involving the Good Friday earthquake of 1964 which struck Alaska with a vengeance - maybe this would have been a gripping story on its own, but you've moved to Rhode Island with your new wife and live a quiet life as a geological surveyor, mixing with the beautiful people and secure in the knowledge that the East Coast's staid tectonics won't reignite your trauma ...

Or won't they?

Herzog makes a bold play here, eschewing LA, Japan, or even NYC in favor of a small town tableau, mixing folk horror with the classic disaster formula. The results are uneven but interesting, as Harry Vail must navigate the treacherous ground of an insular New England community as he tries to unravel the burgeoning threat from below. Midcentury bourgeois angst blends uneasily with the frisson of nature's fury, as nasty party games lead to domestic paranoia and some Stephen King-style conflict with the local dead end youths ... what's the difference, really, between the physical upheaval of an earthquake and the shifting ground of a failing marriage, a failing life?

Sadly, Herzog's juicy mixture doesn't quite land on solid ground. There's too many loose ends and dead ends, and the final quake is (rather realistically) limited in scope: there's only so much destruction an isolated peninsula can endure. Threads of poltergeists and Edgar Cayce (Cay-cee, not Case, Herzog helpfully informs us) clutter up the scene without adding much suspense.

Above, the Pan edition, for Commonwealth readers.

Herzog's Earthsound earns 2/4 for an uneven ride with tremors of feeling. Anything is better than nothing! This title is available to read and download at archive dot org.

Signet Books, 1976 (original pub. 1975)

THE BIG ONE by Harrison Arnston

It was just a matter of time ... there's only so many potential titles for an earthquake disaster novel, and sooner or later it had to be THE BIG ONE!

Our hero Ted Kowalcyzk - pronounced Kowal-sis-ick as an unfunny recurring gag informs us - is retired Special Forces, retired FBI now working in insurance, which is how he starts to sniff out something rotten in the state of California. It seems the big insurance companies are suddenly spooked about earthquake policies, almost as if they've got some inside intel ... and then Ted gets a mysterious package from an old friend who's just suffered a mysterious accident, and we're off to the races!

Or, at least we should be. Unfortunately, after a promising start all the sound and thunder about the Big One turns out to be a big MacGuffin for some substandard shoot-em-up action. All the depth and sensitivity that went into the characters of yesterday's The Nightmare Factor is lacking here, and good guy Ted is Exhibit A. He's a cardboard hero who's only flaw is that he just cares too damn much, and his tragic backstory - wife and kid shot down by a drug fiend connected to a case he worked - is cliche, as is his romance with his dead buddy's hot widow. The resident expository scientist, Dr. Winifred Wickshire, is an elderly rock doc whose treacly presentation soon becomes condescending. This is the kind of book where the good guys are just too cute, which robs the action of any suspense. We know how things are gonna go, especially when Ted can call up 70 (!!!) ex-Special Forces friends for an impromptu commando raid on the bad guys' compound. Again, where The Nightmare Factor's conspiracy unfolded with sinister precision and plausibility, here author Arnston also fumbles things. Spoiler: there's a bunch of government goons out at the Nevada Test Site working on some anti-earthquake super science, and there's some push and pull among the ranks whether the cure will be worse than the disease. There's potential here, but Arnston just can't pull it off!

All the silly runaround might be forgivable if the titular Big One lived up to its potential, but here too we're robbed. After an opening tremor sets the scene, the only other real action we get are some limp nightmare scenarios that wake Ted in the middle of the night, poor guy. Eventually we get round to LA's evacuation and martial law, but this is also bungled, with a top down view that wastes our time with Senators and Generals and "President Byron Walsh" all growling underbaked dialogue at each other. Will the Army's top secret nuclear fracking device defuse the Big One, or trigger an even bigger quake? Will the evacuation of LA prove to be the cure that kills, with millions of refugees at risk? Who cares!

For being one wet noodle of an action thriller, Arnston's The Big One gets ZERO destroyed cities out of four:

At least the cover's cool.

Zebra Books, 1990

TREMOR VIOLET by David Lippincott

There's blood in the streets

It's up to my ankles

Blood in the streets 

It's up to my knees

Here it comes, for the umpteenth time. Los Angeles is gonna get the Big One, the one that's gonna knock California into the sea, a 9 on the Richter scale and worse to come ... Tremor Violet. A lyrical title, and one hell of an explosive cover, but does author David Lippincott bring the noise? Does he ring in the apocalypse in style?

Blood in my love
In the terrible summer
Bloody red sun of
Fantastic L.A.

Let's just say, he gets an awful lot of mileage going over well tread ground. The plotting is paint by numbers, with concerned scientists, crooked public servants, and oblivious private citizens all lined up to say their lines and get put through the cataclysmic wringer. Lippincott's prose is belabored: 

To the outsider, this section of Beverly Hills is both awesome and puzzling; there is no way to be certain whether the gates are meant to keep strangers out or the strangers who live behind them in.

And his characters are contrived, right down to their names: Digit Vorhees, Adam Mosely, Mishi and Addie, Oskie and Pokress, a cast of dozens who fail to convince, neither compelling or realistic enough to become anything more than a parade of thin '70s stereotypes, mere meat for the grinder. Some of it is just plain distracting: why is 15 year old Mishi's dialogue written as if she were a precocious 8 year old? She's a Japanese living in the Hills and speaking ESL, but Lippincott's cutesy rendering of her speech - she learned colloquial English, we're told, by watching old movies - cements her firmly as a stereotype in our minds, and not the awkward adolescent fumbling through her sexual awakening that the author is clearly attempting. None of Lippincott's attempts at a grand tapestry of disaster hold together, leaving us with disconnected episodes which seem even more unsatisfying in their disunity. And the main event? Tremor Violet herself, the "tremendous wallop" that promises to upend LA with her big, scary, epic violence?

It's alright.

Nothing special, really. Less Earthquake and more Smash-Up on Interstate 5 -  a made-for-TV apocalypse. Lippincott manages a decent set piece when some of his victims must rappel down a collapsed penthouse restaurant's glass elevator shaft, but he falls flat with his other scenes of destruction. His main problem seems to be pacing, as scenes and characters are built up interminably over the book, only to sputter out when called upon for their big moment. Wild animals loosed from a zoo, eating earthquake survivors? Sounds horrible, I'll take it! But that bit's over before it even really begins. The dams at the Van Norman Reservoir have blown, flooding the valley? Ditto, it's over and done with. Lather rinse repeat, and Lippincott's big one is a big flop.

And as if to make up for this quaalude of a quake, near the end of things out of nowhere Lippincott springs a brutal rape scene upon us, as poor, alienated Mishi is sodomized with a shotgun by the pervert jailbird Pokress. Pokress gets his head blown off for his troubles, but Lippincott lavishes entirely too much detail on Mishi's ordeal and has done nothing in the preceding 250 pages to earn this savage shock value. It's a Hail Mary pass that lands somewhere south of good taste and nowhere near successful. Just about the only successful piece of this work is the end - I'm not being a wag, Lippincott ends things on a cliffhanger with another tremor imminent, and the suspense works. It'd work even better though, if he hadn't fumbled everything else.

Lippincott's paint by numbers apocalypse gets a miserable rating of one seismograph out of four.

Signet Books, 1975