William Essex - From Below

[kooshmeister]

Nice of him to write the book's title in his own blood as he's dragged down to his death.

From Below is a novel by John Tigges (writing as "William Essex"), who brought us such classics as The Pack and Slime. But this time, instead of ravenous dogs or living lakes of toxic waste, the horror destined to descend upon the hapless town of Riverside is giant leeches. The basic setup is that a bunch of ordinary leeches are living in a pond near an electric substation. During a storm, lightning hits the substation and this somehow causes the leeches to grow bigger, become really mean and leave their little pond home and begin oozing their way to the nearest town, Riverside. Of note is how maliciously destructive the author is to the local wildlife during this opening scene. When lightning hits a tree, it causes birds to explode in clouds of feathers and a raccoon to become fried and his eyes to sizzle and pop out of their sockets. Jeez, we haven't even gotten to the leech attacks and already this book is violent as hell.

Anyway, in Riverside there's some big to-do at the town council. The mayor's brother-in-law has been elected to a position left vacant when the last guy died and this just plain smacks of nepotism. Our hero is a reporter who is suffering from PTSD from his time in Vietnam when the Viet Cong locked him in leech-infested pits. He frequently suffers horrifying nightmares about leeches crawling all over him. I guess he's gonna have to learn to confront his fears or something. Anyway, Tigges wastes no time in getting to the gooey goods with the leeches infesting the town's badly kept storm drains, emerging mostly at night to ooze into homes and attack unsuspecting people, leaving behind nothing but slimy skeletons (shades of Joseph Payne Brennan's Long Hollow Swamp). For the most part, because the victims are attacked in their homes, nobody immediately discovers their remains. The whole thing goes public when a drunk walking home from the bar decides to try and beat a train, gets clipped and falls into a ditch. Crippled, he's helpless against the onslaught of invertebrate violation. The train stops and the brakeman, getting out to see if there's anything he can do for the poor bastard, witnesses him getting stripped to the bone. Of course, by the time he's returned with the cops, the leeches are gone and he's written off as a nut.

Meanwhile, one by one, the skeletal remains of the other victims are being discovered in their homes. A guy who returns home from out of town, suspecting his wife his cheating on him (she is, and getting paid for it!), tries to catch her in the act only to find what's left of her in the basement as well as her latest john out in the yard. Grief-stricken, he calls the cops (I'm surprised Tigges didn't write him as glad that his wife was dead). Then a social worker goes to pay a visit to the Anders family because the kids didn't show up for school. When no one answers the door, she calls the cops, and they break down the door to discover the entire family dead. There's also a pretty gruesome sequence at a church where some unfortunate nuns get slimed and eaten, and the priest, discovering them the next morning, vomits in horror.

Police Lieutenant Traverse (one of the few characters whose name I remember from my brief skimming of the book) thinks there's a serial killer on the loose whose stripping his victims of their flesh and then re-dressing them in their clothes. But our reporter hero thinks it's animals. Of course, nobody believes him. We'll have to see how this pans out. So far, I'm enjoying the book.