A Trip to King Country and The Colorado Kid by Stephen King

I think most readers at least sample Stephen King. From the ones that are supposed to be "high-brow" with their "literature" to the "casual reader," who just want a nice story. And the thing is that he works for pretty much everyone. I know that there's people out there that don't like his work. I just haven't met many and I'm sure they would all be those kinds of folks who "don't like horror." Well, here's one for them. A simple tale of a mysterious death. I was all aboard the Hard Case Crime train when "The Colorado Kid" came out, pretty much buying all of them as they came out and reading most of them as I got ahold of them. 

But I didn't read King's. I don't know why. I was fan, I mean I was fan from my teenage years when I spent a few months pouring through his early back catalog. He's nostalgia for me and a lot of people, capturing a bit of time in our life when horror movies and books were everything. Simple times of blood, gore, thrills, chills and shattering suspense. Salad days. The King books were in my house for as long as I can remember. My mother was a fan, so there they sat, fat little paperbacks with bold colors and dark black covers. Striking images that are lodged in my mind from way back as a child. Back when you wanted a little spookiness in your life, but the actual stuff was far TOO SCARY. 

Man, that monkey on the "Skeleton Crew" cover. Boy howdy, what a creepy little fucker.

It sort of boggles my mind I didn't read this sooner. Maybe it was that his newer stuff post-90's didn't really connect with me, maybe I didn't like that it was a mystery novel by the master of horror. Maybe I'm just an idiot. 

I am.

"The Colorado Kid" is a mystery novel. Well, it's a novel about the nature of mystery. About why people seek the mysterious in their life. The book takes place in Maine ('natch) and is about three reporters, two old men and one young woman and a mystery ('natch) within the framework of the novel. The titular "Colorado Kid" shows up under odd circumstances on a beach, a near impossible occurrence since we find out his only have hours to travel from Colorado to Maine. King throws curveball after curveball at you, solutions that mess up your reader's sleuthing and he probably likes the idea of you (the reader) scratching your head at the tale. 

As I said this is about WHY people try to figure things out. It's about the characters, like all of King's books, the characters are the draw, and the rest is just fine fun. Dave, Vince and Stephanie sit around and talk the whole book and that's why it's engaging. They are people you'd like to get some lobster rolls or a coffee with and bullshit. There's no action, there's not really much suspense and the murder happens "off screen" but it's a thrill-ride, nonetheless. 

In his afterward King says that this would be a divisive novel. I can see that, the "solution" which I won't spoil is either going to work for you or it's just not. But that's the nature of mystery. King's an institution. I imagine it's weird to be a man and an institution, but he does it with humor and grace. I enjoy hearing him speak as much as I do hearing his characters talk. If you take the novel as a long afternoon coffee with Mr. King, I think you'll enjoy it more.

I haven't read the other two Hard Case Crime King books; they seem to lean into his more usual territory i.e., spooky shit. But that won't stop me from trying them out. This one was pleasant little trip into King Country, man, it's nice to be able to read a Stephen King in a couple of hours. That doesn't come around much. 

QUICK SHOTS: To Kill a Dead Man by Charles Runyon

Charles Runyon is one of those authors I had been meaning to read for, I don't know, ten plus years. I never seemed to luck into any of his books but in the sphere of Gold Medal Paperbacks a lot of people praised his work, so I was always on the lookout. Luck struck at the local libraries book sale where I scooped up a lot of his Gold Medals and this Major release. Runyon seems to be more remembered for his work in science fiction and that seemed to be what he preferred. Knocking off the crime stuff for the cash. Sounds criminal.

I got a soft spot for Major books. They aren't usually for everyone. There's a lot of weird and funky sometimes not-quite good books honestly. This isn't one of them. This is a rock-solid crime novel. Boy howdy, I know it was for the cash, but Runyon did lay down the good. Makes me wonder how it landed at such a low-tier publisher. It's easily better than a lot of what Fawcett put out in the 70's or Dell or Pyramid or Popular Library. Maybe it was just too hard-boiled, because this is rough and tumble book. At first glance it seemed like it could have easily been in the 50s-60s run of Gold Medals. But then it hits some lurid twists that are right out the 70s-era paperback. 

Johnny Quill is the right-hand man/paid killer for a mob guy named Fabius. It starts with that old gem: someone who needs to die has their buried treasure and the villains want it. Quill is sent to kill 'em good. But quickly transforms in an "on-the-run" book once he meets Norma the dead man's woman. Then it's a siege novel on a small tropical island. All the while Quill proves that he's a hard-man. We're talking Earl Drake or Parker hard. He doesn't hesitate to survive and doesn't much think about what he's had to do, i.e., murder of the innocent. His relationship with Norma is the center of the book and it's one not of conventional "love" but passion, boredom, necessity and eventually a recognition that she's as much of a survivor as he is. 

Oh, and there's a bunch of action. The siege is compelling and well thought out. Quill goes around killing and collecting an armory like he's in a video game as Fabius and his boatload of goons waits offshore and send waves of reinforcements. Both trying to figure out how to get to what is SO close but nearly impossible to get to kill their troubles away. Fabius is a sick and slick villain who's smart and taught Quill everything he knows; they spend much of the book at loggerheads because they are too similar in nature.

This one NEEDS to be republished. If it was published by a bigger company, I'm sure it'd have a little cult following, instead of being a footnote and outlier in Runyons bibliography. If you like Drake, Parker or Quarry, seek this one out. 

QUICK SHOTS: Slimer by Harry Adam (John Brosnan and Leroy Kettle) Knight

My brain is heading into horror. Halloween is around the corner and it's the holiday for me. That means horror books and movies. So, get ready for that True Believers! Horror paperback collecting is a true minefield of high costs and hard-to-find titles. You can still squeak out a lot of deals on Men's Adventure, but book sellers all seem to think everything is a "Paperback from Hell" and price accordingly. And, hell, I end up paying them. 

"Slimer" by Harry Adam Knight or actually John Brosnan and Roy Kettle is one of those expensive ones. It also had a good reputation past having a bitchin' cover, supposedly the book actually delivered. I was intrigued. Now, "Slimer" has been republished and is quite easy to pick up in trade-paperback or as an eBook. But that just wouldn't do for a paperback weirdo for me. With a little patience I tracked down a "reasonably priced" Star books copy from England. In hindsight, I'm very glad I did. There's something intangible to reading a slightly batted mass-market sized book, especially in the sleazy action or horror variety. It's like seeing "Texas Chainsaw Massacre" at the drive-in, it's in its natural environment. 

So, "Slimer" is not about the Ghostbusters pet ghost. A triple-set of couples are stranded on a lifeboat in the ocean after a problem with attempted drug smuggling plan. They end up on a deserted oil rig...that doesn't pump oil but is actually a genetic research facility trying to come up with a cure for radiation poisoning. But since this is a horror novel, they've obviously made a MONSTER. Brosnan and Kettle DELVIERED, man. This was a rollicking horror tale that rarely gets done these days. Horror writers/filmmakers in the striving to "legitimize" the genre often forget that horror is supposed to be FUN. Screaming in terror is the flip side to uproarious laughter, after all. 

The characters are stock-jobs. There's an evil guy, a leader guy, a weak guy and then their girlfriends who are all sort of interchangeable. This being an 80s horror paperback the women have it rough. Once they all get to the oil rig, the story unravels like a lot of awesome movies mashed together and dripping with slime. There's "Alien" in there. "The Thing" is mixed in, plus some "Invasion of the Body Snatchers" and "The Blob" for good measure. And some Shark action. BOOM, all that means flame-thrower and M-16 action, gnarly kills, goo, shaky science, drugs and desperate plays. 

It all really shouldn't work, but the authors roll it all together and comes out like a tasty horror-burrito. It's a perfect horror B-Movie on the page and that's not an easy thing to pull off. I'm very happy that I have another "Knight" book "The Fungus" to tackle before too long. If you go in expecting "The Stand" or "It" you might be disappointed, but just roll with the punches and have a good time with brain half-way off and I imagine any horror-hound would enjoy "Slimer." 

DOUBLE SHOT: Friday the 13th: The Camp Crystal Lake Series by Eric (William Pattison) Morse

Imagine the big three horror-movie slashers, Michael Myers, Jason Vorhees and Freddy Krueger, take a road-trip in some sort of evil-Mystery-Machine and end up on R.L. Stine's Fear Street. Be a fun time for all, I'd bet. But it sorta happened as all three of the gruesome killer got their own series of YA horror novels. These are books I wish I knew about when I was younger, but, hmm, for some reason I don't think they made it to the Scholastic Book Fair. Everything that was once adult became kid-friendly in the 80s and 90s, Toxic Avenger, Tales from the Crypt, even Rambo. I guess it makes sense that Jason, Mike and Freddy did too. Makes me wish that there was a Saturday Morning Cartoon starring Stephen King (as himself) where he tackled all the monsters and evil around his Castle Rock home. Yeah, through in a dog and a van and you got solid gold.

Anyway, the books are hard to get. Like ridiculously hard to get. As I've done a lot of major collecting in the Men's Adeventure/Mystery genres and know I'm really turning my attention to horror, which is proving to be a most welcome challenge to track things down and keep as much money in my wallet as possible. Just got to keep hunting.  

I started with the fourth and final (sorta) book in the series. "Road Trip" finds a group of cheerleaders and football folks trapped on a dark and stormy night at and around Camp Crystal Lake, which sounds like pretty standard stuff, but it's executed (get the pun?) well. This time we mostly follow Summer who's head-over-heels for bad-boy football-player Slick along with a group of dispatchable teenagers, a football coach and one NERD! Since this is a 90's YA horror the Nerd is obviously picked on by everyone, including the Coach and it just gets worse when they blame him for getting their van crashed and stuck on the aforementioned dark and stormy night. So, when the nerd finds the cursed hockey mask of Jason Voorhees, it's pretty easy to see where this is going. 

Along the way there's a detour that seems right out of a Gold Medal paperback or EC comic. A local police officer has kidnapped his wife and her lover with murder on his mind. He drags them out into the woods with a hockey mask, which is a nice little twist at first you might think that the trooper is the latest curse victim/killer. His plan is to kill them both, stage it like a Jason-inspired killing since obviously the whole area is freaked out by Jason, ya know, since everyone keeps getting killed by him. It's a pretty adult story-line for a YA novel and a welcome way to get away from teenage drama for a few pages. Then the novel turns into the slasher picture we wanted as the nerd is transformed by the hockey mask into a hulking Jason-ish killer and starts beating everyone with a tire iron. There's some nice fight scenes, fakes outs and some bits of gore. It's a solid story to go out on, but the series really could have gone on longer...

I read #4 first, just because it was the only one I had, I did have some luck via my good friend Inner-Library Loan and ended up with a copy of #2 "Jason's Curse" which is really a direct sequel to the first book "Mother's Day" (which I haven't read) so there seems to be a thru-line within the series and considering the movies hopped around so much, a little stability is nice. Morse does give you enough dig in with the story without reading the others. AND IT'S AWESOME.

Kelly is out for some Jason-revenge. Bad things happened to her brother in #1 and she's honing her skill to go hunt Jason down for good. Her plan to take her big 'ol hunting knife and pistol out and set traps gets a little muddled when her boyfriend and another couple insist on tagging along...you know because of needing victims. Well, lucky for Kelly a mentally challenged man finds the mask and becomes a hulking killer right before she decides to go so, she has someone to hunt. We bounce back and forth between the conflicted killer trying to grapple with his horrible actions but unable to control himself and slaughtering folks that were mean to him, the normal YA boyfriend/girlfriend drama and Kelly doing a "Home Alone" at Camp Crystal Lake with deadly traps. 

This is a really gnarly book for a YA novel, grisly deaths and a nihilistic tone really set it apart from the regular books from folks like Christopher Pike or Diane Hoh that I read back in the day and well, now still too. Morse actually captures the dark vibe of the films and only waters it down enough to get it published. It's like Splatterpunk for teens. It's a damn shame these are so hard to come by and like have no chance of ever being republished since the "Friday the 13th" rights are so screwed up. I'll be hunting down the rest and probably spending a small fortune on them. Such is life. 

...oh, yeah. There's a fifth unpublished one which is free on the authors website. I guess I'll read that one next. 

QUICK SHOTS: "Operation Nazi: U.S.A." by Joseph Gilman

Now what we got here is one of my White Whales. Between a general interest in the books that Manor put out back and the day and the tantalizing review of this book of the Glorious Trash blog, I knew this was a book for me. Unfortunately, it's one of those uber-expensive paperbacks that are to find and harder to afford or should I say justifying the price for. Whenever Joe Kenney over at Glorious Trash reviews something the price seems to jump up!

So, I finally found a copy at price I was willing to pay. I still paid a lot, don't get me wrong. But hey, money is just for buying books, right? RIGHT? Anyway, don't tell my wife. Joseph Gilman wrote a couple more books under his own name and then a couple of Nick Carter: Killmasters in the 80s but that's about the extent of my knowledge on him, other than now I'm a fan. I'll get this out of the way right off the bat, this is one of those tongue-in-cheek affairs that I enjoy so much. It's wildly over-the-top and Gilman seems to be having a ball with it. If you don't care for that kind of thing, it might not be your book.

This is the story of a Rain Allison who is also known as the Scorpion and his duties as a member of the Peacemakers, one of those hidden government assassination/trouble-shooting outfits that would be absolutely terrifying in real-life. He came into this outfit back-ass-wards and so convoluted that it's not really worth mentioning other than its wild, he was an insurance salesman and I like it. Rain is a badass who fucks up a lot. He's got that whole 70's-Post-Billy Jack-Native American-badassery going on only with a lot more firepower and his own "War Wagon" that has more gadgets than Bond's Aston Martin. 

He's out to stomp down some Nazi's which is one of my favorite things to read because fuck Nazi's. It's a race-against time novel only the race changes a couple of times. Rain drives around, kills Nazi's, pines for his lost love, talks about Native American stuff and his war-hero father, there's a kung-fu fight, an armored car-car chase, skinning people alive, the threat of poisoned water, revolvers with silencers. 

Oh, it's a total BLAST! It at times it almost reads like a companion novel to Kin Platt's Hitman series. They share a similar tone and wry approach to the conventions of the genre. The plotting is a lot stronger in Gilman's book then the last Hitman I read. It's also first-person narration which, coming from Hard-Boiled Detective Fiction, is my first love. Rain is a fairly funny narrator who still delivers the action and thrills. It does seem like the set-up to a series, though it does have a definite end. I wish there were more, my wallet doesn't but I do. So, I'll have to make do with Gilman's Nick Carter's one of which stars a female assassin named Raina out for vengeance...hmm...interesting. 

QUICK SHOTS: Mind Masters #5: Recycled Souls by Ian (John Rossman) Ross

"The Mind Masters" series is one of those sets where I went on a tear and bought them all before reading any. The groovy-psuedo-Sci-Fi-70s-paperback is a weakness of mine, plus the covers, I mean THOSE COVERS. These books fit in that little niche of the 70s with stuff like "The Six Million Dollar Man," "Big Brain" or "The Enforcer" that took the vigilante/secret-agent formula and energized it with the fantastic. After "Mad Max" in the 80s it was really taken over by the "post-Apocalyptic" sub-genre when you got mutants, lasers, and robot and such.

The 70s as a decade had a big interest in the "mystic" and paranormal. So, Mind Masters is all about Britt and his ESP powers. He's also a badass race-car driver and a 'nam vet, 'natch. It's a gimmick that really sets the books out apart from the others on the spinner rack at the time, yet it's also trying to comfortably assure the reader that it's got a lot of the same ingredients as an "Executioner." It really doesn't, though. Here's one of the biggest oddball choices in the series. It's written in the Present Tense. It's pretty jarring until you get used to it and I'm not really 100% sure it works for an action novel. The rata-tat of present tense sort of cuts the action/tension off at the knees. A little purple prose goes a long way, this reads fairly flat. Like a court transcript of a Mack Bolan. 

"Recycled Souls" is a novel of a lot of big ideas, it's got lesbian armies, sharks, jet-skies, sinking piers, torture, motorcycles and Britt can go all "Scanners" on the baddies. Sounds like a blast, right? It would be if Rossman really committed to writing a pulpy novel jam-packed of action, but what he mostly gives you is long conversations between character yakking about all the cool shit. The action really doesn't start until the very end, and it's done pretty quick. Though its handled well when it is there and is pretty awesome.

So, I got them all and didn't really care of this one. I liked it enough to finish it which is saying something because I don't muscle through bad material. It got a lot of interesting things going on, but the present tense and ratio between explaining and showing need to be tipped the other way. Rossman obviously cared about these books, a lot of them a quite a bit fatter than the standard M.A. paperback and he had some wonderful ideas for the story, just for whatever didn't execute them to their full potential. 

Will I read another "Mind Masters?" Probably, I simply chose this one because it was shorter than the other ones. But this is the final chapter and maybe Rossman was just out of steam. Also, the rest of the series is under John Rossman's real name, this one switched to the pseudonym Ian Ross, maybe he was hoping to farm out some work, but Signet wasn't having it. 

QUICK SHOTS: Digging Dirt: Seeking the Bog Beast by Richard H. Levey

Atlas Comics was a pretty wild little comics publisher back in the 70s. It was basically a spite-comics-book-company out to stick it to Marvel comics when Stan Lee was made president instead of the original owner's son. Gotta love spite. Anywho, previously I have reviewed Targitt by Richard S. Meyers which was the first in a continuation/reboot of the old Atlas line but now as novels. Well, novellas. Atlas was interesting because though it was trying to be Marvel comics, instead of superheroes as it's foundation the whole universe was really grounded in the supernatural and horror. Dracula's, Demons, various monsters even a Vampirella knock-off. Which made it extra groovy. I enjoyed "Targitt" a lot, so it was eager to see what Atlas's very own Man-Thing/Swamp Thing character The Bog Beast's novel was all about. 

I've long been a fan of both Swamp Thing and Man-Thing. I played with Swamp Thing action figures when I was a kid and fell in love with Steve Gerber's run-on Man-Thing early in my comic days. Plus, ya know...monsters. I can't get enough of 'em. I have quite a few Atlas comics but not any issues of The Bog Beast. Lucky for me they are basically retold in the narrative of "Digging Dirt." Bog Beast isn't exactly a swamp monster like the other guys but it's pretty close. He's all goopy and covered in tar and gnarly looking. He's from an underground society and is sent up to see what humans are like. Surprise we're awful.  

This is Richard H. Levey's first foray into narrative work, he like his main character in "Digging Dirt" comes from a reporter background. Basically, the novel is two short re-telling's of the first couple of Bog Beast comic tales with a wraparound story involving a journalist's hunt for the creature in modern times. The first half of the novel tells of The Bog Beast's appearance on the film set of a monster movie and the disgruntled effects man who's trying to sabotage the film. After that The Bog Beast hooks up with some 70s radicals and goes on the lamb. Along the way there's shootings, monster-moider, floods, tar-pits, reclusive filmmakers, carnies and evil (are there any other kind?) movie moguls. 

The first half of the book is far superior to the last half, which is to mostly say the first comic that Levey was adapting was much cooler then the second one. The wraparound segments work fine, and the journalist is a nice, slightly snarky "Kolchak" kinda guy. The second half is a step down and the ending leaves a little to be desired. A couple of radicals and a carnival just aren't quite as interesting as a Hollywood mystery, a Ray Harryhausen-stand-in, and a lost starlet. But all in all, it was a lot of fun, really feeling like what the comics were trying to emulate: a schlocky 70s monster movie and those pretty much always leave something to be desired.  

These Atlas books are too cool for school, they seemed to have got out "Targitt," "Digging Dirt," a comics reprint of their Devilna character, a short story collection, and one more new original in "Wrecage" which has some unused ideas from the legendary Steve Ditko. There's scant information about this revival online, so I don't know if more is planned or not. I hope so, I'm really digging them.