The Cult Breaker

 

The Cult Breaker, by Andrew Sugar

No month stated, 1979  Manor Books

With some serious Clint Eastwoodsploitation cover art (uncredited, but I wonder if was by Anthony “Mondo” DeStefano), The Cult Breaker comes off like the first installment of a series, but there was never a followup volume – nor was there ever another novel by author Andrew Sugar. At least, I’ve never been able to find anything published by him after 1979 – under the name “Andrew Sugar” or under the name “Andrea Sugar,” which was the name Sugar was going by at this time. 

 

As mentioned in past reviews of Sugar’s work, Andrew Sugar reportedly had a sex change sometime in the late ‘70s; I learned this back in 2013 when I was briefly in contact with a person who had served as an “expert witness” in a lawsuit trial Sugar had launched on…well, on Clint Eastwood! Sugar felt that Eastwood’s Dirty Harry flick The Enforcer was an infringement upon Sugar’s earlier series The Enforcer, and took Eastwood to court – only, as my contact revealed, at the time of the trial (June of 1980) Sugar was no longer “Andrew Sugar,” but had become “Andrea Sugar,” a rather “handsome woman.” Learning this was kind of revelatory for me at the time, as it cleared up the mystery in the comments section of my Enforcer #1 review, where James Reasoner stated he’d heard Sugar was really a woman, and then a person named Ralph Blanchette, who knew Sugar in the ‘70s, responded that Sugar certainly was a man. The answer, of course, was that Sugar was both! 

Obviously Sugar had little ground to stand on in the lawsuit, no matter what name or gender he was going by. The trial took place after The Cult Breaker was published, and boy it would’ve been great if Clint Eastwood had been aware of the book. He could’ve just brought it into the courtroom as Exhibit A: “Your honor, who is ripping off who??” (Or would that be “Whom?” I don’t know…Clint would probably know, though.) 

But ever since I learned about that Eastwood lawsuit, I’ve kept wondering about the cover art on The Cult Breaker. Was Manor trolling Clint Eastwood? Did they think the trial would get more publicity and so tried to capitalize on it? Or was it just a fluke? 

I guess we’ll never know, but the important thing to note is that the cover is very misleading, as protagonist Johnny Baron is not described as looking like Clint Eastwood, and he doesn’t carry a gun – indeed, at one point he’s offered a .357 Magnum and flatly refuses to carry it or any other pistol. Instead he uses “shunkens,” or shurikens as they are more commonly known – Japanese throwing stars. He has them hidden in the buckle of his belt, and also in special necklace he wears. It’s the sort of gimmick you’d expect a series protagonist to have, but this was the only adventure Johnny Baron ever had. 

I wondered if this was a trunk novel, held off from publication for whatever reason, as there’s a few-years gap between the publication of The Cult Breaker and Sugar’s earlier Enforcer and Israeli Commandos work, as well as the Manor one-shot Yank. The Cult Breaker came out a few years after all of them – actualy, the same year that Manor finally got around to reprinting The Enforcer #4. But The Cult Breaker was clearly written in the late ‘70s, with a lot of topical mentions, and also at one point the date is firmly stated as being 1979. Random guess: Perhaps this book came out a few years later than the earlier books because Sugar was busy with that sex-change operation. 

Regardless of the real-life background, The Cult Breaker has the same macho vibe as Sugar’s other work. It’s also just as ponderous and weighted down with too much talking and bullshitting. Back when I started the blog, I raved about Enforcer #1 in my review, but something I don’t think I ever mentioned was that I re-read the book a few years later…and didn’t enjoy it nearly as much. I found it…well, I found it ponderous and weighted down with too much talking and bullshitting. I meant to do a “second look” review at the time but just couldn’t drum up the energy, and besides wanted my original reaction to speak for itself. 

This one, though, brings back the feelings I had when I read The Enforcer #1 that second time. It just spins its wheels for the majority of its 218, small-print pages, and there are a lot of similarities to the Enforcer series – which itself became more of a standard “suspense” yarn as the series progressed. In fact, The Cult Breaker is labelled “Suspense” on its spine. It’s not an action-thriller by any means, despite being packaged as one, and, just as Alex Jason in The Enforcer, Johnny Baron spends the majority of the text posing undercover, pretending to be who he’s not, as he gradually figures out what nefariousness a particular cult is up to. 

Like Alex Jason, Baron is a rugged individualist who is yanked out of his normal world and thrust into the role of action-series protagonist. For Jason it was because he was dying of stomach cancer and was given the chance to live again in a series of clone bodies. For Baron, he’s a former mercenary turned smuggler who is caught by a “famous detective” and offered two hundred thousand dollars to infiltrate the private island of the Shrine Of The Forgiven and rescue four people who have supposedly been abducted by the cult. The Objectivist leanings of The Enforcer have been toned down, and instead of the Jon Anryn Institute, Baron’s employer, Ashford Cory, runs a global organization with an army of employees and experts and etc at his beck and call. 

The overall vibe is still the same; just as The Enforcer squandered its pulpy setup by becoming more of a slow-going mystery, so too does The Cult Breaker. Indeed the entire plot, of Baron being hired to rescue four captives, is for the most part overlooked, with more focus placed on his infiltrating the cult. The book could’ve just as easily been titled “The Cult Joiner,” because that’s essentially what Johnny Baron spends the majority of the text accomplishing. Andrew Sugar really grinds the gears in this one, and the novel moves a whole lot more sluggishly than you might expect. I don’t exaggerate when I say that most of the book concerns Baron hoodwinking the Shrine of the Forgiven into thinking he’s a convert. 

Even the setup takes a long time to get underway; we meet Baron as he’s flying in to Corpus Christi from Mexico with his latest smuggling run – not drugs, but priceless artifacts that have been disguised as cheap souveneirs. He’s cornered by some men and starts going into kung-fu and “shunken” mode, not killing anyone but hurting them. He’s knocked out and comes to, to discover that it wasn’t cops surrounding him, but the employees of famous investigator Ashford Cory, who puts forth the $200k job. This sequence alone takes up the first quarter of the novel. 

From there it becomes even more of a long-simmer yarn; Baron’s been offered the gig because one of the top Shrine members is a former mercenary pal of his named Danny Lanz. But, per Cory Lanz has gone crazy, as evidenced by grisly photos Cory shows Baron of the infamous killing technique that was used by a native tribe Lanz and Baron served with during their mercenary days in Africa. Also called the “head peel,” the technique involves slicing the flesh at the back of the neck and then pulling the flap of skin up over the skull until the entire face is ripped off, to be shown to the victim, and if the victim has lived long enough to get to this part he – or she – will immediately die of a heart attack. 

Baron can’t believe that Lanz himself would perform the head peel on people, but Cory assures him that Lanz is full-bore nuts now and is not the same man Baron knew a few years ago. So Baron takes the job and heads to New York, where he’s to “just happen” to run into Lanz and pretend to be sickened in his soul and looking for some purpose, etc, etc. In other words, to make himself a target for the cult. The Shrine of the Forviven runs a sort of commune on 50th Street and some nights they give free booze to old vets at a local bar, one run by another old mercenary pal. 

Sugar often doles out a lot of trash-talk and arrogant posturing in the overly-macho dialog he gives his male characters, and that’s on full display here. But things liven up with the appearance of Oy, an attractive brunette who shows up at the bar and is there to serve as a paramedic but is part of the cult. This scene goes on and on with Baron drinking as part of his guise but getting progessively drunker and afraid he’ll blab too much, then Danny Lanz shows up – wilder looking but still happy to see Baron and get drunk with him – and the “macho dialog” runs rampant as they try to outdrink each other and bet on who pukes first and etc. 

Sugar goes for a poetic approach in the inevitable sex scene between Baron and Oy – like talking about their bodies becoming “one” and such – and also dials way down on the breast obsession seen in the earliest Enforcer novels. In fact, Oy is hardly exploited at all, and about the most we get is she’s pretty and a former hooker who was saved by the Shrine. She will also be Baron’s sole conquest in the novel, and in fact essentially becomes his girlfriend, having him live with her when they repair to the Shrine’s private island in the Bahamas, Eden Cay. But Sugar has a hard time explaining who Oy is, as she isn’t a brainwashed sheep like the other cult members on the island, and seems to do her own thing. 

Meanwhile there’s the cult leader, Uncle Ted, whose schtick is he “looks like someone’s uncle” but can hypnotize you with his eyes, and also insists that everyone toast each other with a special drink of milk every morning. We get lots of stuff about Baron puking his guts out when drinking this milk, given his allergy to dairy or some such shit…it really gets to be a bit much. Plus the dude’s real slow on the up-take because he wonders why every cult member seems so fazed and then only at the end of the novel does he put it together that it’s the damn drink literally everyone on the island drinks every single day. 

But the “cult life” stuff just goes on and on. Baron exploring the island, getting the lay of the land, seeing how the cultists are split into different jobs and etc. And also meanwhile he gets the gig of helping Danny Lanz with island security…but man, even the subplot about Lanz isn’t really exploited. Sugar seems to get bored with it and quickly resolves it just a little over halfway through the novel, with a bizarre shootout Lanz and Baron get in with some rivals in upstate New York, and Lanz going crazy suddenly for no reason. We don’t even get an explanation for the “head peel” stuff, which also is brushed under the narratorial carpet. 

Most importantly, the four people Baron’s supposedly here to rescue aren’t even mentioned. Instead the plot changes to a “doomsday device” Uncle Ted has apparently put together, using toxic waste or something. Suddenly we have stuff where Baron knows how to defuse bombs because he was a demolitions expert in the army and then, with the word count quickly approaching, Sugar does a whole Jonestown Massacre thing with Uncle Ted abruptly revealing that some senators are on the way to the island. Just a few pages later and the senators are dead and Uncle Ted is forcing his flock to commit suicide; I mean it’s like Jonestown on speed. 

Even here Sugar loses the plot thread and instead focuses on Baron trying to defuse that damn doomsday device. In the hugest miss of all, Baron takes no part in the action finale; in fact, a pair of women do all the work (hmmm…), toting guns and blasting at their former cult-friends as Baron tries to take care of the doomsday device. Seriously, Baron hardly does anything action-like in the finale, instead directing a few cult members who miraculously show up out of the woodwork and have just the skills Baron needs a that time – medical, military, etc. Worse yet, the main villains are dispatched off-page, and not even by Baron. 

It's all very underwhelming, and perhaps the indication is that nothing more came from Sugar because he’d lost the spirit. The Cult Breaker is listless and confused, starting off in one direction before veering off in another, sort of like a certain political figure I won’t name. Even the finale is confused, but humorously so. Baron passes out a few times in the final pages, and the very end of the novel features him about to be put under for some quick surgery for injuries he’s sustained, and he’s certain he’ll wake up from it. But the novel ends cold here, and given that Johnny Baron never appeared in another novel, one gets the impression he really didn’t make it through the surgery. 

Back in 2013 James Reasoner and I discussed Andrew Sugar via email, and James turned up the info that an “Andrea Conrad-Sugar” had died in 2010, in New Windsor, New York, which is near the Hudson River – and Ralph Blanchette commented on my Enforcer #1 review that Andrew Sugar had lived in the Hudson Valley. Conrad-Sugar was born in 1933, which seems to line up with Andrew Sugar’s supposed age. James pondered if Andrea Conrad-Sugar and Andrew Sugar were one and the same. But unless we hear from one of Sugar’s children, I guess this will just be a mystery, as Sugar himself – or herself – disappeared from the publishing world after the publication of The Cult Breaker in 1979.

Butler #6: Killer Satellites

 

Butler #6: Killer Satellites, by Philip Kirk

No month stated, 1980  Leisure Books

This was the last volume of Butler written by series creator Len Levinson, and it’s clear that Len intended Killer Satellites to be the final volume of the series, as it wraps up the storyline of hero Butler, essentially taking him full-circle from where he started in the first volume. There is also a focus on telling us more about Butler this time – we even learn his first name! – as well as giving him a Happily Ever After. Which of course makes it all the more frustrating that Leisure Books continued the series in 1982 – without Len’s involvement or awareness – farming it out to some unknown writer(s) for an additional six volumes. 

But honestly, I have no intention of seeking out or reading those later Butler books; this was Len Levinson’s series, and his volumes are the only ones that exist in my world. So basically there’s a “Len six” and a “Ghostwriters six” for Butler, and curiously it’s the latter six volumes that are the most overpriced on the used books marketplace, indicating that they had scarce print runs. It’s funny that they even exist, as Killer Satellites is clearly a send-off for Butler, courtesy his creator. 

This one picks up a few months after the previous volume, and Butler is still with the CIA. In fact there is no mention whatsoever of the Bancroft Instititute, and as mentioned above it’s the first volume of the series that is most often referred to in the narrative – particularly, that Butler was fired from the CIA by series regular FJ Shankham in that volume, “two years ago.” (Though in the typically-poor editing of a Leisure publication, on the very next page we’re told this happened “a year ago.”) But now with this sixth volume, Butler is so ingrained in the CIA that he’s spent six months studying how to speak Russian (and curious spoiler alert, but he never even gets a chance to speak Russian in the course of the novel!). The Bancroft Institute setup is dropped, as is recurring enemy organization HYDRA. 

The back-cover copy as usual tries to heighten the “thriller” elements of the story, but more than any previous volume Killer Satellites is less concerned with action than it is with Butler’s soap-opera life. When we meet him he’s boarding a small plane for a vacation in nearby Cape Cod. As I’ve mentioned frequently in past reviews, Len Levinson’s protagonists are unique in the men’s adventure field in that they try their damnest to pick up women; an inversion of the usual pulp template of the lady throwing herself at the protagonist. Butler hits hard on an attractive young woman on the plane (she looks, we’re informed, like Faye Dunaway), as usual saying stuff that would get a guy at least slapped in the real world. For instance: “You’re rather attractive, and I’m rather horny.” 

And, as usual for Butler, he’s rebuffed; the girl, Mary Ellen, has no interest in him, and just wishes to read her novel. In a curious miss on Len’s part that drove me crazy, we never learn what novel the girl is reading, despite Butler incessantly asking her what the title is! I was hoping Len would do a little in-joke and have Mary Ellen reading one of his own books. Anyway, it’s not that they have much time to really talk, as the front of the plane explodes and it crashes into the ocean – moments after we’re informed Butler is afraid to fly. But Butler’s able to keep his wits and swims to safety, rescuing the girl as well. The plane was intentionally crashed – though how is curiously never stated – and Butler soon learns that a host of his CIA colleauges have also been killed. Oh, and Mary Ellen vows that she will be Butler’s “slave” for having saved her life. 

Soon Butler is made the director of the CIA by whiskey-sipping President Smith; there’s a super-goofy part where Smith, in the bunker beneath the White House, bluffs on the phone with Premiere Brezhnev in the USSR about a satellite being shot down. This part again confirms that Butler is essentially a comedy series,with the assembled joint chiefs of staff even taking off their hats and yelling “hooray!” when the Soviet satellite is shot down. All this, by the way, is in retaliation for a US satellite that was destroyed, and I love the way Len has these heads of state calling each other directly and bluffing one another, making idle threats, etc. There’s also a goofy recurring joke about the Albanians. 

I really get the impression Len was winging his way through this one; the plot changes willy-nilly, with Butler thrust from one crazy situation to another. So he’s made director of the CIA because everyone else was killed, and his first act in this capacity is to call back onto duty the love of his life, Wilma B. Willoughby, who quit after the caper in the previous volume and now teaches at UCLA. In the meantime we are almost casually informed that Butler’s first name is Andrew – his full name is Andrew P. Butler – by a radio announcement Butler listens to while shaving in the shower, announcing that he’s been made the new director of the CIA. Butler’s first name has always been a mystery and no mention is made here that Butler hates it, something that was often remarked upon in previous installments. But the very fact that we’re told Butler’s first name this time could be another indication that Len intended Killer Satellites to be the series finale. 

Meanwhile, Mary Ellen has come to Butler’s home in Georgetown to be his slave, leading to the typical XXX-rated sex scene of the series. I found myself laughing out loud, though, because even in the sex scenes Len goes for laughs – in particular Mary Ellen bluntly asking Butler, “Do you want me to kiss your dicky?” To which a shocked Butler responds, “I beg your pardon?” Len has a lot of fun with this sequence, as it’s a reversal of the earlier scene betwee the two, when Butler was hitting on Mary Ellen on the plane; here it’s Mary Ellen who must convince Butler to have sex with her. Finally he does, in full-bore detail – only for Wilma to come in and catch them together and throw a hissy fit, calling Butler a “pig” and leaving. 

Again we get indication that this is the final volume when Mary Ellen explains to Butler that Wilma is only upset because she clearly loves Butler. Otherwise why would Wilma be so angry to find Butler in bed with another woman? Butler realizes this must be true, but meanwhile Wilma is kidnapped on her way to her hotel. When Butler finally figures out she’s been captured the following day, he decides to make none other than FJ Shankham the deputy director of the CIA, to handle the administrative side of the job while Butler goes out in the field to find Wilma. Here’s where we have the reverse setup of Butler #1, with Butler reflecting on the irony of his being in charge of the man who fired him “two years” (or was it one year?) ago. 

But man, it seems evident that Len was winging his way through Killer Satellites. Subplots are brought up and cast aside within a few pages. Like for example Mary Ellen. Despite pledging herself as Butler’s “slave,” she’s quickly removed from the narrative, Butler insisting that she go home so he can figure out who has been killing his fellow CIA agents. Then next thing you know, Butler is in his red Corvette and driving cross-country; his goal, apparently, is to act as bait for the people who kidnapped Wilma, but still…I mean he literally just drives across the country. We even get more of Butler’s random attempted pickups when he hits on an attractive female bartender who (per the template) turns Butler down, given that she’s married. But if you haven’t noticed, this is how the plot constantly changes in Killer Satellites; just a few chapters ago he was conferring with the President on how he could stop the “killer satellite” business, and now he’s on a cross-country road trip. 

Even what appears to be the big villain reveal is brushed aside after a few pages; Butler does indeed get captured by the same people who took Wilma captive, and they turn out to be…right-wing Canadian extremists. From their hidden location deep in the wilds of Canada they have a missile silo and have been taking down US and USSR satellites in the hopes of causing a war between the two superpowers…but man, like just a few pages after all of this is revealed, US planes come out of nowhere and bomb the place to the ground and Butler and Wilma escape into the snowy forest. The entire “Canadian radicals” development only takes up a handful of pages, and again the focus is placed more on Butler’s love life. 

But still, it’s very funny. Butler and Wilma hide in a cave and Wilma makes it clear that she has no intention of sleeping with Butler, even though we know from the scenes in her perspective that Butler’s the best lay she ever had, and she still dreams of the previous times they made it, etc. But as usual Wilma plays it tough, not wanting to look a “fool” for Butler, and she makes him sleep on the other side of the cave. Butler, sure that Wilma will shoot him with her machine gun if he tries to go over to her, decides to jerk off…no mention is made, by the way, of the “vow” Butler made to himself to never masturbate, as stated back in the fourth volume. Meanwhile Wilma, who is impatiently waiting for Butler to come over to her, looks over and sees “a piston” pumping beneath Butler’s sleeping bag, and angrily realizes he’s jerking off. So she has to take matters into her own hands, so to speak, leading to a sex scene between the two that takes up several pages of text. Even here it’s a payoff on those earlier sex scenes between the two, with Wilma finally giving herself in full to Butler and not pretending like it all was a “mistake” or etc. 

More finalities – on the morning after their idyllic tryst in the cave, Wilma informs Butler that she is saying goodbye to him forever, because she’s too crazy about him, and knows she’ll do nothing but have sex with him all day. (This after Butler asks her to marry him!) We also get the interesting backstory that Wilma was a hippie in the late ‘60s and dropped out of school to screw her boyfriend all the time, and she’s afraid she’ll do the same with Butler, because she likes him even more. So again, despite the “killer satellite” setup and Butler being in charge of the CIA and whatnot, it’s more about Butler moping around and wondering if he’ll ever find true love – not that this stops him from scoring again. In another humorous XXX passage, Butler goes up to Canada to look into the leader of the Canadian radicals, and ends up banging the secretary at the Royal Canadian Mounted Police HQ. 

Here we have another of Butler’s don’t-try-this-at-home pickup lines: “You’re the kind of woman a man would love to go down on.” This is stated mere moments after the woman happens to sit by Butler in the park, and soon enough Butler’s gotten it out of her that no one’s ever gone down on her and etc. So they go back to his hotel where they go down on each other, then have sex, all of it in the usual explicit detail of the series, but again a lot of it’s funny because of the dialog Len gives the characters throughout. But also, none of it has any real bearing on the plot, and is another indication of the ever-changing nature of the storyline; just twenty or so pages ago Butler was the captive of some right-wing Canadians in the woods, and now here he is dining at the Y with a slim secretary who looks “like the actress Lee Remick.” 

It all moves so quickly that Len has to go for a finale that is more out of a mystery than an action thriller, with Butler exposing who secretly funds the Canadian satellite-killing radicals. SPOILER ALERT, so skip this and the next two paragraphs if you don’t want to know, but given that Killer Satellites appears to be so scarce I thought I’d be comprehensive in my review for the people who can’t find a copy. Anyway, it turns out that FJ Shankham has been behind the plot, financing the Canadian radicals – and here we have a reprisal of the first volume, with Shankham again the manipulative bastard who holds Butler’s fate in his hands. But in another strong indication that this was intended as the final volume of the series, Butler literally blows Shankham’s brains out, blasting him point-blank in the forehead with his pistol. 

Even in the final pages subplots are brought up and cast aside within the span of a few paragraphs. Butler meets with President Smith again, and none other than Brezhnev calls in and offers Butler an all-expenses paid trip to Moscow as thanks for preventing WWIII, insisting that Butler come to Russia within a few weeks, and Butler accepts. Meanwhile President Smith floats the idea of making Butler the ambassador to Russia (and curiously, at no point in this entire exchange is it mentioned that Butler now speaks fluent Russian)…but a page or two later Butler’s already decided he’ll turn down the offer. 

The biggest indication that Killer Satellites was intended to be Butler’s send-off comes next: Butler goes back to his pad in Georgetown…to find Wilma waiting there for him. Wilma tells Butler she loves him and would “rather go crazy with him than without him,” and the book – and series – ends with the two having sex. In fact the last line of the novel is Wilma’s “OOOH!” as Butler gives her the goods – and speaking of which, we’ve learned earlier in the book, courtesy a ruler Mary Ellen puts alongside Butler’s erection, that Butler measures eight-and-a-half inches; which is “only two-and-a-half inches more than the average,” Butler argues! 

This of course is a fitting finale for Butler, given the strong focus on XXX-rated sex since the beginning, not to mention that Butler’s been hooked on Wilma since the beginning. (And apparently vice-versa.) For decades Len Levinson thought this was it for Butler, until I happened to mention to him when we talked on the phone in 2012 that the series had continued on for six more volumes. I still recall how flabbergasted Len was; “That was my series!” he kept saying. A commenter named TrueAim left a note on a previous Butler review that at least some of those non-Len volumes tried to retain the feel of the original six books…so if anyone else out there has read them, please let us know. I’m curious if Wilma even factors into the books. 

But again, I’d say those latter six installments are alternate-reality Butler. The series clearly comes to a close with Killer Satellites, and I’d say overall I really enjoyed these books. Again, the cover illustrations and back-cover copy are all misleading; Butler is more of a humorous affair than an action thriller. As usual with a Len Levinson book, it is the personality of the author that most stands out, and no doubt given that Butler was his own creation, Len’s personality is very evident as the series progresses. Indeed, parts of Killer Satellite, in which Butler reflects on his life or the sad state of his romantic affairs, could almost come straight out of Len’s decades-later autobiography, In The Pulp Fiction Trenches. I also appreciated the glimpse into Butler’s personal interests; this time he has a sudden interest in jazz music, with mentions of The Jazz Crusaders and Ramsey Lewis…I got a chuckle out of this, given that Len had to patiently wait while I shopped for Jazz LPs when I met him in Chicago in 2016. 

If I recall, only the first few volumes of Butler were reprinted as eBooks a few years back. Hopefully the time will come when all six volumes will be available again as paperbacks. Personally I’ll miss Butler and his madcap adventures, but I’m happy that Len gave him a proper send-off.

7/25/24 Update: I received the below email from Len himself, and he asked me to post it here for him!

It is very interesting to read a review of a novel I wrote circa 1979 and barely remember.  So I read the first chapter again to re-familiarize myself, and thought this first chapter simply terrific.

What a great writer I was!  I should have won a Nobel Prize and the National Book Award.  I should be rich and famous and living on the French Riviera with a movie star or supermodel, instead of the small cluttered apartment where I now reside alone in a tiny town way out here on the Great American Prairie.

Many of my books were written very quickly under two-month deadlines.  That’s why they read as if I was “winging it”.  Actually I was winging it, which probably explains why subplots don’t go anywhere and why important characters suddenly disappear.  I also had a tendency to write graphic sex scenes, which probably caused many readers to not take me seriously.

My Butler books were written toward the beginning of my literary career.  I think I got better as I became more mature and gained more experience as a novelist.  Thank you for this very insightful review.  You always understand my books better than I do.

Chrysalis Of Death

Chrysalis Of Death, by Eleanor Robinson

May, 1976  Pocket Books

I’d never heard of this obscure paperback original until I recently came across it on the clearance rack at a local Half Price Books. One dollar, so I figured what the hell. I’ve been watching a lot of ‘70s drive-in movies lately, and the setup for this one seemed really in-line with those, to the extent that I wondered why someone like Roger Corman didn’t option the rights. In a nutshell, Chrysalis Of Death concerns a contagion in the Arizona desert that turns people into Neanderthals. 

But then, the uncredited cover art blows this surprise. Author Eleanor Robinson doesn’t outright state “Neanderthal” or “Cro-Magnon” in the brief, 175-page course of the novel; instead, she goes for a “cinematic” sort of approach, one that does imbue the story with tension and suspense, but one that also robs it of concrete details that allow the reader to understand what is happening. As it turns out, big stuff happens in the course of the novel – like main characters dying – but the reader doesn’t even realize something “big” has happened until later on, given the way Robinson has written the book. 

Also, she jams way too many characters into the novel, but then my impression was she was catering to the disaster obsession of the day. But the effect is, the reader doesn’t really get a grip on who is who, other than a few characters who sort of rise to the top in prominence. Otherwise, the characters loglined on the back cover and first-page preview aren’t given much room to breathe…like the drunkard best-selling novelist, or the Joe Namath-esque football player. Robinson tries to cater to the “large cast of characters” aesthetic of the disaster story, but the effect is limited given how short the novel is. Again, this is what gives the impression that it’s a tie-in for a drive-in movie that never was…the more lurid version of The Poseidon Adventure or something. 

The only problem is…it’s not very lurid! I’ll note the sad fact here that Chrysalis Of Death has zero in the way of sex, and the majority of the violence occurs off-page. Rather it is more of a long-simmer potboiler sort of affair, most reminscent of the contemporary Snowman (which also came off like the novelization of a drive-in movie that never was), with the caveat that Chrysalis Of Death doesn’t even feature a big action finale; the cover art not only blows the surprise of the storyline, but also misleads with the explosions and helicopters circling over the Cro-Magnons. Actually that does all sort of happen, but again it’s a little lost on the reader given the “cinematic” way Eleanor Robinson writes the book. 

By “cinematic” I mean the way Robinson will cut away from action; I did appreciate how she stayed, for the most part, locked in the perspectives of her various characters. This means that the narrative doesn’t jump willy-nilly from the perspective of one character to another, without any line breaks or chapter breaks to alert the reader that such a change is occuring. But this also means that Robinson has a tendency to have something occuring from the perspective of one character, then there will be a break to another character…and we’ll only learn in passing what happened to that previous character, due to the obsfucated way Robinson handles the action scenes. Meaning, characters will die, and we don’t even know it until it’s relayed in dialog later in the book. And these are major characters, too. 

The action begins with a young anthropologist or somesuch named Jeff blasting rocks in the Arizona desert, inadvertently releasing an ancient form of life that will soon infect the residents of nearby small town Lazy Creek  The infection is mostly relayed through the plight of several people staying at an out-of-the-way hotel in Lazy Creek, owned by a new arrival to the area named Henry. How the place stays in business, what with its being off the main road and in the middle of the desert, is something Henry is struggling with, but meanwhile he does have some people staying with him, and Robinson introduces them all without much fanfare, expecting us readers to be able to keep track of all of them. 

The way the contagion works is there are these saclike egg things in the desert, freed from their millennia in the rocks by Jeff’s dynamite, and when torn open little fuzzy caterpillars come out, ones that stink horribly. If you touch them it hurts, and soon your hand will swell, and next thing you know you’ll be puking your guts out for an entire day, in addition to passing out a bunch. Slowly your forehead becomes larger and larger and you become more Neanderthal, with heightened senses and only a modicum of intelligence. Again, Robinson never outright states all of this, just showing the infection first through one particular character as it happens to him, with his of course not even knowing he’s become infected with some super-ancient virus. 

As mentioned Robinson really stuffs the pages with a lot of characters: Henry the owner of the place and his wife; Jeff the scientist (whose wife back home is about to give birth); a young woman who is babysitting for another couple who aren’t even there; a famous novelist gone to seed; a pair of Hispanics who pretend to be brother and sister but are really engaged to be married; an old socialite lady and her minder; a drug courier who is carrying a suitcase filled with money; a sheriff who harbors designs on said suitcase; even if he has to kill to get it; a football player and his entourage, including among them yet another wealthy socialite who has a super-annoying tendency to say “big heap” all the time; and that’s just the ones I can think of off the top of my head. I mean all these characters and more – including I just remembered the people who own and work in the local grocery store – all in the brief span of 175 pages. There are even subplots within the subplots, like the football player’s wife who is miserable (eventually we’ll learn it’s because the famous football player is in the closet, though this is “revealed” so hurriedly it barely registers), or even the friend of the football player’s wife who has secretly been stealing jewelry from her “friend” for the past several years. 

Robinson really has it on the long-simmer, with the book occuring over just a few days, so that the horror of the virus becomes slowly apparent both to the characters and to the reader. Gradually we have yet another new character added to the mix: a somewhat-arrogant young doctor who is flown in and who immediately puts Lazy River in a quarantine. Yes, the parallels to COVID are interesting here, particularly given how the Lazy River people begrudgingly give in to the whims of the government during the quarantine…until slowly coming to their senses and realizing the government people have no idea what the hell they are doing. But even when they do rebel, the impact of their action is lost in the way the narrative is handled. For example, a group of the hotel guests plot to hijack a government helicopter that is coming in with supplies. When the attempted hijacking transpires, however, Robinson doesn’t relay it from the perspective of the hijackers or even the people on the helicopter – she relays it from the perspective of someone infected by the virus, whose intelligence has been so ruined that he doesn’t even fully comprehend what he is seeing. 

It's things like this that ultimately sink Chrysalis Of Death, just one wrong narratorial decision after another. There is a lot of setup and little payoff, particularly for the many subplots. And also, some of the subplots are kind of thrust on us with no warning. Like when the sheriff starts searching for the drug courier, and thinks to himself that he’ll deputize the young anthropologist – so it won’t look as suspicious when the young anthropologist turns up dead. This is almost shocking in how casually it’s relayed to us readers, given that prior to this there was no warning our sheriff character would even be a villain. But no, we will gradually learn his own subplot concerns his determination to get the suitcase of money the drug courier might have hidden in Lazy Creek, and he’ll kill anyone who gets in his way. But this subplot too is totally lost in the narrative, with no payoff. Worse yet is the Spanish guy whose wife and child are killed by someone infected by the virus, and who swears revenge – and then disappears from the novel. 

Robinson does well capture the growing horror of the situation, and also she’s good at planting clues that indicate a person might ultimately become infected by the virus, even though they’re acting fine. But it seems that she loses control of her narrative as it nears its conclusion, with a lot of characters dying off-page, and the drama of it totally unexploited. She earns points though for delivering a ‘70s-mandatory bummer ending, which again aligns with the drive-in movie that’s playing in your mind. 

Overall, Chrysalis Of Death was interesting to find on the clearance rack, but not a book I’d recommend. It’s more sluggish than its short page length would imply, and it was a lot of work to keep track of the various characters. Also, the book really could’ve benefitted from some naughty stuff. The editors at Pocket Books really try to make it seem like the book has naughty stuff in it, though; this is one of those instances where you wish the book was more like the back-cover copy would indicate. As for Eleanor Robinson, it appears that she only published one more novel, The Silverleaf Syndrome, another “biological horror” affair that was published in 1980 by Tower Books.  It was also published that same year by Leisure Books as The Freak.

While researching Eleanor Robinson, I came across this 2009 article that tells how Robinson, who apparently passed away some time ago (in 1985, if my math is correct from the dates given in the article), inspired her granddaughter from beyond the grave.