James Montague - Worms

James Montague - Worms (Futura, 1979)



Blurb:
The Norfolk coast made for a perfect holiday — as long as the sun still shone.
But when the rain came, the creatures left the shadows...

WORMS
Spectres from the past tortured James Hildebrand's mind. His blackest nightmares were crowded with malevolent, coiling images of decay.
Then, suddenly, he knew the threat was real.

WORMS
The dead alone could not quench their hunger. And, for the living, the horrors that fed and multiplied in the darkness of the night became more terrible with the
dawn...

The narrator, Mr. Hildebrand, is obviously unhinged. Joylessly married, he finally rebels when he and his wife are stranded at an inn in Blanely, Norfolk after their boating holiday goes tits up. She's all for returning to London, but he insists on staying put. Wandering into town, he visits an estate agents on a whim and has all but immediately agreed to buy a run-down property. The snag is, he needs his wife's inheritance to pay for it. He decides the best way to go about things is to take her out for the day and get her drunk, but when she realises what he's after she sneers at him, recites a roll call of all his faults as a man and vows he'll never get a penny of her money. This isn't advisable in the circumstances, as Hildebrand has recently been fantasising about murdering her.

One gory death and cremation later, and Hildebrand has moved into his dream home, but he's still miserable. Visions of his wife's corpse and finding all these worms everywhere - in the boat-house, the cellar, his cooking utensils, etc. - are making his life a living hell. And there's something odd about Blanely. It never seems to stop raining and the church is inordinately cold. When Hildebrand mentions this to the vicar, the old boy changes the subject and directs him to an engraving on a tomb which he tells him are; "The worms of Hell. They rear in pursuit of the souls of the deceased".

I don't think Hildebrand is gonna see this book out somehow.



Part II gets off to a flier when the authorities sneakily erect a nuclear reactor on Blanely marshes. "The worms won't like that" mutters Hildebrand as he enlists as secretary for the villagers' action committee. On the contrary, they take to it rather too well.

I've no need to spell out what happens, but the author gets most of his novel out of the way before the slippery little customers finally wreak havoc. For a time, they disappear from the action altogether and the novel mutates into a psycho thriller, although you sense them in the background, still plotting their mischief. The characters of the main players are better drawn than we're used to, and the legend associated with the coffins in the church adds a feasible black magic angle to the proceedings if you want to go with it. There's still (what I consider to be - you maybe disagree) the trademark genre flaw: you don't really get to know anybody other than the narrator, so when somebody dies it's a bit "so what, I didn't care much about them anyway."

Strange how these things turn out. I was expecting, indeed, hoping I'd chanced on a Z-list sub-Slugs atrocity, but this pitch-black comedy is actually a skillfully handled stab at the exploitation market and very entertaining on its own terms. If there's a 'When Insects Attack!' novel for people who hate 'When Insects Attack!' novel's, Worms is probably it!



Way back when we first had a look at Worms, we had a game of spot the pseudonym behind author 'James Montague' and came up with MRJ enthusiast Jack Adrian as our prime suspect. Since then we've had the impeccable Paperback Fanatic guide to the creepy crawly 'nasties wherein Justin fingers the culprit as regular 2000 AD story-writer Chris Lowder ..... who often uses the name .... 'Jack Adrian'!