William Schoell - Saurian

[kooshmeister]

One of those books I based entirely on the title and the cover, Saurian both did and and didn't impress me. The main character is Tom Bartlett, a young boy living in a small seaside town that's fallen on hard times. Some huge development corporation wants to get their hands on the land and the town won't sell. Then one giant a giant sea monster comes ashore and wrecks the place. Tom is the sole survivor and barely remembers anything beyond the fact that the thing, whatever it was, was big. Like really, really big. Flash-forward several years and Tom is all grown up and trying his best to suppress the horrible memories of the night the town his was destroyed by a giant monster. Worse, the thing is still out there, and is somehow connected to that development corporation, which of course bought up the land where the town used to be. Could there be a connection? You betcha! It seems that the guy in charge of the company may have some mysterious connection to the monster... and neither he nor it like people nosing around. If Tom is going to overcome his fears and get to the bottom of what really happened to his doomed hometown, he might just be getting into a lot more trouble than he bargained for, especially after an overenthusiastic paleontologist, believing the creature to be some kind of prehistoric survival, comes to a bad end courtesy of the thing crushing his house in the middle of the night...

A book with an almost identical cover is The Lake, which I also felt kinda "meh" about. Not much monster action in it despite the cover, though there is a toxic fog from the same industrial accident that created the monster(s), and the fog dissolves people when it comes into contact with them and engulfs them, so The Lake's got that going for it in comparison to Schoell's kind of underwhelming Saurian. Saurian has an interesting premise, but I don't really think Schoell does much with it, and he takes too long getting to the big reveal, forcing him to cram a lot of action and exposition into the last several pages, which is a big jarring after such a long buildup. I've only ever read one other book by him, Spawn of Hell, and it had pretty much the same problem, along with what struck me as an ultimately pointless detour to a different town about midway through which doesn't really affect the plot much at all, but that's a topic for that book if I ever post about it.

[ramseycampbell]

Here are some of Mr Schoell's comments from an essay he contributed long ago to Fantasy Review:

“gore is gore, whether presented artistically or in a piece of hackneyed crap.”

I discussed this in my column and quoted him and the letter he wrote in response to my previous objections:

"Let me return to William Schoell, at least as a way of introducing this piece. I mean his comment in Fantasy Review 73 that 'literary' (Mr Schoell’s quotation marks ) horror novels are 'a publicity department trick, aided and abetted by self-deluding horror novelists'." In my case he’s thinking of Incarnate. I hope it may be of interest to my readers to learn how that book came to be written. If Mr Schoell detects self-delusion in the process, by all means let him show where. I hope, though, that he won’t fall back on the complaint that I’m taking him “much too literally”; I do expect people whose business is words to mean what they say."