Mark Ronson - Bloodthirst

[franklinmarsh]

Bloodthirst - Mark Ronson. Hamlyn 1979. For Robert.

A gruesome evil survives three hundred years.

'In theyear 1610 the Countess Elizabeth Bathori was walled up alive in her castle for having murdered 650 young girls on order to bathe in their blood. But was her evil influence really dead?
Over three centuries later, in wartime Hungary, the German offensive had become a dismal retreat. During their flight a small band of Panzers took refuge in a ruined crypt. And there they were discovered - and massacred.
Their death lets loose on the modern world a timeless horror which will claim many victims before its bloodthirst is quenched...'

Hey! Another Ronson! It's really not very good, but that's beside the point. As in this best of this bosh it moves quickly, there's always something going on and there's gallons of red stuff (but it's still not as OTT as some of the real classics.)

The blurb above is a little misleading. After a ridiculous but short meaningless prologue, chapter one is indeed a mini-Sven Hassel/Leo Kessler adventure, as a small party of German troops retreat from Russia in WWII. They hole up in a ruined mausoleum, to shield their fire from Ivan eyes, despite one of their number warning that its bad luck to stay in a grave. A coffin within the mausoleum has been dislodged and the lid askew, revealing a small child, perfectly preserved.
The Germans are killed by Russian troops who've crept up silently. Blood from a severed throat drips into the child's coffin...
Chapter two and we're whisked to 1979 and the London Hospital for Diseases of the Nervous System. Sir Henry Beresford is leading a party around, trying to drum up funding.
They meet up with Dr Peter Pilgrim who, with the aid of a Lord Foundation fellowship, is conducting an investigation into the causes of narcolepsy (and hoping to seduce French stunner Anne-Marie Clair, much to the delight of stereotypical rugby-and-booze-obsessed Welsh colleague, Dr Tudor Owens, who's apparently making a book on Pete's chances of success.)
Hospital orderly Lionel Tedworth wheels new narcoleptic, Scandinavian child Britt down for an ECG. Is the machine on the blink? The readings are coming up blank.
'She can't be neither alive nor dead,' says Lionel sagely, and then buzzes off to visit paralysed car crash victim Jennifer, who's wondering if the room containing her life support machine is haunted.
Lionel next slips back to check on Britt, and his thought processes reveal he's had some problems in the past with little girls. Britt wakens, kisses his throat, and Lionel's unexpected pleasure turns to unexpected pain as the kiss becomes a bite, and Britt drinks his blood.

More to come.

[franklinmarsh]

Pete gets a date with Anne-Marie at Villa Dei Cesari (the cabbie dropping them off moans about the Black September hi-jack).
Next day Pete gets to meet Britt's dad, August Hallstrom, who explains that they were holdaying in a remote part of Lapland when his daughter was attacked by a cloud of large mosquitos. Luckily, there was a medical centre nearby to treat her injuries and give her a blood tranfusion.
Afterward, Britt fell into 'trances', became inordinately interested in and inappropriately affectionate with boys, older men, young women, and lopped the head off her favourite kitten...

[dem]

Mark Ronson - Bloodthirst (Hamlyn, 1979)

Photography: Oliver Hunter

Blurb:
In the year 1610 the Countess Elizabeth Bathori was walled up alive in her castle for having murdered 650 young girls in order to bathe in their blood. But was her evil influence really dead?
Over three centuries later, in wartime Hungary, the German offensive had become a dismal retreat. During their flight a small band of Panzers took refuge in a ruined crypt. And there they were discovered – and massacred.
Their death lets loose on the modern world a timeless horror which will claim
many victims before its bloodthirst is quenched...

Not keen on that cover photograph. Reminds me of the weedy 'horror' clip-art used to come bundled in with site building software. Anyway.

Opens with a party of six bedraggled remnants of the routed Panzer division breaking into a huge marble vault to use as shelter from the Russian winter. One of the sarcophagi is open, revealing the perfectly preserved corpse of a boy. Corporal Hans Bauer applies his sausage fingers to removing a silver plaque from the coffin, whereupon three Ivan burst in and take out his colleagues in a hail of machine gun fire. Bauer survives to have his throat slit by their leader. His blood splashes down into the open coffin.

Cut to the present day and the children's ward of the London Hospital for Diseases of the Nervous System. Star patient is the little Swedish girl, Britt Hallström, who is suffering from a narcoleptic condition bordering on catalepsy. Her brainwaves don't register on the EEG scanner. "It's as though we're trying to get a response from a corpse." Meanwhile Dr. Peter Pilgrim, the man whose trendy turtle-neck sweater is frowned upon by creepy orderly Lionel Tedworth as an affront to the medical profession, is making progress with new arrival Sister Anne-Marie Clair, aka "the ice maiden." Dr. Tudor Owen, official Hospital lothario, informs Peter there's a tidy sum been wagered on whether or not he will thaw out the frosty "French bird."

Lionel Tedworth's fondness for little girls once got him into trouble, but that's all behind him now. Not that it would do any harm to give the one they call "the sleeping beauty" a little peck on the lips ... Britt is happy to let him do so. She wraps her arms around him, nuzzles up to his neck, sinks her teeth in. Turns out she has a recent history of such violent attacks. Her father believes the condition originates from a family holiday in Lapland where Britt was set upon by a swarm of evil mosquito. As the night nurse dozes, Britt visits the beds of six children in turn and bites their necks goodnight. Her condition is contagious.

Holly Archer is a reporter on Revue, a best-selling weekly paper peddling 'Blood, Sex & Royalty.' The secret of the editor's success? He dreams up scareheads then tasks the staff writers to provide a semi-factual story to fit. This week's provisional front page headline is the corking "Public Copulation Saved My Marriage," hence Holly's impromptu tour of Copenhagen's sex clubs.

TBC.

Of the admittedly few novels I've read this year, it's Mark Ronson's Plague Pit stands out as the most endearingly deranged. Early days, but already Bloodthirst is shaping up as another Hamlyn classic. Please God, let rock gods Mandy Devine & The Strippers find time to put in an appearance!

[dem]

Even by his own exuberant standards, Mr. Ronson is throwing everything into this one. Horror upon horror. Am struggling to keep up.

So, Holly on an all-expenses in the steamy "sex-fun capital of the world." The author lets us in on a 'shock!-horror!' revelation worthy of Revue. Despite her flair for the sordid story, Holly has yet to surrender her virginity - at least, she had until tonight. Holly attends a live show at a suitably seedy theatre. Despite her reservations, she finds it quite a turn on, so much so that she lets down her guard and puts up little resistance when accosted by the gent in the next seat. Before she can make sense of what's happening, the young reporter has been whisked out of the theatre and into his waiting limo. It's like she's under a spell.

Back at the hospital, Britt and her fellow vampire infants binge on the day's plasma samples.

Lionel Tedworth enrols with "Call me Sam"s Bloomsbury Human Communications Centre, a self-help group for those who feel chronically uncomfortable in the presence of their fellow man. We had Lionel down as a perennial hard luck story, but this night he's hit the jackpot. Call-me-Sam pairs him with sex-starved Sylvia who coyly invites him back to her place for coffee. It's a mutually fulfilling situation. Sylvia gets the nymphomaniac within ("'From the back,' she commanded"), Lionel gets busy with a scalpel. Its a win-win situation, both parties ecstatic - until Lionel's sudden insatiable thirst for blood runs away with him.

Frail old Mrs. Kiss, who fled from Csejthe to London during the war, is offed in her Notting Hill flat by a mystery caller claiming to be a lawyer. Mrs Kiss recognises her visitor as Gyorgy, the waif she took in during the war, and knows him for what he is - the vampire who did for her husband and daughter.

Hospital again. In a moment of lucidity, a remorseful Lionel pens a sad farewell note, and visits the bathroom for the last time. A paralysed former Olympic swimmer dies when an intruder bites through the respiratory tube connecting her to the iron lung. VIP visitor Dr. Axel Stromberg, the Swedish expert on narcoleptic disorders, is non-fatally stabbed by persons unknown. Finally, Sir Henry Beresford is unimpressed with Dr. Pilgrim's slow progress in diagnosing the Britt monster's condition. "Your last paper reads more like an essay on science fiction."

All this, and according to the blurb, we still have Countess Bathori to come.

[dem]

.... no sign of the blood countess as yet, but Ton Ton zombies and bullfighting gypsies have been added to the mix just in case anyone was in danger of comprehending the plot.

Sir Henry Bereseford is allergic to "cranks" so no surprise when Dr. Pilgrim is persuaded to take an extended gardening leave. He and Anne-Marie holiday in France. Driving through the countryside they're overtaken by a madwoman who veers off the road and crashes. It's Holly Archer, evidently stoned out of her mind. Holly tags along on an excursion to Maries de la Mar where they befriend Bruno Farina, the world famous photographer. Bruno takes an instant attraction to Holly and vice versa, but she daren't get too involved .... A fortune teller refuses to read her palm and puts the word around her people that the Englishwoman is "Upier."

While the rest of his people prepare their stakes, one young gypsy steals away from the camp and stalks Holly to the beach. This fellow has no time for stupid peasant superstitions - vampires! werewolves! women's lib! This is the 20th century for crying out loud! Holly suffers herself to be raped by the clown before putting the bite on him.

Dr. Pilgrim catches Anne-Marie with the beach bum who has been trailing them ever since they arrived in town. Her husband! "Wait, Peter! I can explain everything!" He doesn't stick around to hear it.

Back in London, Peter hands in his resignation and goes to ground on Harrow Hill to consider his options, one of which is an invitation from Dr. Axel Stromberg to come work for him. Stromberg has recently opened a clinic on the shores of Lake Inari devoted to the study of extreme cases of psychosis.

A visit from Bruno decides him. The lovestruck lens-man has tied together all the strands and identified the culprit behind all the vampire atrocities. 'Gyorgy,' son of Countess Bathori, is undead and well and bringing disgrace upon Peter's profession. And poor Holly and Anne-Marie have been recruited to his workforce!

So, just as we suspected all along, all roads lead to Lapland!

Peter accepts Stromberg's job offer. Arriving at the Ivalo waterfront he's welcomed aboard Stromberg's private fjord cruiser (The Vlad) by Saturday, Stromberg's glamorous Haitian personal assistant, previous employer Papa 'Doc' Duvalier ...

"But Peter, this is so like a Poe story - I cannot believe it!"

I wouldn't go that far, Madamoiselle Clair, but I take your point.

Forty pages to go!

[dem]

Well that will teach Stromberg to go building a place of evil on a sacred site! Good old Uutsi and his Lapp guerilla army! If only they'd entered the story 150 pages earlier they'd have saved everyone a lot of grief.

Writing in his excellent annotated bibliography, The Transylvania Library (Borgo Press, 1993), Greg Cox hails Bloodthirst a late 'seventies equivalent of J. U. Nicolson's A Finger Of Fear except he doesn't mean it as a compliment. "Bits and pieces for everyone, but nothing that fits together" is perhaps harsh, but not entirely unreasonable - the novel is maybe a little too busy for it's own good (though, sadly, not busy enough to fit in a plug for Ms. Devine & The Strippers). Some ace set pieces, mind, and the hint-of-a-sequel pay off is mildly sinister, but Plague Pit still rules supreme in my book.

[ripper]

I bought copies of a number of Ronson titles when I was on a serious 80s horror nasties kick in the early 2000s, including Bloodthirst. I read one of his--Ogre or Ghoul--and was a bit disappointed and haven't gotten round to reading Bloodthirst. After Dem's excellent summary I am in two minds. It sounds a bit too crazy for my tastes, yet I can forgive a bit of craziness if the book is swimming in gore and laced with lurid s*x scenes a la Guy N. Smith. So.....