In Season of the Witch, Sabrina Spellman was only 15 years old. She hadn’t experienced her dark baptism, she hadn’t signed her name in the Dark Lord’s book of souls, and she wasn’t enrolled at the Academy of Unseen Arts. She didn’t possess a grimoire—she didn’t even have a black cat named Salem yet.

At this point, Sabrina wasn’t much of a witch. She came from a long line of spellcasters, however; and her father was a highly respected and powerful warlock. Said her cousin Ambrose: “You’re such a good girl. Sometimes I wonder how you’re ever going to make a wicked witch.”

Despite her pedigree, Sabrina was never going to be wholly wicked. Her mother, after all, was lovingly mortal. Unlike her pernicious cousin, she had a sunny and indefatigable disposition. She hoped that she would survive her upcoming dark baptism and be a light in the darkness. To her, magic was a way to make the world a better place.

That was the conflict roiling inside Sabrina. On her sixteenth birthday she would have to make a decision—would she give her soul to Satan or renounce the Church of Night altogether? “I wanted to do both,” she confessed. “I felt like I was being pulled in two different directions, and nobody cared that I would be torn in half.”

The main reason for Sabrina’s indecision was her boyfriend Harvey Kinkle. The two met in kindergarten and now as teenagers they couldn’t keep their hands off each other. “I’ve loved Harvey my whole life, and I’ve had a crush on him almost as long,” said Sabrina. “He was my first kiss, and I’ve never wanted another.” When Harvey and Sabrina went on their first date, their chemistry was electric. “That’s how witches burn,” wrote author Sarah Rees Brennan.

Season of the Witch takes place during the summer before the Sabrina Netflix series begins. It’s a fun prequel filled with lots of “Hail Satan!” interjections, quotable Latin incantations and gloriously over-the-top similes such as “The moon shone behind you like a crown of bone, and the night streamed behind you like a cloak of shadows.” Overall, it’s probably the best Sabrina novel you’ll ever read.

The book features alternating chapters that focus on the main cast. It’s on these white-on-black pages that author Brennan really shines. The chapter about Harvey’s older brother, in particular, is especially strong. Like Sabrina, Tommy Kinkle had an all-consuming love for Harvey. But unlike Sabrina, he paid dearly for his devotion. His story will break your heart.

[Chilling Adventures of Sabrina: Season of the Witch / By Sarah Rees Brennan / First Printing: July 2019 / ISBN: 9781338326048]

The Wash was a vast area of mud, quicksand and dangerous tides. Although beautiful from a distance, especially during the summer when the sun sparkled in the morning mist, it was unquestionably Britain’s most inhospitable location.

But love blooms even in the most unlikely places. Just ask Gavin and Liz Royle. Back in 1975, the two young academics fell in love while on a treasure hunt in the treacherous marshland. They never found their hidden booty but they found each other.

They also found the Slime Beast, a reptilian-like swamp creature that slurped human viscera like Nissin Top Ramen. Yum! After a series of grisly murders (and lurid subplots), the gill-man was vanquished in a fiery showdown (see my review of The Slime Beast for more details). Gavin and Liz returned to London, got married, started a family and lived happily ever after. The end.

Now on their 40th wedding anniversary, the couple inexplicably returns to the Wash. Liz thinks it’ll be romantic. Gavin, on the other hand, thinks his wife is daft. Why couldn’t they spend a nice relaxing weekend in Cornwall or Devon or some other sunny vacation spot? Why did they have to return to a place where monsters dwell?

Naturally, things get messy right away. And stinky too. “An overpowering, suffocating smell assailed (Gavin’s) nostrils. Not human excrement or urine, something a thousand times worse. It was the scent of the Slime Beast, a fetid odour incorporating everything that was vile and evil, a putrescence unknown to mankind.”

Gavin knows immediately that another Slime Beast is on the prowl. In tow with a reluctant wildfowling guide, and armed with a satchel of ineffective weapons, he vows to slay the “slime-oozing Satan.” There’s no time for preparation or strategy, the novel is only 111-pages long. Conflict and resolution occur swiftly, and Gavin knows he’s got to hurry before the final chapter arrives.

Fans of the first Guy N. Smith adventure will undoubtedly be interested in this sequel. I definitely was. But honestly, there’s no space for a second (or third) Slime Beast novel on my bookshelf. One is enough. Despite a couple of delightfully horrid moments (and a funny bit about giant crabs), the author doesn’t have anything particularly new or substantive to say. The spawn is no different than the progenitor.

[Spawn of the Slime Beast / By Guy N. Smith / First Printing: June 2015 / ISBN: 9781907846878]

In 1977, a pregnant hippie on a nine-day bender fell down a hole and discovered her version of Pellucidar—a hollowed out, underground chamber filled with dinosaurs. It was an Edgar Rice Burroughs, Jules Verne and Mysterious Island nightmare. Said the author: “Jane Hartman was stuck in an anomaly that spanned several million years, possibly one hundred million years. Hell, maybe longer.”

She survived her slippery slide to Middle Earth and eventually gave birth to a son named Doobie. And just like an inbred version of Adam and Eve, Jane and her son conjoined to create a new Garden of Eden. A couple of generations passed and Jane became the revered matriarch of a tribe of cave dwellers in their own private savage land.

Dinosaurs in the Garden of Eden: For most people (including Young-Earth Creationists) that would be enough. For author Eddie Generous, however, that was just a two-page setup. The real action began when an earthquake dropped the mountainside community of Happy Village into the infernal abyss (half a century after Jane went down the rabbit hole btw). That’s when the novel explodes in a time warp of improbable anachronistic weirdness, sexual misadventure and great big teeth.

First there’s Stevie Drew, a high school junior, who was “the wrong side of the tracks incarnate.” Despite the ever-present dino danger, he couldn’t escape his teenage libido. “He needed to focus on his situation,” wrote the author, “and not worry about how nice Emily’s ass felt against his crotch.”

And secondly there’s David Bowie Bowtie, a Kamandi-like hero who killed chicken-snakes (Velociraptors) and wrassled tank-pigs (Nodosaurs). Even though his gene pool was as shallow as a toilet bowl, he was a noble savage who helped the newcomers navigate the treacherous prehistoric chasm. I’m sure Jack Kirby would enjoy this wonky version of the Last Boy on Earth.

But the best thing about this novel was sweet Jane Hartman herself. Even though she’d been living in a cave for 50 years, she couldn’t escape the influence of the swingin’ 70s. All of her kids had ginchy names like Sonny Bono, Sunshine Nicks and Shroomshine, and her taste in music never progressed beyond Peter Frampton, David Bowie and the Bee Gees. No punk, rap, speed metal or BTS for her.

Jane had been out of circulation for a while and her fuzzy logic was unendingly funny. At some point she discovered an underground Batcave connected to the surface world. Filled with snacks, booze, sex toys, ammo and DVDs (and maybe a giant penny and an over-sized Joker playing card), the bunker gave Jane a glimpse into how the world had changed in her absence. It became obvious to her—after finding a life-sized sex doll that looked like Linda Hamilton, circa 1984 (“Not yet tough, but with a lot of potential,” according to the author)—that people now fucked animatronic robots. Being a groovy chick with no sexual hang-ups whatsoever, Jane starts sleeping with the doll right away.

And later, after spending some time in the “Great Viewing Room” she figured out a way to keep her tribe safe from all the toothy dinosaurs, “thunderdome housecats” and meddling interlopers. “Watch and learn,” she told her kids as she popped a disc into the DVD player. They huddled together in the dark to watch a movie called Home Alone. Taking inspiration from a young Macaulay Culkin, they started making plans for the future.

[Great Big Teeth / By Eddie Generous / First Printing: February 2019 / ISBN: 9781925840568]

“Women have always been the most important part of monster movies,” says author Mallory O’Meara, “because women are the ones horror happens to. Women have to endure it, fight it and survive it.”

But there’s not a wide range of female representation on screen. In the horror biz, women are either scream queens, warty, unfuckable witches or oversexed busty vampires.

Says O’Meara: “Monster stories are powerful. They explore prejudice, rejection, anger and every imaginable negative aspect of living in society. However, only half of society is reflected in the ranks of the people who create these monsters. Almost every single iconic monster in film is male and was designed by a man: the Wolfman, Frankenstein, Dracula and King Kong”—the list goes on and on.

There is one notable exception, however. Back in 1953, a special effects and makeup designer named Milicent Patrick was tapped to create a Devonian-inspired hybrid creature for an upcoming movie from Universal Pictures. To this day, Patrick’s iconic design for the Creature from the Black Lagoon remains one of the best-known and well-loved cinematic monsters of all time.

But Patrick didn’t appear out of thin air like a genie from a bottle. She’d been working in Hollywood for 15 years by then and her resume was pretty impressive. Before designing the Creature (or “Creech” as he was affectionately called on set), she attended the same prestigious art school as Mary Blair and Chuck Jones. As an animator at Disney she worked on both Fantasia and Dumbo. And at Universal she created the Xenomorph from It Came from Outer Space. She was smart and ambitious and easily made her mark in a male-dominated industry. “She didn’t have superpowers or a magic wand,” states O’Meara. “She was simply intelligent and savvy and good at what she did.”

Unfortunately, Patrick’s Hollywood legacy was unraveled by pettiness, jealousy and a big jolt of Hollywood sexism. To promote the upcoming release of Creature from the Black Lagoon, she was booked on a multi-city publicity tour. By all accounts, the cross-country trek was a smash success. Patrick was a beautiful woman who was quick witted and comfortable in front of the camera. She also had a 41-inch bustline and jiggled like a plate of jelly when she walked into a room. One magazine described her as “a statuesque beauty abundantly endowed by nature to take advantage of Hollywood’s wide-screen techniques.” Yikes! Reporters were curious about the movie and exorbitantly interested in Patrick herself.

All this attention (lascivious and otherwise) irked her boss back in California. As the head of the makeup department at Universal Studios, Bud Westmore was accustomed to taking credit for anything under his purview. Even though he had nothing to do with the Creature’s design, he felt like he deserved the media acclaim Patrick was getting. Being upstaged by one of his underlings—a woman no less!—was a big blow to his ego. As a result, Patrick (the beauty behind the beast) was cut loose to appease Westmore. She remained a part of the Hollywood community for the rest of her life, but she never worked again in her preferred profession. She died in anonymity in 1988.

But hold on a sec. Author Mallory O’Meara has written a highly personal history of the queen of monsters. The Lady from the Black Lagoon: Hollywood Monsters and the Lost Legacy of Milicent Patrick shines a light on Patrick’s career, clarifies her contributions to the Creature from the Black Lagoon (and other monster movies) and firmly establishes her place in film history. The book is chatty and nuanced and never wavers from O’Meara’s strong point of view.

Milicent Patrick’s rise, fall and disappearance behind-the-scenes in Hollywood is a fascinating story. To this day, she’s the only woman to have designed an iconic movie monster for a major studio—and you have to admit: the Creature is the coolest of them all. “She should have been hailed as a hero,” says O’Meara in conclusion. “She’s not just the queen of monsters, she’s the goddamn Joan of Arc.”

[The Lady from the Black Lagoon: Hollywood Monsters and the Lost Legacy of Milicent Patrick / By Mallory O’Meara / First Printing: March 2019 / ISBN: 9781335937803]

Do “nature run amok” novels qualify as monster novels? Is a coordinated attack of army ants as monstrous as a mob of abominable snowmen? I say “yes.” Rats, worms, spiders, ants, a plague of flies, a swarm of bees, a flock of seagulls—when Mother Nature gets mad, she has a long list of creepy-crawlies on speed dial to do her bidding.

Squirmsters! is about thousands of ravenous caterpillars terrorizing an airplane during a three-hour flight from Seattle to San Francisco. In a way it’s like a nature run amok novel written by children’s author Eric Carle. Instead of eating pickles, ice-cream cones and lollipops, however, the mutant larvae feast on high school kids, metalheads, businessmen and various airline personnel.

In David Jacobs’s book, the caterpillars don’t morph into pretty butterflies like they do in Carle’s classic kids book The Very Hungry Caterpillar. They stay true to their single-minded prime directive. “They’re man-made monsters,” explains Mrs. Medford-Graham, a federal agent assigned to the case. “You’ve heard of biological warfare, right? That’s what they are, bio-weapons.”

She continues: “They were an experiment that never should have been. DNA engineers took a destructive insect pest and turned it into a weapon of war. The finished product was … Squirmsters!”

It was a silly name, of course. But so were Fat Man and Little Boy (nicknames given to the pair of atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki). Squirmsters had the same kind of devastating potential albeit less explosive. Regular unaltered caterpillars were infinitely destructive to plant life, but super caterpillars were living weapons that could devour crops, create famines and destroy villages.

Accidently released from their cargo bay transport container, the Squirmsters quickly invade the aircraft’s cabin looking for a snack. Seven unlucky passengers immediately succumb to the hungry horde. “Each larva was a feeding tube with a mouth at each end,” says the author. “The gurgling sound they made was like a bubbling caldron of boiling starch.”

But don’t worry. With the help of a flare gun and a contrived plot device, the Squirmsters are ultimately destroyed in a fiery explosion. Good riddance, says Glitch Wade, one of the six lucky survivors. “There goes the second deadliest species on the planet.”

[The Bug Files #1: Squirmsters! / By David Jacobs / First Printing: June 1996 / ISBN: 9780425153208]

Kaiju novels are a lot of fun. In particular, I enjoy the crazy and extravagant descriptive language used by authors to construct their towering colossi. The books are rarely scary, but the earthshaking monsters are always a hoot.

If Gamera-like “gigaanna” are a staple of the genre, why would an author write a kaiju novel and deemphasize the monsters? That’s a question I’d like to ask Lachlan Walter, the author of We Call It Monster.

Don’t get me wrong, there are giant monsters in his book, but they’re peripheral at best. Even more disappointing, Walter clearly has no flair for the material. His kaiju are relentlessly generic. For example, here’s how he describes the first creature to stomp across Sydney, Australia: “It was a massive green-and-black thing,” he writes in the first chapter. “Its body was almost barrel shaped, the same as that of a gorilla or a wrestler.”

Later, Walter catalogues a bunch of creatures spotted during a jungle expedition. “A dragonfly as big as an eagle,” he begins. “Ants as big as dogs, millipedes as big as guinea pigs, Christmas beetles as big as basketballs, stick insects the size of a dining table and a wombat as big as a small car.” Like all newspaper editors I’m a big fan of simple declarative sentences, but writing like this is dull and maddeningly perfunctory.

To be fair, the author has an agenda above and beyond most monster novels. Along with global destruction, he’s telling a story about love and loneliness and commitment and survival. For him, the kaiju are the catalyst for poetry. Good on him.

He may have a lot to say about the human condition, but he struggles throughout the book to give his creatures any sort of unique identity. At some point he just gives up. “They were monsters, plain and simple,” he says. “No amount of jargon or doublespeak would change that.”

In one chapter, a group of strangers assemble on a hill to watch a thunderous Kaiju Big Battel. The problem? The giant monsters are the size of a thumbprint because they’re twenty kilometers away. That, in a nutshell, is my biggest complaint about We Call It Monster. Even if I thought it was a serious rumination about the eternal human spirit (which I don’t), the novel itself is still a bust. The monsters are destroying the civilized world, but the author reduces them to pint-sized specks on the horizon.

[We Call It Monster / By Lachlan Walter / First Printing: February 2019 / ISBN: 9781925840520]

Michael Drake lived a typical and uneventful suburban life. He had a job, a wife, two young kids, a couple of dogs and a sexy neighbor he liked to flirt with. On weekends, he enjoyed camping and fishing.

But Michael had a little secret that he kept from his wife and kids. His great-great-great grandfather was Igor Dracula, a blood-sucking monster that terrorized Europe during the 17th century. Michael wasn’t a vampire himself (he was just a psychologist), and he wasn’t proud of his notorious family history. He kept a daguerreotype of Grandpa Igor hidden in the garage, underneath a pile of old clothes, college mementos and wooden stakes.

Nobody escapes the past forever, however. When 12 ancient sarcophaguses (sarcophagi?) are discovered buried near Transylvania’s Carpathian Mountains, the Dracula curse is reborn. Igor’s faithful servant (a fractured lamia named Veidt Smit) and a giant Dobermann pinscher named Zoltan emerge from their subterranean tombs. And that means trouble for Michael Drake, the last of the Dracula line.

A fractured lamia, for those of you who skipped Strygology 101 at the Academy of Unseen Arts, is a vampire-like creature that can control its bloodlust and function in the daytime. According to Collin de Plancy, the author of Dictionnaire Infernal, lamias haunt cemeteries and disinter corpses. As such, they’ve been valuable wingmen to the Dracula family throughout the centuries. They’re especially handy when it comes to abducting victims for bloodletting.

Because of their subservient nature, a lamia cannot exist without a master. As soon as Smit awakens from his 300-year sepulchral slumber he starts sniffing around for Dracula progeny. “It was his unavoidable duty only to serve them unfailingly … and for eternity.” His preternatural spidey sense points him toward the New World. Destination: Tarzana, California.

Once in California, Smit and his vampire hound hop into a Hearst and travel up and down Highway 1 looking for Michael Drake. Don’t ask me how a guy from the 17th century acquires a vehicle and figures out how to drive. I don’t know. The author doesn’t seem interested in these trivial details and neither should the reader.

One thing leads to another and the Drakes find themselves being attacked by Zoltan and a pack of wild dogs. Their “blood-curdling, ear-splitting roar of fury” can’t be ignored, says the author. One way or another these hounds of Hell are going to turn Michael into a vampire and force him to accept his dark legacy.

Even with the rabid vampirism, Hounds of Dracula is pretty tame overall. Yes, Zoltan is a scary brute, but he’s an ineffectual tool. As a reward for being a lousy alpha dog, he’s dispatched in the most inglorious way possible. And things don’t go smoothly for the lamia either. His demise happens off the page; he doesn’t even get a memorable death scene. Oh well. All villains get the death they deserve. I guess poor Veidt Smit and Zoltan didn’t deserve much.

[Hounds of Dracula / By Ken Johnson / First Printing: October 1977 / ISBN: 9780451077394]

Bug-eyed monsters were popular in the early days of science fiction with their bulging eyes, groping tentacles and dripping ichor. Edgar Rice Burroughs and H.P. Lovecraft (among other writers) built entire careers on the endless confrontation between man and monster.

No one takes bug-eyed monsters seriously anymore. They can only be mocked or evoked in deprecation. It was more fun, however, in the old days when BEMs were featured prominently on the covers of Astounding Stories, Weird Tales and other sensational pulp magazines. That’s what the editors of this short story collection think. And I agree.

Brian Aldiss once said that science fiction was the image of the unspeakable human heart given shape as the grotesque other. And if that’s the case, then bug-eyed monsters are “the unassimilable vision of ourselves, safely distanced, invariably rejected.” As such, they’ve been an important subtextual figure of science fiction from the very beginning.

Take for example “Mimic” by Donald A. Wollheim. It’s a story about an alien creature living among us in plain sight. He looks like everyone else (sort of) but he’s a loner who never fits in. Like a moth that looks like a wasp or a caterpillar that looks like an armored beetle, the creature in Wollheim’s story uses camouflage to assimilate and survive. “Even here, in the heart of the largest city in the world in swarming New York,” says the author, “the eccentric and the odd may exist unhindered.” In other words, we are all bug-eyed monsters—alone and unloved.

“The Last One Left,” by co-editors Bill Pronzini and Barry N. Malzberg, is even more direct. In their story an alien invasion is taking place, and no one seems to notice—no pandemonium in the streets, no newspaper articles, no nothing. The BEMs have arrived and they’re slowly taking over the planet. But whatever. Obviously, the aliens, with their mass hypnosis and “rolicular modal control,” are superior to humans in every way. What can we do but shrug our shoulders in defeat?

These two stories, as good as they may be, are indicative of the entire collection. This isn’t a book for nostalgic readers looking for hideous creatures, Flash Gordon-like heroes and women in brass brassieres. Every author from Damon Knight (“Stranger Station”) to Isaac Asimov (“Hostess”) is trying to deconstruct the sub-genre in their own particular way. Are they successful? Probably not. You can almost see the writers (especially Poul Anderson and Robert Bloch) smirking as they pound away at their clackity typewriters.

But I would recommend checking out Bug-Eyed Monsters nonetheless. Part of understanding what we are and where we are going is understanding where we’ve been. In this way the past always inspires the future. Says the editors: “The bug-eyed monster is where science fiction has been—and in its own way it wasn’t such a bad place to be.”

[Bug-Eyed Monsters / Edited by Bill Pronzini and Barry N. Malzberg / First Printing: 1980 / ISBN: 0156147890]

There’s a lot of bad stuff going on at the U.S.-Mexico border. Human smuggling, human trafficking, inhumane detention facilities and indefensible family separation policies are all horrible.

Things are so fucked up that cartels and coyotes are now digging tunnels from one country to the other. In theory, these subterranean passageways make it easier to sidestep ICE agents and border patrol hassles. A tunnel is especially convenient for Central and South American drug syndicates looking for a way to get their contraband into the hands of their loyal customers. If you didn’t know, the U.S. is the largest market for recreational drugs in the world. Go team!

In this novel by Gayne C. Young there’s a tunnel in progress linking “a nondescript ranch house in Mexico to a nondescript ranch house in Texas.” It’s a big commitment for the Acuña Cartel, but it’s worth every penny. “The tunnel is a sizable investment,” admits Miguel Alvarado, a high-ranking official in the organization, “but it will earn 400-to-500 times its cost once the first shipment of fentanyl makes it across the border.”

And that’s why the cartel is upset when a mysterious incident abruptly stops construction. Each day a delivery truck doesn’t drive through the underground freeway represents a loss of tens of millions of dollars. Jeff Hunter and Jarrett Taylor, two Afghanistan War veterans now employed by the drug mob, are immediately dispatched to the site. Along with an alpha team of mercenaries, their mission is to clean up the situation using any means necessary.

Initially, Hunter thinks that a rival gang is responsible for the narco tunnel mishap. Or perhaps it’s the result of overzealous immigration agents. But he’s wrong. Some type of monstrous creature is obviously attacking the diggers. Says the author: “The bodies were mutilated beyond recognition and resembled caricatures of human forms as if fashioned from a fevered dream or by evil itself. The tunnel floor was littered with dried blood, viscera and torn earth that told of struggle and carnage.”

You have to wonder: What type of animal is responsible for such slaughter? Dogs? Hyenas? Jaguars? How about a vampire-like chupacabra or a mythical jackalope? Maybe a troop of invasive Japanese snow monkeys? That’s the best (and funniest) theory.

For the record, the author never reveals what kind of monsters are down in the dig dug tunnel. He does, eventually, provide a pretty good description of them, however: “The animals resembled baboons except for the eyes, which appeared three to four times larger than they should have been on similar animals of size. Their eyes were coal black and void of pupils. Their fur was dirty white and course. Their claws were elongated, razor sharp and pale ivory in color.”

The Tunnel is written in short, rapid-fire chapters that compel readers to keep turning pages. The monsters are sufficiently scary and the subterranean world is vivid. There’s a long literary history of secret underground worlds, and this book fully embraces it. There’s also a little bit of munitions porn (chapter 27) for those of you who like that sort of thing. And finally, there are some truly laugh-out-loud moments between border agents Joel Andrews and Champe Carter. I hope the author has plans to revisit these two oddballs in future efforts.

The novel ends with a couple of burning questions: Why are these troglobites attacking people? And why did the mere presence of humans whip them into such a frenzy? The answer to both questions is simple. “They liked the taste,” says one of the mercs.

[The Tunnel / By Gayne C. Young / First Printing: June 2019 / ISBN: 9781925840797]