BATS OUT OF HELL

[killercrab]

GNS brought us three great pulp icons - the Crabs , the Slime Beast and the Birmingham Bats out of Hell. The Imageshack image needs to be linked to for some reason.

[dem bones]

Guy N. Smith - Bats Out Of Hell (Nel, July 1978)

Midlands Biological Research Centre, Cannock Chase: Prof. Brian Newman develops a serum which drives the laboratory bats insane. During a row with his assistant and lover, Susan Wylie, over his philandering ways, he collides with the glass case containing the insane bats, and they escape. It soon transpires that their condition is contagious and easily passed on to rats, mice and human beings. The entire Midlands region is worst hit: after attacks on a Cathedral and the main bank, the entire area is condoned off with it's citizens trapped inside, left to the mercy of the bats and trigger-happy vigilantes. There's particularly bad news for Aston Villa fans as, during a rally by political opportunist and would-be messiah Marcus Vandon, the bats take the Holte End, inciting a pitch invasion, riot, monumental death toll, etc.

Meanwhile, Newman and Susan have patched up their differences, although they're too busy to have sex (this one, amazingly, is all but a shag-free zone), and are working flat out to find an antidote, but the newspapers blame him for the tragedy, and he's bashed up by football hooligans while Susan is stripped and mauled before the police grudgingly intervene. With Birmingham ablaze, the bats fly off to 'the Devil's Dressing Room' to see the sucking pit.

The real horror in this one is the desperate solution Newman arrives at to combat the menace, and the ghastly effects it has on the rodent population, and the one-in-a-million human's who are susceptible to being infected by it.

Another one I made earlier. I gather this isn't considered to be quite up there with his best but I thoroughly enjoyed it myself.

[vaughan]

Yah!

Bats Out of Hell was pretty good.

It's basically novella length (just 156 pages in the edition I have) so really shouldn't be too taxing for people.

Given the page count I think something had to go, so we lost some detail that might have been nice. Also, the title of this book is a bit misleading. To me it screams "KILLER BATS!" But to be honest, though the bats can cause death, they're not killing anyone, they're INFECTING them. As such, this is the story o a virus outbreak rather than killer bats - you know? I was thinking along the lines Nightwing, but this isn't that at all.

Still, as usual GNS knows how to par things down and to get to the essence of his story. Somehow, in doing this, he manages to sculpt some reasonably interesting people, and to take the menace over a wide area. Nice.

I liked the scene at the church - "Let go of me - you stupid boy!"

Worth reading this.

[lynnielynn]

I'm sure I've written this before but this was my favourite book in p7, took it to camp(log cabins surrounded by woods with a burnt down building in the middle of them of course ) and read it to us girls around midnight by torchlight, ah the memories!