The Penetrator #45: Quaking Terror

The Penetrator #45: Quaking Terror, by Lionel Derrick

February, 1982  Pinnacle Books

Boy, we’re getting into the homestretch of The Penetrator, aren’t we? At this point there are only a few instalments left until #53, the series finale. And I’m happy to say that Mark Roberts continues to show a new investment in the series, as Quaking Terror is for the most part a bunch of goofy fun, Roberts doling out juicy gore and explicit sex with aplomb – meaning there is none of the half-assedry of the past twenty-some (or more!) volumes. 

I kind of hoped it would be the case when I saw the cover (credited to George Wilson on the copyright page), and I’m happy to report that Quaking Terror is indeed Mark “The Penetrator” Hardin versus a vampire! Not just any vampire, either, but Count Dracula! Granted, Roberts doesn’t go all the way with the setup, but it’s evident that he wanted to. Throughout the book he walks a thin line that the novel’s villain is either Dracula or just some nutjob Eastern European named Magarac who merely thinks he’s Dracula. Otherwise the horror-action hybrid you might be hoping for doesn’t really exist in the actual novel, as Mark Hardin spends the majority of the 200 pages gunning down technicians and guards who work for the would-be vampire. That said, Quaking Terror does at least end with a chainsaw-vs-chainsaw showdown between the Penetrator and Count Dracula! 

There’s also some of Roberts’s typical continuity, as one of Magarac’s men worked on the vibrating “super gun” that Mark destroyed way back in #21: The Supergun Mission. This is what Magarac-Dracula is using to set off volcanoes around the United States, in order to get a ransom from the government. Roberts ties into the then-recent Mount St. Helens eruption, implying that Magarac was behind it, and is now looking to set off more volcanoes. Given that there are limited areas where Magarac can carry out this plan, the entirety of Quaking Terror occurs in Washington state. 

Speaking of topical references, Mark Roberts even finds the opportunity to mention Mork & Mindy; Magarac breaks over the airwaves of the United States just as “Mork had climbed into his Orkan egg.” This line actually took me back; for no reason whatsoever, it made me remember a Mork & Mindy toy some kid in elementary school had at the time (I would’ve been seven years old when this book was published), and I really wanted one of my own, but I never got one. It was this cool little Mork action figure that came with an egg, and I’d completely forgotten about it over the past four friggin’ decades, until I read this line in Quaking Terror. I guess I must’ve really wanted the damn thing, as here I am 50 years old and I still remember it – well anyway, here is the toy. 

Continuing on, Magarac breaks over the TV airwaves to make his threat – sort of how Max Headroom hijacked signals a few years later – and this causes panic across the US. In particular the Mafia gets involved, putting together a hit squad to take out Magarac, becase he’s infringing on their territory. Or something. It’s reasons like this that leads me to conclude that Roberts wanted to do a straight horror-action hybrid, but felt straitjacketed by the conventions of the series. So instead of vampires, the Penetrator fights mobsters and henchmen, and Magarac stays off-page for the majority of the text. 

This is unfortunate, as Roberts really builds him up in the opening. For one, he looks more like Nosferatu than Dracula; Wilson’s cover art is great, but Roberts actually describes Magarac as being “egg-bald [with a] long, lobey head and over-large ears, all flour paste white so that the huge, smoke-gray eyes and nearly lipless gash of a mouth made stygian holes in a skeleton mask.” Ten points for the creation of the word “lobey,” by the way. Magarac also has a dwarf “familiar” named Koslov, who prepares Magarac’s victims – usually employees who have failed him in some way – for a “life bath.” Meaning, their veins are opened and Magarac does something with the blood, though it’s never outright stated if he drinks it. But boy, Mark Roberts ultimately drops all of this in the course of the novel; hell, the dwarf doesn’t even appear again, and there’s no part where Mark Hardin kicks him or anything. I mean, and spoiler alert, but Koslov the dwarf familiar is dead when the Penetrator comes upon him, at the very end of the novel! 

Mark Hardin doesn’t appear in the book until page 28. Roberts spends the preceding pages in exposition overload; we have an overlong bit where a scientist goes on and on about volcanoes and what sets them off and etc…and then, humorously, the scientist is killed off like a page later. But this guy was friends with Professor Haskins, ie the Penetrator’s mentor, or whatever the Professor is to the Penetrator. I mean, it’s not like he’s the M to Mark’s Bond. He doesn’t give Mark orders, or do much else. Well anyway, who cares; the series is almost over, anyway. 

So Mark heads to smalltown, Washington (he does not visit Seattle in the entirety of the book), Roberts of course taking the opportunity to engage in some of his flying fiction as he tells us about Mark’s plane and his flight. One thing to note though is that Mark comes fully stocked this time; in the course of Quaking Terror he uses a riot shotgun, a Mac-10 submachine gun (referred to as an “Ingram M-10”), various pistols, and even once again he uses Ava, his dart gun – with both the knockout pellets and the “instant kill” pellets. So again, the ferocity has somewhat returned to The Penetrator, and Mark avidly kills the majority of his opponents, instead of knocking them out like he was doing for a long, tepid stretch of the seeries. 

This is displayed posthaste, as Mark when he first appears in the text gets in a big gunfight with some of Magarac’s men around the base of a volcano in Washington. Mark guns them down and then heads into a small town on his plane, where he soon hooks up with a small-breasted, “raven-haired” beauty named Carrie who waitresses at a local bar…but is also a college student who is studying the psychological aspects of vampires. Magarac has been seen in the vicinity, and Mark looks to Carrie for info on vampires…cue even more page-filling exposition, as Carrie goes on and on about historical “vampire” cases. 

Here is where we learn of all the mysterious disappearances in the area, with blood-drained bodies showing up, and Mark will spend the time wondering if Magarac is really a vampire and if he’s really been drinking the blood of his victims. Meanwhile Mark gets it on with Carrie, though Roberts does not go for the full-bore exploitation as he would in the later Soldier For Hire. Or, for that matter, as he did in some of the earlier volumes of The Penetrator. But we do get a winner of a line when Carrie strokes Mark’s “pendulous, rising maleness…to fullness.” Sadly though Roberts denies us any similarly-goofy sleaze in the actual sex scene, with Mark castely “turning out the light” before he gets busy with the gal. 

Roberts does deliver a fair bit of action throughout. Mark not only blows away scads of technicians and thugs who work for Magarac, but he also takes on the Mafia. This is courtesy Lucky Lou Battaglia, a gunner from Chicago who has been hired to wipe out Magarac, but instead finds himself running afoul of the Penetrator himself. As ever Mark makes short work of these goons, to the point that you figure if the Penetrator swapped places with The Executioner, the Mafia would be finished off in a few volumes. Roberts injects a fair bit of gore into the tale, though as ever he it as if he’s consulted a copy of Grey’s Anatomy: 

For the most part, Mark Hardin spends the majority of the novel going around Washington, from one Magarac location to another, and shooting up his men – or shooting up the mobsters who are supposedly looking for Magarac. There’s a lot of repetition in the narrative, too; Carrie is abduced by the mobsters midway through the novel, and Mark rescues her humorously fast. But then, Carrie is abducted again later in the book! There’s also a page-filling bit where Mark has to quell a rebellion among the American Indians in town, who feel they are getting blamed for the earthquakes or somesuch. Honestly this part seemed grafted on. 

Which again makes it a shame that so little time is spent with Magarac himself. It isn’t until the very end of the novel that Mark launches an assault on the villain and the two come face-to-face…or perhaps that should be chainsaw-to-chainsaw. Apropos of nothing, Magarac grabs one up when Mark is chasing him, and Mark picks up one of his own…it’s pretty wild, even if it’s just a goofy way for Mark Roberts to establish that a tree stump is conveniently chainsawed into a handy stake! 

Overall, Quaking Terror is pretty entertaining, and it’s nice to see the Penetrator acting like his old self. But it’s a shame the “vampire” stuff isn’t more dwelt upon, so either Mark Roberts didn’t think he could make it work, or perhaps he didn’t get buy-in from series editor Andy Ettinger.

They Thirst

They Thirst, by Robert R. McCammon

May, 1981  Avon Books

Robert McCammon was a name I knew well in my horror-reading teen years; you’d often see copies of his super-fat paperbacks in middle school and high school. I was a Stephen King guy, though, and rarely ventured outside his world to other horror fiction. I do recall attempting to read McCammon’s Swan Song at some point in high school – yet another super-fat paperback, this one about the end of the world – but I couldn’t get over how similar it was to King’s The Stand (which I’d read in its recently-published uncut version shortly before), so I put it aside. Literally the only thing I recall about Swan Song was the description that one of the characters, a black professional wrestler, had a stomach that had gone to “marshmellow” due to his eating donuts or something, and that “marshmellow” description always stuck with me. 

 Well anyway! I’ve been on a horror kick lately, though to tell the truth it’s starting to wane now (it actually lasted longer than previous horror fiction kicks!), and I decided to give McCammon another chance. But as usual with me it couldn’t be easy. The book that really caught my interest was this one, an early novel of his, yet another super-fat paperback, about vampires in Los Angeles. Another one seemingly inspired by King, in this case Salem’s Lot. But folks They Thirst ain’t easy to get hold of. The days of Robert McCammon’s paperbacks being ubiquitous are long gone, especially when it comes to the first four he published, which McCammon himself has kept from being reprinted. They’re now known as the “Condemned Four.” 

Predictably, this means that those first four books are overpriced on the used books marketplace, even though they each went through a few printings. And They Thirst is the most overpriced of all. Hell, there isn’t even a digital scan of it on The Internet Archive. Sellers want $30 and up for copies. I became so obsessed with finding this book that I actually purchased a coverless copy of the original Avon Books edition…and it cost me a dollar. The thing is in super beaten shape, but hey, I just wanted to read the book, you know…I don’t really get worked up about “mint condition” and etc these days. Plus the cover’s kind of lame on this edition. And also, for the first time I’d been called for jury duty, so I thought I’d bring the book along to read. You don’t have to worry about maintaining the condition of a book when it’s already missing the front cover, has a broken spine, and in general looks like it was carried in a backpack on a trek across Europe. I also thought if they saw me reading a book about vampires in L.A. they wouldn’t pick me for the jury, but unfortunately that didn’t work and I was picked anyway. 

Running to 531 small-print pages, They Thirst is not a quick read. Not by a long shot! It took me a few weeks to read it. And I have to say, there were times when I was sufficiently caught up in it that I wanted to read nothing else. (I’m not always faithful to long books when I’m reading them.) I thought They Thirst might be this year’s Colony or The Tomorrow File, a long book that could’ve just kept going on and on, such was my enjoyment. And speaking of Ben Bova’s Colony, it seems to me that Robert McCammon was attempting the same sort of thing, like also what Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle did with Lucifer’s Hammer: a genre novel written in the style of the bestselling mainstream fiction of the day. They Thirst is ostensibly horror, but like those other novels it offers a panoramic view of a large cast of characters interracting across a large canvass of action, with the idea of appealing to a larger readership than just horror fans. 

But here’s the thing. They Thirst is usually loglined as “vampires in Los Angeles.” It wasn’t until around page 400, though, that I realized IT WASN’T EVEN A VAMPIRE NOVEL. I have no real knowledge of Robert McCammon, haven’t researched him at all, but if I am correct he has “banned” They Thirst and the previous three novels because he considers them subpar, or at least not good indications of his writing. I don’t know what he holds particularly against They Thirst, but my own personal guess would be because the novel suffers from identity confusion. I mean the first two hundred pages are like a crime novel about a serial killer in L.A., sort of a prefigure of Marcel Montecino’s The Cross Killer. Then They Thirst turns into an end-of-the-world disaster novel, before transforming yet again into a quest novel in the final quarter. Actual vampire stuff is scant, and like John Steakley’s later Vampire$, the vampires that do show up come off more like zombies. 

To be sure, this is not a Dracula type of yarn; these vampires are not the suave sinister types who lure in young women (or men) and have their way with them one by one. Hell, Thirst is more of a “traditional” vampire novel than this is. Rather, They Thirst is more of a virus contagion sort of yarn, with vampirism quickly spreading across sections of Los Angeles and turning regular everyday folks into bloodthirsty vampires who thirst for blood. To me, it just all seemed more like a zombie apocalypse sort of story, only McCammon wants his cake and to eat it, too, as he tries to have it both ways – vampirism spreads to such an extent that almost the entirety of L.A. has become vampires, or knows about vampires, yet our author also wants to have it that the actual existence of vampires is still questioned by most people, especially those outside of L.A. This becomes especially hard to buy as the action becomes more and more apocalyptic in the final section. 

Oh and I almost forgot: above I wrote that They Thirst clearly seems to cater to the bestselling fiction template of the day, but one thing I was bummed to learn was that it was very tepid in the sleaze arena. I believe there’s only one sex scene in the novel, early on, and it’s minimal at best. What I’m trying to say is, this is certainly no Live Girls. And hell for that matter, McCammon doesn’t even exploit the setting much. When I saw this novel was about “vampires in L.A.” I imagined, you know, vampires running amok in the neon glow of Sunset Strip, but that never happens in the book. We get a lot of namedropping of various streets, buildings, and sections of the barrios, but for the most part the zombie-like vampires lurk in the shadows of empty houses, and the king vampire himself lurks above the city, in a castle built by a murdered horror movie actor. 

Now this bit really grinded my gears. Another thing the McCammon of today might not like about They Thirst is that there’s so much setup with little payoff, from characters to subplots. One of the latter concerns the wonderfully-named Orlon Kronsteen, a Bela Lugosi-type horror actor who starred in a movie about Jack the Ripper (and other stuff, though we are told woefully little of him) and had a castle built above Los Angeles. But “several years ago” Kronsteen was murdered, apparently in some sort of ritual deal, with his head cut off or something…and Prince Vulkan, the king vampire of They Thirst, decides this castle will be his perfect home base. But nothing whatsoever is made of Kronsteen, the entire mystery of why or how he was killed just totally dropped from the narrative…even worse is that some random biker seems to imply that he was there the night it happened, but this biker too is dropped from the narrative. 

It's like that throughout. In pure “bestselling fiction” style, Robert McCammon introduces sundry characters at the start of They Thirst, but he turns out to be like a pet-sitter who takes on too many animals to watch. I mean pretty soon most of these characters are just plain gone, and folks by the end of the novel they still haven’t come back! In fact it’s a wonder Avon Books didn’t package They Thirst like a blockbuster-type novel, giving a quick logline of the many main characters: 

Andy Palatazin – Los Angeles police captain who knows vampires are real and ultimately sees himself as the only man who can stop the infestation. Plus he’s haunted by the ghost of his mom. 

Gayle Clarke – Hotstuff reporter for a tabloid; when her boyfriend tries to drink her blood she realizes vampires might exist. Intermittently disappears from the narrative, only to return hundreds of pages later. 

Prince Vulkan – Dead since the 1400s, turned into a vampire as a teen, with the appropriate temper tantrums of an undead teenager. The chosen disciple of “The Headmaster” (ie the devil in all but name), for reasons not explained he’s only now decided to conquer L.A., despite being hundreds of years old. 

The Roach – Serial killer freak with a penchant for murdering hookers who look like his dead mother and stuffing cockroaches in their mouths. Serves as the would-be Renfield to Prince Vulkan’s Dracula. 

Kobra – Albino biker with the memorable intro in which he blows away some rednecks in a bar with his Mauser for absolutely no reason. Perhaps the most wasted character in the novel; Kobra is developed as this super cool badass but anticlimactically drops out of the narrative, only to return sporadically afterward. 

Tommy Chandler – Another teen, this one alive, a monster movie fan with posters of Orlon Kronsteen on his wall and also who knows how Kronsteen’s castle is layed out, thanks to a feature in an old issue of Famous Monsters Of Filmland. 

Wes Richer and Solange – He’s a rising star on the comedy scene with a hit show in which he plays a moron Sherlock Holmes; she’s his “Afro-Asian” mistress, a stacked beauty with a penchant for reading ouija boards and whatnot. In fact it’s through one of these that the title of the novel comes into play, as Solange receives the message “THEY THIRST” from the spirit world. 

Ratty – A ‘Nam vet who lives in the sewers beneath L.A., where he grows his own drugs. In his “Timothy Leary for President” shirt he’s the highlight of the novel, though only appears in the final quarter. 

Father Silvera – A brawny priest with a hidden disease that’s killing him, he takes the expected route of denying that vampires exist, then realizing it, then refusing to go on the quest to the Kronsteen castle to kill Vulkan, and then instead saving his flock…before finally heading to the Kronsteen castle. 

There are sundry other characters, many of them unnecessary, like the hotstuff real estate lady who helped Vulkan buy the castle. She gets a few chapters, then just flat-out drops from the narrative. Same goes for the owner of a funeral parlor chain. Or Rico, who is searching for his lost girlfriend in the barrio. Or a doctor at a hospital who realizes too late that her “dead” patients are really vampires. Many of these characters are of course turned into vampires, but even then they disappear afterwards, with no “I’m a vampire now!” shock return. It’s a bit disappointing, but it must be said that, while you’re reading the book, you don’t realize that the majority of this stuff isn’t going to pan out. I mean it’s about the journey, not the destination, as I’m sure Ratty would say, but still. It wasn’t until around page 500 or so that I realized so much of this stuff was not going to be resolved. 

The first couple hundred pages were by far my favorite. McCammon delivers a taut suspense thriller with only minor supernatural overturns; this opening section is almost a standard crime novel, with Capt. Palatazin obsessed with finding and stopping a serial killer the papers have dubbed the Roach. It’s very much a police procedural, with no action, just Palatazin going about the work of deduction and following clues. And we have stuff from the Roach’s point of view; curiously, his day job is as a pest exterminator, same as the serial killer in Lou Cameron’s The Closing Circle. The horror novel stuff gradually develops, mostly through the strange bit of corpses being mysteriously dug out of graves at night. Palatazin, whose father was bitten by a vampire when Palatazin was a child in Hungary, knows something is going on. 

But the “vampire virus” stuff builds up and soon it’s more of a zombie apocalypse yarn, with whole sections of the barrio for example overrun by vampires. Then the end of the world vibe begins; Vulkan uses his powers to bring down an apocalyptic sandstorm on Los Angeles, blocking the city off from the world and keeping people from leaving. Phone lines are down, planes can’t leave, etc. This section goes on for a long time and again made me think of King’s The Stand. It’s very much a piece of disaster fiction now, with long sequences of various characters getting trapped in cars or in their homes and trying to get out before the daylight goes away so they can kill vampires. This part was my least favorite in the novel. 

Then the final quarter takes on a quest angle. Some of the characters band together to get to the Kronsteen castle, where they figure the “king vampire” might lurk. This too takes up a large brunt of the narrative; I mean they aren’t like “Let’s go there,” and then they’re at the castle the next chapter. It’s almost grueling and again takes away from the vampire stuff the reader might want. It’s really just characters fighting their way through blinding clouds of sand and trying to figure out where they are. To tell the truth it was exhausting to read. What makes it worse is that McCammon drops the ball in the finale. Major characters are dispensed with in an almost offhand fashion, and worse yet the entire point of certain characters even being here is rendered moot. No spoilers, but Palatazin in particular. I mean this guy’s dad turned into a vampire, so he has a personal, uh, “stake” in the matter, but he doesn’t contribute much to the climax. 

Even funnier, McCammon doesn’t seem to know when to end the novel. So even after the good guys have sort of won, we get like an extended 20-page bit where Gayle Clarke, who has mostly disappeared from the novel at this point, tries to escape from the military base in which survivors are being held. And it just keeps going on and on. All so she can get out to the real world and tell the story that vampires exist…not that anyone believes her. Even though the entirety of L.A. turned into vampires, complete with even the deejay on a radio station taunting the last few humans in the city. But like I said, McCammon wants his cake and to eat it too. 

So yeah, I was a bit underwhelmed with They Thirst. I do think though that I enjoyed it more than Will did, over at Too Much Horror Fiction. I was sufficiently caught up in it, at least for the first few hundred pages. But once it got to the apocalyptic sandstorm bit it started to lose my interest. I also felt the climactic assault on Vulkan in Kronsteen’s castle could have been more thrilling, but McCammon was so focused on showing how dire the plight of his characters was that he did succeed in making it all seem hopeless. But then he makes it seem so hopeless that the climax is a bit hard to buy. 

I’ve got some more Robert McCammon novels which I might read someday; one of them, Wolf’s Hour, about a werewolf in World War II, is one I really wanted to read back when it came out, but just never got around to.

Vampire$

Vampire$, by John Steakley

May, 1992  ROC Books

This is a novel I’ve always remembered, because I bought it fresh off the racks when it was first published; it came out during my sudden interest in horror fiction in my teen years. I am not sure what attracted me to Vampire$; maybe it was the back cover, which promised a sort of men’s adventure take on horror fiction, with bounty hunters taking on vampires. At the time, mixing horror with action wasn’t nearly as commonplace an idea as it is now, so likely this appealed to me. Also, I’m sure I recognized the name of the author; John Steakley’s previous novel, Armor, was always displayed in the sci-fi paperback section of my local WaldenBooks, and I thought it looked super cool with its cover art of an armored space guy taking on a bug-eyed space monster, but for some reason I never actually purchased the book. 

But the reason I remember Vampire$ is because it’s one of the very few books I’ve ever given away. I’ll admit, I am stingy with my books; I don’t hoard them, because I do actually read them (even if it takes me decades to get to them). But I don’t give them away! And yet I did give this one away; I tried reading it shortly after buying it, but just couldn’t get into the novel. I had a friend, with the odd name of “Jamec” (or, “James with a ‘C,” as he always explained it), and if I recall correctly he was interested in the book so I gave it to him. I probably traded him for something. I also seem to recall that he did read Vampire$ and liked it a lot. 

The curious thing is, even though I only read the first several pages of the novel, it still stuck with me – I vividly recalled a weird pseudo-Western opening in which a group of vampire hunters were staking zombie-like “goons” before finally taking on the “Master Vampire,” and they were using crossbows and stakes and whatnot. Also, the bit with the Master Vampire calling the leader of the bounty hunters, Jack Crow, by name also stuck with me. But I stopped reading the book! Then some years later I realized that John Carpenter’s new film Vampires was a film adaptation of this novel, even though they changed the dollar sign to an “s.” 

Steakley certainly wasn’t prolific. This and Armor were his only two published novels. Vampire$ did well enough to warrant a film version, though, so it’s surprising Steakley (who died in 2010) didn’t write more books. Initially Vampire$ seems to be in the vein of the horror paperbacks that were proliferating on bookstore shelves at the time, but one quickly sees it’s of a slightly higher literary caliber; indeed, this novel answers the unasked question: “What if Tom Wolfe wrote a horror-action novel?” Parts of Vampire$ seem to have been taken directly from The Right Stuff or The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, both in tone, narrative style, and even in the simultaneous mocking and worshiping of macho heroism. Particularly in the action scenes; like Wolfe, Steakley eschews the terse, punchy short sentences normally associated with pulp action scenes and instead goes for endless run-on sentences: 

It’s like this throughout the novel; anytime something exciting or tense or dramatic happens,the sentences start getting more and more breathless, just going on and on. I found the style to be grating, at least in a novel about bounty hunters who go after vampires. I wanted a more direct approach to the action; John Shirley could’ve turned this concept into a nail-biter of a novel. Instead, Steakley turns in a book that I found tedious for the most part, mostly due to the glib nature of his protagonists. We are to understand that Jack Crow and his team are burnt out and hide their eternal fear behind macho bravura, but Steakley can’t decide which of the two he wants to show us more. To the point that if the protagonists aren’t trying to one-up each other in drinking contests or whatever, they’re running off into the shadows to cry alone. 

The ”scenery description” bits are even more Tom Wolfe-esque; the below could come straight out of the part in The Right Stuff where the Mercury Seven astronauts move to Houston, Texas (doubly so, as this excerpt takes place in Dallas): 

I still haven’t watched John Carpenter’s Vampires, but judging from the trailer it seems that Carpenter really went for that Western vibe. As it turns out, the novel itself doesn’t have that style at all, save for the opening – with Team Crow in a small dusty town taking out vampires and dealing with a Mayor who doesn’t want to pay the bounty hunters. But after that the novel ranges from Rome to Los Angeles to Dallas, with a long detour in Cleburne, Texas, and this latter part is actually more so “small town, USA” than pseudo-Western. For that matter, Team Crow go about their vampire-busting duties in a very un-Western manner: they wear chain mail of “high-tech plastic” that covers them from head to toe (with cross-shaped halogen lamps on their chests), and they kill vampires with crossbows, pikes, and stakes. But the Western stuff does enter the fray with the Team acquiring the services of a “Gunman.” Despite doing this for a few years, Jack Crow in this novel has the sudden revelation that they could use guns to blow away vampires, instead of cumbersome crossbows and whatnot. 

The only problem is, neither Jack Crow nor any of his Team members are “shooters.” So they need a guy who can use a gun. And yes, a guy; this is not an equal opportunity gig, as Jack Crow insists that only men be on his team…and fit ones, at that. The only women in the orbit are Annabelle, the middle-aged matron-type who oversees the group (widow of the man who originally funded them), and new gal Davette, who is constantly described as “beautiful,” and that’s it. Steakley is incredibly reserved in the sleaze and sin department; Vampire$ is anemic (if you’ll pardon the lame vampire-esque pun) in the sex department, with zero in the way of titillation or exploitation or anything. Hell for that matter, even the violence is pretty tame. 

Also on the team is new priest Father Adam – the Catholic Church is secretly behind the vampire killing, you see, so Team Crow always needs a priest. And Father Adam instructs, for reasons not elaborated on, that it must be single single bullets used to shoot vampires. Ie, no machine-gun auto hellfire, so there goes any expectations that this might be a more entertaining Nightblood. In the opening sequence we see Team Crow in action: basically they find the resting places of vampires during the day, and Crow and a few others will go into the dark confines to peg the vamps with crossbows – crossbows which are attached to a rig on a truck, which pulls the vampires out into the sunlight to burn them up. But in this opening scene Crow inadvertently learns that silver also can harm vampires, to the point that vampires can’t heal these wounds, like they can others. 

Another thing to note is that vampires in Steakley’s novel are basically gods; in fact one of them refers to himself as such. Steakley does not spend much time at all on vampire lore, or the hierarchy of vampires, but it seems to go like this: there are “Master Vampires,” ie the godlike ones who move quicker than the eye can follow, can jump incredible distances, and who are impervious to most weapons. But to become a Master Vampire, first you must be bitten by one…and die…and then you come back as a zombie-like “goon.” These are mindless creatures that just shuffle around, looking for blood, and Team Crow spends most of its time taking these lower-level creatures out. Even though they are lower-level, they’re still hard to kill. If a goon lasts long enough, apparently, it regains its senses and becomes a Master Vampire, and Master Vampires are almost impossible to kill; Crow has only killed a few of them in his two-year career. But now it appears that the vampires know Crow, even referencing him by name, and the opening sequence further features the majority of Crow’s team getting wiped out by a vengeance-minded Master Vampire. The rest of Vampire$ concerns Crow hiring a “gunman” and continuing with his vampire-killing job. 

The novel is very sloppily constructed. There is a lot of showing and telling; there are so many times where characters will talk about doing something…then they’ll do it…then they’ll go talk about what they just did. Sometimes it’s pretty egregious, too, particularly when Steakley will have characters discuss something we just saw happen. A lot of this is given over to the “boys” in Team Crow telling “the girls” what happened during the job, and it’s all just so repetitious. A lot of the book could’ve been cut. Also there are bizarre narrative choices. The first 100 pages get tedious in how nothing really happens but lots of talk and Team Crow getting drunk and talking about it. Then there follows a bravura hundred-page sequence where they take on vampires in smalltown Cleburne, Texas. Then after this stellar sequence we have a super-random backstory that goes on for nearly seventy pages and concerns a previously minor character. Who is suddenly revealed to be tin the thrall of the vampire Team Crow just killed, which renders all this moot. I mean this out-of-sequence stuff might work in a Tarantino movie, but here it just comes off as super random…particularly given that the character with the long story being recounted was a minor character at best in the preceding 200 pages. 

There’s also a helluva lot of POV-hopping, by which I mean that gear-grinding manner in which we jump willy-nilly from the thoughts and perspectives of one character into the thoughts and perspectives of another character, with no white space or other sort of warning that, “hey, we’re about to switch to another character’s perspective!” This goes on throughout the damn book and it just drove me nuts. There’s also way too much explaining of what happened…characters will dole out glib comments (pretty much the only kind of comments they make), there will be a lot of macho posturing in return…and then someone will explain to a new character (most often a female) what the boys were really just trying to say to each other. It’s very insulting to the reader’s intelligence. 

Perhaps the biggest misstep in the construction of the novel is that the first hundred pages seem to feature Jack Crow as the protagonist…then a hundred pages in Steakley introduces a new character, Walter Felix, and he becomes the main character! And the annoyance is Crow is still there, just a supporting character now, and Felix spends the next 250-plus pages questioning Crow’s leadership and butting heads with him and mocking his “samurai bullshit.” The problem here is that there’s nothing wrong with Crow’s leadership; we know from page 1 that he’s been handed a thankless, sure-to-get-him-killed job, and besides he seems to have walked out of any action movie of the era. We’re told he’s a giant of a man, six-feet-plus of pure muscle; Steakley clearly had a Stallone or a Schwarzenegger in mind, which makes it humorous that James Woods got the role in John Carpenter’s 1998 film adaptation.  Another thing to note is that Steakley fails to really describe any of the other characters; the reader’s imagination must do some heavy lifting throughout the novel. 

But see that’s another thing about Vampire$: I didn’t like any of the characters. They’re all so glib and spend so much time butting heads, particularly with Felix’s introduction, that you never really feel anything for them. This was Steakley’s biggest stumble, because the novel starts off with Crow losing his team after what seemed to be a successful mission; one of the horror highlights of the novel is when the revenge-seeking vampire attacks the drunken partiers in their hotel. After this we have a bit with Crow getting drunk and then crying in the lap of none other than the Pope (his team is sanctioned by the Catholic Church, but Steakley doesn’t do much with this, either)…then we have that excellent midway action sequence which caps off with the big reveal that one of the vampires knows Crow by name. But all the drama and tension Steakley tries to instill here is squandered because these characters seem so distant; we aren’t told enough about them, nor why they even got into the vampire-hunting game to begin with. This is another miss, as with “new guy” Felix the author had the opportunity to show how a new team would develop, but instead he has Felix and Crow arguing the entire time, and Felix constantly threatening to quit. 

John Carpenter must have had the same issue with Steakley’s plotting, as it appears that the character of Felix didn’t even make it into the film. It also appears that Carpenter added a new subplot concerning a vampire; one of the frustrations of Vampire$ is that the vampires themselves are not very exploited. They’re evil and nearly impossible to kill, but Team Crow shows no interest in them whatsoever. Even the dangling subplot of the vampires banding together to take out Crow himself is not much exploited. Instead, so much of the novel is given over to the glib back-and-forths of Team Crow, plus the increasingly fractional relationship between Crow and Felix. By far the highlight of the novel is the hundred-page stretch where they go to Cleburne and bust up a nest of vampires; this sequence is stellar, playing out almost in real time, as Crow and his best buddy Cherry Cat go into the town courthouse (where the vampires have holed up) and lure out “goons” before facing off against a Master Vampire. 

Compared to this, the finale is underwhelming. And it’s messy again. We go into a freefall here, Steakley jettisoning all the headwind he’d achieved in the Cleburne sequence with an overlong flashback concerning a minor character…then we have the almost-casual offing of several major characters…then the sudden revelation that a Dallas bigwig is actually a Master Vampire…then the harried confrontation with said vampire. None of this stuff matches the tension and sheer fun of the Cleburne sequence. The epilogue in particular is annoying because a main character suddenly returns as a vampire – a development you can see coming from miles away – and Steakley writes the sequence with such opaque prose that you have no frigging clue whatsoever what exactly happens to him. The finale’s dumb too, as we see Felix starting up his own team of vampire busters…with nothing to make his way of leading the team seem different from the “Samurai bullshit” he accused Crow of. 

It seems to me that John Steakley was trying to both spoof and pay hommage to manly masculine action entertainment, but unfortunately this ironic detachment schtick works fine when it’s Tom Wolfe studying the early Space Race but falls flat when it’s about a bunch of crossbow-armed vampire killers. Steakley seems to be trying to question the masculine heroic sacrifice of Jack Crow through the constant badgering of Felix…but Felix offers nothing different. Felix is even more violent than Crow, for that matter, gunning down scads of vampires in the course of the novel. Maybe one of the (very few) female characters in the novel might have offered a different, less “Samurai bullshit” take, but the female characters are literally escorted off to safety before any of the action scenes. 

I mean, Vampire$ is entertaining, and Steakley can certainly write, but it’s just kind of a mess…and gets to be a bit of a beating at 357 pages. Maybe Steakley struggled with writing, hence why Vampire$ and Armor were his only two novels. And speaking of which, he had something weird in mind, as apparently “Jack Crow” and “Felix” were the names of the two main protagonists in Armor; a cryptic Author’s Note in Vampire$ informs us that “This Crow is no other Crow” and “This Felix is no other Felix.” Another thing to note is that this 1992 edition is the stated “first mass market printing,” but the book is copyright 1990. 

Steakley by the way lived right next door to me, in McKinney, Texas (though I was unaware of this at the time), and as I mentioned in an earlier post he appeared in an episode of the 1980s Dallas-area show The Texas 27 Film Vault, which you can see here (link cued to Steakley’s appearance).

Thirst

Thirst, by Pyotyr Kurtinski

August, 1995  Leisure Books

Apparently twenty years passed before anyone noticed the name Pyotyr Kurtinski was Peter McCurtin gone Slavic. -- Lynn Munroe 

“I can see you have a great big hard-on. I don’t mind being fucked by a vampire. Lord knows I’ve been fucked by everyone but the Birdman of Alcatraz. Just don’t get too rough.” -- From the book 

If it were not for Lynn Munroe I wonder if anyone would have ever known that Thirst was the last published novel of Peter McCurtin, who died in January 1997 at the age of 68. McCurtin was very prolific, but if I’m not mistaken Thirst was his only horror novel…but then, I wonder if it could accurately be described as such. If I didn’t know any better I’d say this novel was intended as a spoof of horror novels; it makes the similarly-goofy The Vampire Tapes seem like a piece of serious horror literature. Of course the other possibility is that McCurtin was just totally out of his area in horror and turned in what he thought was a genuine horror novel. 

The reviews for this novel on Goodreads are almost comical in how savage they are. McCurtin – though of course the reviewers have no idea it is McCurtin, and assume “Kurtinski” is a real author – is raked over the coals, particularly for his frequent mistake of stating that a bat has a beak. This fallacy is repeated throughout the novel. But then, the novel is about a vampire who can turn himself into a giant bat, so it’s not like realism is much of a concern. Seriously though, things needed to be grounded in reality for the supernatural stuff to have any impact, so little details like “bats don’t have beaks” should have been a concern for McCurtin…which makes me suspect the book is a spoof. 

More evidence comes in how neurotic our 200+ year-old protagonist, William Van Diemen, turns out to be. The guy is like the Woody Allen of vampires, though we’re informed he’s a good-looking Dutch dude who is permanently 23 because that’s when he became a vampire. One would have to wonder how such a goof could have survived – and thrived – for over two centuries. In Thirst he’s constantly second-guessing himself, mulling over really stupid stuff, making frequent mistakes, and he even falls in love. What I found most interesting about this neurotic nature is that Len Levinson told me that, when he was writing his Sharpshooter novels in the ‘70s, Peter McCurtin himself (who was editor of the series) said that Len’s version of “Sharpshooter” Johnny Rock was “too neurotic,” and wouldn’t last long in his mob-busting war if he was constantly second-guessing himself. Len reigned this in and delivered a neurosis-free Rock in Headcrusher. 

So McCurtin failed to heed his own advice in this 1995 novel. And that’s another thing. If I’d started reading Thirst without knowing anything about it…I’d probably fire off an email to Len to ask him if he’d written it! Now I’m not saying Len Levinson would think bats have beaks, but Thirst is so “Len Levinson-esque” that I wonder if McCurtin was influenced by Len. Like a Len Levinson novel, there’s no “plot” per se and the characters all seem to exist outside the novel, often obsessing over things both mundane and spiritual. That said, Len would have written a better novel than Peter McCurtin did. Thirst, while it is Len Levinson-esque in the narrative style, lacks the trademark spark of a genuine Len Levinson novel. 

The most curious thing is how little Thirst is like the other McCurtin novels I’ve read. I guess the closest comparison would be his strange ‘70s attempt at a bestseller beach read-type book, the similiarly-goofy The Pleasure Principle. The difference is Thirst is longer, coming in at 346 pages. But per the Leisure Books norm those pages fly by thanks to some very big print…and also true to Leisure form the novel is riddled with typos. In many ways Thirst is exactly like the stuff McCurtin was writing (and editing) for the publisher back in the ‘70s, not to mention that the “main” plot (per se) features our villainous protagonist Van Diemen operating less like a vampire and more like a ‘90s Johnny Rock, fighting the Mafia…which is another source of ridicule in those Goodreads reviews, given that this vampire does his fighting with guns and grenades! 

So for 346 big-print pages Van Diemen, who has a castle in the Bronx, tries to stop a lawyer who wants to purchase his land, feeds nightly on unsuspecting prey, works on his autobiography, turns a hapless P.I. into a vampire, and also falls in friggin’ love with a jaded photographer who either has a “hard face” or is “attractive” (McCurtin can’t seem to make up his mind). She also has a “hip-flask voice,” one of my favorite random descriptions ever. Oh and there’s also a sort-of Vampira type who shows up in the novel for a handful of pages, but McCurtin does nothing at all with her. Actually, she’s more of a fake vampire than a horror hostess – calling herself “Draculina,” she has her face done up like a “ghoul” and dresses like a hag, but Van Diemen deduces that she has a “nice body” beneath the drab clothes. Van Diemen rapes her, along with another woman earlier in the novel; Van Diemen’s tendency for rape is another source of anger the Goodreads reviews. Yes, Van Diemen rapes (and kills) two women in the course of Thirst, but then again, he also figures that he has killed nearly eighty thousand people in the course of his vampire life – this a quick calculation he does based off his nightly feeds over the course of the past 200+ years. 

This I found was the only non-goofy stuff in the novel, because McCurtin clearly understands you can’t have a vampire hero. By nature vampires must drink blood to live. But then the seriousness is robbed by Van Diemen’s frequent bitchery over common misconceptions about vampires, not to mention that he also has a VHS library of every vampire movie ever made. There’s an “I can’t believe Peter McCurtin actually wrote this” part where Van Diemen says that he even has Interview With The Vampire on VHS, and the soon-to-be-a-vampire-himself private eye responds that this particular movie hasn’t even come out on VHS yet, so it would be impossible for Van Diemen to have a copy of it on video…and Van Diemen boasts that he has a pirated copy! It’s stuff like this that again makes me suspect Thirst is a spoof. Just too much of the novel is given over to Van Diemen’s obsessive compulsions about various mundane topics…and also, for an immortal vampire, the dude is constantly getting hassled: by the lawyer who wants to buy his land, by his own lawyer who is representing him in the case, by the sad-sack private eye Van Diemen turns into a vampire, and finally by the photographer with the “hip-flask voice.” All of these characters are constantly questioning Van Diemen, or putting him out of sorts, and he’ll go back to his Bronx castle to sulk. 

Those looking for a traditional vampire yarn will be quite diappointed with Thirst. Again, the Goodreads reviews are indication of this. Only in the extended excerpts from Van Diemen’s autobio – written in ugly italics – do we get the traditional stuff, with Van Diemen being turned into a vampire (by some vampire woman who bit him during sex, a recurring theme here) and then going about his “new vampire life” for the next few centuries. As mentioned he has a castle in the Bronx, the construction of which in the 1800s he recounts for us, and now he sticks to himself, only venturing out each night to feed. He turns himself into a giant bat to do this; McCurtin has it that the bat transformation is “an act of faith” and that each night when Van Diemen throws himself off the tower of the castle he could very well plunge to his death if he doesn’t transform. Oh and as a giant bat he can fly “300 miles per hour.” Seriously! Plus we’re informed of the various fallacies on how vampires can be killed, but McCurtin still sticks to the main ones: stakes to the heart and fire. 

Van Diemen’s a loser, though, there’s no other way to put it. So the book opens with him in his library working on his bio, and he treats himself to one glass of vodka, after which he’s drunk. Oh, and he also pops a few Ritalin. He flies out to feed, goes over a zoo…and there’s the “hard faced” female photographer out there taking photos who might really be pretty (again, McCurtin can’t figure this out), but she certainly has a nice body (maybe), but also a rough demeanor from being a famous world-traveling photographer and seeing it all. Van Diemen turns human and approaches her in the dark. Her name’s Maggie Connors, and Van Diemen has heard of her, but this night he goes to feed on her…and she takes his photo, and he stumbles in the flashlight and flies away in escape. Our tough bastard of a vampire, folks! And he goes back to his library to sulk over this, working up a rage to get revenge on this woman. Oh, and he obsesses with worry that she might get the photo printed in the papers…but will people even know who he is? Will anyone believe her story? Etc, etc. 

I mean honestly, the book is a spoof. It has to have been intended as a spoof. Because soon after this, Van Diemen’s getting hassled by his loser lawyer, Bradford Wilcox, who keeps pestering Van Diemen that another lawyer, Landau (who likely represents a mobster), is trying to get Van Diemen’s castle. But now they’re leaning hard on Wilcox himself…with the threat that Wilcox’s mistress, Tracy, is going to come out with photos and a fake claim that Wilcox had her get an abortion…and Van Diemen is winging off to burn down the lawyer’s house and then rape and murder Tracy. Here we get a bit of that old ‘70s-style sleazy sadism: 

Actually the sleaze is goofy, too. The quoted dialog at the top of the review is courtesy Maggie Connors, the photographer who snaps Van Diemen’s photo before he can kill her. He obsesses over her, finally locates her…and when he gets the spring on her (staying in a “special guest house” in the zoo…under heavy guard, even though she hasn’t told anyone she was attacked by a vampire?), she promptly offers herself to him:

Even Live Girls didn’t feature the line “I’m being screwed by a vampire.” Van Diemen, ever second-guessing and doubting himself, wants to bite Maggie’s neck and kill her, but doesn’t…then flies back to his castle and keeps thinking about her! There are even parts where he calls her on the phone to chat! I kid you not, friends! McCurtin tries to go somewhere with this; Van Diemen’s property soon becomes the target of the mob, with guys tossing trash and stuff on the grounds and later assassins sent onto the property, and Van Diemen will kill them off and call Maggie so she’s in such and such a place to take a photo of it. But the plotting is just so random that McCurtin, if he was serious about the whole thing, had no idea what he was doing. 

Like the shady private eye, Victor Mara, who is apparently hired by Landau to get the goods on Van Diemen. For reasons never satisfactorily explained, Van Diemen turns Mara into a vampire, perhaps to use him as his inside agent. But man, this develops into yet another goofy subplot, where Mara keeps trying to convince Van Diemen to let him move into Van Diemen’s castle! I mean complete with Mara, now a vampire, worried about the rent at his place and just persistently nagging Van Diemen about letting him have “just a little corner” of the castle to call his own! And this just keeps going on, perhaps further evidence that Thirst is a parody of serious horror fiction. It’s hard to believe Peter McCurtin could have intended this novel to be on the level. 

More Sharpshooter or Marksman (which McCurtin also edited and wrote for in the ‘70s) similarities are evident in the finale; anyone who has read those books, particularly ones actually written by McCurtin, will know that a favored “climax” featured all the villains conveniently assembling in one place so Rock or Magellan could blow them all to hell at once. Well guess how Thirst climaxes! Van Diemen even handles the job with some un-vampiric dynamite. We even get banal details like the note that he lodges the dynamite sticks on the roof (carrying them up there in his giant bat beak, naturally), so the wind won’t blow them away. I mean folks that is how Thirst climaxes – our vampire protagonist turns into a giant bat and carries dynamite in his “beak” and places it on a roof, ensuring that the friggin’ wind won’t blow the dynamite away. It’s not exactly Bram Stoker, is it? 

Speaking of whom, the last lines of the novel should be the final proof that Peter McCurtin was laughing to himself throughout Thirst; Van Diemen decides that maybe he does love Maggie Connors, and wonders what “Prince Dracul” (aka Dracula) would think! And Maggie wants Van Diemen to take a bubble bath with her...and this will be his first bath since the 18th Century! The end! Oh and another goofy thing, Van Diemen is always coming up with stupid inversions of the usual oaths, ie “by the Antichrist” and “only Satan knows” and other dumbass stuff. 

So all of which is to say, Thirst is a complete and total failure as a horror novel. But as a goofy-toned horror novel parody, it is a roaring success. It’s also fun to see that McCurtin was able to publish a quick and dirty (and sleazy) ‘70s-style novel in the mid-1990s. But still it was a sad way for such a prolific author to go out; as mentioned, this was Peter McCurtin’s final novel.

Nightblood

Nightblood, by T. Chris Martindale

January, 1990  Warner Books

I’ve wanted to read this one for a long time. First of all, I think I am legally obligated to note that Nightblood is First Blood meets Salem’s Lot. You will see this claim in practically every review of the book. Hell, the novel is compared to Morrell on the first page, in a blurb from novelist J.N. Williamson. And as it turns out, there is truth to this claim…as Nightblood is really just First Blood meets Salem’s Lot. 

It’s been over thirty years since I read Salem’s Lot; as a teen in the late ‘80s/early ‘90s I went through the expected Stephen King phase…hell, I even subscribed to the Stephen King Book Club. I read Salem’s Lot at this time and I recall loving it, and I think it was even my favorite King novel for some time. To this day I’ve never seen the ‘70s movie based on it, and also my memory of the novel is now dim. Literally the only part I remember is where a guy tries to use a cross to stop a vampire and King builds up the tension – only for it to turn out the cross doesn’t work because the guy is faking his belief. And hey guess what, a scene just like that is here in Nightblood! 

So yeah, the story is pretty much identical: vampires, led by a powerful king vampire, take over a small town in the US. The First Blood comparison comes in the form of the novel’s protagonist, Chris Stiles, a ‘Nam shit-kicker who now goes around the country in a van at the behest of his brother (who is a ghost!), fighting “Evil” with Uzis and a katana and pipe bombs and etc. It’s a great idea…and I seem to recall at one point it was rumored that Sylvester Stallone was considering taking his Rambo franchise into supernatural territory…wasn’t one of the rumored Rambo V plots about him taking on vampires or something along those lines? 

The only problem is, Chris Stiles is no John J. Rambo. In fact, the dude comes off poorly in his first – and only – book. He makes one mistake after another, gets knocked out and captured a bunch. Hell, it turns out he has a penchant for reading Romance novels. What the fuck kind of vampire-kicking hero is that?? Plus the guy’s name sucks, I mean “Chris Stiles” sounds more like an insurance agent, or even worse a Hollywood actor…the name has none of the impact of a “Rambo” or even a “Bolan.” I mean maybe if his name was Johnny Stiles, or heck even Connor Stiles…but I digress. It’s also kind of funny that author T. Chris Martindale named his vampire-busting hero “Chris.” 

At 322 pages of small, dense print, Nightblood is more concerned with characterization and suspense than I would have suspected about a novel featuring an Uzi-bearing vampire hunter. One thing I appreciated was that Martindale didn’t waste our time with background; we meet Stiles while he’s already been in the game for some time, and there’s no setup with him in Vietnam and etc. In fact the back cover gives us more detail on this than the novel itself does, at least at first. But the long and short of it is that Stiles and his brother Alex were both in ‘Nam, and Alex was killed by something over there, and now Alex’s ghost occasionally comes to chat with Stiles, telling him that “Evil” is manifesting in such and such a place. It’s up to Stiles to load up his Uzis and go kick Evil’s ass. 

Driving around in his van, it’s hard not to see Stiles as a horror paperback equivalent of Traveler…again with the caveat that Stiles goofs up a whole bunch for someone who has been doing this so long. He poses as a handyman, or occasionally as a writer, and when we meet him Alex’s ghost has appeared and told Stiles to hie the hell hence to Isherwood, Indiana, a small town in which Evil is coming up. Alex even has the name “Danner” for Stiles to look into. Speaking of equivalents, Danner will be the equivalent of the king vampire in Salem’s Lot. 

And friends Martindale is very on the level that he’s been inspired by King; there’s a part where we are informed that Stiles dealt with “heavy vampire activity” in Maine…which happens to also be the setting of Salem’s Lot. The King comparisons also come in the form of the hardscrabble smalltown yokels Stiles hobknobs with. Just kidding – I grew up in a town smaller than Isherwood so I am quite familiar with hardscrabble smalltown yokels. (Here is evidence to support that claim.) Speaking of my Stephen King-reading teen days, I still recall this older guy at the time who always got drunk with my uncle Jim…can’t remember the guy’s name but I remember him once sneering at me, “Are you still readin’ them Stephen King books?" I mean the way he asked it, it was like he was asking if I was still mainlining heroin. 

It's also to Martindale’s credit that he gets to the action quick. Stiles heads into Isherwood, makes friendly eyes at busty waitress Billie at the local diner, and that night he’s out on Danner’s property and shooting up the vampire himself. Now meanwhile Billie’s kids, teen Bart and 11 year-old Delbert, have snuck onto Danner’s property…and end up running into the vampire. These two kids seem to have come out of The Monster Squad in how they are little Monster Kids quite aware of vampires and whatnot – so at least for those two there’s none of the “vampires don’t exist!” schtick that will take up the brunt of the ensuing novel. 

But here’s the thing. Stiles gets Danner dead bang, just blitzting the shit out of him with a laserscoped machine gun…and then lets the mutilated, cut-down vampire run off into the darkened woods. Del and Bart plead with him to go finish off the vampire, but Stiles is like, nah, it’s all good. Of course, this will turn out to be incorrect, and perhaps Martindale was hoping to show how even an experienced vampire hunter could be surprised by a true king vampire, but the truth of it is, this makes Stiles come off like a buffoon. I mean if you’ve chopped the vampire down to pieces, finish the job there and then, don’t be cocky about it and assume the daylight will finish the job. 

So this sets in motion the Salem’s Lot stuff. I was not prepared for the “small town minds” ethic that Nightblood would appropriate (that phrase, by the way, is the title of a book my mom always wanted to write about the town I grew up in…I’ll steal it someday). I mean what I’m saying is, there’s a ton of stuff about the various hardscrabble smalltown yokels, and for lots of sequences Chris Stiles disappears. Or he’s sleeping. Seriously. I was hoping there’d be some actual Monster Squad fun, with Martindale at least focusing on Del and Bart, but they too don’t do much. I did appreciate the bit where their mother Billie considers reading their copies of Famous Monsters of Filmland for research. 

It's these sorts of fun touches that are for the most part missing in Nightblood, making the novel a bit too listless for the action onslaught I expected. The book is also repetitive. The entire middle and final half is comprised of various scenarios in which Stiles corners Danner, or Danner corners Stiles, but one or the other will escape. I mean Stiles gets the drop on Danner several times, even blowing him up at one point, but the vampire keeps getting away – and coming back stronger than ever. And hell now that I think of it, Danner also comes off like a dolt in the book. He too makes several mistakes, underestimating Stiles…there’s even a part where the mega horrible king vampire is afraid of running into Stiles. 

There is at least action…and also Stiles takes a lot of damage, but again it’s due to his own shortsightedness. Like the part where Danner totally captures him, breaking a few of Stiles’s fingers and even about to make Stiles suck him off, but our hero is saved by…a ghost. I mean this is literally the only time in a novel where I’ve encountered “ghost vs vampire;” I don’t think Bewitched even ventured into that territory. And again, main baddie Danner runs away from the ghost. It’s all very puzzling because it’s like Martindale keeps belittling his own protagonist and antagonist. 

The finale takes a page from William W. Johnstone, with the town cut off from the world and overrun by Satan’s minions, save for a few plucky survivors. More First Blood stuff here with Stiles teaching people how to set traps and make bombs and whatnot. There’s also a cool part where Stiles has to dash for safety past several vampires, armed with a katana, and starts lopping them apart. Mainly though he does his fighting with his guns. There’s also a fun part where Del tries to pass himself off as a vampire with fake blood and fake vampire teeth. But again the novel is undone by the repetitious confrontations between Danner and Stiles…made even worse that Danner’s ultimate defeat is made possible by a newly-introduced character. 

Martindale also gets props for working in a subtle First Blood allusion. Those who have read Morrell’s novel will recall that Rambo and his trainer Trautman begin to share a psychic bond, knowing what one another think. Stiles and Danner begin to experience the same situation. I thought that was cool, but I didn’t think it was cool that there was no naughty stuff in the book. Stiles and Billie develop feelings for one another, but there’s no gratuitous part where they consumate their burning yearnings. I mean Stiles does goes to bed several times in the novel, but it’s just to sleep. The poor guy’s tuckered out from searching the town all day for Danner’s resting place. 

Overall though, Nightblood does sort of capture the First Blood meets Salem’s Lot vibe, with the caveat that it’s not as good as either of those novels, coming off as too similar to the latter and with a hero who compares poorly to the hero of the former.

Bloodletter

Bloodletter, by Warren Newton Beath

June, 1996  Tor Books

Mining the same territory as Shade, Bloodletter concerns the author of a string of wildly popular vampire novels who might be a vampire himself. But while the plot is similar, the two novels are very different. For one, Bloodletter initially came out in hardcover, in 1994 (also published by Tor, and apparently with the same cover as this paperback). And another, author Warren Newton Beath is shall we say a much better writer than Ron “David Darke” Dee – but then, the higher-caliber writing is one of the missteps of Bloodletter. Whereas Dee turned in a grungy, sordid tale filled with lurid situations, Beath seems to want to write more of a literary novel with horror trappings. 

But then, for much of its narrative Bloodletter really isn’t a horror novel, at least not in the classic sense. It’s more of a dark psycho-sexual thriller that features a twisted serial killer as well as a famous writer who seems to be batshit crazy. This latter would be Stephen Albright, the “king of the paperbacks,” whose series about a vampire named Bloodletter have turned him into a celebrity. I find it humorous that Beath named his fictional bestselling horror author “Stephen,” but regardless, this particular Stephen is himself a much more cerebral author than one would expect. Indeed the Bloodletter books don’t sound fun at all, judging from what little we are told about them, going for more of a quasi-historical gnostic bent than one would expect for a lurid paperback. 

We don’t learn much about the books, but we do learn there are thirteen in the series, all paperback originals, and all trading on the arcane lore of the vampire. While Beath never uses the term “gnostic,” that does seem to be the vibe of the series, in particular that there is a recurring trio dynamic of the titular Bloodletter, his troll-like familiar, and Thanata, a female immortal who serves as Bloodletter’s nemesis through the ages. It just all sounds a lot more cerebral than the popular fiction Beath tries to convey it as; indeed, it sounds a lot like Beath’s actual novel, which itself did not achieve any mega popularity, thus proving out that a “cerebral-literary” vibe does not lead to a popular horror paperback. 

The Bloodletter’s schtick is that he is some sort of immortal force of evil who manifests on Earth via the work of an artist or writer or whatever. Albright, who believes the Bloodletter really exists, fears that he has unleashed the vampire on Earth via his novels. And also that the vampire is responsible for a particularly twisted serial killer who calls himself Diver Dan. One disturbed individual, Dan – who apparently suffers from a condition that his turning him into a woman – has a penchant for abducting young women with hummingbird tattoos, torturing them to death, and then having lots of sex with their corpses. There are many scenes from Diver Dan’s perspective, and we know he is the current vassal of the Bloodletter – not only does Dan have the entire 13-volume Albright series of novels, but Dan also believes he had an audience with the actual vampire, and now kills for him. 

Beath plays all of this on more of a psycho-suspense angle, particularly given how the main character is a psychiatrist named Eva LaPorte. A hotstuff babe in her 40s who hit it big on the pop-psych scene with feminist interpretations of myth, Eva has been hired by DeMarco, Albright’s boisterous agent – and also, bizarrely enough, owner of a chain of fitness centers(?!) – to see if she can help Albright with his delusions. The true problem so far as DeMarco is concerned is that Albright is about to squander the chance for big bucks: truly given over to the “delusion” that the Bloodletter exists, Albright is about to put the kibosh on the long-awaited big-budget film adaptation of his series. DeMarco wants Eva to get in Albright’s head and figure out how she can get him to stop thinking there are really vampires. 

Oh and I forgot to mention, but Albright just tried to kill himself…with a .357 Magnum! How someone could fail to kill themselves with a .357 Magnum is something Beath doesn’t elaborate on; we get the humorous assertion that the bullet “traveled too fast” or somesuch. But then it occurred to me that this was likely another dangling mystery Beath was trying to provide – another clue that Albright himself might be the Bloodletter. The novel is filled with such mystery, with Albright – young, with dark hair and the good looks expected of a vampire – acting increasingly deranged…up to and including having the photos of Diver Dan’s victims hidden away in his apartment. Not to mention a severed heart in his fridge, something Eva discovers late in the novel. 

As mentioned Eva is our main protagonist, and it must have seemed a good idea to Beath to view the vampire story through the prism of an intellectual. Unfortunately the result for readers is that the novel is too slow-going and suffers too much from characters, particularly Eva, denying that there are any such thing as vampires. Beath really pulls this one to the stretching point; the entirety of Bloodletter is an extended “do vampires really exist?” riff. The impact of the story is also lessened by the “literary” vibe. The fact that the book is populated by narcissistic Hollywood types doesn’t help matters; Eva in particular is known as a sort of celebrity psychiatrist. 

With its “serious” approach to horror and its literary vibe, Bloodletter reminded me of another novel I reviewed here many years ago: The Late Great Creature. There is even the callback to the sordid underbelly of Golden Age Hollywood, with mentions of Bela Lugosi and the actress Peg Entwistle, whose sole claim to fame is that she jumped to her death off the Hollywoodland sign. Another point of reference is clued on the cover, with a blurb from horror historian David J. Skaal, author of The Monster Show and Hollywood Gothic. One imagines that Beath leaned very heavily into these particular tomes, with all sorts of sordid detail on silent horror film director FW Murnau – like that he died in a car crash while getting a blowjob from his boytoy. 

This stuff in particular reminded me of The Late Great Creature, as well as another horror film-focused novel I reviewed some years ago, Flicker. There’s a lot of stuff about how Bela Lugosi too might have known the Bloodletter, and how he wanted to do this vampire flick with Peg Entwistle, and also how Murnau envisioned this crazy flick about the apocalypse and vampires taking over the world. All this bleeds into the modern day, with Albright living in Lugosi’s Hollywood apartment and such. But again the subtext is heavy that it’s all in Albright’s mind, and that serial killer Diver Dan is just a plain nutjob, inspired by a fictional character and not by a real vampire. 

Beath shows some dark humor in the sequences with Dan, in particular a disturbing bit late in the book from the perspective of one of his victims. Never even given a name – at this point she merely thinks of herself as the latest victim of the notorious killer – this poor girl tries her hardest to make friends with Dan to convince him not to kill her. After all, this is what they said to try on all the true crime shows. The vampire stuff is mostly relegated to lore and Hollywood stories, and also the detail that Eva’s ex-husband, also an academic, penned a tome on vampire history…with the unusual tidbit that vampires were claimed to have double-headed dicks. Well that was a new one to me. 

Beath continues to want to have his cake and eat it, too, when a blindfolded Eva is apparently bitten on the neck…by a vampire or by Albright (or Albright the vampire) she does not know…and then starts to imagine all sorts of pangs for blood, or strange sentiments like wanting to tear a child apart. But is it all in her mind, and Albright’s insanity just spreading to her? It just goes on and on…made all the more annoying in the rushed climax. I mean I couldn’t believe it, but Beath, after leisurely telling his tale for 300-some pages, blows right through the finale, with the reveal and dispatch of the titular Bloodletter in just a few harried pages. This annoyed me. 

Overall, Bloodletter was definitely written better than Shade, but lacked that novel’s fun drive – not to mention the lurid spirit. While Shade was lovably explicit, Bloodletter also goes for more of a highbrow vibe in the naughty parts. This too reminded me of The Late Great Creature and Flicker. But then, if you enjoyed either of those novels, you’ll certainly enjoy Bloodletter.

Annoying note: For some inexplicable reason, Blogger was flagging this review for content.  I can only assume it was the cover, which as you can see does not even feature any nudity.  I decided to just obscure it completely in the cover scan above to hopefully circumvent the issue.

The Wolf Man vs Dracula: An Alternate History For Classic Film Monsters

The Wolf Man vs Dracula: An Alternate History For Classic Film Monsters, by Philip J. Riley

No month stated, 2010 BearManor Media

I’ve wanted to read this for a long time. The story on this slim trade paperback is that The Wolf Man vs Dracula is an unproduced script written in 1944 by Universal Studios screenwriter Bernard Schubert, who went on to write the Universal picture The Mummy’s Curse. The script then sat in a box in Schubert’s garage for “forty years” before he and book editor Philip J. Riley got it out. 

The curious thing of course is that Schubert’s name is not printed on the cover of this publication, only Riley’s. Also, Riley has copyrighted the book himself – even though he himself does not contribute anything to it (other than finding the script and talking to the people who worked on it, that is). What I mean to say is, there is no introduction from Riley, or summary of the project, or anything. Indeed this book would have greatly benefitted from a bit more background. As it is, we get a few short introductory pages comprised of the hazy, decades-later memories of two men involved with the aborted project: Schubert (who died in 1988), and special effects man David S Horsley (who died in 1976). 

So in this regard we are presented with the thoughts of men who are no longer around to support the claims. I only note this because apparently Philip J. Riley has come under heavy fire from the Monster Kid community for such stuff: see the Classic Horror Film Board thread on this publication for more on that. The majority of the thread is nothing more than character assassination of Riley, accusing him of everything from plagiarism to theft. To his credit, Riley briefly appears on the thread to defend himself, acknowledging his occasional gaffe (it would appear his greatest “sin” was mixing up the names of a few actresses) and stating that he is merely a fan, publishing material for other fans. 

One of the biggest accusations is that the script for The Wolf Man vs Dracula is shall we say fake, a product of Philip J. Riley’s mind and no one else’s. This is because none of the “major” Universal historians (ie David J. Skal, Gregory Mank, etc) had ever heard of it prior to the publication of this book, and apparently there are no mentions of Schubert’s script in the official Universal records – though some people on that thread I linked to did find a trade announcement from 1944 which confirmed that Bernard Schubert was working on a script of this title. Of course, the answer is that the script sat in Schubert’s garage, and Riley kept the discovery of it to himself. And also, all those accusing Riley of making it up could have saved themselves some trouble and just read the damn book: it is quite evident that this script was written by a Universal screenwriter in the mid 1940s. 

Anyone who has seen the “monster rally” films of the ‘40s, ie Frankenstein Meets The Wolf Man, House Of Frankenstein, and House Of Dracula, will know one thing: the monsters seldom actually appear in the movies, and when they do it’s brief. And the producers never take advantage of having all these monsters together in one picture; indeed, the monsters will usually have their own separate plots and never come together. Only in the final minutes of Frankenstein Meets The Wolf Man or the finale of Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein do the monsters really interract. Compare to a modern-day approach to the concept, a la Return Of The Wolf Man, in which the monsters share a lot more “screen time” with one another. 

But that ‘40s mindset is front and center in The Wolf Man vs Dracula. I mean first of all, and I apologize for any spoilers, but the title itself is misleading. The “Wolf Man” doesn’t fight Dracula at all in this script! Instead, it’s Larry Talbot, ie the man who is cursed with being a werewolf (Lon Chaney Jr), fighting a giant bat in the climax. There is no scene where the actual Wolf Man fights the actual Dracula. And, true to the underwhelming vibe of the monster rally films (at least insofar as actual monster stuff goes), Talbot is human for the majority of the script, only turning into the Wolf Man at the very beginning and the very end. As for Dracula, he turns into a “giant bat” a bunch of times, but spends the majority of the script trying to get his fangs into some random countryside girl, for reasons never properly explained. 

Here's where more of those accusations come in, because in that hazy-recollections prologue, special effects guy David S. Horsley claims that The Wolf Man vs Dracula was to be shot in technicolor, and that color test photos were taken of Lon Chaney Jr. These photos have never been seen, though Riley intimates in the intro that he has seen them – however they are not reproduced in the book. Also, the historians claim there’s no indication Universal had any plans for a technicolor film in this genre at this time. But Horsley’s claim is backed up by the hazy-recollections of screenwriter Schubert, also in the prologue, who states that he was hired for the job precisely due to his work on a technicolor picture, thus he knew how to cater his script to the increased cost involved with color. 

What this means is that The Wolf Man vs Dracula would look pretty cheap, only taking place in a few locations (re-used sets from previous pictures, as thriftily noted by Schubert in his script) and only featuring a few actors. Oh and I forgot – another claim is that none other than Bela Lugosi would once again play Dracula, playing him for the first time on screen since the 1931 film. Horsley in his recollections says he’s unsure if color photos were taken of Lugosi, but one thing insinuated is that Lugosi was too old at the time for the physical action of a monster fight, thus the necessity of replacing him with a giant bat in the action scenes. This is where Horsley came in, trying to work up a giant mechanical bat to look realistic in technicolor. 

So there’s your buzzkill early in the review: the cover (created by Philip Riley and taken from period illustrations – and in fact I seem to recall a thread once upon a time that he was even accused of ripping this illustration off!) is a total lie. The “Wolf Man” does not fight Dracula. I mean technically he does, but it’s Larry Talbot in his non-wolf form. And he’s fighting a giant bat, not Bela Lugosi in a cape. Interestingly, the actual Lon Chaney Jr. Wolf Man did indeed fight the actual Bela Lugosi Dracula in Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein, one of the saving graces of what I consider an altogether annoying movie. Also that film established Larry Talbot as a vampire hunter…and curiously the seeds of that idea are planted in this unproduced script. Oh and that’s another thing…throughout the book it is “The Wolfman vs Dracula.” Every Monster Kid worth his salt knows the Universal character is referred to as “The Wolf Man,” ie two words. 

Another thing to handle straightaway is that the intro features a more serious goof, and again it’s “voiced” through the recollections of Schubert, who died many years before this book was even published. Schubert – or Riley speaking for him – states that The Wolf Man vs Dracula “would have been a natural sequel to Frankenstein Meets The Wolf Man.” Within the first few pages of the script we realize how innacurate this is: The Wolf Man vs Dracula is actually a “natural sequel” to 1944’s House Of Frankenstein. According to that Classic Horror forum I linked to above, Philip Riley apparently acknowledged his mistake in this regard on some social media forum. But goofs like this are no doubt why he is disparaged by the Monster Kid community. 

Anyone with even a passing interest in the Universal monster rally films will recall that Larry Talbot “died” in the finale of House Of Frankenstein after being shot by a silver bullet, fired by a gypsy girl who loved him. This is how Talbot is discovered in the opening of The Wolf Man vs Dracula, lying beside the skeleton of a girl in gypsy clothes. So in other words the script picks up right after the climax of that film…several years later, but still. It sure isn’t a sequel to Frankenstein Meets The Wolf Man, which ended with Talbot as the Wolf Man being swept away in a flood beneath Frankenstein’s castle while fighting the Monster. 

So here is the plot of The Wolf Man vs Dracula in a nutshell: Larry Talbot is revived, briefly turns into the Wolf Man in the hospital and kills a guy, then escapes into the countryside. When next we encounter Talbot he is back in human form, still in Transylvania, and has, apropos of nothing, hunted down a local man named Anatole. This is because Anatole, we learn, is the town hangman, and somehow Talbot thinks the hangman will be able to kill him. For good. Meanwhile, none other than Count Dracula has designs on Anatole’s “dowdy” young daughter, Yvonne, if not for that pesky crucifix she wears. Talbot marries Yvonne to force her dad to kill him(!?), and Dracula claims he can “help” Talbot die…if only Talbot will get rid of Yvonne’s pesky crucifix! The action climaxes with Talbot fighting Dracula (in giant bat form) and saving Yvonne from the vampire’s clutches. After this Talbot turns into the Wolf Man and runs roughshod over the local gendarmes in Dracula’s castle, finally being gunned down by Anatole. 

In the opening, Schubert implies that his script went unfilmed because Universal had met their picture quota for that year or somesuch. I think another reason might be that his script is subpar. Sure, this is likely his first draft, but as it stands, Schubert’s The Wolf Man vs Dracula is pretty lame (and pretty tame), and it makes even the most maligned monster rally film, House Of Dracula, seem like Citizen Kane in comparison. Maybe an inventive director could have brought some life to the proceedings, or maybe just the novelty of seeing Chaney and Lugosi in color would have sufficed. But the story itself just sucks. (If that’s too lame of a monster rally pun for you, you could instead say it lacks any bite.) 

And I’m judging the script by the merits of its filmed contemporaries, not from a modern-day perspective. I mean the monster rally films weren’t exactly grounded in logic. Look at Frankenstein Meets The Wolf Man, which detours into nonsense in the middle half: Larry Talbot starts the picture wanting to die, but halfway through he’s suddenly maddened to revive Frankenstein’s Monster. Even considering that, The Wolf Man vs Dracula suffers from illogical plotting. Like most notably, Larry Talbot barges into Anatole the hangman’s home, announces that he is a “murderer” and wants to die…and Anatole is like, “You can stay here for the night! Oh, and this is my daughter, Yvonne!” It’s just ridiculous. 

Even more ridiculous is Dracula’s fixation on Yvonne, which makes no sense. Actually, Dracula’s presence itself makes no sense. He’s not introduced in any grand fashion; literally we are just informed he happens to be sitting in Anatole’s home when Anatole himself is introduced in the script. Dracula’s just dropped in to chat with the town hangman. That’s literally the guy’s big introduction. And also the dialog, later in the script, intimates that there’s some confusion at play…that this Dracula is only a “relative” of the Dracula who caused all that trouble in London some years ago, ie the events of the 1931 film. Of course it’s the same vampire, though none of the locals realize he’s a vampire. 

And why Dracula is obsessed with Yvonne is a mystery. The impression I got was that she must be the only attractive young woman in the area. But the script makes it clear that Yvonne is not attractive…at least in how she presents herself. Only Dracula can see how hotstuff she really is…something we viewers get to see when Talbot marries Yvonne and she suddenly transforms into a mega babe. But then in the actually produced monster rally films, Dracula (as played by John Carradine) was also a bit of a lothario, so I guess the whole Yvonne storyline makes sense in that regard. What I’m trying to say is it’s so unexplored and unexplained…and so humdrum. We’re talking about Count Dracula here. Literally all he does in The Wolf Man vs Dracula is try to get some young Transylvanian girl to remove her crucifix so he can bite her neck. 

Another thing is that Dracula doesn’t even have any good dialog. In fact, the dialog throughout is without note, though Schubert does successfully capture the whining of Larry Talbot. I could see Lon Chaney Jr. delivering all of Talbot’s lines, so Schubert succeeds in capturing his voice; in Schubert’s comments in the intro, he notes that the Wolf Man was screenwriter Curt Siodmak’s “baby,” but again Schubert got this particular writing gig due to his experience writing to technicolor. There are very few speaking roles in the script; it really is almost a situation horror-drama concerning the core characters of Larry Talbot, Count Dracula, Anatole, and Yvonne. A character who briefly appears is “The Commissioner,” and it seems evident that the role was written with Lionel Atwill in mind; by this point in his career a beleaguered Atwill mostly just had supporting roles in Universal horror pictures. The Commissioner only appears in two or three scenes, but his dialog has a very Atwillian bent. 

Monster action is almost nonexistent. Early in the film Talbot turns into the Wolf Man; given that he’s in the hospital when this happens, the scene comes off like a retread of a sequence in Frankenstein Meets The Wolf Man. After this Talbot doesn’t transform again until the finale, when he again becomes the Wolf Man after fighting Dracula(!!). Schubert does present a little more “Wolf Man carnage” than was seen in the other films of the day; the Wolf Man tears into several gendarmes in the finale before being brought down, yet again, by a silver bullet. Schubert not only recycles sets in his script but scenes as well. Throughout The Wolf Man vs Dracula Talbot pushes Anatole to make a silver bullet to kill him with…which again is more illogical stupidty because Talbot goes to Anatole because Anatole is a hangman! Why the hell would he suddenly expect him to craft a silver bullet? But anyway Talbot as the Wolf Man meets the exact same end as in House Of Frankenstein, gunned down by a silver bullet. 

Other monster action: Dracula transforms into a giant bat a few times, flying back to his castle. There’s also a part where he turns himself into a wolf and attacks some townspeople, trying to frame Talbot. Now a curious thing here is that Dracula, like everyone else in the script, tells Larry Talbot he’s crazy to think he’s a werewolf, because werewolves don’t exist. I thought this would go somewhere, like Dracula of course knowing there are werewolves and looking to turn the Wolf Man into his vassal. Like for example in the contemporary Bela Lugosi flick Return Of The Vampire. But Schubert does nothing with the setup. About the most we get is a part where Talbot ventures into Dracula’s castle and discovers some monster lore in Dracula’s library; in an uninentionally humorous scene, Talbot spends all night reading the books, suddenly becoming an expert on vampires! In fact it is Talbot who keeps insisting to Anatole and Yvonne that Count Dracula is a vampire. This means that Talbot spends the majority of the script trying to convince people that monsters exist: that he himself is a werewolf and Dracula is a vampire. 

But it’s the biggest miss that the Wolf Man and Dracula never actually meet, at least in their monster forms. Talbot heads into Dracula’s castle in the final scene, battling the giant bat and staking it – another special effects shot which would see Dracula dissolve into dust. But it is an ignoble end for Dracula for sure. Even Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein realized the value of having the actual monsters fight one another. My assumption is Schubert was writing under the notion that Lugosi would be physically unable to handle an action scene, but this too is odd because Lugosi, as the Frankenstein Monster, battled Lon Chaney Jr. as the Wolf Man in Frankenstein Meets The Wolf Man, released just the year before. Who knows. The long and short of it is that it’s underwhelming, not to mention a letdown given the title of the script. 

So in conclusion, it is not to the loss of the Universal horror franchise that The Wolf Man vs Dracula never came to be. The titular characters come off poorly and the story hinges on one illogical development after another. I wonder though if the script made the rounds in the Universal screenwriter department. Curiously, Larry Talbot is suddenly alive and well in 1945’s House Of Dracula, which turned out to be the actual film that followed House Of Frankenstein. As mentioned, that earlier film ended with Talbot “dead” from a silver bullet. He’s alive again with no explanation in House Of Dracula. Almost makes one wonder if someone goofed and thought Talbot had been reborn as in Schubert’s script. But that doesn’t pan out, for as mentioned Talbot meets the same end in The Wolf Man vs Dracula as he did in House Of Frankenstein.