Gary Brandner (1933–2013)

Shades of [b:Pet Sematary|33124137|Pet Sematary|Stephen King|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1480069533l/33124137._SY75_.jpg|150017] (this was written 3 years later), dead is indeed better. A charlatan fortune teller decides to perform a resurrection and has unexpected success. Initially everyone involved seems so relaxed about this it felt bizarre, but the way Brandner sets up the 80s soulless rise to fame with dealmakers fighting to sign him for their run at the LA big leagues is really funny and validates the flat affect as pure comedy. Unfortunately Brander doesn't lean into this and tries to get a horror ending, the satire elements fall away and the rest is hackneyed, stereotypical use of voodoo and entirely expected, while retaining the now mysterious blasé attitude to the now far less friendly resurrected dead.
This is roughly akin to a James Herbert story, or worse Stephen King.… (more)

This was nowhere near as good as his other book [book:The Brain Eaters|2088320]. Frankly, the best part of the book (pardon my phrasing) is the horrific rape scene that kicks it off. The werewolf stuff was okay once it got going but all too brief. Most of the novel spends its time setting things up leaving me caught in a holding pattern. The plot is paper-thin, and the characters are not complex at all. Not that they had to be but if I'm to spend that much time with them, I need a little something more. Speaking of characters, the lesbian nun felt a bit cliche but that might just be the nun-sploitation part of my brain speaking. I knew immediately what she was there for, some minor exposition and then fodder. Her death scene though was pretty good. To sum things up, the 1981 Joe Dante film is the superior version of this story. Just skip this book and watch the movie.… (more)

This is essentially 28 Days Later by way of the first third of George Romero’s Dawn of the Dead with heavy Cold War Era political thriller undertones. Basically, a hippy eco-terrorist chick gets her boyfriend to screw up a harmless test involving spraying dye to test air dispersal, and the brain eater parasite is unleashed. The book, for the most part, follows a disgraced newspaper reporter as he discovers and unwinds the crisis. It was a fast-paced and easy read though the last fifty pages had a couple of lulls that probably should have been shortened. Otherwise, all the character work and introductions had something to do with driving the plot along including cutaways to the several first incidents of brain eaters causing people to go berserk.
The story had plenty of horror and some tense action pieces though I preferred the straight horror scenes more. The subplot that finally intersected in the last bit of the book with the KGB Agents and the Soviet “Agricultural” Specialist, which was the espionage undertone of the work, surprised me in its final twist involving the hippie girl which I thought that I had figured out already. It was a little punch to my political stances as she was made out to be a vicious idiot who was violently against war and pro-environmentalism that the reader was supposed to hate. At the same time, some of the victims of the parasites had racist and homophobic thoughts as they were succumbing and portrayed as victims. I might be reading too much into it as I have no idea what the author’s political bent was at all.
Overall, I recommend this if you’re looking for a not-too-heavy end-of-the-world horror story. The story is fast-paced, it never stops moving forward save in a few spots, and there is no doubt that it is meant to be a straight horror story judging by the very horror-morality ending, the other elements from outside genres being just a part of the scope. In fact, I definitely now want to check out the first [book:The Howling|481462] book now. I loved the movie since childhood so it’s not like I wasn’t interested beforehand.… (more)