Richard Lewis: Spiders

[vaughan]

You do know the search function is worthless, right?

Well, I just did an 8 hour reading session, starting at 10:00pm right through to 6:00am - fortunately I have nothing important to do today!

The cause of all this mayhem is simple, Spiders. They don't call them 'page turners' for nothing!

You know, I so loved this book - it's just plain TERRIFIC if I may say so. It's got everything you might want, blood, gore, icky creatures, moments when you're reading it and you get a little itch on ankle and think - "oh-uh". Yes, silly, but effective.

With a title like 'Spiders" you know this is horror of the arachnid variety. Thousands of the little buggers, teaming, streaming, spewing across the English countryside - eating all in their path (yes, EATING). Scientists are baffled and we, as readers, learn things as they do. The military have itchy trigger fingers, preparing the nukes, and London is brought to its knees.

All sound rather over-the-top? Well, that's exactly what makes this a great read. Richard Lewis just goes all out, cutting to the chase without hesitation. The story moves from being an isolated death in a bedroom to a countrywide disaster at breakneck speed. And of course, the climactic scenes are wildly mad and vicious.

Yeah - you've got to love it. 153 pages of rip-roaring brilliance that had me staying up, reading reading reading.... this is what it's all about!

Pure entertainment, and exactly the reason I have decided to revive my interest in pulp horror fiction. This is the best I've read yet.

Now onto some Guy N. Smith, Cannibals I think..... Yum!

[dem bones]

I think the only 'Richard Lewis' novel that didn't quite do it for me was Pestilence which seemed rather serious, but even that had some great bits and a book-stealing performance from some snails at sea. Come to think of it, i still ain't got Spiders, but from your review it sounds well up there with The Web (Spiders 2), Devil's Coach Horse and the tremendous Night Killers (cockroaches versus London: who could resist?).

And it seems he's making a comeback, or at least, someone using the name 'Richard Lewis' has a new horror novel out Monster's Proof (Simon & Schuster, 2009) although it looks suspiciously light on killer insect content. Here's the blurb just in case.

Livey Ell is the only normal person in a family of geniuses. She's a cheerleader with an absentminded professor father and a math genius of a little brother, and she's sure that life couldn't get any weirder than it already is.

But when her little brother, Darby, brings his childhood imaginary friend Bob to life through a mathematical proof, things start to get really strange. Bob, a creature of pure math, hates chaos and disorder in any form. And as his power grows stronger, he becomes determined to fix our disorderly world in any way possible.

But that's not the only danger. People know that Bob is in our world -- including a top-secret government organization that wants to control him, and a cult of Pythagoreans who worship him.

Now Livey and Darby will need all the help they can get to stop him -- before the world as we know it is changed forever.

Monster's Proof is a horror novel that brings together pure mathematics with adventure, humor, romance, and some of the most original characters you'll ever meet.

[killercrab]

Pure entertainment, and exactly the reason I have decided to revive my interest in pulp horror fiction. This is the best I've read yet. >>

Good for you Vaughan - wanna copy of DEVIL'S COACH-HORSE by Richard Lewis free of charge? PM me your address and I'll pop it in the post.

ade

[H_P_Saucecraft]

Erm... Dem, I think you meant Parasite, Pestilence is the Edward Jarvis novel (about lampreys I think, in the to read pile at the moment).

Spiders is great & so is its sequel, The Web, shame there was never a third book (same could be said for Hutson's Slugs books). You'd think I'd leave them alone, being an arachnaphobe .

[dem bones]

Jun 26, 2009 20:02:43 GMT H_P_Saucecraft said:

Erm... Dem, I think you meant Parasite, Pestilence is the Edward Jarvis novel (about lampreys I think, in the to read pile at the moment).

Worst of it is, i must see Parasite every day of my life - it's directly in my line of vision whenever i look up from the computer screen.

[dem bones]

Arrow edition, 1987

"Eaten? What do you mean eaten? Inspector, people are not eaten in their beds in the middle of Kent!"

After a lifetime's distinguished service to the sugar industry, kindly old Dan Mason, 67, thinks it's time he and wife Mary put the lunacy of London life behind them, see out their days in the quietude of the Kent countryside. The Mason's buy remote Dragon's Farm for what the spotty young estate agent insists is a song,and Dan doesn't even wait for wife and furniture to arrive before he's tackling the garden. So there he is, digging away when he disturbs a colony of nasty looking spiders. One of the little blighters leaps at his arm and sinks its fangs in, making the normally placid Dan so outraged he stomps the creature under his heel. That night a mob of the super-evil eight-legged creatures creep inside the farmhouse, Dan's peaceful retirement is over almost as soon as it began, and we're off on another insanely readable 'Nature Is Revolting!' nasty from one of the undisputed masters of the form.

There's no messing about with Richard Lewis. Hardly have we had time to marvel at Dan's horribly discoloured, infeasibly swollen arm flailing about so dramatically than we're introduced to John Murphy, a middle-aged garage owner who has just cheated on his la-di-da wife Alison for the first time and is now driving home like a maniac to try repair the damage. The spiders have already saved him the trouble of begging forgiveness, unless he fancies unburdening his soul to the unsightly mess they've left in his bath. As it happens, John is spared the sight of her mangled corpse as the spiders' kamikaze unit finish him off the moment his car pulls into the garage.

Next up, check-out girl Suzy Carter is enjoying a sex session in the woods after dark with David Pringle, a married teacher at the school she's not long left. It takes her a while to fathom out that his orgasmic screams and shrieks are due to a third party tearing lumps of flesh from his back. Suzy is fortunate to escape with her life. A passing motorist deposits her at the police station where she sticks to her ravings about big giant spiders eating David no matter how many times the sergeant slaps her face. He reckons Suzy's making it all up so she won't get trouble from her parents - "from what I hear, she's a right little raver as they say these days" - though not feeling quite so sure of himself once he's been out to view what's left of the corpse with it's intestines hanging out all over the place and everything.

And we're still only up to p. 40!

To be very continued alongside The Day Of The Triffids

Grateful thanks to H. P. Saucecraft!

[jamesdoig]

I don't understand this spider aversion to eyeballs - surely the juiciest plum.

Nov 28, 2011 21:27:44 GMT dem bones said:

Arrow edition, 1987

[dem bones]

Nov 29, 2011 2:46:55 GMT jamesdoig said:

I don't understand this spider aversion to eyeballs - surely the juiciest plum.

That will almost certainly be down to the artist giving up in disbelief after the first page, James, because Lewis is BIG on squishy eyeball-munching, especially when a King Spider, "the size of a large crab", leaps into the fray. Anyway, so far it's been vignette upon vignette, what of the plot?

Naturally, there isn't much of one. As luck would have it, the late Dan Mason's son, Adam, is an accomplished biologist with a University lab technician for a girlfriend and a closet Arachnologist for a best friend. It takes them all of five minutes to work out what they're up against. This, alas, is of zero consolation to the Grant family. In what reads like a banned episode of Brookside, Jimmy, Sheila, their little boy Damien and tiny tot Tricia are picked off one by one is a meticulously executed home invasion.

Already Lewis has established the blueprint that will see him through the 'nasty' years and the beauty of it is, if you hate Spiders you can safely give the rest a miss, but for those of us who have a fondness for this kind of thing, you'll already be up for The Web, Devil's Coach Horse, Night Killers and the maybe-a-little-too-serious snails-on-the-rampage slow-burner, Parasite, arguably his most personal work.

[dem bones]

Spiders update. They've arrived in London, having stopped off on the way to decimate a primary school near Sevenoaks. Blackheath has come under siege - admittedly, nobody lost any sleep about that - and they've even taken out a commuter train heading for Kings Cross. Some of the more stoic Kentish farming type refused to abandon their farms to the tiny invaders, among them "a hippy community who believed that God would spare them - they were completely annihilated." Alan and his team capture one of the giant arachnids in a fire-fight - cue the hapless policeman whose protective suit proves anything but - and this seems to send out a signal to the spiders who go to ground for several weeks. "Right! Panic over! Everybody go back to your homes in London!" urge the Government. Restaurants reopen. All save the sewage workers return to work. The Royal Family come home from Canada. And the Rev. Frederick Bodley holds a standing-room only thanksgiving service in his Hampstead Church to praise God for his intervention on behalf of the faithful. This proves woefully premature when Mr. Riley strikes a bum note on his organ and the furry fiends come scuttling out from the pipes.

A thought. The 'Nature's gone berserk!' novels reached the height of their popularity during the Satanic Reign of M. Thatcher. If their time is ever to come again, when better than now while we're reliving the nightmare? If Laurence James were still with us, what's the betting he'd already have resurrected 'Richard Haigh' and his killer pigs for a war versus next year's London Olympics?

[dem bones]

Having driven virtually the entire population of London from their homes, the super-spiders begin a leisurely scuttle North devouring every living thing in their path. Other than the odd mundane nice-sex scene, Louise Roberts, Alan's lab rat girlfriend, hasn't had much of a look in so far, but that's about to change in the course of three chapters. First she drives to Manchester to pack her old mum off on a flight to a relative in Quebec. It's no easy matter leaving London. Those who've stayed behind have formed into gangs, and her car is beset by leather jacket hoodlums until she puts her foot on the gas and grinds one of them under her wheels. Her mother has only too fears: flying and being eaten alive by spiders. How lucky for her that the plane should stop at Heathrow for a refuel!

Just when all seems lost, Alan finally makes "the greatest breakthrough in the history of science." The spiders are vulnerable to Dutch flu - they don't have the correct anti-bodies to survive it. On his advice, the Prime Minister has all stray and neglected cats and dogs infected with the virus - household pets are put on standby in case the stock dries up - and lowered by helicopter among the spider armies. Unfortunately, in his excitement to go swanning off to meet the PM, Alan leaves the latch open on the cage housing 'Charlie', the enormous hunter spider who is something of an evil mastermind. Louise, diligently working off her grief over her mum's grisly demise, doesn't notice the hairy monstrosity releasing his thirty fellow captives ...

Even by Hamlyn nasty standards, they really don't come any more formulaic than Spiders, but Lewis's strengths lie in his set pieces - the arachnid invasion of the British Airways jet, the climactic showdown in the cellar of the derelict laboratory which spawned the biologically-altered spiders - and a style so unfussy it makes Michael Avallone seem like Thomas Ligotti. If he has one weakness, it's a woeful lack of bad sex action. Suzy Carter and David Pringle do their best with the obligatory al fresco grapple, but the author hasn't given them anything kinky to work with unless you include the mass participation of flesh-eating spiders as a legitimate perversion.

No matter, Spiders is highly recommended to fans of this kind of malarkey, and, of course, six years later, they would return!

The Web

[erebus]

Well after a nasty encounter in the shed with a big cousin of one of these guys ( maybe him on the cover ) I decided Hey ! its been a few years why not read SPIDERS again. And rather like the original author of this thread I had a marathon reading session and breezed through it. Its that kind of book.
Now Ive not really liked spiders from a young age. But over my later years Ive suddenly become an aracnophobe. Don't know why. My biggest fear is and always will be centipedes though, which begs the question why these critters never got in on the act back in the day ? Surely they are more plausible than flys, catterpillars and moths who had there individual rampages at some time. But back to spiders.
Dem has summed the book up wonderfully, I need not throw anything else into the plot, apart from a few incidents that stuck out for me . It is very light on sex apart from the fateful forest frolics. But early in the novel why does Lewis always refer to each females breasts as hanging a bit low or drooping etc, bit of a fetish going on there Rich ? . And also in the finale,... which is staggeringly like that of THE RATS underground cellar/basement big versions of the creatures etc....Why is it the flamethrowers always conk out in these scenarios. Yep it happens in books too as well as the films. And of course someone has to fall down the steps after slipping, its obligatory.

After the Hutson and Herbert editions to the killer creatures amok sub genre. I think Lewis is without doubt the best at it. His other works have also thrilled me. NIGHT KILLERS ( also due a revist ) was brilliant. THE DEVILS COACH HORSE the same. PARASITE was a little reserved for me but enjoyable nevertheless. I always imagine the spider attack scenes in the two books like that of the scene in Lucio Fulci's THE BEYOND ( pipecleaner legs aside ) So with that in mind I'm off to read its companion piece THE WEB. I recall liking this more than its predecessor so its going to be fun.

On another note has anyone read his novel POSSESSED ? I have not, nor do I own it. Do we have a thread on the site anywhere. I shall scour the searchbar.

[dem bones]

Mar 13, 2013 11:43:00 GMT erebus said:

I'm off to read its companion piece THE WEB. I recall liking this more than its predecessor so its going to be fun.

Thought The Web was a massive improvement on Spiders, would put that alongside Devil's Coach Horse, Rabid and the mighty Night Killers as his very best work. I think of Spiders as a case of Mr. 'Lewis' warming up for greater things. Parasite is the only one I struggled with; whereas the others are unashamed sensationalist nonsense, here he seems to have adopted a more serious approach to ecological catastrophe, words I never thought I'd get to type in connection with a novel where one of the best bits involves a gastropod kamikaze squad tightrope-walking aboard a boat with a view to blowing it up.

Possessed first appeared under his Alan Radnor byline? We've not yet had a thread for it as far as I'm aware.

[erebus]

Rabid ? What is this you speak of Dem. Total memory drain but I can't place it. Keep thinking of a Cronenberg novelisation or something. Please enlighten me.

[dem bones]

Mar 13, 2013 21:56:18 GMT erebus said:

Rabid ? What is this you speak of Dem. Total memory drain but I can't place it. Keep thinking of a Cronenberg novelisation or something. Please enlighten me.

Yes, amazing as it seems ....

Rabid

[erebus]

Getting back to Possessed. Ive had a wander over to ebay to pick one up. What seems strange though is in each of the three auctions for the book, It says there are only 32 pages in the novel. Surely this is an error. Ive seen the book around on stalls years back, but recall it being your average 190 odd page standard book. Now after seeing this Ive started to doubt myself. 32 pages....Surely not !