Glenn Chandler - The Tribe

[nightreader]

The Tribe - Glenn Chandler (Hamlyn 1981)

On the back cover there is “WARNING! This is a taste of horror not for the squeamish…” How right they are.

This is bloody and gory and nasty and massively entertaining.

Our hero, detective Chief Superintendent Graham ‘Chubby’ Holroyd is called out to a particularly nasty murder, described in full Technicolor goriness:

“The vilely mutilated corpse of a young girl was stretched on its back, the head had been hacked off and the brains removed with a drill, great folds of flesh had been cut away from the thighs so that the whiteness of the bones was exposed, and there had been extensive disembowelling.”

It’s the first of four horrific cannibal killings. Chubby learns that the four different suspects were all social anthropology students at the same University, all taught by Professor Allen Braithwaite. At the same time Maggie and Herbert Gubert decide to visit Braithwaite, Herbert had once worked in Papua New Guinea where he met the Professor. Braithwaite had been on an expedition to study a tribe in one of the remotest parts of the world, a tribe never before visited by the modern world.

Braithwaite is a charming and handsome villain, intelligent and predatory. He captures Maggie and Herbert, kills the woman and forces her husband to eat his wife’s flesh. But Maggie and Herbert’s daughter realises they are missing when they don’t turn up for a birthday party and soon start to track them down, following the trail to Braithwaite’s remote country mansion.

Chubby learns that the students were linked to Braithwaite in a very special way. They had all been hand picked to go with the Professor to see the tribe he’d discovered in Papua New Guinea. The students are horrified to see their Professor taking part in cannibalistic sacrifices, eating human flesh. They fear for their lives and leave him, only narrowly surviving their ordeal. Braithwaite is furious they abandoned him and takes his revenge slowly and terribly.

While with the tribe Braithwaite collects shrunken heads possessed by the malevolent spirits of powerful cannibal tribesmen - he uses the heads to turn the students into subservient flesh eaters, his revenge for being left by them in the jungle and part of his own mad dream of re-creating the tribe in England...

Apologies for the spoiler.

This is a true nasty. However it’s also a really good read, fast paced, thoroughly blood splattered but with enough plot to be interesting too, with a great climactic ending that doesn’t drag on forever.

[dem bones]

Straight to wants list!

Something I love about Hamlyn is how they categorised their macabre fiction into 'Horror', 'Occult' and the gloriously unambiguous 'Nasty'. Looking through the listing, it's blatantly clear that the 'nasties' predominated and you can only wonder how they ever got the publishing rights to the glaringly incongruous likes of The Black Castle, let alone the literary and eminently sensible The Wicker Man!

The Charles L. Grant pair have got me wondering too. He was the founder and, pretty much, the epitome of the 'Quiet horror' 'movement' (or 'Shadow Punk' as Karl E. Wagner affectionately dubbed it): could he really have suddenly let rip with a couple of mindless slime-and-chainsaw shockers or are The Nestling and Night Songs in keeping with the rest of his work?

[franklinmarsh]

"Glenn Chandler's The Tribe is enjoyably old-fashioned (and gory)" - from the old board. This is a belter - and I got rid of my copy! Back on the old board Funky told us that The Sanctuary was a good 'un (and considerably less blood-spattered) and Lurker mentioned that the good Mr Chandler created Taggart!

[Craig Herbertson]

I confess to owning a degree in social anthropology. Those heads resemble the size of my brain at the end of the course. My favourite tribe remain the Mbuti.

www.ucc.uconn.edu/~epsadm03/mbuti.html

They used to have great all male celebration. Women utterly forbidden on pain of death. They took Wilson, the anthropologist out into the forest to observe. In the forest they swung round their bullroarers (sic) and made terrible noises. 'The women think these are the spirits of the dead', they told him and he was sworn to secrecy.

Later he asked the women about the ceremony and if they were very scared. One said. 'No, the men swing round their bullroarers and pretend its the spirits of the dead but for God's sake don't tell them we know.'

[justin]

Just ripped through the climax of The Tribe and can confirm it is a belter! More than making up for the period of my life known as "the lost years", in which I tackled Return of the Living Dead and Curse.

I'm not sure if Chubby was an early version of Taggart, but it does resemble a particularily gory police procedural thriller. One scene in which someone is fed their foot (?!?) is suitably shocking and made my stomach gurgle- I think it was in disgust rather than hunger.

Highly recommended, as is Chandler's The Sanctuary.

[bluetomb]

For one reason and another, this was the first unapologetically full on nasty horror I've read in a very long time. I was rather looking forward to it, and not only did it not disappoint, it some way exceeded my expectations. So much to enjoy here right from the start. A classy prologue in which a white man waits in a tribal hut in Papua New Guinea, wracked with fever, waiting for maggots to hatch in a wound in his shoulder, and for the natives to return and make a meal of him. Blade meets flesh, and end chapter. I readily imagined "The Tribe" ominously splashing across a screen and tensing up in the dark on my couch in anticipation, though I was reading it on a coffee break, standing up on a bright morning at work. Then we move to a suburb of Northampton (wooooo Northampton!!!), where Detective Chief Superintendent Graham "Chubby" Holroyd has been called to a particularly heinous crime scene, in which a university lecturer has butchered and curried his daughter and then killed his wife in the process of force feeding her the results. The horrors keep coming, and it all seems to have to do with one anthropology class...


The main thing people probably want to know about in this one is the gore. Well, there are only a few scenes of fully fledged on page bloody brutality, and it’s not Hutson style Technicolor visceral. But when it gets down its pretty relentless, gripping and disquietingly mean. Chopping and slicing and cooking. No quick, easy deaths here. And there's one particular sentence sure to have anyone gagging, laughing out loud or both. The gore isn't the only draw here, in fact it wouldn't work half so well if the book were less skilfully put together. It only gets really full on nearly 80 pages in, but it’s hardly pleasant up until then. Instead it builds up tension in chapters, then releases in single paragraphs or a few stark sentences, effectively jolting but also stirring intrigue and capturing the imagination, developing the underlying story but keeping the reader guessing. It moves fast, nary a single chapter lacks some kind of a pay off, but it’s controlled. Even when the nastiness really breaks, the book moves sideways rather than try to maintain it and risk becoming predictable, dull, dispiriting or anticlimactic. With a sideways dodge before building up again, this has a mighty finale, undented even by one silly bit of contrivance. As tense as it is gruesome and told in good time, barely letting up even to the final sentences.


The book has some deft characterisation too. Swiftly sketched, but deftly. The titular tribe are a sad, tormented bunch, walking a razor line of semi sympathy without being actually likeable. The victims have some life in them before they lose it, and the main villain is a memorably grim but not without his charm sort. Most interesting are Herbert and Maggie Gunter, colonial relics, he an old stick of a man but in a nice way, she overweight, over-eager and comically oblivious, but as sad as mocked. In fact the only one who doesn’t quite come off is Chubby Holroyd. We don’t get quite enough of him, and he’s a bit too unflappable from the start. He comes across very much like a solid TV cop, smart and likeable, but I think he could have been a little more psychologically vulnerable.



He’s about the only weak point though, and a pretty minor weakness to the book as a whole. One of the absolute highlights of my year, it makes me sad to think that there probably aren’t more than one or two others in the Hamlyn line that might compare. Ah well…


Check it out post haste!

[drauch]

Finally shelled out the cash for this a few months back, as the whole cannibals run amok angle is one of my favorites (Morse's The Flesh-Eaters, Ketchum's Off Season, Wes Craven's The Hills Have Eyes, etc!). A wee bit more than I'd like to pay, but well worth the investment, now a cherished item amongst my collection. The other users already did a wonderful synopsis, but I just wanted to add that this features an absolutely gut-punching ending, the type that once I closed the book I just sat staring at the floor. Hoping someday the online seller gods will smile upon me with a copy of Chandler's The Sanctuary, which seems all but impossible to find for an overseas fellow.