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The CriminOlly Plain Dealer #2

Weekly newsletter 8th September 2024

This has been an enjoyably varied reading week for me. Five books read and no two of them alike. I think I sometimes fall into patterns with my reading where I read a string of similar books. I suppose that’s one of the dangers of taking part in themed monthly reading events, and also of trying to keep on top of at least some of the latest crime and horror releases. Anyway, it’s been refreshing to have a week with so much variety, and I particularly enjoyed reading some poetry for a change. I always say I don’t like it, but then usually find that I do.

Cheerio!

Books I’ve read this weekNightmares and Geezenstacks by Fredric Brown

A deliriously inventive and enjoyable collection of short stories first published in the 1960s. When I say short, I mean short, some of them are less than a page. And yet Fredric Brown manages to pack something satisfying into every single one. An idea, a twist and often a chuckle or two. There’s a range of genres here – SF, crime, horror and a kind of bawdy shaggy dog story, and they’re all fun, even if sometimes the fun comes from being creeped out, or having your imagination stretched rather than from a belly laugh. Be warned though, not all the stories have dated well.

Jack Carter’s Law by Ted Lewis

Although written later, this is a prequel to the excellent ‘Jack’s Return Home’ (filmed as ‘Get Carter’). I have to admit, I much preferred the other book, which has a much more interesting and emotionally involving plot. ‘Jack Carter’s Law’ has Carter in London involved in gangland shenanigans. It’s definitely action-packed, but I found it hard to get too involved with the story.

The vibrant, under-represented northern setting of ‘Jack’s Return Home’ helps to make it, especially given Jack’s fish out of water status in his once familiar environment. By contrast, the London of ‘Jack Carter’s Law’ is so familiar from countless British gangster movies that it feels like a cliche.

That said, the prose is often great – a distinctly British style of hardboiled writing. I’ll definitely read more Lewis, but my second outing with him was not as enjoyable as the first.

Sherlock Holmes: Zombies Over London

Stephen Mertz’s Sherlock might not be the most faithful version of Conan-Doyle’s detective, he feels more like James Bond at times, but this is still a wonderfully enjoyable adventure. It’s fast-paced, funny and inventive. What it lacks in logical deduction it makes up for in sheer entertainment value. It has zombies, airships, Einstein, great set piece action sequences and an enormous sense of fun. Mertz has been writing this kind of thing for decades and it shows, he never puts a foot wrong and turns in a book that will leave you grinning ear to ear.

Headhunters by Luis Paredes

‘Headhunters’ has a lot going for it. It’s inventive, fun, funny and moving. The book has a great found family unit at its heart, and they’re a delight to read. With hero Edgar, the ghost of his grandfather and his best friend and her aunt up against a bunch of demons. The fact that the demons have a family dynamic of their own also makes things fun. There’s action, magic and thrills throughout and the characters (human and demon) really shine.
The challenge I had with the book is that it’s not really my kind of thing. At its heart it’s a well crafted dark fantasy tale that would suit a young audience well. As an older reader I found a lot to enjoy here, but didn’t really connect with the book as much as I’d have liked to.
So maybe not a perfect choice for me, but if you’re a dark fantasy fan you may well love it.

Permanent Verb by Gareth Howells

I don’t feel like I’m critically equipped to assess poetry, so this review will be brief. Not every poem in this collection worked for me as a reader, but when they did, they really did. I suspect that’s always the case with poetry collections, especially with ones where some of the work is clearly very personal. The result was a collections that I loved at times and liked at others.

This week’s videos

The CriminOlly Plain Dealer #1

Weekly newsletter 8th September 2024

I’ve spent most of this week in bed with a virus that has knackered my asthma and left me not able to do much at all. Other than read, because I can always do that.

I’ve found myself drawn to shorter fiction, something I’ve neglected recently, and it’s been an enjoyable return. Short stories can be enormously satisfying when they’re done well, and the vast majority I read this week were. The constraints of the format make authors think about their words in a way I’m not sure they always do with novels.

The time resting has also given me a lot of time to think about this whole blogging/reviewing/YouTube thing. It’s helped crystalise my thoughts about how I want to approach it in the future and also made me reflect on the things I was missing. One of those was definitely writing, and so this newsletter was born.

It’s intended to be a summary of what’s been going on in my reading and on the channel, a written accompaniment/alternative to my Weekly Wrap Up videos on YouTube.

Do let me know in the comments if you think it works, or if there is anything else you’d like to see in it.

Cheerio!

Books I’ve read this weekSix Bullets to a Man by Jethro Wegener

‘Six Bullets to a Man’ (great title!) is a riveting 70s set Southern thriller with hero Duke Gibbs going up against racist bad guys in Mississippi. Imagine a blaxploitation version of The Executioner and you wouldn’t be far off the mark. It’s gritty, action-packed, very tense at times, has a decent sense of place and some great supporting characters. Plus lots of racists getting their arses kicked. The plot is a bit more complex than it appears at first and when it borrows tropes from the wider genre it does it in a really satisfying way. Recommended if you like tight action thrillers.

I’m Starting to Worry About This Black Box of Doom by Jason Pargin

I enjoyed this a great deal. It’s fun, funny, smart and very readable. Pargin manages to pull off the trick of taking a dumb (but very enjoyable) caper story and using it to reflect on the modern social media age in a really interesting way. There are a bunch of different threads that get juggled very effectively and come together at the end to make an enormously satisfying conclusion. All in all, a success.

Cruel Nature by DB Albiza

This is a very entertaining and beautifully presented horror short story collection for younger readers written by a school teacher who wanted to engage her students with a book that was fun and creepy.
Reader, she succeeded!
The tales are efficiently told and effective, with some good concepts and an engaging, simple prose style. Don’t let the middle grade label fool you, there’s some creepy stuff in here! DB Albiza definitely has a talent for horror and the illustrations by Elizabeth Quinonez are fantastic.
Recommended, especially if you have younger horror fans in your life, or just fancy a bit of nostalgia for your own formative years as a horror reader.

Dread by Kevin Bachar

‘Dread’ is an enjoyable volume of horror stories, all of them short (some very short) and punchy. There’s decent variety here (ghosts, cryptids, killer animals, to name but a few) and a really impressive building tension in each story. I kept on going to put it down and then finding myself reading just one more story. A great one to have on your phone or erreader for coffee break reads, just don’t blame me if you don’t get back to work on time.

Red Moon by Kerry Richardson

An enjoyable collection of short horror stories that I flew through. There are some interesting ideas here and a load of variety, with the stories ranging from Lovecraftian to supernatural revenge to creepy demons. The prose can be a little overly embellished at times, but the stories have energy and are clearly written by someone who loves the genre.

Death is Funny Sometimes by MC August

A pleasingly varied and very satisfying short story collection. Broadly speaking it’s horror, but there is some crime and sci fi in here too. There’s a definite movie theme to a number of the stories (one is about a middle aged giallo actress, another concerns snuff movies) and what struck me as the author’s greatest strength was the characters’ dialogue, which really is pretty great.
As the title suggests, there is a string vein of black humour running through it all, which helps make the goings on seem not too horrible, even when they are pretty horrible.
All in all a very enjoyable set of shorts to sit down with. I particularly enjoyed the descriptively titled ‘Dead Kid at a Sleepover’.

Rest Stop by Nat Cassidy

‘Rest Stop’ is a gloriously tight piece of suspense/horror fiction that manages to cram more into it’s 160 pages than many far longer books do. After a brief lead in, it grabs hold and absolutely refuses to let you go. The claustrophic “guy trapped in a small space and weird stuff starts happening” style story is almost unbearably tense, with a wonderfully mysterious and memorable villain. 
What’s most impressive is that, as with his excellent novel ‘Mary’, Nat Cassidy manages to include so much interesting and reflective character detail. The main character is complex and there’s as much interest to be had in learning more about him as there is learning what happens to him. 
The cherry on top is a really great epilogue. Oh, and the fact that the formatting of the book is amazing. Multiple cherries.
I now count myself as someone who will read anything Nat Cassidy puts out from this point on.

This week’s videos

The CriminOlly Plain Dealer #0

If you’re seeing this, hello! Also, apologies for the complete radio silence on WordPress since the end of 2022! The unexpected growth of my YouTube channel diverted my attention away.

It’s been rewarding, and I’m still loving making videos, but I’ve lately come to realise that I miss the written word (as in me writing it rather than reading it). Where I used to write reviews and blog posts, I now just talk to my phone instead. Don’t get me wrong, I love talking to my phone (and of course all the people who see my content thereafter), but it felt like the right time to start getting some of my thoughts down as text as well.

So I’m going to try and wake this place up again in the form of a weekly newsletter (probably each weekend) which will contain:

A bit of a ramble.Short reviews of any books I’ve finished that week.Details of the long-form videos I’ve posted on YouTube that week.

I’ll also be posting it on Substack (in order to be down with the kids), so feel free to follow me there if you prefer it to WP https://substack.com/@criminolly

I thought it was also worth throwing in my Linktree, which has links to everywhere you can find me online https://linktr.ee/criminolly

Cheerio!

Drood by Dan Simmons #BookReview

CriminOlly thinks: A wonderfully rich and absorbing mix of supernatural mystery and biography. 5/5

Reviews

Drood is an absolutely fascinating book and a very ambitious one. Like Simmons’ The Terror it’s a vast period novel, that takes historical characters and blends in heavy doses of weirdness and pulpy adventure. At almost 800 pages it’s very long, but Simmons’ writing is skilful and it never drags or feels dull.

The book is narrated by author Wilkie Collins and largely revolves around his friendship/rivalry with Charles Dickens. Woven into all of this is the titular Drood, a mysterious figure who Dickens first meets at the site of a train crash and to whom he later introduces Collins. Drood reads like the villain from a Penny Dreadful – suspiciously foreign, devious and supported by an army of minions doing his bidding. He doesn’t get much screen time, but his presence infuses every page of the book, as Collins tries to work out who or what he is.

The book is filled with a huge amount of detail about the lives of Collins and Dickens, but somehow that never gets in the way of the central narrative. The mystery of Drodd keeps pulling the reader along. As with The Terror, the sense of place is spectacularly well done. Victorian London leaps from the page, and Simmons’s throws in graveyards and sewers as well as more respectable locations. It’s clearly a meticulously researched book and Simmons’ familiarity with his subjects makes for a book that is genuinely interesting as well as very entertaining.

Perhaps most notably of all, Collins is a brilliant narrator. His self-delusion is fascinating and lends a fantastic air to everything. It’s hard to know what is real and what isn’t and as the book progresses that sense grows. It really makes for a compelling and richly enjoyable read and one that I’ve kept mulling over after finishing it.

Video ReviewBook Details

Title: Drood | Author: Dan Simmons | Publisher: Quercus | Pages: 775 | Publication date: 1st February 2009 | ISBN: 9781847249326 | Source: Gift

Synopsis

Sealed for one hundred and twenty-five years, Wilkie Collins’s scribbled words launch a feverish descent into the underbelly of Victorian London as he is dragged into Charles Dickens’s pursuit of a spectral figure known only as Drood.

Warnings

Content Warnings: Racism, drug addiction

Tender is the Flesh by Augustina Bazterrica #BookReview

CriminOlly thinks: Fascinating and intelligent dystopian horror. 4/5

Reviews

Tender is the Flesh is a fascinating piece of dystopian science fiction that takes an extreme scenario and runs with it. In this case the event that creates the world of the book is a virus that infects animals and makes their meat deadly to humans. Humankind’s reaction to this is to start rearing people as livestock.

The books centres on Marcos, a man who works at a senior level in the meat processing industry. The plot follows his growing disquiet with the work he is involved in and through the story the full details of the tiered structure of the new society are revealed.

My one reservation about the book was a nagging feeling that the central concept was too fantastically horrifying to be credible. Given the deep instinctive taboo around cannibalism and the fact that plant-based meat substitutes have come so far, I’m not sure the book is all that convincing. That said, Augustina Bazterrica does a great job of making it as believable as it could possibly be. Every detail has been thought through and the word building is excellent. The scientific, cultural and culinary impacts are all considered and described, but never in a way that feels too laboured, or which impedes the story. At times that detail is horrific, but the book rarely dwells on it. In fact there is a slight sense of detachment throughout that I found separated me from the victims of the horrors being described. Only at the very end is that barrier shattered.

Really, this is a book about our ability to dehumanise other people when it suits us. It delves into a subject that is central to our existences and does so in a way that never feels preachy. Yes, the premise of Tender is the Flesh did feel somewhat incredible, but this kind of systematic barbarism for the sake of convenience happens every day on an industrial scale.

Video ReviewBook Details

Title: Tender is the Flesh | Author: Augustina Bazterrica | Publisher: Pushkin Press | Pages: 219 | Publication date: 5th November 2020 | ISBN: 9781782276203 | Source: Gift

Synopsis

Working at the local processing plant, Marcos is in the business of slaughtering humans —though no one calls them that anymore.

His wife has left him, his father is sinking into dementia, and Marcos tries not to think too hard about how he makes a living. After all, it happened so quickly. First, it was reported that an infectious virus has made all animal meat poisonous to humans. Then governments initiated the “Transition.” Now, eating human meat—“special meat”—is legal. Marcos tries to stick to numbers, consignments, processing.

Then one day he’s given a gift: a live specimen of the finest quality. Though he’s aware that any form of personal contact is forbidden on pain of death, little by little he starts to treat her like a human being. And soon, he becomes tortured by what has been lost—and what might still be saved.

Warnings

Content Warnings: Sexual abuse, cannibalism, mutilation

Death Note by Tsugumi Ohba & Takeshi Obata #BookReview

CriminOlly thinks: 2400 page manga epic is an entertainingly twisty ride. 4/5

Reviews

Death Note is a fascinating and fun, but also flawed, manga series that blends dark fantasy and detective fiction into a compelling tale with an enjoyably pulpy feel. At 2400 pages it’s a beast of a book, but one that managed to hold my interest.

The set-up is entertainingly bizarre. Outside of the human world, another exists. It’s populated by Shinigami (death gods) who can travel to our world and kill humans by writing their names in notebooks they carry. The story follows Light Yagami, a young man who discovers one of the notebooks and forms a partnership with Shinigami. Light starts using the book to kill criminals in an attempt to create a better world.

Writer Tsugumi Ohba and artist Takeshi Obata take that concept and run with it. Light ends up pitted against a similarly youthful genius detective (the mysterious L) who is working with the police to catch him. Those police include Light’s father, which mixes a bit of family melodrama into an already rich and colourful story.

The manga was originally published in the popular Japanese magazine Weekly Shonen Jump over a 3 year period, and it has the episodic feel you’d expect from a serial work. I imagine the experience of reading it in its original form was not dissimilar to devouring a Victorian penny dreadful. There’s definitely some padding, with the middle section dragging a bit, but for the most part this is a very enjoyable and energetic read. The plot twists frequently and there’s real pleasure to be had from watching the opposing forces try to outwit each other. The fact that the main characters are young gives is a very YA feel and it would be fair to say it doesn’t dig as deeply into the moral dilemma Light faces as it might have, but that kind of introspection might have ruined the fun.

My favourite parts were the detailed explanations Light and L give of their reasoning, which read a bit like Poirot summing up at the end of a Christie mystery. Less enjoyable was the incredibly annoying and weak-willed female character who becomes Light’s girlfriend, but she and the padding are the only weak points in an otherwise very strong offering.

Video ReviewBook Details

Title: Death Note | Author: Tsugumi Ohba & Takeshi Obata| Publisher: VIZ Media LLC | Pages: 2400 | Publication date: 5th September 2017 | ISBN: 9781421597713 | Source: Purchased

Synopsis

All 12 volumes of Death Note in one monstrously large edition!

This hefty omnibus combines all 2,400 pages of the megahit thriller into a single massive tome, presented in a beautiful silver slipcase. A perfect collectible conversation piece and a must-have for Death Note fans. Also contains an epilogue chapter never before seen in English!

Light Yagami is an ace student with great prospects—and he’s bored out of his mind. But all that changes when he finds the Death Note, a notebook dropped by a rogue Shinigami death god. Any human whose name is written in the notebook dies, and now Light has vowed to use the power of the Death Note to rid the world of evil. But when criminals begin dropping dead, the authorities send the legendary detective L to track down the killer. With L hot on his heels, will Light lose sight of his noble goal…or his life?

Warnings

Content Warnings: None

Carry on Screaming: The Fog by James Herbert (1975)

CriminOlly thinks: Horrifically effective set pieces and a chilling central concept overcome a weak plot 4/5

Reviews

The year after ‘The Rats’ smashed its way onto the horror scene, James Herbert published his second book. His debut must have been a tough act to follow, but somehow he manages to up the shock factor with ‘The Fog’. I first read it as a teenager back in the 80s, but long before that I’d been gleefully relayed the details of some of the more horrific scenes by school friends with older brothers who had read it. Interestingly, there is one sequence I vividly remember having described to me that isn’t in the book at all. A fact that probably says a lot about the fevered imaginations of adolescent boys. 

The premise of ‘The Fog’ is as simple and immediately attention grabbing as that of ‘The Rats’. There are no furry critters this time, just a weird fog drifting around England which sends anyone who breathes it in violently insane. Like ‘The Rats’ it has a plot that isn’t a million miles away from the disaster movies that were popular in the 70s; but again Herbert ramps the horror up to eleven and produces something which has some lastingly disturbing moments. 

The violence in ‘The Fog’ is as graphic as that in ‘The Rats’ but even more shocking because for the most part it is humans delivering it. Herbert mixes utterly random acts of carnage (a bus driver ploughing his vehicle through passengers waiting at a bus stop), with more personal ones (a man decapitating his wife and carrying her severed head around). Most shocking of all is the fact that children are not immune to the fog’s effects. A memorable early scene has a group of school boys attacking their teachers and each other in a bloody, sexual frenzy. In a nod to his first book, Herbert also throws in killer pigeons and cats who turn on their owners.  

Indeed, whilst these are differences from ‘The Rats’, there are more similarities. The structure of the two books is identical with a slowly evolving linear plot interspersed with horrific vignettes. These are typically centered around characters who appear simply to be killed, but like in ‘The Rats’, Herbert gives them convincing and fairly detailed back stories before bloodily executing them. Once again, the hero (in this case, Department of the  Environment inspector John Holman) is an everyman character who gets wrapped up in the events by chance at the start of the book, and continues his involvement because he’s that kind of guy. Just like in ‘The Rats’, the hero ends up working with government scientists and the military to defeat the menace. In this case with the twist that his early exposure to the fog has left him immune to it. 

The fog itself is a bit weird, a big block of glowing mist that slowly floats around the countryside claiming victims. Whilst the havoc it causes is chillingly gruesome, the actual fog is almost ridiculously unthreatening and it is only really the inability of the authorities to deal with it that causes problems. What problems they are though! The most horrific scenes are generally the smaller scale one, but the disaster claims literally thousands of victims in mass suicides. 

Disappointingly, there is less of a political edge to ‘The Fog’. Whereas the focus on deprived areas of London in ‘The Rats’ allowed some social commentary from Herbert, the broader setting here (effectively the whole of the south of England) seems to stifle that urge in him. There is a sub-plot about the origins of the fog that could have been developed further, but it feels like something of an afterthought really. 

Fortunately, any such issues are forgotten in the gripping final act, which sees Holman battling through a devastated London. It’s an effective and memorable climax to a book that is just as compelling as Herbert’s first.

Video review

Title: The Fog | Author: James Herbert | Publisher: New English Library | Pages: 267 | Publication date: 1975 | ISBN: 9780450042782 | Source: Purchased

Synopsis

It begins with a crack that rips the earth apart. Peaceful village life shattered. But the disaster is just the beginning. Out of the bottomless pit creeps a malevolent fog. Spreading through the air it leaves a deadly, horrifying trail, destined to devastate the lives of all those it encounters…

What else happened in 1975

1975 saw a continuation of current affairs themes from earlier years in the decade with high unemployment and multiple IRA bombings in England. The Labour party conference voted against continued membership of the EEC, and the relationship with Europe is still something the party is struggling with today, as their confused, cautious Brexit policy evidences. Meanwhile, on the other side of the House of Commons, Margaret Thatcher was elected leader of the Tory party. It would be another 4 years before she became Prime Minister.

1975 was a pretty unspectacular year for horror, the 3 most notable movie releases being David Cronenberg’s ‘Shivers’, ‘Jaws’ and ‘The Rocky Horror Picture Show’. One might argue that the last 2 aren’t horror films at all. 

Horror literature fared slightly better, with ‘’Salem’s Lot’ by Stephen King and ‘Audrey Rose’ by Frank De Felitta from the US and Graham Masterson’s first novel ‘The Manitou’ in the UK.    

Warnings

Content Warnings: suicide, rape, homophobia

Sick Bastards by Matt Shaw #BookReview

CriminOlly thinks: Extreme horror which fails to shock or horrify. 2/5

Reviews

Every so often I try another extreme horror book and once again don’t enjoy it. Sick Bastards is the second of Matt Shaw’s books I’ve read, and I liked it even less than the first (Octopus). It’s not just Shaw either, I’ve tried other popular extreme horror writers like Jon Athan and Aron Beauregard and come away similarly unimpressed. My issue with the books is not so much the extreme nature of the sex and violence the books contain, but everything else that surrounds it. Explicit content can be enormously effective when you care about the characters, if you don’t it quickly becomes a slog to read.

Sick Bastards is about a family (mother, father, adult son and daughter) who live together in a small house. Some kind of terrible (probably nuclear) event has taken place and society has crumbled. The family keep themselves entertained by having sex with each other and fed by killing and eating other people. The book opens with a very explicit scene of sibling incest that is interrupted by the call from mum to come downstairs for a cannibalistic feast. That lack of any build up whatsoever is one of the problems with the book. There is no gradual ramping up of tension, just a headfirst dive into content intended to shock.

And it is shocking at first, purely because of the nature of what is being described. But any sense of outrage or transgression drains away almost immediately, because the reader has no connection with the characters at all. In fact, far from being appalling or grimly titillating it quickly becomes plain boring.

This is a book that carries a warning on its cover (“Warning this is an extreme horror novel. It is not intended for those who are easily shocked or offended”) which it completely fails to live up to. Let’s also consider the fact that the author chose to sensor the pretty mild swear word included in the title. It makes what should be alarming feel incredibly safe. Which is the book all over really.

Video ReviewBook Details

Title: Sick Bastards | Author: Matt Shaw | Publisher: Self-published | Pages: 238 | Publication date: 18th January 2018 | ASIN: B00HY129FC | Source: Purchased

Synopsis

WARNING: THIS IS AN EXTREME HORROR NOVEL. There is gore. There is bad language. There are scenes of a sexual nature. But hidden underneath it all is also a chilling story. Please do not purchase this book if you are easily shocked, disgusted or offended. This book is not for you.

A family will do anything to survive after a nuclear attack has left their world in ruins. Actions which even surprise them…

Warnings

Content Warnings: incest, cannibalism

Cows by Matthew Stokoe #BookReview

CriminOlly thinks: Not disturbing, just foul 2/5

Reviews

Cows is perhaps the least disturbing “disturbing book” I’ve read. It’s reputation for being off the charts in its extremity precedes it but is, in my opinion anyway, undeserved. It’s certainly disgusting and on a couple of occasions horrifying, but it’s also far too ridiculous to be disturbing.

The book follows a young man, Steven, who lives with his abusive mother and crippled dog. Steven’s existence is pretty grim, but things start to look up when he starts working at a local slaughterhouse. There he gets to know his deranged co-workers, as well as some of the livestock.

I’ve seen the book compared to Iain Banks’ The Wasp Factory and there are some similarities. The awkward young protagonist, the bizarre goings on, the abusive parent figure. But where The Wasp Factory was a masterpiece of macabre and grotesque invention, Cows feels like the kind of thing a schoolboy would scribble in the margins of his exercise book in an attempt to shock his peers. There are two scenes that have some kind of impact. One involves the literal eating of shit, and came close to making me puke. The other is a horrifying act of self-mutilation. Apart from that, Cows really didn’t impress me in any way.

The writing is poor and the plot is so ludicrous that it’s hard to read. There’s a nasty edge of misogyny to it all as well, and the terrifying sense that the author feels there is some kind of deeper message to the book. If there is, it’s buried behind so many layers of crap that it’s completely invisible.

Ultimately, Cows is a book that completely falls apart under the weight of its own pretension and its desperate need to be shocking. It’s not enjoyable to read. It’s not interesting and it’s certainly not disturbing.

Video ReviewBook Details

Title: Cows | Author: Matthew Stokoe | Publisher: Self-published | Pages: 215 | Publication date: 31st October 2015 | ISBN: 9780987453662 | Source: Purchased

Synopsis

One of the most outrageous, original and insightful books ever written on the subject of alienation and societal decay, Cows is a violent, blood soaked nightmare – a scatological tale of love, self-empowerment and probably the most extreme novel you’ll ever read. Hailed around the world as a cult classic, Matthew Stokoe’s novel set the bar for gritty urban horror.

Mother’s corpse in pieces, dead dog on the roof, girlfriend in a coma, baby nailed to the wall, and a hundred tons of homicidal beef stampeding through the subway system. And Steven thought the slaughterhouse was bad . . .

Warnings

Content Warnings: self harm, bestiality, animal cruelty, incest, child abuse

The Cats by Berton Roueché #BookReview

CriminOlly thinks: Killer animals have rarely been this dull 2/5

Reviews

Feral by Berton Roueché is book that feels like it was published in the wrong decade. Released in 1974 it went up against James Herbert’s The Rats and Stephen King’s Carrie, two books that redefined the horror genre and set the tone for years to come. Whereas King and Herbert were angry young men with a desire to shake things up, Roueché was in his 60s and Feral looks back (to Du Maurier’s The Birds) rather than forward.

The plot is straightforward and unfold slooooowwwwllllly. The narrator and his family travel from the city to their holiday home on Long Island. There they find a stray kitten which they adopt and then abandon when they leave at the end of the summer. When they next visit a pack of feral cats has established itself in the local woods and is starting to attack local wildlife.

What the book has going for it is a sense of credibility. Until the end at least it all kind of makes sense. Some city folk probably do adopt and then dump cats at their holiday homes. Those cats probably do turn feral. Whether they ever do it on the scale seen in this book is questionable, but certainly many areas that rely on the seasonal holiday trade do struggle with stray animals.

There are really two problems with the book. Firstly, in striving for realism, Roueché turns in a book which is frankly kind of dull. The events do ramp up as the story unfolds, but there’s a definite lack of tension, drama and gore. Secondly, cats (even en masse) really aren’t that scary. Part of the reason Herbert’s The Rats works as well as it does, is because humans are instinctively wary of and disgusted by rats. The exact opposite is true of felines.

That combination is fatal for a book that claims to be a work of horror and as a result Feral is a tame and thoroughly missable entry in the killer animal sub genre.

Video ReviewBook Details

Title: Feral (aka The Cats) | Author: Berton Roueché | Publisher: Pocket Books | Pages: 126 | Publication date: 1st October 1974 | ISBN: 9780671801526 | Source: Purchased

Synopsis

This splendidly horrific yarn opens with a couple returning to New York after a holiday on Long Island, during which they had acquired a kitten. They cannot keep the kitten in the city and so dump it, hoping it will find a new home. Berton Roueché has always based his stories on fact–and it is not difficult to imagine that the prevalent practice of dumping unwanted domestic pets in rural areas could lead to the gripping and sinister situation that is the thrust of this compulsive story.

For the cats have developed into a rapacious community of their own, and begin to plague this couple when they return to the Long Island village of Amagansett. At first the cats just seem to prowl. Then they begin attacking – rats, birds. Soon large game – deer, dogs – begin to feel their madness. Then they become cannibals, killing and eating each other. In the shattering climax to this novel there is only one animal left to feel their wrath – man himself.

Warnings

Content Warnings: Animal cruelty