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Post by dem on Jul 1, 2008 18:25:46 GMT
James Montague - Worms (Futura, 1979) Blurb: The Norfolk coast made for a perfect holiday — as long as the sun still shone.
But when the rain came, the creatures left the shadows...
WORMS
Spectres from the past tortured James Hildebrand's mind. His blackest nightmares were crowded with malevolent, coiling images of decay.
Then, suddenly, he knew the threat was real.
WORMS
The dead alone could not quench their hunger. And, for the living, the horrors that fed and multiplied in the darkness of the night became more terrible with the
dawn... The narrator, Mr. Hildebrand, is obviously unhinged. Joylessly married, he finally rebels when he and his wife are stranded at an inn in Blanely, Norfolk after their boating holiday goes tits up. She's all for returning to London, but he insists on staying put. Wandering into town, he visits an estate agents on a whim and has all but immediately agreed to buy a run-down property. The snag is, he needs his wife's inheritance to pay for it. He decides the best way to go about things is to take her out for the day and get her drunk, but when she realises what he's after she sneers at him, recites a roll call of all his faults as a man and vows he'll never get a penny of her money. This isn't advisable in the circumstances, as Hildebrand has recently been fantasising about murdering her. One gory death and cremation later, and Hildebrand has moved into his dream home, but he's still miserable. Visions of his wife's corpse and finding all these worms everywhere - in the boat-house, the cellar, his cooking utensils, etc. - are making his life a living hell. And there's something odd about Blanely. It never seems to stop raining and the church is inordinately cold. When Hildebrand mentions this to the vicar, the old boy changes the subject and directs him to an engraving on a tomb which he tells him are; "The worms of Hell. They rear in pursuit of the souls of the deceased". I don't think Hildebrand is gonna see this book out somehow. ************* Part II gets off to a flier when the authorities sneakily erect a nuclear reactor on Blanely marshes. "The worms won't like that" mutters Hildebrand as he enlists as secretary for the villagers' action committee. On the contrary, they take to it rather too well. I've no need to spell out what happens, but the author gets most of his novel out of the way before the slippery little customers finally wreak havoc. For a time, they disappear from the action altogether and the novel mutates into a psycho thriller, although you sense them in the background, still plotting their mischief. The characters of the main players are better drawn than we're used to, and the legend associated with the coffins in the church adds a feasible black magic angle to the proceedings if you want to go with it. There's still (what I consider to be - you maybe disagree) the trademark genre flaw: you don't really get to know anybody other than the narrator, so when somebody dies it's a bit "so what, I didn't care much about them anyway." Strange how these things turn out. I was expecting, indeed, hoping I'd chanced on a Z-list sub- Slugs atrocity, but this pitch-black comedy is actually a skillfully handled stab at the exploitation market and very entertaining on its own terms. If there's a 'When Insects Attack!' novel for people who hate 'When Insects Attack!' novel's, Worms is probably it! ************* Way back when we first had a look at Worms, we had a game of spot the pseudonym behind author 'James Montague' and came up with MRJ enthusiast Jack Adrian as our prime suspect. Since then we've had the impeccable Paperback Fanatic guide to the creepy crawly 'nasties wherein Justin fingers the culprit as regular 2000 AD story-writer Chris Lowder ..... who often uses the name .... 'Jack Adrian'!
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Post by jkdunham on Jul 1, 2008 18:54:01 GMT
Way back when we first had a look at Worms, we had a game of spot the pseudonym behind author 'James Montague' and came up with MRJ enthusiast Jack Adrian as our prime suspect. Since then we've had the impeccable Paperback Fanatic guide to the creepy crawly 'nasties wherein Justin fingers the culprit as regular 2000 AD story-writer Chris Lowder ..... who often uses the name .... 'Jack Adrian'! And who went on to co-write the first of the long-running Deathlands series with Laurence James. And not only that, apart from his work on 2000 AD, 'Jack Adrian' also wrote for Action, where he produced the greatest strip ever to appear in a British comic; Kids Rule O.K.There's still (what I consider to be - you maybe disagree) the trademark genre flaw: you don't really get to know anybody other than the narrator, so when somebody dies it's a bit "so what, I didn't care much about them anyway." How can you say that, Dem? Surely, as laid down by James Herbert in the bible of 'When Animals Get A Bit Pissed Off' books, i.e. The Rats, each victim gets a whole chapter devoted to a potted history of their miserable lives up to the point where they get eaten. Are you saying that in Worms the victims aren't even afforded the dignity of a mini-biography before they get turned into a bloody pulp? |
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Post by dem on Jul 1, 2008 21:13:36 GMT
How can you say that, Dem? Surely, as laid down by James Herbert in the bible of 'When Animals Get A Bit Pissed Off' books, i.e. The Rats, each victim gets a whole chapter devoted to a potted history of their miserable lives up to the point where they get eaten. Are you saying that in Worms the victims aren't even afforded the dignity of a mini-biography before they get turned into a bloody pulp? I dunno. I saw Worms looking all lonely at the old place and felt sorry for it so I rehoused it with it's friends. Curse this compulsive streak that dooms me to re-post & re-post & re-post my inane musings for eternity! Jack Adrian. How many of them were there or rather, who else other than the aforementioned used the name? I just posted up the details of his collection of 'lost' E. F. Benson stories, The Flint Knife, and whichever version of Jack put that one together got into a terrible temper with Hugh Lamb and Cynthia Reavell in Ghosts & Scholars over it. A ghastly business. I must select the juicy bits for Vault.  |
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Post by pulphack on Jul 1, 2008 22:00:28 GMT
there's on;y one Jack Adrian, and that's Chris Lowder. he began his career fresh out of school by penning The Abductors, a mayflower SBL which was published as by desmond reid, with no revisions, for which he lost half the cash...
despite this harsh introduction to fleetway, he worked on comics for years, and as steve says he was also an ardent paperback pulp writer.
he's also very keen on popular fiction, late-victorian to wwII. so besides his horror anthology work, he's also edited collections of work by the likes of Dornford Yates and Edgar Wallace (even unearthing the original and fairly different US magazine version of EW's The Northing Tramp) and had a heavy hand in Dent's late eighties series of classic crime and thrillers.
he was also a member of the London Old Boys Book Club for years, because of his love of sexton blake and papers like the magnet and gem, and there are certainly a lot of members who recall his eccentricities with - er - apprehension (the same can be said of mike moorcock, who was apparently thrwon bodily out of a meeting by the then chairman. we've also numbered david baddiel and the late george sewell as members in our time!).
he's writen under a number of names - he did some horror p/b's as jack hamilton teed in the late seventies (a name derived from old blake writer GH Teed) - but there truly is only the one JA, and that's mr L.
illness curtailed his ouput in the late eighties, and recently he seems to move in more literary climes. he always seemed to have an ambivalent attitude to pulp, loving it but hating editorial parsimony and interference with people's work, and also bemoanng the fact that the great writing was swamped by the hack. (surely that depends on how you define the terms? anyway...)
fascinating bloke, by all accounts, and capable of some decent writing - but for me, his strength is really as an editor, anthologist, and pulp fiction analyst via his introductions.
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Post by dem on Jul 1, 2008 22:56:34 GMT
Ah, thanks ever so for that, pulps! Yes, certainly a fascinating fellow and an incredibly versatile one at that. 'Jack Hamilton Teed' is a new name on me but seems very much the kind of guy I should and will look out for. Looking back through some of my small press publications, it's amazing the busy authors who took time to pen protests when a review didn't quite match their own judgement of their work. Gerald Suster gives some poor bastard both barrels for his appraisal of one of his non-fiction titles in Udolpho and Mr. Adrian was clearly furious to be reminded that Hugh Lamb had already resurrected one of E. F. Benson's uncollected stories ( The Chippendale Mirror: the basis for the Googie Withers installment of Dead Of Night no less!) for Forgotten Tales Of Terror. Oh, and we mustn't forget he also wrote The Independent's Peter Haining obituary. |
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Post by jkdunham on Jul 1, 2008 23:17:20 GMT
'Jack Hamilton Teed' is a new name on me but seems very much the kind of guy I should and will look out for. , Mills & Boon 1977, seems like one you should add to your list. |
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Post by allthingshorror on Jul 2, 2008 7:50:11 GMT
 THE BLOOD OF DRACULA By Jack Hamilton Teed
Mills and Boon/ Venture Books 1977.The Horrific trail across England in Search of a small glass phial containing blood - blood that had once flowed through the veins of the Lord of the Vampires.One of those 20p in the charity shop buys - unlike the £10 I paid for it's other Mills and Boon brother, The Hound of Frankenstein by Peter Tremayne. At 96 pages, The Blood of Dracula is only slightly longer than those Famous Five books I dipped into when I was nine or so. I had the book read in just over an hour and even though the book has some prose you just have a giggle over and then re-read to your bemused but uninterested other half... His mind was a turmoil of thoughts as he gazed down at the ghastly scene - as the hideous creature sucked and gobbled greedily at Digger's torn throatIt does try so hard to read like a horror crossed with a pulpy noir tome - with the lead Von Ballim trying to do his best to outwit the most fearsome Vampire of them all. Not bad for an afternoons read, but Hound of Frankenstein piddles all over this one. |
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Post by dem on Jul 2, 2008 10:34:48 GMT
Not bad for an afternoons read, but Hound of Frankenstein piddles all over this one. Ah, but Hound Of Frankenstein pisses over just about everything! Arguably the nearest thing I've read to a literary equivalent of a Hammer film. He gets it so right! Thanks for the review, Johnny. I note that curt has also *ahem* raved (" ... I wouldn't recommend taking the trouble to track it down ...") about BLOOD OF DRACULA at the indispensable Beyond the Groovy Age of Horror |
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Post by allthingshorror on Jul 2, 2008 13:15:19 GMT
want to borrow it dem?
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Post by dem on Jul 2, 2008 16:09:36 GMT
Thanks for the kind offer Johnny but I'll decline as I don't encourage loaning books on here, mainly because you're only a postal misdelivery away from one party being left furious and the other cringemakingly embarrassed. The 'system' we have - people picking up spare copies to swap or give away when they see 'em going cheap - has served us well so far and seems the best way to continue. But thanks again.
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Post by allthingshorror on Oct 23, 2008 8:16:06 GMT
Got a letter back from Jack Hamilton Teed/ Jack Adrian/Chris Lowder. This is what he has to say on Worms.
I'm afraid I'm going to have to let you down on this one John with a heavy thump. I'm afraid I'm not the author of Worm's - and could only hazard a guess at who wrote it. Are you sure it's not one of Guy Smiths efforts that he's decided to keep to himself?
Hmmm - back to the drawing board. I do have a cracking interview with Jack Teed though - give me a week and I'll put it up.
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Post by allthingshorror on Oct 23, 2008 8:31:31 GMT
Oh - and here's something else that people may or may not know about - TWO other Mills and Boon horror books other than the Dracula and Frankenstein ones?
Adam, by Fred Baker (can't find a copy anywhere)
The Big Deep by Frank Pepper (found a cheap copy - think there's one left on abebooks.com)
Does anyone know anything else about these books and their authors?
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Post by dem on Oct 23, 2008 8:52:31 GMT
Hmmm - back to the drawing board. I do have a cracking interview with Jack Teed though - give me a week and I'll put it up. Both pulphack and Justin (in the classic Paperback Fanatic 'When Animals Attack' issue) are insistent that Worms is the work of Chris Lowder and that's good enough for me, but i'm glad to be able to exonerate Mr. Tweed altogether and I apologise for ever blaming him! Great news about the interview, John! |
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Post by allthingshorror on Oct 23, 2008 17:21:06 GMT
As I have a free evening tonight (!) I'll get it down tonight and post it on the website. Will put up the link when it's done.
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Post by allthingshorror on Oct 23, 2008 21:39:04 GMT
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