QUICK SHOTS: Feast of the Swamp Goblin by Lewis Stone

I can honestly say this is the first book I have directly read as a result of scrolling Instagram. I'm fairly sure that I was looking (and drooling) over some Guy N. Smith covers (he's popping up a lot lately for me) and saw the title "Feast of the Swamp Goblin" all in a gooey-looking font and after finding out it was a short work of pure-pulpy-horror I knew I had to give it a try. I hadn't ever heard of Lewis Stone before but, I mean "Feast of the Swamp Goblin, c'mon. That's a book screaming to be read. 

The novel is subtitled "A Horror B-Book" and that's what it is: a B-horror-movie on the printed page, or a direct-to-video-monster movie between two covers. It's a classic set-up. A group of college students go out into the woods to have some fun (i.e., booze and sexy sex) to blow off steam...unfortunately Swamp Goblin. There's a nerd, a slightly-more-cool nerd, a jerk-ass jock-type and his annoyed girlfriend plus a Ripley-woman. To top-that-off you have a grizzled hunter who is well, hunting the Swamp Goblin for his own reasons. These are all stock characters; Stone gives you enough to care a little about them and at least most of them are nicer than a lot of the assholes that seem to get killed in old horror novels. There's plenty of gore and the monster-attack scenes are well spaced within the book, not too long but not a constant barrage either. 

Speaking of Guy N. Smith, the nerd character is reading Smith "The Slime Beast," which Swamp Goblin seems to share a lot of D.N.A. with. It's a nice little touch. Stone writes in a clean, unpretentious style and keeps the pace up. All things that I look for in a book. It's a short book, more like a novella so if you like old school 70s/80s paperback horror or monster movies give it a go. It got me to order Stone's other Horror-B-Book, "The Campbell Lake Summer Camp Massacre," which seems like a nice and fun slasher tale. I rarely read any "new" books, so this was a nice change of pace.