Bill Garnett - The Unbegotten

[H_P_Saucecraft]

Bill Garnett - The Unbegotten (Hamlyn 1982)

This one arrived, this morning:

[dem]

have you read it yet, Dave? if it's anything like this one, i reckon you'll get along with it.

Bill Garnett - The Crone (St Martins, August 1987)

Blurb:
IN AN ANCIENT TRANSYLVANIAN RITUAL OF BLOOD, FIRE AND STEEL, SHE DIED TO CREATE A CREATURE OF VENGEANCE

First the creature was a mindless lump of semifluid flesh resting under the floorboards in the dingy London rooming house. Impelled by its overwhelming need to eat, to grow, it fed on beetles, silverfish, then rats — each time changing, taking the form of its victims.

Then it heard the baby's sickly wail...

Holborn, Central London. Peter Stone, manager of a successful travel agency embarks on a fling with his ultra-efficient but unbalanced new secretary, Roszina Janosi, 27, who wants more from the relationship than just 72 hour sex marathons. But the more Stone gets to know Rozina, so his infatuation shrivels and dies. He resolves to end the relationship, pick up the pieces with Elaine, his boring but ever-loyal doormat of a wife. Sadly for him, the mercenary Miss Janosi has planned for this inevitability. From the first she had designs on becoming Lady Stone MK. II, and nothing will stand in her way. Rozina phones Elaine and callously spills the gory details of the affair. Elaine affects indifference: Peter is always having it off with his secretaries, she yawns. Roszina is merely the latest and will be already be forgotten. Furious at Elaine's riposte, the fiery floozie composes a dramatic suicide note, identifying the heartless Peter as the father of her unborn child, then takes what she miscalculates will be a safe dose of paracetamol and calls the emergency services. This will do the trick! Let's see wifey stick by the heartless bastard when his name is dragged through the gutter press!

The Ambulance arrives too late to save her.

Back in her homeland of Transylvania, Magda Janosi, survived both the Nazi's and the Communists. Now a cobweb-haired, toothless mummy of an arthritic with a horrible clawed hand, her last remaining hope from life is that Roszina, the product of her gang-rape by Mongol soldiers, settles down with a nice man and gives her a grandchild. When her neighbour, Michael Flynn, an elderly alcoholic, reads her the morning's headlines, the crone resorts to black sorcery to avenge her beloved daughter's death. Slicing a lump of flesh from her saggy midriff, she fashions the bloody mess into the shape of a blob-man and wills it to life. Then she runs her ancient ceremonial sword across her throat ....

It's taken 98 pages (of 215) but now we're off and running with all that "mindless lump of semifluid flesh" stuff promised in the blurb, and the remainder of the novel follows the shape changer's relentless pursuit of the philandering travel agent from Lincoln's Inn Fields to Kenya, taking in several popular Middle Eastern tourist destinations along the way. Stone survives encounters with - among others - a zombie, a dirty great snake, a rot-faced leper and a vulture the size of a light aircraft, before the final showdown, by which time he's taken the advice of a hastily introduced best friend and consulted a witch-doctor. With his every narrow escape, an innocent bystander cops it, including a blue-rinse American tourist and the crone's downstairs neighbour, Chrissie Arnold (who once came third in a Miss Morecambe Bay beauty contest) and her toddler. Decent ending, too.

For fans of product placement on a Jim Moffat scale, when he's flush Bill Garnett evidently goes in for Teachers and Disque Bleu, but there are days when he'd kill for just a pack of Rizla's and a box of Swan Vesta's.

[H_P_Saucecraft]

Haven't read it yet, dem - but that cover for The Crone looks great. I still haven't read my haul from last year's pulp fair, so I aim to get back to more vault activity & film comments/reviews activity, I've neglected them lately - not sure when my last Hamlyn review was, but too long ago.

[dem]

Will look forward to that! The Crone may not have been a Hamlyn but it certainly reads like one. I'm certainly up for more Bill Garnett and luckily, he seems to have shifted a few in the early 'eighties with titles like Down Bound Train (Popular Library 1974: Mayflower, 1975; Sphere, 1985), The Shadow (Sphere, 1982), Oddbods! (Sphere, 1984), and The Hell-Train (St. Martins, 1988). Wonder if they're all as whiskey-sodden as The Crone?