You can't trust your mother ... your best friend ... the neighbour next door. One minute they're perfectly normal, the next - Richard Lewis - Rabid (Mayflower, 1977)
Oh, great - it's Richard "The Web" Lewis! How did he land such a prestige gig?
Suddenly Rose grasped the farmer's hair and viciously pulled his head down .. smothering his face in her armpit.
"No! No! No!" The old man cried in agony.Last weeks novel,
The Rage, was good but disappointingly sensible so this time I've turned to a man I
know I can rely on to come up with the goods - Richard Lewis. Better still, Richard Lewis let loose on a David Cronenberg script!
Eighteen year old beauty Rose is horribly injured when boyfriend Hart's Norton Commando skids off the road trying to avoid a stalled camper van. Hart breaks some bones but its his girlfriend who cops the worst of it: the fuel tank explodes over her belly and you can see her intestines, her liver and everything. It's disgusting!
Two miles away on the outskirts of Montreal, the brilliant plastic surgeon Dr. Daniel Keloid is fending off the latest money-making schemes of his business partner Murray Cypher. Cypher reckons the nurses at the Keloid clinic should adopt red mini-skirts as their uniform and he's keen to put his DIY face-lift into production. Unfortunately Roxanne Rushton, the third partner and Keloid's wife, has no sense of humour and scuppers his plans. She doesn't think "finger lickin' surgery" is the ideal slogan for the practice either. Their debate is interrupted by an emergency call and Keloid, being a dedicated surgeon, dashes off to see what can be done for Rosie. She's a puke-provoking sight, close to death and it might be better to let her slip away but on the other hand he'll never have a better specimen on which to demonstrate his revolutionary work with neutral field tissue and other highly complicated medical jargon.
Rose wakes from her coma a fortnight later. Her injuries have healed remarkably well although, on closer inspection, there's a nasty growth under her arm - a throbbing pink retractable tube which squirts green stuff and requires regular blood feasts. Only when a fellow patient answers her screams does she realise the awful truth: Rose has become an armpit monster!
Her first victim, Lloyd Walsh (face-lift, non-DIY) survives the ordeal - he has no memory of the incident - and Keloid, not wishing for any scandal to attach itself to the clinic, instructs the staff to say nothing of the trashed room, all the busted equipment, the pools of blood or the nurses suspicion that Walsh is a sex-maniac who tried to rape Rose while she was in the coma to which she's now seemingly returned. He's much too pleased that the salvage job on her belly has been so successful to have it ruined now, although that swelling is a bit of a worry.
Rose awakens the next night in agony with the protrudence thirsting for more lovely blood. This time a randy farmer cops it - there's also some unpleasant cows-fondling business - and a hen gets trodden on as she rushes from the barn leaving her victim to his destroyed eye. Next it's the turn of Judy (nose-job) who's taking a midnight dip at the clinic in her yellow bikini and has Rose figured for a voracious lesbian! She gets drowned in their furious struggle and now Rose knows she has to get away with Hart or she'll be locked up for good!
****
"The ridged end of the protuberance seemed to be made up of sphincter muscles similar to those in the large intestine, or bowel"Yuk! I told you it was good stuff, didn't I?
She won't appreciate me for saying it but Judy who never lived to see her second nose-job is better off where she is (dumped in a freezer). Those who survive their encounter with Rose are invariably reduced to psycho blood-feasting cannibals. There's a nasty incident in the Kentucky fried when farmer Cyclops swipes another fellow's bucket and takes a chunk out of the waitress's leg before he's pulped to death. Worse is to follow when Dr. Keloid goes berserk in theatre and his colleagues go down in a welter of blood. The patient, blissfully unaware of the carnage, will not be best pleased with his face-lift should he recover.
Rose, meanwhile, has taken advantage of the distraction and while the foaming Dr. Keloid is biting at the wire grille in the police van, she makes good her escape, thumbs a lift from a trucker and spreads the infection right back to Montreal as she heads for her boyfriend's place. Trouble is, leather-clad hunk Hart and Murray Cypher, travelling in the opposite direction, have been detained for tests at the clinic as it's now become clear that its the source of the fast-spreading rabies epidemic.
Normally I'd be the first to commend a novel for getting its business over in 140 pages but having just hit the ninety-fifth I'm cursing Lewis for not stringing it out over at least 250!
****
CRAZIES RUN RIOT IN MONTREAL By the time Hart and Cypher are given the all-clear and allowed to go on their way Montreal is under Martial law and there's a shoot to kill policy versus the rabid. Knowing that Rose is staying with best friend Mindy, they head back to the city and learn for themselves just how widespread the epidemic already is. Not that they were safe in the police cell either, Dr. Keloid having sunk his fangs into three of the cops before they could take him in.
Rose is perfectly calm and glad of Mindy's company during the day but come the night the agonising stomach cramps and blood thirst are upon her. She has to get out! Wandering into town she pays a visit to the Eve cinema where there's a double bill of Swedish porn. She's just settling back to endure a lesbian romp in
I Was An Au Pair when the local creepy sidles up next to her. While he's occupied with her knockers, the tube sneaks out from under her armpit and that's tonight's feed sorted. But how long can she carry on?
It doubtless benefits from my never having seen the film so I don't know how much is Lewis and how much is Cronenberg but I thought this was great. It helps that nobody's safe from being snuffed at any moment, particularly the lead characters who, by and large, are likable. Lewis is good on horrible little vignettes and there are two particularly strong ones (involving a luckless Santa Claus and some tooled-up extermination men gone rabid) and an ending that seems like a nod to
Night Of The Living Dead.
