MAN IS THE PREY by James Clarke

Danger from above, danger from below, danger from every living thing ... for our final entry of the year author James Clarke lays down the law: MAN IS THE PREY!

A beefy book with a simple concept: animals that kill people. All of 'em, all over the world, but especially Africa as that was Clarke's remit. Clarke horrifies with tales of killer beasts, but he also equivocates when necessary. Consider his thoughts on the gila monster, a controversial "man killer" in the literature:

A number of people who ridicule the idea of the gila monster's [bite] being lethal to man claim that those who died after its bite were all alcoholic or sick. Curiously it seems a great many of them were, but then if an alcoholic is knocked down by a bus did the bus kill him or did the alcohol?

The "deadly" aspect of an animal may be variable, and down to circumstance. Is the elephant more dangerous than the lion, than the hippo, than the croc? Do raw numbers of victims tell it all, and do we even know the true numbers? Does any of that matter when you're the one getting chomped? 

Above, the original hardcover edition with a back cover cameo from a chacma baboon. Clarke's careful treading elevates his book above a simple chronicle of misery and helps us think about our place in nature, as a part of nature despite our best efforts. Owing to its era, much of the color comes from big game hunters and safari tales. Goodreads reviewer Brett Dulle has an insightful review which helps put certain parts of the book in context:

The book has two clear biases:

1. The author is an ex-pat living in South Africa and as a result the book is more focused on African wildlife than other countries dangerous animals. For example, his chapter on crocodiles is almost exclusively about the Nile crocodile. It's hard to criticize him for this because it is obviously much easier to write about what you have a personal experience with and these firsthand accounts are the most interesting parts of the book.

2. The author has a strong interest in big game hunting. My estimate is that over half of the information in the book comes from big game hunter's memoirs or conversations with big game hunters. This effects the coverage of different animals. The crocodile, an animal the author admits is probably the most voracious man-eater, gets 10 pages while the elephant gets 20 pages of coverage. As the book moves away from the big game animals, it feels more like he's simply listing off facts about these animals and the book starts to drag. Again, it's hard to complain since the stories of the big game hunters are usually quite exciting.

These foundational biases aside, the author also takes sides with some of the animals. Bears are depicted as practically harmless while wolves are ravenous hellhounds that, according to a story he reprints, almost ate an entire village in one night.

Another example of Clarke's personal views coming through is his treatment of the killer whale. Despite no real hard data about orcas eating or killing humans, he takes it as read from anecdote and reputation that the fearsome predator is a known, guaranteed killer. After all, no less an authority than the US Navy says that orcas "will attack human beings at every opportunity." And would you want to test that out yourself?

James Frederick Clarke (1934-)

The final chapter details the most dangerous animal to man: himself. The second to last chapter covers insects and arachnids, and delves into disease and famine - we know the mosquito is one of the deadliest creatures on earth, due to its transmission of a multitude of diseases. Bees and wasps can kill through swarming by the thousands or from one single sting on someone unlucky enough to be allergic. How does this stack up against a tiger's fangs or a shark's jaws? How much does public health and policy factor into a focus on deadly animals? It's not so easy as a top ten list but the journey is rewarding.

That ol' showman Ivan T. Sanderson shows up in Clarke's bibliography with a book on elephants, The Dynasty of Abu. Famous tiger man Jim Corbett features as well ... of course! It wouldn't be much of a book on killer animals without the hunter who bagged the Man-Eaters of Kumaon among many others!

More of man against nature ...

Lions, tigers, bears ... sharks, snakes, and things that sting! Killers from legend and in the laboratory, who kill for food, for self defense, or just for the hell of it! Clarke catalogs them all, and we're all the better for it! Man is the Prey is well worth picking up even today, as both a snapshot of an era and a thoughtful, expansive exploration of its subject. Grrr, hisss, ahhh!

Panther Books edition

Another hardcover, with a goofy snapshot!

Clarke's excellent text is available to read and download at archive dot org.

Pocket Books, 1970 (original pub. 1969)

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

QUARANTINE by Josh Webster

It's the ultimate biological warfare: a manmade strain of rabies that kills in hours, circulates in the water supply ... and the CIA has just lost control! Now a small island off the coast of Washington is facing death, madness, and the final QUARANTINE!

First impressions count. The gorgeous cover art of '70s plague thrillers like The Nightmare Factor and The Black Death set the stage for the intricate machinations within, the casts of characters adrift in new worlds of terror, the mad visions of our own world ripped apart by disaster. Quarantine's cover art, unfortunately, is all too typical of the dregs of the late '80s horror boom. Goofy ass skeleton arms hold up an idyllic forest scene, dripping with blood ... it's just plain dumb! It looks dumb and it prejudices readers like yours truly against what might be an effective thriller. Sad to say, the novel within doesn't rise above the cheesy cover.

Jaded CIA man Stone has a plan to cash out of his career: sell the manmade rabies strain to Saddam Hussein! The former dictator of Iraq is unnamed, but the novel gives enough context of a secular ruler facing down the Ayatollah in a grueling war of attrition. Stone himself enjoys the idea of Khomeini in the final throes of madness, barking out orders to lackeys as his brain is devoured by the rabies strain. Author Webster is most effective with his nastier characters like Stone and his lackeys, while his good guys deliver overdoses of treacle with their sob stories and cutesy family lives. Our hero Dr. Lockton has a dead wife and a kid with cystic fibrosis, leaving him vulnerable to Stone's offer of paid medical for life if he helps design the ultimate killer. Stone sets him up with a beautiful cabin and a high tech lab on Vashon Island in the Puget Sound, and of course through Stone's double dealings the virus gets loose and the island's inhabitants become grist for the cheap horror mill. That's how it all feels: like a slasher film setup, as the virus drives its victims into a murderous rage that sees them biting, bashing, and slashing the uninfected. There's no sense of reality, of life beyond the narrative, and as soon as characters are introduced they get instantly slotted into roles as victims, villains, and set dressing. The novel also lacks the medical/scientific power of The Nightmare Factor and The Black Death: there's a little bit about the virus gripping people's brain with madness but it all feels pretty rote, as do the various gory ways people die. Webster strings it all together competently enough, but the final product just isn't worth it.

For a limp, unsatisfying attempt at horror, Quarantine earns one rabies virus out of four:

Worldwide Books, 1988

PLAGUE by Graham Masterton

Working writer Graham Masterson throws out this disappointing disease thriller that offers up human misery and slack storytelling, as the whole Eastern Seaboard is ravaged by PLAGUE! Masterson is a titan of the horror field, responsible for the smash '70s hit The Manitou and still writing today in his 70s. Will Errickson of Too Much Horror Fiction has several entries concerning Masterson and his genre dominating horror output, but unfortunately it seems like this specific title was tossed off for an easy payday.

Handsome, divorced, wonderful Dr. Petrie (get it?) wakes up to a freaked out father with a sick little boy one fine Miami morning, and things degenerate from there. It seems there's a "super plague" that's been percolating in the raw sewage washing up on shore, and now it's cutting a swath through the city. This plague kills you in hours, which raises the question of how it manages to spread at all. This brings us to one of the glaring shortcomings of Masterson's thriller, the perfunctory plague menace. Neither the wild sci-fi speculation of The Omni Strain nor the grubby realism of The Black Death, this plague is blamed on some vague "radiation" as is the immunity of certain characters like Dr. Petrie (exposure to x-rays) and his daughter Priscilla (watching TV - for real). An unconvincing cast of supporting characters includes a hard nosed union boss, feuding bacteriologists, and washed up, gay as hell Golden Age actor Herbert Gaines, who gets recruited as a spokesman by some hardline New Righters to mount a racialist response blaming blacks and PRs for the plague. Plus ce change, plus c'est la meme chose, I suppose ... Petrie's daughter is referred to by the nauseating nickname "Prickles" throughout, and the back copy should warn you what you're in for here - half-baked, simpering prose about the father/daughter bond and Dr. Petrie's noble suffering through this pandemic that kills millions, as it spreads outside Miami despite the best efforts of the government in true cynical '70s fashion. One rare effective moment is when Dr. Petrie informs a National Guardsman that the "vaccination" he got is pure placebo and he's as doomed as any of the civvies he's threatening. But mostly we get miserable tableaus involving miserable people, from small business tyrant Edgar Paston and his love/hate relationship with young hood Shark MacManus, to Dr. Petrie's irritating, 19 year old girlfriend Adelaide who immediately gets gang-raped by Hell's Angels when she steps out of line and out of Petrie's protective custody. All these miserable people gradually make their way to NYC, some dropping dead along the way, until we congregate in a fancy high-rise and face the third act threat, some ravenous rats, and here we're in pure fantasy land, as any emotional truth or tactical realism has flown clear out the window.

It seems like everyone shits their pants after catching the plague, which is one of the few worthwhile bits throughout along with Gaines' recruitment by fascists. Not much else leaves an impression though. Masterson's writing is serviceable enough, delivering us from set-piece to set-piece until the abrupt, unsatisfying ending. For his miserable, empty end of the world, Masterson's Plague earns ZERO plague doctors out of four!

Ace Books, 1978

THE OMNI STRAIN by Cliff Patton, M.D.

It was supposed to be harmless. A beneficial bacteria, genetically engineered to subsist on oil. It could clean up toxic spills or sabotage an enemy's energy reserves. But now THE OMNI STRAIN is loose and nothing will ever be the same ...

Author Cliff Patton, M.D. brings his medical knowledge to bear with some engaging exposition on the rarefied world of lethal disease research, as his CDC characters go through the motions on this strange new bug that's cropped up dead center in their own archive! It seems the Army cut a deal to sit on some ... new strains, guaranteed access in exchange for no questions asked. But that doesn't cut it for Dr. Charlie Prentice, especially when old Sam the night janitor drops dead in the middle of a lab, along with a whole herd of guinea pigs. The Army claimed P-61 was "nonpathogenic" and they'd know, surely?

Meanwhile, the biggest oil tanker in the world, on her maiden voyage, is attacked by a mystery sub! History's largest oil spill! Here's some technothriller intrigue, and Patton manages well without getting bogged down into technical minutia, dated geopolitics, or dull exchanges between military men about nuclear options and so forth. It's a mildly convoluted setup but once the Navy borrows P-61 we just know things are going to spin out. And boy do they ever, just peep that back cover: millions dead! Things get a little rushed towards the end and Patton has to resort to a "Died in Vietnam" style postscript for his characters, doing a little world building in the process as the ravaged Mid-Atlantic states are reorganized into New Columbia. Patton doesn't quite reach the most sublime highs, but these are acceptable thrills and you have to appreciate his professionalism as the plot unfolds. He doesn't skimp on the gross-out factor, either, as the Omni Strain dispatches its victims with some nasty effects.

Zebra Books gave us a beautiful abstract cover for The Omni Strain, with some thematically appropriate obscuration of the title. For delivering the gruesome goods with a modicum of style, The Omni Strain earns three putrid Petri dishes out of four:

Zebra Books, 1980

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)