Michel Parry - The Rivals Of King Kong

[dem]

Michel Parry (ed.) - The Rivals Of King Kong: A Rampage Of Beasts (Corgi, 1977)

Are you ready to be frightened out of your gorilla skin?

Introduction - Michel Parry

Philip Jose Farmer - After King Kong Fell
H. Rider-Haggard - The Monster God
Hugh B. Cave - The Cult Of The White Ape
Howard Waldrop - Dr. Hudson’s Secret Gorilla
Joseph F. Pumilia - The Myth Of The Ape God
Karl E. Wagner & David Drake - Killer
Kit Reed - The Attack Of The Giant Baby
Henry Kuttner - Beauty And The Beast
P. Schulyer-Miller - Spawn
Robert Silverberg - The Day The Monsters Broke Loose
Steven Utley - Deviation From A Theme

Another book in the background. Of the Michel Parry titles I have copies of, this is the one I've read least. Most likely I never did get right through it as only Hugh B. Cave's Cult Of The White Ape has stuck in the memory and that vaguely. Of course, as any James Moffat masochist will tell you King Kong only ever really had one serious rival, Queen Kong, but let's dip in and see what we will see.

Howard Waldrop - Dr. Hudson’s Secret Gorilla: "So, I have succeeded. You helped with the operation, you saw! A man's brain in the body of a gorilla. He lives!" A promising start! Roger Lidell is fatally mangled in a car wreck near the home of professional mad scientist Dr. Hudson, who scoops out his still-living brain and get it home to the lab. Assisted by his evil crony Tuleg ("He reminded me of Rondo Hatton, the Creeper. He did not need acromegaly. He was an ugly man."). Hudson believes his experiment will make him one of the immortals. Tuleg, being a sexual sadist, is only really in it for pizza and scorching the gorilla-man with a cattle prod when his master isn't around.

Hudson has a beautiful daughter, Blanche, who is appalled by what her loving but deranged parent has done. Blanche's kindness brings out the Kong in Roger, but unfortunately, her body brings out something worse in Tuleg. When the professor dies raving, the monster strips, murders and rapes Blanche (in that order). The latter action keeps him distracted long enough for Roger to swipe his keys and let himself out of the cage. One shredded Tuleg later, and the world's most intelligent and dangerous gorilla is loose to do battle with the world!

Kit Reed - The Attack Of The Giant Baby: A secret laboratory in New York City. Dr. Johan Freilberg has been left in charge of Leonard, his fourteen month old son for the day, so where better to keep an eye on him than his workplace? As Freilberg potters among his test-tubes, Leonard gobbles down a rejected culture from a clumsily discarded petri dish, lets himself out of the complex and goes walkabout in Riverside Park, much to the distress of a courting couple, a mugger and an unfortunate stray dog ....

[dem]

Hugh B. Cave - Cult Of The White Ape: Matthew Betts, a representative of an important rubber company, arrives drunk at a village in the M'Boto hills where he immediately upsets the natives by lashing out at their ancient witch-doctor, Kodagi. Lyle Varicks, a Belgian Government agent, tries to keep the peace, warning Betts that here in the Congo rain-belt, he cannot mistreat the natives, many of whom are members of the feared Bakanzenzi cannibal cult. Out of respect to Varicks, Kodagi lets Betts be until he willfully desecrates a sacred woodland glade where the Bakanzenzi worship the Goddess Astarte, the punishment for which is death. Not nice death, but death by mauling at the claws of the white were-apes ...

There's also a romantic sub-plot involving Varicks and Betts's wife, Lucilia ("slim, flower-faced and so very lovely ..."), who needless to say, spends much of the story either being beaten by her brutal swine of a husband, tied-up and left for gorilla meat or fainting. Splendid if, admittedly, slightly absurd stuff.

Philip Jose Farmer - After King Kong Fell: "The dead Kong did not look as big or as dignified as in the movie. He was spread out more like an ape skin rug than a body, and blood and bowels and their contents were splashed all around him."

Tim Howller was thirteen at the time. He'd gone with his parents to visit Uncle Nate and Aunt Thea who lived near the top of the Empire State. The marriage was not a happy one and, when Thea cried off their proposed visit to a Times Square theatre claiming a headache, they had another blazing argument. Tim was even more upset and embarrassed than his parents. To him, Aunt Thea out-beautiful-ed even Fay Ray and he'd been having fantasies about her for some time. So, Thea stayed behind as Nate, putting a brave face on things, treated his relatives to an audience with the Eighth Wonder of the World. When Kong, tormented by the flashbulbs, broke loose from his shackles, Tim was knocked unconscious in the riot, eventually staggering away when the ambulance crews arrived to remove the injured and the dead. He witnessed the swatted bi-plane crashing to the street and bursting into flames; and he was in the crowd who converged around the gorilla's corpse at the foot of the Empire State Building.

In the ensuing chaos, Carl "It was beauty killed the beast" Denham called in a taxidermist - he was determined to take Kong on tour one way or another - only to become embroiled in an unseemly squabble with lawyers acting on behalf of the air-force, the Empire State, the transit system of Manhattan, and other injured parties, all of whom staked a claim to the body. Ann Darrow announced her intention to sue Denham for $10m for "various physical indignities and injuries suffered during her two abductions" and, this being a Farmer story, Grandpa Howller speculates at length as to whether the implications of the former were even possible.

Finally, when the crane hoisted Kong's broken body from the street, the onlookers were treated to a ghoulish thrill they weren't expecting ...

This is an excellent opener. Recently read Farmer's My Father, The Ripper in Michel Parry's Jack The Knife which is fun if not quite as well rounded as After King Kong Fell. It's an extract from Farmer's novel A Feast Unknown, narrated by 'Lord Grandrith' who has done everything possible to keep his late step-father's diary a secret from that pesky biographer (Edgar Rice Burroughs). The diary tells of the dreadful night in foggy Whitechapel when Alexandra Appelthwaite bravely confronted her husband, John Cloamby, pleading with him to give himself up. Cloamby, a woman-hating maniac recently escaped from a cell in Cumberland Castle, raped her for her trouble. Cloamby/ Jack The Ripper began his reign of terror shortly afterward. Alexandra left England for Africa with his brother and her lover, James, the Viscount Grandrith, where she gave birth to Tarzan within months of their arrival!

[droogie]

Hello all! Can anyone explain why this particular book fetches high prices? Was it withdrawn due to the topless woman on the cover? I know it's tough to find but cannot figure out why. Thanks!

[Michael Connolly]

May 12, 2019 15:01:42 GMT droogie said:

Hello all! Can anyone explain why this particular book fetches high prices? Was it withdrawn due to the topless woman on the cover? I know it's tough to find but cannot figure out why. Thanks!

I've never seen a copy of it. But then, I've never looked for a copy of it.

[dem]

May 12, 2019 15:01:42 GMT droogie said:

Hello all! Can anyone explain why this particular book fetches high prices? Was it withdrawn due to the topless woman on the cover? I know it's tough to find but cannot figure out why. Thanks!

I doubt it was withdrawn, and certainly not on account of the cover painting. According to Michel, it coincided with the rise of the blockbuster novel: Corgi & Co. lost interest in publishing/ promoting "little" books (i.e., those that sold respectable numbers) so, presumably, once they'd shifted the initial print run, they killed it.

[Dr Strange]

There's an article from Book and Magazine Collector in 2003 here that puts the going rate for Rivals of Kong at £10-£12 - link

There really is no explaining the prices asked for some books by online traders these days, other than they are just chancing their arms.

[helrunar]

Hi Dr Strange, I've wondered for years just what the explanation is for these freak prices one sees now, often for common trade paperbacks of the 1970s and 1980s or even more recent. I forget just when I first noticed the crazy prices but I'm pretty sure it was on Am a zombie "vendor" listings.

I always think that the dealer can't possibly have the title in stock, because booksellers, by definition, want to move their stock. I mean old paperbacks of the 1970s aren't really objects of the antiquarian book trade. Are they?

I figured seeing $299 or $499 or $799 or even more extreme for such a book was some stepped-up dealer's idea of a "search fee."

cheers, Helrunar

[mcannon]

May 13, 2019 14:58:24 GMT dem said:

May 12, 2019 15:01:42 GMT droogie said:

Hello all! Can anyone explain why this particular book fetches high prices? Was it withdrawn due to the topless woman on the cover? I know it's tough to find but cannot figure out why. Thanks!

I doubt it was withdrawn, and certainly not on account of the cover painting. According to Michel, it coincided with the rise of the blockbuster novel: Corgi & Co. lost interest in publishing/ promoting "little" books (i.e., those that sold respectable numbers) so, presumably, once they'd shifted the initial print run, they killed it.

That's interesting. I had always assumed that the horrendous prices listed for "Rivals of King Kong" was the result of it being somehow hideously rare, at least in comparison to the earlier "Rivals of Frankenstein" and "Rivals of Dracula" volumes.

I was lucky enough to buy a copy of "Kong" in a regular second-hand bookshop for about its cover price, years before I discovered how expensive it could be (I always like to remember bargains like that whenever I pay ludicrously inflated prices for some crumbling old paperback). That's still the only copy I've spotted "in the wild" though, while I've seen quite a few Frankensteins and Draculas for sale at quite reasonable prices over the years.

Mark

[droogie]

Thanks for the info. so far. I figured it probably had a really low print run, and any returned copies got destroyed instead of being let loose on the 2nd hand market. I'm not sure how the UK publishers worked those things out.

[Dr Strange]

May 13, 2019 19:25:07 GMT helrunar said:

Hi Dr Strange, I've wondered for years just what the explanation is for these freak prices one sees now, often for common trade paperbacks of the 1970s and 1980s or even more recent. I forget just when I first noticed the crazy prices but I'm pretty sure it was on Am a zombie "vendor" listings.

I always think that the dealer can't possibly have the title in stock, because booksellers, by definition, want to move their stock. I mean old paperbacks of the 1970s aren't really objects of the antiquarian book trade. Are they?

I figured seeing $299 or $499 or $799 or even more extreme for such a book was some stepped-up dealer's idea of a "search fee."

cheers, Helrunar

It's The Madness of Crowds. At the end of the day, the dollar worth of something is whatever someone is willing to pay for it. I think there very probably are people paying these prices, but they keep quiet about it afterwards out of embarrassment.

[helrunar]

I'm curious whether anybody actually does pay $399.00 or whatever it is for, say, a 1960s horror anthology paperback from the US or the UK. None of my business, really. I just thought the prices were on there from people who have decided to set this type of amount as a "search fee."  Or robots---I've read that there are imposter booksellers posting on various sites, including Am a Zombie.

In the interests of full disclosure, last year I paid $25 for a copy of the gorgeous UK paperback edition of Stewart Farrar's Serpent of Lilith. It was great fun--read like an unfilmed Hammer screenplay, and has a beautiful cover painting, so I have no regrets. For me, that represented a mid-level splurge.

cheers, Helrunar

[Dr Strange]

May 14, 2019 20:31:26 GMT helrunar said:

I just thought the prices were on there from people who have decided to set this type of amount as a "search fee."  Or robots---.

I don't know, but I just can't see much point in offering to sell a book that you don't have. If it's that rare, how are you ever going to find one?

[mcannon]

May 14, 2019 20:31:26 GMT helrunar said:

I'm curious whether anybody actually does pay $399.00 or whatever it is for, say, a 1960s horror anthology paperback from the US or the UK. None of my business, really. I just thought the prices were on there from people who have decided to set this type of amount as a "search fee."  Or robots---I've read that there are imposter booksellers posting on various sites, including Am a Zombie.

In the interests of full disclosure, last year I paid $25 for a copy of the gorgeous UK paperback edition of Stewart Farrar's Serpent of Lilith. It was great fun--read like an unfilmed Hammer screenplay, and has a beautiful cover painting, so I have no regrets. For me, that represented a mid-level splurge.

cheers, Helrunar

While I've paid multiples of the original cover price for many a purchase, in most cases that's simply factoring in years or decades of inflation. I can think of only a small handful of times that I've paid what I've acknowledged as "silly prices" for old books. The most notable examples in recent years were a 1960s Charles Birkin paperback collection and an original Arkham House edition of Manly Wade Wellman's "Who Fears the Devil?" Even then the amounts I paid were fractions of some of the asking prices I've seen for the same items. For the most part I'm pretty stingy.

Actually, the way to get me to pay through the nose is to dangle an old comic or children's book in front of me that I had as a kid. I'm a terminal nostalgic when it comes to things like that.....

Mark

[humgoo]

May 13, 2019 19:25:07 GMT helrunar said:

I always think that the dealer can't possibly have the title in stock, because booksellers, by definition, want to move their stock.

Yeah, these "sellers" seem to be known as bookjackers, as explained in the following article:

www.zubalbooks.com/article-bookjacking.jsp

They don't have any book, and their "catalogue" is generated by a programme. So they never show the books' pictures, and never provide any specific descriptions. The practice seems to be some kind of "arbitrage" (if that's the right financial term). After buying books for a while on the net, one can't help becoming aware of these "jackers".

[helrunar]

Wow, humgoo. I've been looking for something that would explain this practice for a long time! Not surprised that some kind of software (and perhaps robots) is involved.

Thanks!

Helrunar