WILD CARD by Raymond Hawkey and Roger Bingham

Here's a weird one: a parapolitics thriller starring an unnamed President, set in a delightfully gonzo 197X near future setting where urban guerrillas have gotten ahold of suitcase nukes and the traffic is still hell on earth! The Fortress of America is coming apart at the seams, so science adviser Nadelman proposes some necessary evil: a faked UFO invasion, complete with an alien infection! Only such an otherworldly threat could possibly save these disunited states. The President isn't quite sold, but one assassination attempt later he begrudgingly signs off, and Wild Card lets loose.

Once we're off, however, the story proves muddled and unfocused. I'm glad the authors avoided two fisted filler and potboiler beats, but most of the way through it feels like we're reading a short story that just happens to keep going. There's nothing wrong with their writing per se, but things never quite come together, and threads fail to develop fully before we move onto the next sequence. And for all the acknowledgments front and back dedicated to real life scientists about the techniques described within, not much of it seems to come out in the final product, save for a deadly reveal one of the characters overhears, and a sci-fi device that comes in at the end to put a little twist on things. The alien building is fun though, as the scientists in the story play around with science fiction tropes and attempt to create realistic fictional invaders.

To Hawkey and Bingham's credit, there is a crackerjack disaster sequence near the end, and the usual downbeat '70s ending with a little cynical twist. Those creative scientists are finely drawn, a midcentury mix of careerists, ex-Nazis, and idealistic babes in the woods, none of whom can fully understand the tenuous nature of their continued employment - or survival! The authors also handle the President and his cabinet well, leaving him nameless and letting the setting speak for itself as to political developments in the near future. There's a lovely sequence near the beginning where the President watches a news broadcast and pays special attention to the graphic design on the little screen behind the anchor - he sees the Statue of Liberty and the US dollar getting destroyed, graphically on screen just as they are not-so-metaphorically outside in the real world. Hawkey was a graphic designer in another life and can be credited with the modern look of the airport thriller!

From the MI6 HQ website

Wild Card's cover art from Ballantine Books is uninspired but gets the job done, and at least it's not as hackneyed as this Panther edition from 1976:

Ahhh, a skeleton!

Hawkey wrote two more thrillers in the same vein sans Bingham, and they make up the loose Presidential Trilogy:

Everything in this goofy ride is eminently plausible, from false flag UFOs (some may also remember Reagan's fixation on alien invaders as a conduit to world peace) to domestic biowarfare (more ably presented in other thrillers like The Nightmare Factor and The Black Death, and partially archived among other places under the Special Virus Cancer Program). It's just a shame that it doesn't congeal into a successful story. Wild Card tries to go all in but busts out with a mediocre 2/4 rating.

Ballantine Books, 1974

SUM VII by T.W. Hard

Callow med student Bryan St. John tags along on a grave robbing expedition to Egypt, where a secret tomb is uncovered and a miraculously preserved body is whisked back to San Francisco for some outrageously unethical attempts at revival. This is 1979, not 1879, by the way, and spoilers abound, so beware!

Sum VII is unique, like no mummy ever seen before. His brains haven't been sucked out through his nose, nor have his other organs been removed and stored in jars per the standard Egyptian mummification process. In fact, his body is totally intact, and perfectly preserved ... as if he's in a state of suspended animation ...

Well, of course he is! And we know what's gonna happen, they're gonna wake him up and mayhem will ensue! To his credit T.W. Hard puts us through these predictable paces with a modicum of grace. The medical scenes having just enough techno thriller panache to carry us through the outre concept, and once ol' Sum VII is up and about Hard works well at portraying a person lost in time, savagely thrust into a world he never wanted. There's some technobabble gobbledygook that allows a computer to translate snippets of his ancient speech, but thankfully again Hard plays it just smart enough that it feels natural - it's all too little, too late for our modern day bunglers anyways, who find themselves one step behind the canny survivor. He's armed with intelligence, endurance, and mind powers that speak of something otherworldly. His mission? Go back to bed! St. John and the rest of the blinkered scientists eventually see the truth of his quest and oblige him. Farewell, traveler, you were ten times as three dimensional as any of your pursuers!

Some other editions

Sum VII sounds like a suitably dynastic name but author Hard plays cute with us - it's actually his specimen designation, standing for State University Museum, specimen 7 out of 7. It's a nice final wrinkle in this story of culture shock and future shock. Author Hard only put out a couple more titles, at least under this name, but he's hardly the worst writer to tackle paranormal fiction. Too bad.

A message from the ages

For a cliched concept pulled off with acceptable ability, Sum VII earns two out of four ancient alien ankhs:

Ballantine Books, 1979

THE BLACK DEATH by Gwyneth Cravens and John S. Marr

Here shall we live

In this terrible town

Where the price for our eyes

Shall squeeze them tight like a fist

And who knows? Echoes in tenement halls ... but it's in a very high class high-rise that our horror begins, when a poor little rich girl returns from her western getaway feeling a little blue. And before you know it she's taken a turn for the worst, and winds up a Jane Doe on the morgue slab. And the chain of infection has already begun. Before it's all finished, it'll burn through Harlem, Uptown, 42nd Street, every rat-infested slum and every other glittering high-rise in the whole of NYC. It's THE BLACK DEATH, and it's gonna knock us back to the Dark Ages!

There's fear overhead, there's fear overground.

Lookit that cover! One nasty rat, ready to take on the Big Apple! Much better than the usual sterile test tubes and petri dishes and microscopes that festoon a lot of disease thrillers. And that's the kind of story we get inside - gritty, dirty, centered on the streets and the people. Cravens and Marr use some eloquent interiors of Yersinia pestis at war within its human hosts as contrast to the outer reality of medicine and science as human practices, bound in by a myriad of human structures. Later on, when things have gotten truly bad, our protagonist Dr. David Hart reflects on how impossible it was to see exactly how things were going to break down ... but then, he realizes, there was always that fear, that foreknowledge, that something was wrong. His health department tried its best, but they're overloaded and underfunded when they catch this new blip on their radar. Maybe it's nothing, the bureaucrats and politicians hope ... but we know better, oh yes.

For minor spoilers, there's an excellent shift halfway through the novel wherein Dr. Hart is incapacitated by the plague. When he wakes up it's in an abandoned hospital. Weak, addled, alone, he ventures outside and finds a whole new world - or rather, the end of the world. And the novel kicks into high gear, with a new, apocalyptic churn of horrors. Our gossamer civilization is burning at both ends and the stage is set for scenes more depraved than the worst phantasmagoria from Bosch.

Meanwhile, in the bowels of Washington a different kind of vermin are scuttling around. The current crisis has whipped them into their own fevered frenzy, desperate to cement their positions in the "permanent state" that runs deeper than any elected position, including the president. These paranoid ciphers trust no one and love nothing, and there's no depravity they won't indulge for national security: witness their calm debate over "full neutralization of all non-rodent carriers" ... they're talking about us, baby! Here the authors give us more historical background of the kind we got in The Nightmare Factor: Operation Sea-Spray again, biowarfare in Vietnam, and the myriad chemical/biological/ballistic assassination plots against Castro. In yet another example of their cynical nihilism, our DC demons wonder whether they can frame the NYC plague as a Cuban plot in order to finally pull off the invasion/counterrevolution they've been slavering at for decades now. Some are afraid the plague may be traced back to their own dark doings, and in another example of the authors' grounded realism there is no smoking gun to prove or disprove this. We all must live with uncertainty, including the possible conspirators. 

The authors don't skimp on any aspect of the story. The horror is bloody disgusting, the tension ratcheted to nerve wracking tightness. From Dr. Hart's nighttime walks - an escape from himself and the frantic pace of modern life - to Nurse Dolores Rodriguez and her quietly carried torch for the good doctor there isn't a false character note. Rodriguez is sketched as a believably, beautifully strange person, one of those who move through life silently, never complaining nor hinting at the vast reserves of strength within. She isn't the only one who gets quick, professional description that sticks with us whether they live, die, or disappear into the unknown. Our supporting cast include the "Blackhawks" nurses of the health department: a team of Black, hispanic and "oriental" gals beating feet through the worst neighborhoods in the city tracking down bugs. Thankless, dangerous, necessary work. Cravens and Marr effortlessly illustrate one of the major contradictions of modern life: we're all individuals but we can't escape our boxes of race, class, sex, the lines that sort us out into the whole stinking mix of humanity, even as we yearn to be recognized for ourselves and to fulfill our roles the best we can. These invisible lines can have catastrophic effects during a crisis, for individuals and outwards.

By the time this whole bloody business is over we'll be witness to extermination squads, nerve gas delivered by top secret "monopod" drones, the ultimate heights of the human spirit and depths of its depravity. For a historic scale and soul shattering horror, Cravens and Marr's The Black Death earns a full four suppurating buboes out of four!

The Black Death is available to read and download at archive dot org. Highly recommended. 

Ballantine Books, 1978 (original pub. 1977)

THE HERMES FALL by John Baxter

Who will survive and what will be left of them when author John Baxter slams asteroid Hermes into the North Atlantic at 150,000 miles per hour? It's a classic '70s disaster epic with all the sex, sleaze, and world ending cataclysm you'd hope for, plus some biting criticism of NASA politics with the freshly debuted space shuttle facing a trial by fire in its new mission to destroy Hermes. No prizes for guessing how that goes ...

Baxter says he was inspired to write the novel following his research on the Tunguska event for his nonfiction work The Fire Came By. Here he rises to poetry with his passages on the asteroid, while the plotting and characters are crafted finely enough to avoid the fill-in-the-blank formula tang of many disaster/thriller novels. The novel only falters in the final 50 pages, when our hero astronaut must suddenly race cross country to save his girlfriend from some escaped convicts. It's clear Baxter was attempting to draw down the perspective and end on a human level, but the contrived circumstances and attendant rape peril are a shoddy comedown from the previous highs.

The Hermes Fall was one of a trio of big space rock novels released in quick succession at the end of the '70s. Lucifer's Hammer came out in 1977, followed by The Hermes Fall in 1978 and Shiva Descending in 1980. Hermes is the best of the three. Niven and Pournelle's Lucifer's Hammer is techno-fascist wish fulfillment for the soft suburban set, with the end of the world allowing the authors to justify their reactionary worldview putting minorities, women, and dirty hippies firmly in their place. Benford and Rotsler's Shiva Descending suffers from turgid plotting and card stock characters. Worst of all is the simple fact that neither book captures the chaotic, all consuming destruction of the fall nearly as well as Baxter does, though Niven and Pournelle get credit I suppose for being the first out of the gate.

Across the pond, Panther Books released this tatty looking edition.

And its teeth are bared in a terrible hatred ...

4/4

Ballantine Books, 1978

MONSTER by Jeffrey Konvitz

Boring! This is one turgid, overlong excuse for a "thriller" ... Jeffrey Konvitz was clearly banking on another big budget adaptation like his breakout hit The Sentinel, but this by-the-numbers potboiler didn't catch anyone's eye in Hollywood, and for good reason. From the convoluted setup (oil is discovered beneath Loch Ness, and exploration by the Gemini Company disturbs Nessie) to the following lack of monster action (she gets two "big" scenes that are over far too quickly) this novel just fails to deliver. It doesn't help that it seems like Konvitz tossed his monster research off in an afternoon and fills most of the book with his two-fisted hero's battle against a nasty piece of mercenary trash named Lefebre (that's lah-FAYVE by the way), the security head for Gemini Oil. 

Oh well, at least there's a nice step-back and map.

0/4

Ballantine Books, 1982

MAPS OF THE UNKNOWN: Donnelly's Atlantis

Lost Atlantis as imagined by its modern pioneer, Ignatius Donnelly. From Citadels of Mystery, by L. Sprague de Camp. Courtesy Ballantine Books, 1973 (original pub. 1946).

MAPS OF THE UNKNOWN: Stonehenge

From The View Over Atlantis by John Michell. Courtesy Ballantine Books, 1969.