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.