FFB - Spiderweb

Robert Bloch' Spiderweb was published in 1954; this book was one of a double offer from Hard Case Crime (2008), hence the bar-code on this image and the strapline ‘Two complete novels!’ The other Bloch novel was Shooting Star. Hard Case Crime brings to a modern audience old out-of-print classic crime novels plus new writing, with covers harking back to the golden age of pulp paperbacks.

Bloch’s novel is an enjoyable crime noir about Hollywood’s dark side. Eddie Haines is a washed-up radio jockey who can’t get airtime in LA. Then he’s befriended by Professor Otto Hermann who promises to make Eddie rich. All Eddie has to do is pretend to be a gifted self-help guru to the stars. It seems that Hermann has access to many secrets of the film stars and by using Eddie in his new guise of Judson Roberts, they can fleece unsuspecting pigeons. When Eddie meets Ellen and falls in love with her, he can’t get out of his deal with Hermann – because he too was being cunningly blackmailed…

Bloch gives away some of the conman’s secrets, which should be enlightening and educational. His characters use the psychological studies of the day to good effect to work subtle and convincing scams.

There are some great one-liners in this book. As the Professor explains about one film star hooked on astrology: ‘But she won’t so much as sleep with an assistant producer without consulting the stars.’

Bloch’s horror writing style is in evidence as well: ‘Poinsettias pressed myriad bleeding mouths to a garden wall.’

And he always likes to play with words – as evinced by some of his book and short story titles. Here, he goes all alliterative: ‘I eyed elkskin and surveyed suede.’

Of course he’s a master of the hardboiled style too; this is a great description: ‘She gave a look that would have made her a fortune as a glass cutter…’

Stephen King writes of Bloch, ‘Perhaps the finest psychological horror writer.’ [He’s keeping his options open, I guess, using ‘perhaps’.]

King’s writing pal Peter Straub says, ‘Robert Bloch is one of the all-time masters.’

I wouldn’t disagree with either of these gentlemen. Bloch is worth reading.

FFB - Koko

This Friday’s forgotten book was published in 1988; a departure for Peter Straub, moving from supernatural elements to thriller. But this is a thriller with a difference, with over 600 pages. It concerns four survivors of the same platoon whose service in Vietnam culminated in an atrocity in a small village, Ia Thoc. Four men from totally different backgrounds, who chose different paths in life, Dr. Michael Poole, ‘baby doctor’; Harry ‘Beans’ Beevers, the ‘the world's worst lieutenant’, now a lawyer; Tina Pumo, Pumo the Puma, a NYC restaurateur; and wild little Conor Linklater, a skilled carpenter.

Fifteen years later, they reunite to investigate a series of murders in the Far East: the killer stuffs one of the regiment’s playing cards into his victim’s mouth, mutilates him, and identifies himself with a name they all once shared – Koko.

Koko is rich in characterisation, suspense and horror. And irony: ex-Lieutentant Beevers is the instigator of the search for the Koko killer because he can see the potential for a best-seller non-fiction book and even a mini-series. There are flashbacks, some graphic, snatched from the memories of the main characters; each in their way adding another piece to the puzzle of why they acted as they did.

Dr Poole observes that ‘improbability and violence overflowed from ordinary life, and Stephen King seemed to know that.’ So does Straub. Time and again someone would enter a room and I would wonder if the killer was there, ready to pounce; and even when he did, the suspense continued.

Some of the characters were not particularly pleasant yet I still cared what happened to them – well, with the exception of Beevers! And as the search progressed and the identity of the killer changed, sympathy began to creep in. For Koko is a story about a haunting: as ‘if Vietnam was their real life and everything else just afterglow.’ It is a pleasure to read, notwithstanding the coarse language and graphic brutality depicted.

‘Terror has many layers’ says one of the characters, and so has Koko.

This is a psychological horror thriller, touching upon Vietnam, the ironies and terror of that conflict, but mainly it is about people sucked into the past. A memorable page-turner.

(Indeed, so memorable that some years after reading Koko, when I acquired a book for Solstice, A Dark Time by William Patrick Hackett, I felt resonances of Koko, though Hackett’s is wholly original and to be recommended).

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A Dark Time.

This is one of those big and long American novels that defy definition, with several characters seemingly disconnected until the connections are made - none of which seem contrived. The odyssey we share with Danza and O’Neil is believable and traumatic. I certainly sensed a layer of nihilism running through the tale. What indeed is the point of a life? Maybe examining that question in the so-called ‘flower power’ period, where everything wasn’t all about ‘love’, gives us one answer; it was just as dark and nasty as any other decade. In fact, ultimately, life is to be lived. This book has the potential to become a powerful movie; a tour de force.

- Nik Morton