Paperbacks from Hell [N.F. - Literature, Art]

In the wake of Jaws, it didn’t take a genius to figure out that the one way to make a killer shark scarier was to make it the family pet. But since most people don’t let sharks sleep in their bed or take them out for walkies, dogs became the new sharks. Cujo (1981) is the book most associated with killer canines, but the subgenre was going strong by the time Stephen King published his ambitious novel about a good dog gone mad due to a bad bat with rabies.

The problem with killer-dog books is that most people like dogs, so as soon as a canine eats a kid, we find ourselves wondering what the kid did to provoke it. As a result, these novels are often real bummers. Robert Calder (a pen name for Jerrold Mundis) can’t make us hate the lab animal on the run in The Dogs (1976), and in The Long Dark Night (1978; adapted for the screen as The Pack), callous summer vacationers pretty much get what’s coming to them at the paws of the dogs they heartlessly abandon each year. Even homicidal Baxter the bull terrier in Hell Hound is the most likable character in Greenhall’s book.

One way writers sought to make dogs scarier was to give them rabies. Rabid sees a pair of upper-class twits smuggle a French dog through British animal quarantine, unleashing a wave of death-dealing doggies on the U.K. All brown corduroy and tweed, the story’s told in the deadpan tones of a BBC informational film, even as infected corgis turn on their owners and Jack Russell terriers rampage through the countryside, leaving half-eaten tramps in their wake.

But as robust as this trend was, dogs never became the new rats. That job was left to cats.

Angry puppies were England’s worst nightmare, even in the future England of talking animals depicted in The Haven. Credit 62

Credit 63

Eye of the Tiger

Imagine what it was like to be Nick Sharman. For three years he woke up every morning, checked the papers, and saw that no one had done it yet. He didn’t want to do it. He kept waiting for someone else to do it, because it was so damn obvious. Then one morning, three years after James Herbert had unleashed his Rats, Sharman picked up his pen and unleashed…The Cats.

Just as we’re predisposed to like dogs, most people consider cats far too lazy and irresponsible to engage in organized mayhem. Write a scene in which an army of cats descends on London, and most people will assume that at any moment they’ll lose interest and start rolling around in a sunbeam or chasing laser pointers. Kitties are just too cute and fluffy to be scary, and scenes of their soft paws poking under doors induce giggles rather than gasps. When a radio announcer is buried alive in an avalanche of mewling kittens, the immediate reaction is not one of horror but a soul-deep “awwwww…”

In fact, it’s the humans who look like the sadistic monsters in Cats Gone Wild books, saying things like, “So, the plan is to wait for the cats to show themselves and then go at them with flame throwers.” When the felines are finally burned alive with napalm and the survivors are machine-gunned, it feels like something of an overreaction, especially when we all know that a helicopter dangling a bit of string could have led them out of town just as efficiently.

But cats have an inherent nobility that dogs and rats lack, which is probably why humans feel better when we bring them down to our buffoonish level by dressing them in reindeer antlers for holiday cards. Ha-ha! Look at the covers of Night-Shriek and Satan’s Pets! The kitties are wearing wigs! Ha-ha-ha!

You’re not laughing. What’s the matter? Cat got your tongue? And your liver? And your face?

Before the internet, cats were sometimes considered less than cute. Credit 64

When Alan Ryan took his novel Panther! to Signet, he also brought a cover by his friend, artist Jill Bauman. The publishers didn’t like being told what to do, so they rejected the cover and commissioned new art by Tom Hallman. Published here for the first time is Bauman’s unused cover (above), along with the image that was used in its place (right). Credit 65

Credit 66

Today’s Menu: You

There is not an animal that walks, crawls, swims, or flies that does not want humankind dead. Bears hate us, bats hate us, dogs and cats clearly hate us. Let’s face it, humans are delicious. In the eyes of animals, we are walking pizzas, and the best thing is that we deliver ourselves.