ARCHIVAL UPDATES: UFO TREK

Warren Smith's UFO Trek is now available to read and download at archive dot org. The file contains the Sphere edition, the original Zebra Books artwork and Zebra's retitled reissue artwork as well.

Courtesy Sphere Books, 1977 (original pub. 1976).

BRAK VS. THE MARK OF THE DEMONS by John Jakes

Pain dazzled behind his eyes. Once more he retreated, seeking firm ground. The shale betrayed him again. He broke his fall with one elbow at the last instant. The bird-thing swiped at him with its talon. Brak hitched out of the way. The talon tore a hole in the earth where he'd been. 

Lying on his side, Brak struck the bird-thing's leg, struck again. Gristle parted. Ichor glistened between stringy fibers. The monster's weight collapsed its leg. 

Brak scrambled up, panting. The beak probed for his eyes. He jumped in the air. The beak shot between his legs. He came down astride it, the gray world tilting, whirling -

Conan, Kyrik, Tark, and now ... Brak the barbarian, a rangy blond warrior down from the north, locked in an endless trek for far Khurdisan. The foul wizard Septegundus has cursed him that he'll never reach his destination, and at the moment it seems the curse may prevail, for Brak is trapped in the trackless Logol wastes, an endless realm of shifting sands and the skin scouring Skulwind. Things get even worse when he rescues the weird twins Ky and Kya from a skeletal bird beast. They claim to be exiled nobility, but something about them puts Brak on edge. Soon enough they've joined with a ragged caravan ran by the trader Hadrios and his daughter Helane, and it should be smooth sailing to the city of Samarind, and then on to Khurdisan ...

And then the killing starts.

Alive with pleasure ... and terror!

Author John Jakes was a prolific writer, active in SF and fantasy while also finding mainstream success with his historical epic series The Kent Family Chronicles. 

This entry in Brak's ongoing adventures shows Jakes as a sure hand, ably mixing elements of horror with a solid swords and sorcery foundation. Brak is a tough customer, a tall blond fighter who wears a lion skin and a ponytail. He brooks no guff, but he's also polite enough when not tussling with assassins and brigands, and doesn't seem interested in courtly intrigue or lost treasures. He and Helane hit it off fast, and Brak proves a gentleman in his conduct with her. The supporting cast are well crafted, a good example being the "Nestorian" priest Pol who struggles with his faith even as he searches for answers to the demonic threat. Nestorianism is of course Jakes' fantasy interpretation of Christianity, just as the raiders of Quran belong to some kind of pre-Islamic Arabic city-state. Those fearsome Quran fighters all wear a red jewel in place of their left eyes, and Jakes excels at fantasy details like these. He gives us some creepy river critters too, some kind of catfish with little bug legs that take chunks out of our cast. I love this kind of swords and sorcery writing, with a fairly grounded world that is nevertheless beset by dark forces and filled with weird corners. The demon blood-eaters are a great portrayal of vampiric evil in a dark fantasy setting, and meanwhile our barbarian hero's nemesis Septegundus worships the dark entity Yob-Haggoth in an easy but effective Lovecraft pastiche that adds a cosmic dimension to Brak's struggle. When the unknown strikes, you can feel Brak and co's fear.

Jakes keeps the story moving fast, and before we know it Brak's battling the blood-eaters in the Red City of Quran, and things are looking grim indeed. The climax comes as a blend of classic peplum disaster and the apocalyptic butchery of the sci-fi/horror flick Lifeforce, as the city falls down around us and the blood-eaters are revealed in their truest horrific form. It's a nail biter down to the final page, and even then Jakes leaves us on a melancholy note.

Brak must have conquered the market, because this title has quite a few reprints with varying cover art. The Paperback Library original from 1969 (just above) is a pretty straightforward representation of elements from the story, while the 1977 edition from Pocket Books that tops this entry is in a strange, delicate style that adds generic fantasy imagery such as the alien beast that Brak's astride - in the story, everyone rides regular camels through the desert! The Sphere edition is pretty generic, while the Tower Books version at least gives us the killer bird beast (with friends!). The Sphere says this is Brak's third adventure, while the OG Paperback Library calls it number two. Oh those wacky Brits ...

Brak earns a full 4/4 in his high tension struggle against the demon blood-eaters! Get Brak'd!

Pocket Books, 1977 (original pub. 1969)

THE CAT by Andrew Sinclair

She threw back that shiny hair

Like the mane on a Delta queen

Gonna spend my last dime on a telephone call

'Cause she's the wildest thing I've ever seen

A beautiful, powerful, sleek black panther, quite a prize indeed for someone with too much money and not enough sense. That's Jebb, an idle richie rich with a private zoo, and despite some gorgeous wrought iron filigree we know that the Cat, of course, cannot be caged. "As gripping as Jaws," and for once that ubiquitous blurb has some teeth, for this particular animal attack story concerns THE CAT'S predations on Jebb's home, the twisted little village of Wittlemead, and the rotten black heart that's exposed as the beast rends and tears through the flesh of its inhabitants. Wealthy, penny pinching Jebb skimped on his security measures, as the cat's escaped from that antique Victorian cage in his private menagerie and is now having his neighbors and passers by for lunch! Our zoo fool throws the odd honest cop's investigation back in his face with the bold announcement of his standing dinner plans with the Chief Constable - yes, it's that kind of town. And sitting on top of this steaming midden of sex, lies, and disemboweled corgis is Peter Gwynvor, last of a once-proud line, reduced to pathetic dinner parties in his crumbling manse with the handful of locals who will bother. There's the dull, droning chicken queen Lucy Maidstone (her hi-tech industrial flocks soon to be laid waste), the local charity monger slash rubbernecker Mrs. Stott (her corgis soon to be rent limb from limb), old scuzzy Jebb himself, and of course the promiscuous Claudia and her parents, the Major and Lydia, old Africa hands we're told. Claudia is double dealing with Peter and his manservant Mr. Spring, though her overheated plotting is of no concern to either man, both of them far too enraptured in their own miseries. The Cat has plans for all of them, or at least Fate has plans for them to meet the Cat ...

Little kids, corgi dogs and fox hounds, bored sentries, innocent chickens ... no one is safe when the Cat strikes. And despite Jebb's best efforts, soon the creature's depredations cannot be denied, and the entire county goes into a frenzy. Fleet Street comes calling, Claudia does a nude spread as the Cat Girl based on her close encounter (almost eaten while rolling in the grass with the stolid Mr. Spring), and Peter has to consider what all of this petty bullshit means: his titles, his land, his (lack of an) heir, this Wittlemead which seems to be rapidly shaking itself apart. It's all very, very British, and many of the cast find themselves unable to let go of the former glories and shame of Empire. The modern British Army is, of course, totally inept in their attempts to catch the Cat, but the Major believes his experience in Africa hunting beasts (and men like beasts, he joyfully reflects) will aid him. The Cat proves him wrong. Mr. Spring prepares for a showdown with the Cat as well, drawing on his violent past in the Hell of the Pacific, and his brutal training may well make him a match for the beast. Peter meanwhile falls into a love triangle with Claudia and her sister, and mopes about until one too many atrocities snap him out of his funk and he too prepares to stalk the cat - after delivering a sermon, of course! Normally Peter's annual speech is a quiet affair for Remembrance Day (wherein the village mourns its 30 young men lost in the Great War, "most of them wasted in one minute by one machine-gun at Ypres"), but facing this new evil Peter gets a little more worked up, speaking truths that must be on everyone's mind at the moment:

"For the beast is within us. We confront him daily. He walks the dark places of our minds, the thickets of our wants. Envy is the beast, that envy which makes us rend the reputations of our friends and neighbours. Sloth is the beast, which lets us wallow in our beds after gorging on dead flesh. Malice is the beast, as we lie in wait to rip apart our chosen victims. Wrath is the beast, as we frighten away what we fear may be true. Lust is the beast in the darkness of our desires. The seven times seven sins are the claws of the beast, and they scratch us into doing what we know we must do."

Before the Cat escaped, Jebb had been worrying sick over the rising threat of having to obtain some kind of permit for his private zoo or to allow (gulp) the public to view his animals. He was scared stiff by the Dangerous Wild Animals Act of 1976, which motivated plenty of killer cats in British animal attack novels as well as sightings of real life Alien Big Cats (ABCs) after owners supposedly dumped their illicit kitties. Moving across the animal kingdom, the back page ad is for Sphere Books' paperback of the all-American Alligator, by Shelley Katz.

Originally published in hardcover as The Surrey Cat

Class, gash, and gore - the stuff of British horror! They call her THE CAT, and she earns a solid 3/4 stars!

Sphere Books, 1977 (original pub. 1977 as The Surrey Cat)

ALLIGATOR by Shelley Katz

"Don't go," Luke said, "listen to me." His voice echoed in the quiet. Same had never heard three hundred people be that quiet. "I've lived a long time. I know the swamps better than any of you. You don't stand a chance against that alligator. He's too old and too tough. Nature is on his side, not yours. Take my advice, stay here where you belong. Stop now while you can. Don't you see? I can feel it. That ain't no gator you're courting. It's death."

Two gator poachers don't make it home after tangling with a 20 foot monster alligator. What's left of them sends the town of Glades, Florida into a panic and then a frenzy, as word travels and the outside world comes crashing in with rubberneckers galore and a select few men who aim to kill the beast. One of them is local boy made good Rye Whitman, now a high powered Miami real estate dealer, his own kind of apex predator. But if he's to survive the treacherous swamplands, he'll need local guide Lee Ferris. Lee made it out of Glades too ... to Vietnam. The things he did there followed him back to Glades, and he doesn't have much use for people in general. A shark like Whitman? Even less so ... Except something is drawing them together, into this doomed, mythical quest to kill the alligator, and they'll need all of Lee's bushcraft and Rye's animal cunning if they're both to survive. But after everything the everglades throws at them, they might not care.

There's strong writing here, with plenty of rich characterizations, pungent Southern melodrama, and a sense of fun that's often missing from so-called "elevated" or literary horror (dig that jello!) but Alligator also suffers from a slack middle and a monster star that's MIA for too much of the story! Katz even loads us up with a convoy of gator bait following leads Lee and Rye into the death glades, but then lets most of them off easy as they each eventually turn tail from the challenge. The bodycount is frustratingly low. Even so, you'll be carried along with Lee and Rye through an onslaught of stinging, biting insects, the burning sun, cutting sawgrass that grows 6 feet high, and always the stinking, sucking waters of the swamp  - Katz does a knockout job on the setting, both the rotting shithole town and the endless, trackless green hell beyond.

Alligator must have made a big splash, because there's multiple foreign editions. The Sphere editions are co-credited to husband Paul. There's also a handsome reprint from Centipede Press which came out last year, limited to 500 copies at $125 a pop - but only $95 if you're okay with an unsigned copy!

Variations on a theme ...

Shelley Katz is still writing today at her blog, and also recently edited a "crowd writing" collection of true stories from real people.

Our author

The cover on the classic Dell paperback looks like it should be a stepback, but it isn't, though the scales are embossed for a cool texture effect. The full gorgeous painting is confined to the back cover. 

Alligator still gets good reviews nowadays (note that this reviewer also mentions pacing issues), and its inclusion on a top ten list by David Foster Wallace may prejudice you one way or the other. Don't worry about that! For its fear-soaked atmosphere and sweaty Southern melodrama, Alligator earns a solid 3/4 stars.

Dell Publishing, 1977

THE FLYING SAUCERERS by Arthur Shuttlewood

Arthur Shuttlewood: BESTSELLING AUTHOR OF 'THE WARMINSTER MYSTERY!' If that blurb meant anything at all to you in 1976, you'd be snapping this book right off the rack. The Warminster mystery concerned strange earth sounds heard in 1965 (said to knock birds right out of the sky!) which developed over the years into UFO sightings and photos of varying provenance. 

One photograph of the Thing ...

... and its location in the UK

Arthur Shuttlewood was a local journalist in the small town of Warminster who soon became entranced by the mysterious happenings of the Thing, as the mystery was eponymously dubbed. A series of books followed, and eventually Shuttlewood was fully enveloped in the '70s British UFO scene, dominated as it was by the muddled mysticism of the fascists behind The Flying Saucer Review. This current title is a melange of mystic mumbo jumbo that starts with a soft pedal as Shuttlewood goes over some regular British folk and their UFO sightings:

The bold cover art promises space aged revelations, with a pair of cutting edge F-104 Starfighters engaging a saucer. But soon enough Shuttlewood is delivering the standard mystic saucer stew, citing Brinsley le Poer Trench and Otto Binder for musings on ancient astronauts and their genetic plan for humanity, and quickly blending in hollow earth and polar openings with nary a hesitation. Shuttlewood name checks Kiwi pilot Bruce Cathie and his world energy grid alongside ley lines and supposed ancient Celtic nuclear piles, as he swerves into pyramid power and dense bouts of numerology. Says Shuttlewood:

My own belief is that the great pyramid is a multi-dimensional space-time condenser, the four-triad group of a veritable powerhouse in which every dimensional form of life in the whole universe could, if so deciding, converge and converse by pure mental communication.

There's a WWII sighting of an "egg shaped craft" by Polish fighter Antoni Szachnowski and mention of foo fighters, which sound like the typical nuts'n'bolts American stuff, and then suddenly Shuttlewood is dropping his favorite mystic numerology volume, The Seal of God by one F.C. Payne. Payne's work inspired Shuttlewood to investigate recent history for signs of divine guidance:

The six leaders whose nations were involved in the biggest show of hostilities in the history of mankind were: Churchill, Hitler, Roosevelt, Il Duce, Stalin, and Tojo. Take the initial letters of these names and what have we? Spell it out loud and clear, for it was and is so true! We have C-H-R-I-S-T!

Come page 83 Shuttlewood's quoting a crank letter he got from one Muriel Barker of Southend-on-Sea, which cites his colleague Brinsley le Poer Trench on the fact of Jesus Christ flying a UFO from Gethsemane to Glastonbury, where the Son of God inspires the legend of King Arthur! It's so British it hurts at times, especially with time capsule passages like: "Not many admirers know that vivacious Adrienne Posta, well-known actress and comedienne, saw a UFO on Monday 24 January 1972 at Cambridge Square, London." You're right, I didn't know that!

Ms. Posta looking glam

Shuttlewood's friend and former Warminster nurseryman Jack Harraway sends him translations of Spanish newspaper articles on UFOs, for an informative chapter which is also another time capsule piece, as Harraway is living in Alicante, Spain while serving on the executive committee for the National Farmers' Union in the Common Market. Further Britishisms follow as Shuttlewood quotes UFO witness Ray P. Logan, who hypothesizes that the flying sorcerers (as Shuttlewood's been calling them throughout) are avoiding direct contact with us in the same manner that we'd avoid waltzing right into the gorillas' enclosure at London Zoo, and that they're feeling us out through observation “very much as Dave Sexton, manager of Chelsea FC, will send scouts to watch another team’s style of soccer play before planning his tactics in a coming match.” Shuttlewood references John Keel and Robert Charroux for more ultraterrestrial meddling in ancient mysteries, before relating a strange experience with two college students named Micah and Joeb who demonstrated strange powers on a train - the weirdest part is that Shuttlewood separately receives an account by another experiencer, Marion, who met the same boys!

Shuttlewood relaxing with a cuppa ...

... and in the field (left), pointing out a
UFO location for the Marquis of Bath

The author's approach is summed up near the end, when he asks us, “Astrology, Numerology, Symbology: Have these abstract or long-forgotten arts any contribution to make towards slotting the UFO jigsaw pieces together?” The final chapter features some intense numerology, and at this point you're either vibing with Shuttlewood or you've written him off entirely.

Grand old UFO man Hilary Evans made his appraisement clear in his essential annotated UFO catalogue:

Right before his numerological rally, Shuttlewood drops a final anecdote about one Randy Otter's "zoo hypothesis" printed as an article in the Post Office Courier, which is reheated from Charles Fort's terse observation that "we are property." The Space Age calls out to the Golden Age with the musty archives of generations between, and Shuttlewood rallies round the maypole alongside Trench, Holiday, and the rest of the British mystic brigade.

The Flying Saucerers is available to read and download at archive dot org.

Sphere Books, 1976