The Nature Of The Beast

The Nature Of The Beast, by Peter Menegas

December, 1975  Bantam Books

This horror PBO was clearly intended to be the next big thing – cue back cover comparisons to The Exorcist and whatnot – but The Nature Of The Beast was clearly a dud, going on to obscurity; I only learned about it when randomly coming across the cover online. 

Will at Too Much Horror Fiction reviewed this one many years ago, and he did not like it at all, but in one of my contrary moods I decided to seek the book out anyway and give it a shot. “Surely it can’t be that bad,” I foolishly thought…and then just as foolishly I attempted to read the book. 

No; it’s bad. It is very bad. Author Peter Menegas makes one poor decision after another, and The Nature Of The Beast soon becomes a tiring and trying chore of a read, and I can only agree with Will that the best thing about the book is, by far, the cover. 

However, unlike Will I was actually foolish enough to read the entire book! He wisely gave it up midway through. Like I said, I was in a contrary mood, even if it was my own best interests I was, uh, contrarying. At least the book was fairly short, coming in at 240 pages. 

If you are a cat lover in particular I would advise you steer clear of The Nature Of The Beast. The novel opens with the protagonist, Dee Dee Burke, discovering a crucified cat corpse in her NYC penthouse, and as the novel progresses more of the poor critters will be gutted and nailed to a cross. 

And yes, that’s the name of the book’s hero: Dee Dee. Clue number one that this book’s going to suck. Self-described as a “Vogue mother,” Dee Dee is insufferable, a decades-early version of an AWFL. But then unlikable protagonists seems to be common in horror fiction, so maybe author Peneter Menegas did not intend for us to root for her. He does however expect our imaginations to do all the heavy lifting, as the most description we get about Dee Dee is that she is, apparently, pretty, and that she has “dark and straight hair.” There is zero in the way of exploitation in the novel, and in fact I think the word “breasts” doesn’t even appear once – resulting of course in a heaping helping of demerits. 

At any rate, Dee Dee has two punk kids: Alun, 8, and Terry, 6. And yes, it’s “Alun” with a “u,” but anyway the two kids talk like they’re decades older (or maybe my own 8-year-old is just WAY underdeveloped in the speech department), and weird enough they’ve lately taken to talking about weird visions and whatnot, and sticking to themselves. 

New York City isn’t much brought to life, as Dee Dee is a “going to the salon for the afternoon” type of wealthy mother and about the most we get are vague mentions of “Puerto Rican kids” who have come from uptown and are stirring up trouble. But we aren’t in New York for long; Dee Dee’s husband, a disaffected business bigwig who is so immaterial to the plot that I didn’t even bother to write his name down in my notes, announces that the family is moving to England for his job. 

Menegas slowly plays up the “horror stuff” with the gradual revelation that Alun and Terry’s prophecies are coming true…for example, in New York they say something about seeing animals from their bedroom window, and then that night Dee Dee finds out the family is moving to England, and then they go to England and have to get a temporary house in London, and it just so happens that Alun’s and Terry’s bedroom happens to face a public park that has a zoo in it. Hence, they’re seeing animals from their bedroom, just like they said they would in New York. 

Only, all this is so slowly developed that it lacks any impact or urgency. Dee Dee has to explain it all to her dimwitted husband, and even she can barely grasp the import. Oh, and meanwhile the sitter they hire claims that the two kids killed and crucified a cat right before her terrified eyes, and she’ll no longer be working for the Burkes, thank you very much. Even here Dee Dee refuses to believe it’s true…I mean just on and on with the lameness. 

It gets even lamer with Mr. Tregeagle, the portly and prancing (if you get my drift) owner of a local antiques store. Yes, friends, many scenes of Dee Dee going to the antique store: the horror! Of course it eventually becomes clear that there is an evil luring behind the portly shop owner’s smile, particularly when he learns that Dee Dee’s mother was a minor poet of cult fame who turned out epics based on Celtic myth. I mean first he names his heroine “Dee Dee,” and then he makes the main villain a fat gay guy who owns an antique store – either Peter Menegas had no idea what he was doing, or maybe he intended it all as a spoof, who knows. 

More cats are killed, more antiques are bought. The knives come out when Tregeagle invites Dee Dee to a country manor where his fellow cultists congregate for the weekend, featuring portly Brits in robes trying to sacrifice animals and whatnot. I should mention here that these cultists are Celts, not Satanists, so again Menegas was attempting something different. Unfortunately, different doesn’t always equal good. 

And I mean “the knives come out” only in the figurative sense, as really Tregeagle just gets incredibly bitchy with Dee Dee, who goes back home to her disaffected husband and wonders if her two brat kids really are mutilating and crucifying cats. But having wasted so many pages, Menegas finally decides to get far out on the horror front in the final quarter. 

In what could be a delirium or a descent into madness or even a real, actual meeting of the supernatural, Dee Dee finds her punk kids missing and goes running for them, out to the beach (at this point they’ve moved to some estate in Cornwall, which per the annoying English tradition is given its own pretentious name), and as she runs her teeth start falling out and she looks like a hag(!?). 

As if that weren’t enough, she has an encounter with a deer-headed man, presumably a god of some sort, and he has his way with Dee Dee on the beach, but Dee Dee slowly begins to enjoy it; Menegas never gets outright sleazy, but the sequence isn’t fade to black, either. After it’s all over the deer-man leaves and Dee Dee comes back to reality, no longer a hag, and with all of her teeth back in her mouth – and her kids are there, too. 

There follows a laugh-out-loud bit where Dee Dee meets with a swami, who explains that the deer-man was likely the Celtic god Cerunnos…but then was it all a dream? Who knows, and who cares. The Nature Of The Beast ends with Dee Dee apparently just as Celtic-attuned as her two sons are (apparently they’ve been chosen by the Celtic gods or some shit due to their linneage, or something)….and the husband’s still as disaffected…and thankfully the novel is over. 

Sometimes it is clear why books are obscure, and why they stay that way. I cannot recommend The Nature Of The Beast, as Peter Menegas makes one poor choice after another – the work of an author trying to write a “horror novel,” but not having any idea how to go about it.

Traveler #11: The Children’s Crusade

Traveler #11: The Children’s Crusade, by D.B. Drumm

February, 1987  Dell Books

I get the impression that Ed Naha prepped for this volume of Traveler by reading the installments that were written by series co-author John Shirley. Instead of the spoofy banality that was #9: The Stalking Time or the parodic descent into Hell that was #10: Hell On Earth, Naha finally delivers exactly what this series needs: a fast-moving action thriller with a taciturn protagonist who despite his bad-assery always finds himself defending “the little guy.” 

Naha does pick up on elements from the previous volume; as we’ll recall, that one had an opening sequence in which Traveler, now dubbed “Storyteller,” was living on some pueblo where he’d tell stories to a pack of mutant children. Naha drops this in the opening chapter of The Children’s Crusade, with Traveler deciding to head back out onto the road. 

We are told that it’s been a year that Traveler has been living here in the pueblo, so at least this time around I’m not as confused by the dating of the series. Naha frequently states that the bombs dropped “two decades ago,” and there are a lot of references to how Traveler’s battles with roadrats and other post-nuke scumbags was “long ago,” in “the early days” after the war. 

It’s curious that Naha has introduced this “long time ago” scenario to Traveler, and my best guess is that he wanted to distance himself from Shirley’s installments, so he could write a series (and hero) that was slightly different than John Shirley’s version. 

In other words, Shirley’s volumes took place in those “early days,” and by setting them long ago in the past, Naha is free to refer to them, but without the emotional trauma that would be necessary if they were events that had occurred recently. Like in particular Jan, Traveler’s soul mate who went off with Traveler in a Happily Ever After in #6: Border War, before we found out at the start of #7: The Road Ghost that she’d been killed – Traveler thinks of Jan once or twice in The Children’s Crusade, but it’s more in a wistful, “she’s been gone a long time” sort of way. 

That said, Ed Naha brings a lot of “emotional content” (as Bruce Lee would say) to the series; for the first time ever, Traveler thinks of his lost wife and son…like throughout the book. Methinks Naha is setting up the final volume in some fashion, but it is otherwise curious that these two characters, who have never been seen in the series and only sporadically mentioned, are the focus of so many of Traveler’s thoughts this time around, up to and including an emotional dream sequence in which Traveler goes out shopping to buy his four year old son some Legos, only to come home and watch as the child and his mother are blasted away in nuclear hellfire, with Traveler unable to help and forced to watch. 

Also curiously, the “children” of the title are not the mutant kids “Storyteller” would entertain; it’s a new pack of kids, new to the series I mean, and Traveler runs into them in an abandoned shopping mall in California. Naha seems to do a Yojimbo riff here with Traveler the lone wolf heading into a town and helping one side while pretending to help the other; perhaps I make this connection because Naha specifically refers to Lone Wolf and Cub in the narrative, so it would seem he is a bit of a fan of samurai movies. 

Otherwise we are very much in John Shirley territory here, only minus the nuke-spawn mutant monsters Shirley would often bring to his tales. Instead of bogging things down into pseudo-epic or religious satire, Naha keeps things moving with Traveler getting in frequent scrapes while doling out action movie-esque one-liners. Traveler is once again a smart-ass, I mean to say, and he delivers a bunch of memorable lines throughout The Children’s Crusade. And unlike The Stalking Time, the action and storyline itself are never mocked; it’s merely Traveler mocking the people he goes up against. In other words, Ed Naha plays it on the level, just like John Shirley did. 

Traveler comes across a group of teens who are drinking beer and talking about a conspiracy back in their hometown, and Traveler immediately takes a liking to them and helps them hide from the mercenaries who come looking for them. Again Naha clearly has his series set in a different world than the earliest volumes; it is made clear to Traveler again and again that this is a “new America” and “his kind” – ie mercenaries and other men of violence – are no longer welcome or wanted. Naha even gets in a little Right Wing-mocking in an early scene where Traveler makes an impromptu stop at the Grand Canyon to see it for the first time in his life, and a local tells Traveler to get out or he’ll be shot dead: “After all, it’s the American way.” 

The changing of the times is especially pronounced when Traveler arrives in Bay City, on the Pacific; actually it’s more like pre-war times, as the little town is fully functioning and has everything from a police force to an amusement park for the kids. At this point Naha has retconned Traveler into essentially a standard men’s adventure series, without any of the post-nuke trappings of the earlier installments. 

Here the Yojimbo stuff arises, as Traveler discovers that something rotten is going on; the scar-faced but good-hearted mayor of the town is secretly being held prisoner, taken captive by a turncoat police chief (who looks like William Shatner, we’re told, in what appears to be intended as a joke that Naha loses interest in). Traveler poses as a guy just visiting town while helping the group of teens hide – their leader is the mayor’s grandson, and they too are wanted by the merciless cops and mercs who have taken over the town. 

It’s more of a long-simmer setup here as Traveler investigates and gets in occasional scrapes. Naha skirts some boundaries with Traveler finding himself attracted to a girl in the group of teens – she’s apparently only 15 or thereabouts – and developing a rapport with her, before Naha drops this as well. Indeed he even has Traveler briefly reflect on his passing fancy with the girl, at the end of the novel, and wonder what he was thinking! But at any rate this is the rare volume where Traveler does not enjoy any female companionship…which, now that I think of it, seems to be a recurring element of the Naha installments. 

That said, Naha does want to tie back to the earlier volumes, but often in unintentionally goofy ways…like when Traveler calls old buddy Orwell on a payphone, who is now working for the new CIA in Las Vegas(!). This sequence exists only to set up ensuing volumes, as Orwell relates that a civil war is brewing in the new United States, and rumor has it that none other than series villain President Andrew Frayling – presumably killed in earlier Shirley installment  Border War – is plotting to overthrow President Jefferson (himself a character in earlier installments). 

Frayling as we’ll recall is a wildly overdone Reagan caricature, but he was old even in the Shirley installments, which as we’ll further recall were two friggin’ decades ago. Naha has it that Frayling is now nearly a hundred years old and what’s more he’s wheelchair bound and with a fried face, so in other words like the original Enterprise captain on Star Trek. Traveler ultimately discovers that Frayling is behind the plotting in Bay City, which entails Frayling getting hold of a few nukes that have been deposited in the area. 

The gore has also been removed from the series, and the climax is mostly bloodless when compared to Shirley’s books. But Naha does set up the next volume; Frayling and his henchmen escape, headed for China (which it is rumored survived WWIII unscathed), and Traveler heads after him – along with a newly-introduced character named Persky. A female cop on the Bay City force, Persky is invariably described as “feline” or “small,” and otherwise is not exploited in any way whatsoever, but she does have a snappy rapport with Traveler, so one wonders if she will become Traveler’s new flame. 

Two more volumes were to follow, and hopefully they will be more like this one than the others Naha wrote for the series.

Black Angel: Dixie Death Hunt

Great news, everyone – a new volume of Black Angel has come out via Tocsin Press! It’s titled Dixie Death Hunt, and here’s the cover: 

It’s Hard Target as a ‘70s Blaxploitation movie starring Pam Grier (or perhaps Jayne Kennedy), as The Black Angel heads down to Georgia and takes on a group of bigots who hunt black men for sport. Along the way we get a naked chase through the woods, our heroine going undercover in a memorable fashion, and the return of the Black Angel’s leather catsuit – not to mention a monstrous mutant redneck freak. Plus all the sex and violence that is to be expected of a Men Of Violence Books publication! 

Head on over to Amazon, where you can preview the first several pages (on desktop only) and order a copy – the perfect stocking stuffer for any action junkie on your Xmas list! And grab copies of the first volume and The Doll Cage while you’re at it!

Satan’s Child

Satan’s Child, by Peter Saxon

No month stated, 1968  Magnum/Lancer Books

Peter Saxon was a house name used by several British authors; the name is most associated with The Guardians, a swinging ‘60s horror-action series that was much loved by Curt Purcell of The Groovy Age Of Horror. Twenty years ago when I was a regular reader of Curt’s site, I went out and picked up a few of those Guardians books, but boy it appears they have become quite scarce and pricey these days; the same goes for the non-series Peter Saxon books, of which Satan’s Child is one. 

According to the Vault of Evil forum, this version of Peter Saxon was an author named William McNeilly, who turned out a few horror paperbacks, all of which are well-regarded by the Vaulters, with this one in particular seeming to be their favorite. Now that I’ve read this fast-moving horror pulp, I can agree with them; Satan’s Child is a very entertaining read, hitting a lot of high points in its 200-page runtime. 

Seemingly taking place in the 1700s, Satan’s Child is a supernatural-themed revenge thriller, like a Hammer take on Death Wish. But this isn’t a simple “kill my enemies” type of revenge yarn; it’s a “I’ll turn myself into a bull and sodomize my enemy’s wife with my two-foot-long dick” type of yarn. So yeah, this one’s really out there – and seems even more so, given the formal, almost omniscient tone McNeilly tells the story in. 

The novel takes place in rural Scotland, for the most part, and one must be prepared to wade through a lot of painful “Scots” dialog that would even give Irvine Welsh pause. When I see stuff like this, I’m reminded why my ancestors came to America. (Or maybe it was Ireland they left; no one seems to know or care.) This is a Scotland just barely out of the Middle Ages, of backwards villagers and deep-rooted superstitions, the type of people who would eagerly burn a woman for being a “witch.” 

This is how the novel begins, with an attractive young woman named Elspet Malcolm being dragged naked to the fire pit, her husband Magnus dutifully whipping her as women watch from the windows of their homes, commenting on the young woman’s “diddies.” Also watching are Elspet’s children: Iain, 13, and Morag, 11. The man whipping Elspet is not their father; Magnus Malcolm is the bastard’s name, a local who has brought Elspet and her two children from a neighboring town, and now he’s about to burn her for being a witch. 

We are given vague detail that Elspet might have been a little “friendly” with some of the men in the village, and this has put her in the cross hairs of Magnus and the village women, who have used the handy ruse of accusing her of witchcraft to get rid of her. McNeilly does not shy in the gruesome details here, complete with the TMI note that Elspet soils herself in her fear, and the horrors continue when the shell-shocked children go home and decide to run away…only for Magnus to come home and stop them, attempting to rape young Morag…before Iain comes along to defend his little sister with an axe. 

A curious note is that Magnus calls Morag a “spawn of Satan,” but Morag soon drops out of the narrative and it is Iain who grows up to be an adept of the Left Hand Path. Presumably Iain is the titular Satan’s Child, not Morag, but methinks McNeilly knew what he was doing here. At any rate we flash forward some unspecified time – it’s many years later and Iain is now an adult, but he still is treated like a young man, so I’m assuming we’re like 15 years or so out. When we meet Iain again he’s in the Himalayas, in the presence of the Masters of the Cult, where he is about to become an Adept of the Eleventh Degree. 

After a druggy initiation ritual, in which Iain is to have sex with a girl and slice her throat during the act – a scene played more for shock than sleaze – Iain finds himself magically transported back to Scotland, where he now is a powerful mage. Whether Iain actually killed the girl – or even had sex with her – is something our hero debates for a hot second before getting on to the business at hand: doling out supernatural vengeance to the townspeople who killed his mother, “so many years ago.” 

From here Satan’s Child follows what the Vault of Evilers refer to as a “vignette approach,” which is in fact a great description of how McNeilly tells his tale. As I’ve found is common with horror fiction, Satan’s Child doesn’t so much follow a protagonist as he or she goes about his or her business, but instead goes from one character to another – more accurately, one victim to another – as he or she suffers his or her horrific fate. 

The problem is that McNeilly has not properly set up any of the townspeople in the opening sequence. We only meet a few of them – Magnus, of course, and the “pricker” (aka the witchfinder), and a few of the women – but none of them are really brought to life so that we may hate them as much as Iain Malcolm does, so that we may lust for their violent demise as much as he does. This I felt was the ultimate problem with Satan’s Child. 

Another thing is that the characters are fairly boring, because they’re all simple townsfolk living in backwards 1700s Scotland. Regardless, Mcneilly displays a vicious imagination that goes in really bizarre places; in the first “vignette,” Iain turns himself into a woman (how very modern!) so as to sow a jealous riff between a husband and wife, leading to an almost EC Comics denouement. 

Even crazier is next; as mentioned above, Iain turns himself into a bull, and allows himself to be “found” by one of his targets, a man who sells and breeds cows and whatnot. There’s a crazy bit of cow-sex-exploitation here that goes into the realms of bestiality because the reader knows the bull is really Iain, and he literally fucks a cow to death, first chasing the poor girl around the pen and then slamming his two-and-a-half-foot dick into her, to the extent that it ruptures the poor animal’s heart! 

As one will note, Iain’s goal isn’t just to kill his victims, but to make them suffer psychologically as well. And spiritually, too; the pricker suffers in this regard, as he’s moved on to Paris and has left behind his rural backwoods witchfinder days. This sequence is masterfully written because it’s another indication that our hero is a bit too driven; essentially Iain works with a lower-level left hand pather, and the two run a caper on the pricker, posing as government agents who need the man’s old skills to get a witch to confess – and of course, after the pricker has crushed the poor girl’s fingers and whatnot, he finds out who she really is. A nice twisting of the blade on Iain’s part, but again it lacks much kick because we weren’t given sufficient time to hate the pricker’s guts at the start of the book. 

But this “vignette approach” continues through the breezily-written book…breezily, that is, save for the painful “Scots” dialog we are occasionally assailed with, not to mention the author’s occasional tendency to lecture us from his high horse. But I guess that’s to be expected from a British pulp writer of yore; they just couldn’t help themselves. 

There’s a more elaborate setup where Iain returns to the village and starts up an actual coven, leading to a crazy bit of one guy wearing the skin of another, gradually being crushed to death by the drying skin, Iain killing two of his prey for the price of one. Here McNeilly brings in a new character, a woman who has also come to the village and stays to herself, but employs several of the locals. 

Meanwhile Iain shows off his occult mastery, transforming himself into various animals and killing off more targets, before ultimately setting his sights on his main goal: his stepfather, Magnus Malcolm, who is still alive – and who has remarried, his new wife about to have a child. Here the author leaves no question that Iain Malcolm has gone too far to the dark side, as he plots to kill the baby – only to find himself in a war of magic with a white witch who is determined to save the child’s life. 

As the Vaulters noted in the link above, the climax is somewhat expected, but nonetheless well delivered, and even touching in a way. I also felt certain that McNeilly knew what he was doing with Iain not being the person referred to as “spawn of Satan” by Magnus, but Iain’s sister, Morag, which nicely sets up the finale; Magnus turns out to be wrong in many ways. 

Overall Satan’s Child was a lot more entertaining than I expected it to be, and certainly went in wild directions – perhaps made even more wild given the overal staid approach of McNeilly’s narrative. Supernatural things happen without much fuss, giving the impression of a world much closer to the power of the occult than our own. Now it looks like one of these days I’ll need to check out the other “Peter Saxon” books I have.