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

In the four years after James Herbert’s The Rats, every critter got a turn at the all-you-can-eat human-meat buffet. Authors reveled in an escalating arms race to find new creatures—bees, alligators, fire ants!—that could tear us apart like chicken wings. A mere year after his public-health-scare screed Rabid, David Anne thought he had a winner in The Folly (1978). What man could contain his screams when confronted with killer rabbits? And not just any rabbits—genetically engineered rat rabbits “from the spawning-ground of hell.”

Those bunnies have nothing on Academy Award–winning screenwriter George Wells’s sole novel, the scrotum-ripping Taurus (1982), about Mexican bulls retired from the bullfighting circuit who get stoned on agave roots and go on a crime spree across Mexico, murdering women with their enormous penises, killing men by goring them in the crotch, and generally demonstrating that bulls are “the most virile animal the world has ever known.”

Apparently no species is too cute (The Folly), domesticated (The Farm, Taurus), or satisfied with its diet (The Predators) to want a piece of us. Credit 67

More stoned animals go wild as geese, pigs, goats, even cows get high on ketamine and unleash hell on Old McDonald’s murder farm in The Farm (1984). The pigs proved popular and trotted off into the sequel, The City (1986). Animal-amok literature reached peak lunacy with Mark Washburn and Robert Webb’s The Predators, in which a Kodiak bear and a great white shark battle each other on pay-per-view cable. Whichever one loses, the reader wins.

Seafood Gumbo

In the wake of Jaws, humanity was under siege from an all-you-can-eat seafood buffet of aquatic horror. Enraged tuna (Fleshbait, 1979), mutant lampreys (Pestilence, 1983), and even the lowly jellyfish (Slime, 1984) all worked together to make people the catch of the day. But the stars of this feeding frenzy turned out to be killer whales. As Arthur Herzog (author of bee-attack best seller The Swarm) reminds readers repeatedly in Orca (1977), killer whales are the only animals besides humans that kill for revenge.

Peter Tonkin builds a better Jaws with Killer, dropping the awkward Mafia and infidelity subplots from Peter Benchley’s best seller and cutting right to the good stuff: five characters, stranded on an ice floe, at the mercy of a pod of killer whales, led by a crazed super-whale escaped from a military laboratory. It’s a nonstop symphony of chaos as these angry pandas of the sea bite off blue whale tongues while botanists toss dynamite at herds of stampeding walruses. Arms are eaten, whales’ brains are stabbed, and burst bodies sail through the air like exploded paper bags.

Next up: crabs. What could drive a crab to kill? Doesn’t take much, as it turns out. They’re the angriest residents in nature’s death zoo. You barely have to look at one sideways before it’s making menacing clickety-clicks.

Like some kind of crustacean Churchill, King Crab leads his minions out of the Irish Sea and onto Britain’s holiday beaches in Night of the Crabs (1976). It is an awesome sight. Crabs enjoy nothing more than a nice rampage, so for them it’s an excellent bonus to discover that someone has brought their favorite food to the party: human guts. Don’t mind if I do, say the crabs, although in their language it sounds more like clickety-click-click, as they start with the tramp platter.

Don’t go in the water. Don’t go near the water. You know what—move to a landlocked nation and stay there. Credit 68

Credit 69

As the crabs topple our bridges, it seems that humanity has no choice—mankind is on the menu. Yet King Crab has made one fatal miscalculation. He has eaten Professor Cliff Davenport’s favorite nephew. Now it’s personal.

Davenport is not only Britain’s top marine biologist, he’s also its loneliest. Only constant work can fill his long, solitary nights, and now he commits his stiff upper lip and his sad coping skills to avenge his nephew.

Davenport meets Pat, a young woman as lonely as he is, who brings his dusty old penis back to life after years in storage. Reinvigorated by her ministrations, Davenport remembers paraquat, the common weed killer found in every British garden shed that’s so toxic it can cause Parkinson’s disease. Davenport dives over King Crab’s army in his helicopter, drenching them in this toxic soup, killing them where they scuttle. The few survivors retreat on a shame march back into the sea.