Chadzilla ROARS!!! (The Official Blog of Chadwick H. Saxelid, Writer)

The Valley - by William Meikle

The year is 1863.  A group of gunslingers have been hired to protect a gold prospecting camp in Montana.  What the gunslingers are supposed to be protecting the camp from isn't made all that clear.  When they arrive, though, they find the camp demolished and the river infested with giant scorpion looking things.  Giant scorpion looking things that are starving for some fresh meat...

Film critic Roger Ebert finished the first paragraph of his dismissive review of the 2006 disaster thriller Poseidon by defining the word perfunctory, because that was the word that most came to mind as he watched the film.  "It [Poseidon] was perfunctory," Ebert wrote in 2006, "by which I mean, according to the dictionary that came with my computer: cursory, desultory, hurried, superficial, careless, halfhearted, sketchy, mechanical, automatic, routine, and offhand."  Ebert's comment stuck in my mind, obviously, and I toy with it every now and then.  Which is what I did while reading the beginning of William Meikle's pulp story The Valley.

Meikle does not bother enhancing the beginning of his cowboys versus monsters story with such pesky distractions as character, motivation, setting, foreshadowing, atmosphere, or even context.  His just starts with a group of hired gunslingers riding into a demolished town and then goes from there, moving the story at a trot that does not once slow down.  If it did, then it would not have been able to keep up with Meikle's wild imagination and reach the explosive ending.

But a funny thing happened on the way to the story's ending.  I found myself getting interested in what was going to happen next.  The gunslingers were an interesting and even a bit likable wild bunch of archetypal characters.  There is the Hot Headed Psycho Kid, the talkative yarn spinner referred to as the Squire, the man of both cloth and lead called the Pastor, and Frank Collins, a Confederate Army deserter that, despite selling himself as a hired gun, has had his fill of killing men.  The Magnificent Seven they aren't, but there is never any doubt as to their capabilities with a gun.

And those capabilities are put to very good use.  Because the giant scorpion looking things that are swarming out of the gold mine are only the start of the gunslingers troubles.  It seems that the missing miners have not only found a mother lode, they have also opened the door into another world.  A "lost world" that has been frozen in time, until now.  One filled with saber toothed tigers, woolly mammoths, giant birds, and even pygmy cave men.  But the gunslingers have a job to do, and they are going to do it.

I burned through The Valley in less than a day, enjoying the action packed b-movie silliness of it while it lasted.  The ending leaves the door open for a potential sequel.  I am not the least bit ashamed to admit that I want to read it.

The Invasion (Extended Edition) - by William Meikle

If aliens were to arrive today and commence with the invading and terra-forming, humanity would be screwed.  Big time.  Even Stephen Hawking understands this:

"We only have to look at ourselves to see how intelligent life might develop into something we wouldn't want to meet. I imagine they might exist in massive ships, having used up all the resources from their home planet. Such advanced aliens would perhaps become nomads, looking to conquer and colonise whatever planets they can reach."

Which is what happens in William Meikle's short and simplistic alien invasion thriller The Invasion.

It begins with a downpour of green colored acid rain that dissolves any and every living thing, plant or animal, that it comes into contact with.  Structures made out of former living things, such as houses, are not effected.  Neither are the oceans, for whatever reason.  Anyway, the green colored acid rain dissolves the living tissue down into a green slime that is capable of moving and chasing down any and all life forms that have taken shelter, or that are not wearing somekind of protective clothing.  Hey, there have to be some human survivors to follow through the slime coated wasteland that was once Earth, okay?

But the slime isn't done.  It hardens and grows spores that hatch burrowing insects that begin digging, but digging for what?

Last week I praised Drive Angry for not getting too much plot in the way of the story.  Today I am going to spend a little time (very little) complaining about author William Meikle not getting enough plot in the way of his story.  I am just fickle that way, I guess.

The difference between the two is that Drive Angry gave its characters some color.  Granted the colors were all primary ones and there were no shades of gray to muddy the narrative waters, but Drive Angry did not require shading.  All it needed was a reasonably good excuse to kick some ass, show T&A, and have some muscle cars zip and growl across the screen.

The Invasion has a reasonably good excuse to commence with the world ending and alien fighting - see the above Hawking quote - and there is plenty of it, but what is missing from Meikle's story and his cast are broad strokes of color to give them some interesting flavor.  The cast of characters are so thinly sketched that they make stick figures look fleshed out in comparison.  The events of the story are quite gruesome and harrowing, at times, but there are also times when they are described in a detached manner that makes the story read as rushed and underwritten.  Which is a pity, for a little more color or panache to the storytelling would have made it a lot more fun to read. 

Crustaceans - by William Meikle

Having been born in 1967, I am "old" enough to fondly remember the "Carnivorous Pest" sub-genre craze that flooded the British horror fiction market in the wake of James Herbert's best-selling pulp horror novel The Rats.  Every animal or pest you could conceive of mutated into vicious and carnivorous beasties that attacked and ate every man, woman and child that was unfortunate enough to cross said mutated creatures path.  Cats, spiders, jelly fish, slugs, ants and, in what had to be the genre's apex of silliness, crabs visited the All You Can Eat Human Buffet.

Written by a prolific author named Guy N. Smith, the killer crab series featured insanely large and pretty much indestructible crabs - which varied in descriptive size from "small dogs" up to "midsize cars" - that viciously attacked and destroyed small sea side towns populated with mostly unlikable characters, the numerous deaths of which were described in over the top detail for the reader to enjoy.

I have only read one of Smith's crab novels - The Origin of the Crabs - and, to this very day, I cannot tell if Smith was being serious, or if the whole thing were just a colossal joke.  Of that book, and Smith's output, I can only say that one was more than enough.  Which brings me to William Miekle's self-described "homage" to Smith's killer crab saga, Crustaceans. 

Dead and dying sperm whales begin beaching themselves along the eastern coast of the United States.  Inside the dead and dying sperm whales are crabs.  Giant, man-eating crabs that go on the attack the moment that they burst free of their blubbery prison.  A lovely young (Scottish) scientist named Shona Menzies is recruited by the "men in black" to investigate.  She is quick to suspect that the crabs are searching for something.  But what?

Meanwhile a drunken crab fisherman named Porter takes his prize catch to the Central Park Zoo in order to make some booze and cigarette money.  His unruly catch grows too big to contain, however, and Porter is tasked with catching the escaped crab before it can do any harm.  What Porter doesn't know, and Shona Menzies has just discovered, is that the crabs have been breeding beneath the island of Manhattan for quite some time... and they are now ready to venture out of the sewers and subway tunnels to feed. 

Miekle's short novel is much more than the "homage" to Smith's crab novels that it claims to be.  Crustaceans is actually a (authorized? un-authorized? fan fiction?) continuation of Smith's confoundingly popular series.  Like the Smith novel that I read so long ago, Miekle's story moves at a breathless pace.  Trivial matters such as characterization and attention to mood building detail are discarded, as they would only slow the silliness down to a point that the reader would notice just how silly the whole venture is. 

Crustaceans is focused on one thing and one thing only: giant, man-eating crabs attacking people and invading New York City.  Anything that doesn't involve that is irrelevant and ignored.  Which is how it should be in a book like this.

I am not the least bit embarrassed to admit that I finished Crustaceans with a big and goofy grin spread across my face.  If you have any fond recollections of reading any and all entries in the "Carnivorous Pest" sub-genre, then I think you might enjoy it as well.  If not, then don't waste your time.