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)

MAN-EATER by Ted Willis

Got shiny diamonds

Like the eyes of a cat in the black and blue

Something is coming for you ...

Look out!

A washed up circus trainer dumps two tigers on a dark country road and so begins THE SHOCK EXPERIENCE OF THE YEAR ... or maybe not quite, for author Ted Willis is very restrained with his mayhem, and aims for more emotional blows than bloody guts and grue. Though not as feverish as Andrew Sinclair's action in The Cat, Willis delivers a similar setup: a small English town (in this case Whitford) that will soon learn that killer cats are the least of its problems, as their predations on the populace uncover an unholy tangle of sex, lies, and rape that runs straight through the halls of power. It's almost too much for an honest copper like Gosford, but thank God that strange fellow Birk is skulking around, having rented a cottage on the hill ... he seems to have some experience in hunting beasts, whether human or feline. Gosford, Birk, and the rest are about to find out that the tigers are just two of the predators on the prowl in Whitford.

The author

Author Ted Willis (1914-1992) was no slouch, being a prolific playwright, screenwriter, and novelist, a devoted communist, Chairman of the Writer's Guild of Great Britain 1958-1964, and a recipient of a life peerage in 1963! His Man-Eater is artfully drawn out, introducing us to the town of Whitford through the man-eaters' first victim Tom Pickford, stepping out with a local girl on a forest road, and then through Chief Inspector Gosford's stumbling investigation of Pickford's disappearance, which proves frustrating as nobody wants to talk lest they expose Pickford's double life and their own shady dealings. Our tiger mates Ranee and Mohan seem almost perplexed by this bizarre community that's become their hunting grounds, and Willis keeps sympathy for them strong throughout. Meanwhile his focus on his human characters verges on the parapolitical, as we get a feel for the class lines and power networks that keep little Whitford plugged into the national body politic - what a day for some bloody tigers to ruin your child pornography ring!

As philanderers, innocent bystanders, and biker hooligans are rent and bloodied on the moors and in the woods, as the suicides and self incriminations ring out, and as the fierce, lost, doomed tigers find a net tightening inexorably around them, it's enough to drive you to drink. Says gunman Birk, "I'm a bit of an anachronism too, you see, part of the post-imperial hangover. Like those tigers - a member of a doomed species. I'm not really equipped for life in the last half of the Twentieth Century. And frankly, the more I see of it, the less I feel inclined to care."

Some other editions

With Ranee and Mohan burning brightly in the night, Man-Eater hunts down a 3/4 rating.

They're out there ...

Bantam Books, 1977 (original pub. 1976)

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 Berkeley Medallion Book, 1966

DELUGE by Richard Doyle

"Kennington Park Road - water entering from north-east," called out the officer in charge and another marker was moved up. The pattern was becoming clear; the surge had spilled over in Bermondsey and was cutting across the bend in the river into Lambeth. By the time the tide overtopped on the other side, along the Albert Embankment, people trying to escape southwards would find themselves trapped with the river at their backs. His thoughts were interrupted by an urgent shout from Carswell.

"Derek," the Controller's face was pale with dismay, "it's the Undergound," he said in an unnaturally high voice. 

"They still have passengers in the tubes."

It's panic on the streets of London (and all up and down the eastern English coast for that matter) as hurricane force winds drive the storm of the century up the Thames, threatening seven million souls with a horrible death via an inescapable DELUGE!

After an exciting opening with a threatened freighter in the North Sea and reports of record surges from coastal towns, we quickly bog down into bureaucratic exposition as Peter Collins (Flood Room officer on standby) and displaced Kiwi Derek Thompson (Chief Engineer to the London City Council) feel out the first warning signs and begin their doomed attempts at prodding the system into action. We know exactly how that's going to go, don't we ... This is a necessary part of any disaster narrative, the pregnant menace, the foreknowledge that something's terribly wrong. We spend a little too much time here, though, and the first third of the story starts to feel like we're wading through hip deep water, sloshing and straining to make any progress. Eventually the storm arrives and things really get bent, as we're hoping, but it's rough going getting there, with too much back and forth with a slimy Labour pol named Miles Wendoser doing everything he can to stymie emergency efforts for fear of panic. Big mistake, we know! Wendoser is a plastic politician in the Tony Blair mold, with no real principles or scruples beyond what's best for his image in any given moment. Oh yes, and to make things worse, the American President is due for a tour!

Hardcover jacket artwork

Thompson has a memory of a flood back in New Zealand, which wiped out a tiny village, and he shudders at the thought of that power brought to bear on a modern metropolis. Doyle takes a ghoulish glee in showing us exactly how awful a flood could get in a modern city, with bridges smashed by loose barges, power plants blown up, slums flooded out and gas lines exploding, hospitals becoming death traps, those poor bastards in the tube, all this and more, and everywhere masses of people trapped by the rising waters and left to die by a government paralyzed by indecision and ignorance. Doyle doesn't mind dispatching his characters with clinical precision, sometimes scores at a time, sometimes in singular vignettes, and he does a good job for the most part in sketching people in before they meet their fates - it's a cross section of '70s society in the UK here, with "colored" chaps and working girls, pensioners and posh types all in danger from the flood. Nobody deserves what they get, and here Doyle is effective in illustrating the sheer waste and folly on the human level within a massive catastrophe, and the very human decisions that play into the death toll from a "natural" disaster.

Above, an American edition from Bantam Books, 1978. There's much to like here but the pacing is just too off. Doyle would revisit this setup a quarter century later as Flood, from 2002. The description makes it sound like more of a modern thriller, with American and NATO forces aiding Britain and "an explosion the size of a small Hiroshima" ... I wonder how much Doyle's style evolved over the years, for better or for worse? A great-nephew of Arthur Conan Doyle as noted above, Richard Doyle (1948-2017) has a brief but intriguing wikipedia page and was especially concerned, it is said, with the effects of climate change. After slogging through this bleak but unsatisfying read, maybe you'll spare a moment in thought as well ...

Deluge earns a disappointing 2/4 rating.

Pan, 1978 (original pub. 1976)

COVER UPDATES: MYSTERIOUS VISITORS and GOD DRIVES A FLYING SAUCER

A very cool Chris Foss style flying saucer on this 1975 edition of Mysterious Visitors by Brinsley Le Poer Trench from Pan ...

And a hazy portrait of the heavens for this 1971 edition of God Drives a Flying Saucer by R.L. Dione from Corgi Books. UK publishers loved lavishing lush paintings on their paranormal cheapies!