Demonic Color - Pauline Dunn

[kooshmeister]

Nabbed for about $4 and some change on eBay. I'm unsure what the plot is, but that cover intrigues the hell outta me. According to one (mostly) spoiler-free user review on Goodreads, this book, written by Dawn Pauline Dunn and Susan Hartzell using the former's middle and last name as a pseudonym, it's about an evil green gas (gettin' some "Colour Out of Space on steroids" vibes). As long as two 90s fashion victim kids with gelled hair get eaten by the killer green fog, I'm down.

Of course, there's the elephant in the room, which is that in some respects, this book is simply Dunn and Hartzell's earlier The Crawling Dark with a different title and a slightly different plot (evil flesh-eating gas as opposed to evil Satanic worms or whatever it was in Crawling Dark)... and that both steal entire passages from Dean R. Koontz's Phantoms but just change the characters' names and the nature of the threat. That they got away with this twice before someone finally caught on and Zebra pulled the books from shelves following a court case is amazing. Dunn and Hartzell did manage to write one more book for Zebra, Flesh Stealer, but by then the damage had been done (or should I say "Dunn?").

According to Goodreads' bio, Dawn Dunn continued writing under her own name without Hartzell after the plagiarism fiasco, at least until '01, and she currently works as a nurse practitioner. No word on Hartzell.

Anyway, I eagerly await Demonic Color's arrival by mail. And I eventually wanna get Crawling Dark as well. I'm a big fan of Koontz's Phantoms and I wanna see exactly just how badly these two plagiarized it. I'm hoping it ends up being decent despite this, because the idea of killer green gas sounds interesting.

[andydecker]

The colouring is indeed demonic.

[kooshmeister]

The title looks embossed and kinda shimmery. Demonic indeed!