Phone Call

by Jon Messmann

DIAL "D" FOR DEATH

A fresh and innocent girl just of the farm answers the ringing phone in a New York subway station...

A harried corporate executive picks up the phone in his private office...

A voluptuous young woman pushes aside her lover for the night as she answers the phone at her bedside...

A brutish taxi driver takes a call in his rundown flat...

And instant death---as a lethal electric charge comes hurtling through the receiver.

Crusading consumer advocate Nate Bridger refuses to believe the chain of coincidences or the answers he is given. He pursues the facts behind the telephone company cover-up and police procedures to discover the awesome, blood-chilling truth. Impossible, they had told him. Impossible, you may tell yourself. But is it?

See what happens to your nerves WHEN THE PHONE RINGS...

Genres: Horror

214 pages, Mass Market Paperback

Published May 1, 1979

About the author

US author, a.k.a. John Joseph Messmann

Reviews

[Grady Hendrix · Rating 2 out of 5]

Jon Messmann is the pen name for Michael Butler & Dennis Shryack the screenwriters of the 1982 movie that was made out of this book, variously known as BELLS or MURDER BY PHONE.

On his own, Shryack would write the screenplay for TURNER & HOOCH, for which he received $1 million, the highest price paid for a screenplay up to that time.

I prefer TURNER & HOOCH.

[Bonita Martin · Rating 5 out of 5]

My husband and I read this before the advent of cell phones. This book was so good, if our phone rang and neither of us was expecting a call, neither of us would answer it!

[Mikepottz · Rating 4 out of 5]

An incessant public phone continued to ring in a flee-ridden, sewer smelling subway station. An innocent farm girl answers the public phone, a white flash, lasting a second, exploded from the phone, the women catapulted through the air, her body twisted laid crumpled. A pristine unattended white phone is picked up by an executive, the white flash emitted into his ear sending his body flying through a glass window and plummeting like a bomb crashing onto the pavement below. Manhattan moves on, nothing to see here. Yellow Adidas are twin spots of brightness in the night. A pissed off bike rider in beautiful yellow Adidas is going to force electricity through the phone lines, teaching people lessons on manners and corporates insensitive giants. A sophisticated complex electrical machine is his command post and he will feel the immense power he can inflict. A live telethon will feel the abhorrent atrocities as bodies are draped over chairs like dolls. Fear of the phone is real.

[David Cordero · Rating 3 out of 5]

Very entertaining thriller.

[Printable Tire]

Over the summer I went to a paranormal convention in Burrillville, Rhode Island and scored a free copy of this book, a novelization of a movie I've never heard of. The hero is a Ralph Nader environmentalist/consumer advocate type and the love interest works in the customer relations office of a phone company that is trying to put a lid on the fact a maniac has discovered a way to electrocute and murder people he doesn't like via the conduit of landline phones. In this book, having an answering machine could save your life! The story begins with some great late 70's urban sleaze:

The city, like a sleeping alley cat, had wakened, stretched, blinked in the new day. During the night, it had shaken some of the dirt from itself and now it was prepared for a new coat of grime. The morning sun touched the tops of the steel, glass, and stone mountains, but the sun was an alien thing to the city. The sun was for green and growing places, not for concrete pavements, and they lifted and buckled in resentment. Below the city's skin, where the sun never reached, its lifeblood of wires, pipes, conduits, cables and tunnels began to throb with the new day's activities.

And the phone continued to ring.

But eventually it devolves into an episode of Kojack, and it becomes unclear why our advocate hero is involved anymore in a case best suited for the police. There's also a lot of "grabbing soft shoulders" stuff so maybe the author got really horny.

This book took me weeks to finish, but it only took me 90 minutes to watch the equally forgettable/nice time capsule movie last night on youtube. "The Phone Call" aka "The Calling" aka "BELLS" aka "Murder by Phone" stars a bearded Richard Chamberlain and John Houseman as a bizarre composite character of a Jewish environmentalist and a socialite love interest from the novel.

It's a real case of insider baseball to note all the changes to this obscure movie from the script this obscure novelization was presumably based off of, but I guess it's worth noting the killer is much older, Houseman is much sleazier, the love interest is completely different, and there's NO telethon mass death scene! Missing that scene bummed me out, but the movie makes up for it by making some palpably gruesome death scenes and for showcasing some really interesting novelty phones, like that one that looked like a dildo that got entirely too much screen time.

"I'll never go out for a sandwich again without thinking of this horrible night."

[Thomas Sueyres · Rating 2 out of 5]

I love the movie, Bells / Murder by Phone, but the book it is based on is unfortunately just not well written. The plot and characters were kept in tact for the film, but the screenplay wisely makes changes to the cringe-inducing dialogue, situations and some character tweaks - for instance in the book, Nate is flat-out hostile and belligerent to everyone, while being completely irresistible to women. It also drops a climactic scene involving a telethon which at first I thought was a mistake, but after thinking about it, I think it would have probably looked a bit comical on the big screen. Worth reading if you are a fan of the film, or you have a high tolerance for very trite '70s ecological soapboxing and laughably overwrought romance.

[Paul Lê · Rating 3 out of 5]

A fast read. Difficult but magnetic protagonist. Slasher meets '70s paranoiac city thriller. The basis for the film Murder by Phone.

[Brian Barnett · Rating 2 out of 5]

The rating for this book would've been a lot higher if all the chapters read like the first one and the last two. All the story in between was rather boring. For such a short book, it sure took a long time to get through, especially for something that I would've taken as a pulp novel. Most pulps, as far as I'm concerned, should have you turning pages like a madman, but this one was the most yawn-inducing book I've read in a while.