DEATH BITE by Michael Maryk and Brent Monahan

In the closing days of 2024 we learn that MAN IS THE PREY! In fact and fiction, on the ground and in the air or underwater, no one and nowhere is safe from nature's fury!

First up: it's almost 20 feet long, can kill a dozen men with a scratch of its fangs, and exists in a permanent state of pissed off! It's the near-mythical island taipan of Naraka-pintu, a tiny (fictional) hellhole between Australia and New Guinea. Locals call the island the gateway to hell, and as for the snake? The devil himself. Now, one of these demons is loose in San Diego, CA, and no one is safe from the DEATH BITE!

Authors Maryk and Monahan have crafted a winning monster here, a killer snake twice as long as its "mainland" (real world) variant, nurtured to extreme size and temperament by its isolated island home. The authors do a bang up job incorporating real snake science into their work, as well as the murky, dangerous world of exotic animal smuggling. Our giant taipan is being smuggled into the USA for Scott Miller's private zoo of dangerous snakes, with researcher Marcus Wrightson offered a sweetheart deal on the snake's rare venom if he'll help transfer it from the boat off San Diego to Miller's zoo in Florida.

Hardcover edition, 1979

Some shady characters have other plans, however, as does the snake ... Soon, our titan of terror is loose in the San Diego hills, and Miller and Wrightson are caught with their pants down explaining just what the hell they were thinking with their reckless scheme. Wrightson meanwhile has become entangled with Miller's mysterious assistant Ioka, and her connection to Miller's past may hold the key to the man's obsession with this demonic killer he's unleashed. The authors do a good job balancing some subtle character work with the unfolding action, especially the bad guys who we learn more and more about as their own harebrained plot for snakenapping unfolds.

This book belonged to George P. Asvos!

When Death Bite strikes, it's with a vengeance. However, just as most snakes can go a long time between meals, conserving their energy, so too does Death Bite rest between feedings, perhaps for a little too long. The middle of the book sags a bit, especially once all the pieces are in place and everything seems ready to cut loose. All the buildup leaves us rushing through the final 50 pages in a whirlwind.

Above, the Granada edition. Pacing aside, Maryk and Monahan's thriller seems ready made for a film adaptation, and Death Bite eventually made it to the screen as Spasms. The coolasscinema blog has an in-depth article on the troubled production of Spasms, including insight from Maryk and Monahan about their frustrations with the shoot. Co-author Brent Monahan has also written a bit about the novel and film adaptation at his personal website.

Maryk and Monahan's Death Bite earns a 3/4 rating for some lethal strikes amid languorous pacing.

Ace Books, 1980 (original pub. 1979)

SHOCKWAVE by Nick Everett

"From the depths of the ocean comes the most devastating of all the Earth's forces ..."

Watch out ... for the SHOCKWAVE!

The "rugged Englishman" Kirk, sexy lady scientist Simone, and a boatload of Norwegians are sitting on top of a big problem in the North Sea: an unstable trench that's about to launch a landslide into the ocean depths, triggering the most massive tsunami ever seen in this hemisphere. Worst of all, the blast wave will be on track to slam into the eastern coast of the UK!

This is author Nick Everett's only credited work, though the polished writing points to a pseudonym of some working writer. Everett leads with a little bit of disaster science onboard the good ship Isthmian, along with Kirk's battered libido - Simone "can make a duffle coat and a pair of sea-boots look sexy" we're told, and once Kirk gets off this tub he's entertaining thoughts of a courtship with her. That'll have to wait, of course, once the seafloor shakes and the big wave starts rolling.

Everett writes a short, tight little disaster epic, drawing down on family man Walter's evacuation via traffic jam and on daredevil pilot Ryan's rubbernecking by way of his precious twin engine Dakota, the very same plane brought to life on the front cover. Walter's a drab grey man living a drab grey life, and now he might lose it all without having ever really enjoyed himself! Ryan meanwhile gives us a bird's eye view of the action and pushes himself further and further into reckless hedonistic thrill seeking.

Like the water sucked out to sea before a tsunami, the empty hours between the announcement of the disaster and the inevitable crashing wave are a loathsome absence, proof via negation of a horrible, inescapable reality. When the shockwave finally comes roaring ashore and overground it's almost a relief, a sweet release for our trapped cast. Pilot Ryan could easily have flown to safety, but his own demons compel him to witness the destruction, and poor Walter, well, he's stuck in a miles long caravan along with a thousand other souls.

Closeup on the cover art!

Everett mentions a 220 foot tall tsunami resulting from the Good Friday quake that struck Alaska in 1964, which also factored into the background of Arthur Herzog's Earthsound. Over at the Paperback Palette, Jeffersen has amassed an exhaustive entry for water based disasters - that's "flood, deluge, squall, gale, tempest, cyclone, hurricane, typhoon, tsunami," any and all "EXTREME WATER EVENTS," and Shockwave is among the many, many entries. Jeffersen also has questions about Everett's identity, because great minds think alike.

His lengthy survey also covers Deluge by Richard Doyle and The Raging Flood by R.T. Larkin. Check it out!

Shockwave earns a reliable 3/4 for a no frills, cheap thrills disaster!

New English Library, 1981

IMPACT! by R.V. Fodor and G.J. Taylor

Brace for IMPACT! Geologist R.V. Fodor joins with G.J. Taylor (having also coauthored Junior Bodybuilding) for this hefty addition to the big space rock genre of the late '70s. What are we in for when a swarm of meteoroids crosses our path?

Fodor and Taylor have written an odd duck here, with too many dropped threads and dead ends. They give us just a taste of the usual big disaster tropes, with President Stein and his men debating doomsday, scientists decoding the composition of the rocks, and us little people facing oblivion, but soon enough we realize that we're halfway through a 400 page would-be epic and nothing much has happened!

Stein's science advisor is a Malthusian creep with a roster of self serving double talk as to why we should let the big one smash into Central Asia, knocking out the USSR and China and launching a new ice age that will kill billions worldwide. There's some unsatisfactory '70s style cloak and dagger action over exposing this evil plan, but like everything in the story it reads as a pale shadow of other, better writing. There's not much from the POV of the rocks either, which is usually my favorite part of space rock disaster thrillers. 

Again and again, Fodor and Taylor drag us through pages and pages of establishing characters only to drop them for the next batch, without building on anything they're already written. The highlights are front loaded, with the complete destruction of small town Ardmore, KS due to a single relatively "small" meteor, and a charming detail about how the satellite surveillance nerds of the Intermilitary Data Center enjoy watching volcanic eruptions change the landscape. Unfortunately nothing really gels as the story unfolds, and the last 100 pages read like filler. By the time the apocalypse smashes down we don't really care, which is never a good sign when you've got the fate of the world in the balance.

The Sino-Soviet split makes for some attempted suspense, with those goddamn Chicoms playing the long game - what's a few hundred million deaths to those inscrutable Orientals anyways?

We get some perfunctory space action in the home stretch, and a ridiculously convenient reveal that saves our boring lead couple from vaporization. Yawn!

Fodor and Taylor's disaster slog earns a very sad 1/4 rating ... It's not as outright crap as Mayhew and Long's Fireball, but there just isn't enough to recommend here. Getcher space rocks off elsewhere.

Lesiure Books, 1979

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

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)