This post is brought to you by Strange Adventures, a story collection by G. W. Thomas that features a number of action-oriented tales with monsters. The book brings together adventure elements with occult detectives, mystery and monsters. What kind of person likes to delve into the strange things lurking in the jungles, mountains and frozen tundra of this world? Sometimes they can be found in Strange Detectives but in that book the setting is often the English country house or city streets of Arkham. In Strange Adventures, the companion volume, the action goes into the snowy alps, the Old West and the modern deserts where the Athenodorians are still at work protecting humankind from the terrible things that want our world. Either book, you are sure to find some chills and thrills as brave men and women face off against what lies in the darkness.
I’m a sucker for a bottleneck story. You know the kind, where a small group are cut off from the rest of the world by a terrible evil and have to survive. You know not all of them will, but some may. It’s an instant Horror situation that never grows old. The writers who use it are often Lovecraftian, either by intent or accident, though Lovecraft didn’t invent it. William Hope Hodgson, who was one of the writers who inspired HPL, used it earlier in several novels and stories. (For more on that, go here.) Lovecraft’s best use of the trope is “At the Mountains of Madness” though it’s in “A Colour Out Space”, “The Shadow Over Innsmouth” and others. That being said, Lovecraft didn’t use it exclusively.
The bottleneck novel became more frequent with the 1970s paperback explosion. A small town is cut off and attacked by vampires, psychic girls, ghosts, giant ants, bees or frogs, creatures from another dimension, evil children, etc., etc. The bottleneck builds suspense as it limits options. You can’t just run away, call in the Marines or hide until IT goes away. You will try, but the evil will stop you and kill you off one-by-one. And it is that scenario I want to look at here in two similar books that in my opinion work and fail.
I will begin chronologically though I read them in the reverse order. The first one is Phantoms (1983) by Dean R. Koontz. This one even got a film version with a screenplay by Koontz. You might remember it. The film appeared in 1998 with a too young Ben Affleck and a too old Rose McGowen. (More about that later.) Let’s talk about the book first.
The plot is familiar. The town of Snowfield is suddenly and mysteriously devoid of people. Dr. Jenny Paige and her fourteen year old sister, Lisa, arrive to find the town quiet. Then they discover bodies that are dead and purple. Being a doctor, Jenny calls the cops in Santa Mira, the largest town nearby and warns it maybe a plague, radiation or a nerve gas attack. Sheriff Bryce Hammond brings in his men and soon realizes it is not any of those things but some kind of monster. Deputy Stu Wargle gets his face chewed off by a giant moth and the name Timothy Flyte and The Ancient Enemy is written on a mirror. This is the name they give the gigantic sludgy monster living under the town in a series of cave.
Hammond calls in the Feds. A special team comes but is quickly killed off so that Hammond, the Paiges, the now present Timothy Flyte, and few other soldiers are all that is left to defeat what might be Nyarlathotep, a crawling chaos with a god complex. They destroy the creature using a man-made germ for cleaning up oil slicks. There is a subplot with a serial killer type named Kale who becomes an acolyte of the Ancient Enemy. He and a leader of biker gang attack the good guys in the hospital but are blown away with some quick shooting. The romance between Hammond and Jenny finally comes to fruition in the epilogue.
The movie version does most of this, but truncates the story to make it fit. (I understand the need for this, and I think Koontz did what he could to save as many beats if not all the characters. He uses the dead Stu Wargle, played by Liev Schrieber, to act as a Kale replacement. The film ends differently but the same somehow. Peter O’Toole as Flyte does not die.) The casting was obviously done to get certain actors in the film and it doesn’t work well. Ben Affleck is too young to be a seasoned cop while Lisa, who is precocious fourteen is replaced by a sleazy eighteen+ McGowen. It’s not a masterpiece of Horror movie-making but like the book, it made money.
But I have a bigger bone to pick with Koontz’s novel. This is supposed to be a Lovecraftian piece, admittedly by the author himself. The ending is so sugar-sweet it almost made me gag. The pretty ones survive and instead of Lovecraft’s dark mood of the universe is so cosmically big and horrible, we end with an almost blatant rah-rah Christian ending. Koontz admits in a new afterword that Phantoms wasn’t a book he wanted to write but circumstances forced hm. He never wanted to be a “Horror Writer” but a Suspense writer. And most of his books show this. Phantoms sticks in his craw almost as much as it does mine.
The second book is Isle of the Whisperers (1999) by Hugh B. Cave, a newer novel but from a writer who was creating strange stories in the Pulps ten years before Dean R. Koontz was born. Cave was one of the old Pulpsters who found a new opportunity with the flood of Horror paperbacks in the second half of the 20th Century. And boy, am I glad he did. Much of what Cave wrote back in the old days is sadly dated. The Weird Menace stuff is over the top and oddly dissatisfying. Shudder Pulps are an acquired taste which I never really acquired.
But Isle of the Whisperers is no Shudder Pulp. It is a mature work using the same formula Koontz used but it works better. I’ll explain why I think so in a bit. First, a little plot description so you can see the similarities. Cave sets his bottleneck in a small town on Saxham Island. (Islands make great bottlenecks. Ask Dr. Moreau.) Dr. Martha Rowe is an archaeologist, who accidentally releases an ancient terror while exploring Saxham Cave on the island. The book follows her assistant, Dan Lorimer and the other islanders as the terror rises up and takes over some of the townsfolk. Like intelligent zombies these victims try to gather more followers to the ancient spirit, which flows from its hole like an enchanted cloud.
Cave is almost John Wyndhamesque in depicting the struggle and individual townsfolk as their loved ones become part of the mob. We learn slowly of the warnings signs of the monster from old stories and evidence. In the end, Dan must follow Martha back into Saxham Cave to destroy the evil spirits and trap them once again in their vault below. There is romance between Dan and Ina Sherman, a local woman. In this respect, Cave is not unlike Dean Koontz, who always has a dollop of relationship stuff in Phantoms.
And here is where I realized that in terms of ingredients the two books are very similar. Bottleneck, underground amorphous terror, relationships and a desperate struggle to end the horror plus a few Lovecraftian touches. They could be the same book (which was something Koontz had to deal with when “Pauline Dunn” who plagiarized his book with two novels from Zebra Books) but they are so different. Which comes down to the men who are writing these tales. A good writer puts his or her own stamp on their work. The bare bones aren’t really as important as the words they weave.
That being said, Cave’s book is the by far the better one even if it wasn’t the big cash winner. And I put this down to characters. While Dr. Jenny Paige knew everyone in Snowfield, and she is the conduit by which we learn about the different victims, you never really feel much for the baker who has her hands cuts off and left with the rolling pin. Or the couple who barricaded themselves into a room but were devoured anyway. But in Cave’s book you feel for the various people as they suffer the siege. (Perhaps that was Koontz’s mistake. All the townspeople are already gone when Jenny and Lisa arrive.) What is Elbert Cheeley’s wife to do when her husband is outside the house calling to her to join him? While Koontz’s Ancient Enemy is bigger (much bigger in a very Lovecraftian way) it is less interesting. And its downfall comes in the end from its own arrogance, allowing the humans to analyze its chemical makeup. Cave’s monster has to be understood as well to defeat it, but the monster doesn’t give it away foolishly. And it is not destroyed, only trapped once more.
Finally, if you feel like a good bottleneck book, (like I do in the Summer, lying in my backyard hammock) then I recommend Cave’s book first. It is a Horror novel written by a writer who didn’t mind the sobriquet though he wrote many other things as well including books about Haiti. Dean Koontz is still with us and if you prefer Suspense to HPL then he has several bookshelves of books for you. (Oddly, Koontz also was straw boss on a Frankenstein series that I quite enjoyed. He is more of Horror Writer than he likes to admit. He also wrote Science Fiction back in the old days of the 1960s and early 70s.)
Mythos Horror at RAGE m a c h i n e
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