This
was a total accident but it turned into an interesting exercise. I got off the
train at Katoomba and went straight into the Katoomba Book Exchange to see if
there was anything that seemed interesting. I picked up a book entitled Ghoul that seemed good, but, seeing as I
had no cash on me and I needed a coffee, I put it back until after I had been
to the ATM and had had a caffeine injection. These essential tasks completed, I
hoiked the book off the shelf and marched to the register only to discover that
the cover had changed completely: rather than displaying the sinister,
emaciated figure emerging from a brick-lined pit that we all recall as a colour
plate from the 4th hardback edition of the Call of Cthulhu rule book, this wrapper was black with a dinky
hologram image of a skull. What the...?
I
went back to the shelves and discovered that, when I had tucked the first book
away where I thought no-one would get to it in my absence, I had put it right
alongside another paperback with the exact same title. It seemed churlish of me
to not acknowledge such serendipity, so I bought both volumes and determined to
do a ‘compare and contrast’ exercise on both titles. My results are as follows:
*****
RONSON, Mark, 1980, Ghoul, Hamlyn Paperbacks / The Hamlyn
Publishing Group Ltd., Feltham, Middlesex, UK.
Octavo; illustrated
wrappers with metallic green titling on the top panel; 202pp. plus 5pp. of
adverts. Slightly rolled; spine cracked; a crease to the outer edge of the top
panel; some wear along the spine; pages lightly embrowned. Else, good.
I
had qualms the moment I discovered that one of the lead characters in this tale
was named ‘Max; Max Sword’. The immediate future of my reading experience did
not seem all that bright. However, I was to be pleasantly surprised.
The
plot of this story was a multi-stranded narrative twining about tensions in the
Middle East, the discovery of a lost ancient burial site and a wandering bunch
of drugged-out hippies following their Charles Manson-like messianic leader.
The lynch-pin connecting all of these disparate threads is an ancient creature
of Arabic legend: an eater of the dead; a ghoul.
The
setting for the tale is mostly in the fictional Arabic Kingdom of Abu Sabbah
overseen by the enlightened King Hamid. To begin with I felt that the device of
a made-up country was bit twee, but it never seemed to bother Hergé, so I just
rolled with it. Abu Sabbah, we are told, lies on an old Crusader supply line,
and sports an impregnable fortress at the head of a stark valley known for its
moaning dust storms and called the “Valley of the Djinn”. Deep in this
portentous vale a recent earthquake has revealed ancient stonework – the
resting place of an Egyptian High-priest, who was interred there while exiled
from his home country. Meanwhile, King Hamid’s jealous and fundamentalist uncle
Malik has begun fomenting discord, and rumours of an imminent coup abound.
Into
this setting a burgeoning cast of characters descend to begin their adventure.
Max Sword, elderly novelist and penner of Wilbur Smith-like doorstop thrillers,
flies into Abu Sabbah to meet up with his daughter Julia, an archaeologist and
discoverer of the lost tomb; her dig has been sanctioned by the handsome King
Hamid who harbours strong affections for her and who hopes that the find will
promote much-needed tourism for his frustratingly oil-free desert patch. On the
same flight into the tiny country is ruggedly good-looking Adam McAndrew, a
film-maker and ex-adman down on his luck and hoping against all hope that Julia
Sword will allow him to film the opening of the tomb.
Meanwhile,
Mossad agent Moshe Leore, having just foiled an attempt on his life by
drug-crazed assassins of a peculiarly determined cast outside the Garden of
Gethsemane, has followed an untrustworthy Arab contact into Abu Sabbah, in
order to learn more about the training grounds of these attackers. He poses as
an American salesman selling air-conditioning and meets up with his informant,
a paedophilic Greek named Xenopoulos. This unsavoury fellow directs Moshe to a
meeting with the untrustworthy Arab woman who seemingly led him into the ambush
in Jerusalem, at a run-down whorehouse in the Abu Sabbah capital.
With
all our major players ready to move, the action starts when the newly-awakened
ghoul emerges from the caverns below the Valley of the Djinn and attacks and
mostly devours one of the hippies who have taken up residence there, following
their charismatic leader Sonny in search of “The Experience”.
I
wasn’t sure how this amalgam was going to resolve itself: There seemed at first
just a little bit too much going on. As far as the romance was concerned, I had
all of the lovers pretty much pegged by Chapter Three, although I couldn’t help
thinking that the winsome Julia ought to have better taste. As far as the
deaths go too, I pretty much had everyone’s come-uppance sussed, although it’s
all credit to the writer that I thought the survivors only missed checking-out
by a hair’s breadth.
I
was pleased that there was a fair deal of research that found its way into the
narrative: a well-known and thinly-disguised tale from the Arabian Nights is re-told by way of explanation about the ghoul and
its depraved habits and a fair whack of Crusader history – specifically the Old
Man of the Mountain legend – is updated for a Palestine vs. Israel era
conflict. The varying strands of the story thus found their way deftly to a
point of resolution.
That
being said, the sub-plot featuring Moshe and the drug-crazed assassins, seemed
excess to requirements: while interesting, it was purely tangential to the
machinations of the ghoul and could have been dropped without affecting the
horror story. Unfortunate, because Moshe is one of the most well-rounded and
interesting characters in the book; unlike the gormless and whimpering Adam who
couldn’t even get off the ‘plane after Chapter Two without getting sunburnt.
The
end of the book is problematic: there is a climax and all players win free from
certain death and danger, but we are left being told that key characters are
determinedly and unknowingly heading back into terrible danger. I’m not sure if
this was a set-up for a sequel or not, but it seemed an ill-conceived way of
ending.
All-in-all,
I was happy with my purchase: the story was entertaining; I enjoyed reading it;
there was obviously a lot of research that was put to good use; there were some
sex-scenes (of which I’m normally not a fan, because they’re usually so poorly
executed) but these were non-gratuitous and tastefully handled. I didn’t feel
I’d wasted either time or money (unlike the next encounter).
I
give this three-and-a-half tentacled horrors.
SLADE, Michael / Black
River Inc., 1988, Ghoul, W.H. Allen
& Co., London
Octavo; illustrated
wrappers with a holographic decoration on the upper panel; 415pp. plus 1p. Of
adverts. Slightly rolled; pp. 245-6 detached; shelfwear with a crease to the
upper panel; text block and page edges lightly embrowned. Good.
Michael
Slade (if that’s even his name) is obviously a believer in the maxim that “more
is more”. If I had thought that in my previous read the author had tried to
bite off more than he could choke down, I was due to be very surprised indeed.
Slade’s
thesis with this novel is that horror fiction - be it books, movies, or whatever
- are a cathartic means for us to confront our inner demons and are therefore
harmless and on the whole helpful for releasing pent-up emotions. So far, so
ho-hum. We wade through a bunch of talking heads scenes where this
pop-psychology is hammered home, along with definitions of schizophrenia and
the difference between a psychotic and a psychopath. Finally, one of the
characters (I forget which one because they’re all interchangeable and unremarkable)
posits the theory “what happens when someone with one of these disorders no
longer perceives the unreality of a horror fiction and accepts it as reality?”
Now we’re off and running.
Sadly,
Mr Slade starts overreaching himself. It transpires that, rather than showing
us a schizophrenic killer with such blurred definitions, he shows us a schizo,
a psychotic and a psychopath all in
the grip of such a distorted worldview, and, to top it off, he even throws in a
copycat killer aspiring to emulate the others. Too much; way too much.
On
top of this, the action jumps frenetically from London to Vancouver to
Providence, RI., and involves several flashbacks to previous evenings,
foundation events in 1971, the present in various locales...very choppy. Then
there are the “characters”.
Given
that there are three serial killers (four, if you count the wannabe copycat)
and that the writer is trying to hold off the big reveal in this regard for as
long as possible, I rapidly started to pigeon-hole them all together under the generic
heading ‘Bad Guy’ in my mind. I didn’t care if this was the “Sewer Killer”, or
the “Vampire Killer”, or “Jack the Bomber” – ‘bad man do bad stuff’, was how I was
reading it. This is because Slade withholds feeding us details of appearance or
internal musing because he doesn’t want us to guess his big surprise. Working
against him in this regard is the fact that I don’t care and the less time I
spend with these icky perpetrators the better I like it. There are scenes where
the baddie is doing something particular – “Jack Ohm” for example has a weird
perception of the world, as if he’s locked inside a panic room, to reflect his
schizophrenia – but it’s often just confusing and distracting rather than
offering any real insights. Then there’re the white hats.
Again
‘more’ seems to equate with ‘better’ in Slade’s view; to my way of thinking it
just comes out as ‘more’ and that leads to ‘confusing’. In London, we have
Hilary Rand head of the Murder Squad at Scotland Yard and trying to track any
one of the three killers which the Met have identified; almost three years of
no clear results have led to her imminent removal in order to let someone else (ie.,
a man) have a go and whining about how unfair this is becomes her default
position. Initially, we meet forensic psychologist Dr. Braithwaite, who seems
to be a good pairing with Hilary: his Jamaican roots have led him through some
awful racist encounters in this 1980s Britain, and he is set up as simpatico with Hilary, embroiled in her
own sexist fight. Soon though, he becomes merely a signature at the bottom of several
insightful memos regarding the murderers and little else. Two other officers
are established as Hilary’s staunch attack-dogs, willing to go down fighting on
her behalf: the first gets auto-beheaded with the killer’s assistance and the
second is a proxy doppelganger of the novel’s main hero who, for inconvenient
matters of plot, is in North America for most of the book.
Zinc
Chandler, our hero, is rugged and mesomorphic, lantern-jawed, sunglassed and
buzz-cut. He reads like a Cyberpunk
character. He’s an officer with the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP), or
Mounties, which is a little hard to reconcile, along with his innate
sensitivity and love of kittens. In essence he’s a cardboard figure dressed up
with any qualities which the author feels are needed at the time. He also has a
cardboard moral compass with a needle pointing inevitably due North. En route to the last page he spurns a
bevy of alpha-females throwing their naked forms at his feet, to dote upon shy
and insecure Deborah Lane, a writer of romance novels who has the misfortune of
being related to the killer(s). So far, so
ho-hum.
Along
this tortured path there are many, many other bit parts, and they all get their
come-uppance or fade into the wallpaper as their usefulness waxes and wanes. Each
bad guy gets more (more!) than what he
deserves (and they deserve a lot) and things quickly become a passing parade of
gruesome, gratuitous deaths (and desecrations, and dismemberments, and
disposals of the evidence). In fact, it becomes evident that the serial killers
are all targeted against each other on a track to the last maniac standing - a
psycho-tontine, if you will – so it hardly behoves the reader to invest any
time with the good guys and their efforts. This is a plot on rails.
The
link with Providence, Rhode Island, isn’t a mere coincidence, either. One of
our killers is convinced that HPL’s Great Old Ones spoke to him during a
premature-burial rite of passage into a teenage band of hoodlums, and it
transpires that he implicitly believes that the Cthulhu Mythos is real. He
thinks that he is an Old One too, fated
to be the harbinger of the others, and destined to call them back to Earth from
their imprisonment. I kid you not. To this end, Zinc and Deborah discuss the
impact of HPL’s work, wander like tourists around the town and talk as if the Necronomicon actually existed. Look, I’m
all for people carving out their own piece of territory in the Mythos, but
surely we can all do it with some taste and grace? The Cthulhu Mythos as
psychotic delusion is fine, very clever, but a less gratuitous reading would
have served things much better I feel. There’s a bit where Deborah explains to
Zinc that Cthulhu is actually a symbol of HPL’s fear of sexual intimacy: I’m paraphrasing
because I don’t want to have to go back trawling for quotes, but her
description of the Big C is as a gigantically, obese monster with human female
genitalia where its face ought to be. Seriously? Beak and tentacles? My
speculations about Michael Slade began to be more disturbing than his messy
little book...
Despite
the fact that his characters are either hammer-ready wooden, or are ephemeral
wraiths that vanish rather than being pinned down, and that his plot is a train-ride
through a wallow of gory crapulence, there are some – some - things to take away from this book. In setting up the scene,
Mr Slade has done his homework: he deftly sketches the organisational structures
and jurisdictions of such entities as the London Metropolitan Police Force and
the RCMP; his description of the London sewer network and its security measures
is brisk and informative, as is his summation of the Albert Hall, where an
attack by “Jack the Bomber” is thwarted. Kudos for the information. Sadly,
whenever we get to this kind of scene-setting material, Slade’s writing becomes
workman-like and he has a distinct fondness of outlining things by means of
numbered lists: as a reader you’re suddenly jolted into text-book territory and
it kills the massive suspension of disbelief required to soldier onwards. Still,
if you’re after a fast-and-dirty overview of these organisations for, say, your
own gaming story, it’s not bad material to springboard off from.
All-in-all
though, I can’t recommend this book: it tries too hard to do too much and
wastes its time and the reader’s. It’s confusing and full of typecast players
who serve only to make the plot obvious and to diminish any really creative
aspects of the story-telling. It’s also a gory mud-pie session in the true
splatterpunk style of gratuitous excess that does little to entertain and heaps
to make the reader scan the author with a wary eye. The research alone earns
this work half a tentacled horror from me; everything else is to its detriment.
The
copy I have is plastered all over with enthusiastic quotes from Alice Cooper,
who is referenced often in the text, along with having his song lyrics
reproduced; I suspect that golf-aficionado
Cooper never actually read the thing and that his endorsement would have served
merely to boost his cut of the sales. So, don’t be fooled by the cover. People!
Take warning!
One-and-a-half
tentacled horrors.
*****
So,
there you have it: two books with the same name that are poles apart in quality
and execution. One thing I take away from Mark Ronson’s book is that
understatement is far more effective than the scattergun approach of sheer messiness
that Michael Slade espouses. Both books have interesting background research
which they deliver in quite different fashions: Ronson’s material is
effortlessly sunk deep into the grain of his narrative, while Slade periodically
stops his breathless headlong rush to provide a lecture, either – unbelievably -
from the mouth of one of his characters, or directly to the reader in bullet
points. Ronson’s piece reads like one of those novels you buy at an airport to
pass the flight, but with enough originality to raise it above the herd; Slade’s
oeuvre is pure splatterpunk nastiness
with little else to recommend it.
This
was fun! I wonder if there are any more books out there with identical titles
that I could do this with?
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