Gannon 1: Blood for Breakfast

Blood for Breakfast (Gannon #1)
Dean Ballenger
1973

Ohhhhh man, this was good. I've been on a chase for this for a good while now, first seeing it on the amazing Glorious Trash, then shortly after seeing writer/director Craig S. Zahler review it on Goodreads. I haven't read any of his books yet, but so far I've been enjoying his film output, especially Brawl in Cell Block 99. Naturally, like all things I read about and want, it's terribly rare and expensive. Patience eventually paid off (I wasn't patient; I looked it up almost daily) and eventually a copy surfaced from some random little shop in a different state. Then I said fuck it and dropped way too much money on the other two, but I've convinced myself that it was worth it.

Blood for Breakfast is a real anomaly. It's hardboiled crime set in the 70s, but it retains all the wacky character names and slang dialogue from something like Dick Tracy, but with that 70s sleaze and violence you know and love. Some shithead affluent teens rape a young girl, and despite people seeing it, everyone remains quiet like someone behind the scenes is paying some hush money or issuing out threats. Brother Gannon, a real hardass and ex-soldier hears about this from his Dad and gets furious and decides to leave. He tells his boss he'll be back and he's got some stuff to settle, so the boss gives him a pair of spiked knuckles to get some answers.

Gannon comes to town and starts throwing down some hard cash in some seedy places to get some answers, and when people give him shit he starts throwing those spiked knuckles around, tearing flesh off of faces and even ears. Everyone that comes across Gannon talks to him like a prohibition era cartoon thug, but they all concede because he's a fuckin' tiger, which is frequently repeated. In between searches he gets really horny and finds women to have sex with to calm him down, a bad trait he admits to that eventually causes him some trouble. But he can't help himself, like in one scene: "He grabbed a couple handful of boobs, nice firm absolutely no-sag boobs" before leaving her apartment to go hunt down more thugs. A man after my own heart.

This just never lets up; I haven't read anything like it. When I read something like Mike Hammer I'm always sad the sex is off page and the violence is so tame, but in this it gets downright nasty. Which is perfect. Mike Hammer would strongarm people and talk trash, but Gannon busts into an office and calls a lady, which is frequently narrated as a 'lesbian', to "Shut up, you officious bitch or I'll tear off your tits and slap your face with them!"

I won't go too crazy into the plot, but I read almost the entire thing one sitting and didn't want it to end. Hopefully someday these will at least get a digital collection. I'm not counting on it, but maybe Zahler can make it happen if he keeps it up.

Borrowed Covers, Part 1

I always like finding those posters or covers for ficiton that tend to 'borrow' from artists. Poor Frazetta seems to typically be emulated the most frequently, but due to his popularity and output these are usually pretty easy to spot. There's infinite coverage on game cover ripoffs, like Contra and Castlevania to name a few popular ones, but I don't see a whole lot for books. So huzzah, here we go whenever I find some.

Mindbridge the novel was published beforehand, but this specific re-release was in 1978, the same year of Eyes of Laura Mars. Maybe stretching it, but seems too coincidental.

Another similar case, both released in 1984. This one gave me quite a laugh. At a quick glance I swore that was Albert Finney.

 So I think this one is a bit of a reversal. Pigs was released in 1973, and any poster or release for it was quite a bit different until DVD, when the art started to adopt this cover from 1986, Richard Haig's The City (sequel to The Farm), which appears to be edited for its release. The good folks over at Vault of Evil posted the unedited image, borrowed here below, which these editions of the film have appear to been using.



The unedited art, courtesy of Vault of Evil boards.



I rented Pigs in middle-school and haven't revisited since, so seeing this now get a Bluray fairly recently was pretty exciting, although I'm not sure it's all that worth getting excited for! And same goes for The City, which took me a fair bit to track down, along with its prequel, The Farm, which I read last year and was quite underwhelmed with. A bunch of farm animals get all jacked up on PCP and there's sort of a siege situation on a farm. Sounds like the stuff of dreams, but it's mainly a lot of buildup to a pretty weak payoff. Pearls before swine or whatever.






The Touch of Hell

Original British cover that's fairly accurate.

The Touch of Hell          
Michael R. Linaker
1981

I really love chaos in fiction. Things exploding, people running around in a daze, everyone just trying to survive from this sudden disaster or whatever incident. I like the little scenes and descriptions that compliment the chaos, like this random dude in in Richard Laymon's One Rainy Night that runs out in the street and shoots an arrow at the protagonist's car, then disappears; or how when Anthony Edward's character in Miracle Mile returns back to the diner where it all started and it's in ruin, the people gone now and a coyote by the bar. Irwin Allen's big productions, The Poseidon Adventure and The Towering Inferno really excelled at this too, especially with how it dispatches its big name cast without warning. And nothing really compares to those two in film. There's obvious budget constraints to all these practical things falling apart and exploding (just look at the horrible elevator effect in Earthquake), but modern disaster films skip the random group of people. It's usually a family or a small group, and from the get-go you know who's going to survive, so there's no impact or emotion when someone bites it.

So yeah, novels are where it's at in that regard for the most part, and I've been fancying a lot of British stuff lately where chaos runs amok, like Nick Sharman's kids on the rampage novel, Childmare, and the heart of this review/rant, Michael R. Linaker's The Touch of Hell, where people do indeed bite it.

The Touch of Hell takes place entirely in a small English village, so it's more low-scale disaster I suppose, but the small village/small town trope is always an arrow to my heart. You get your introductions to this guy and that girl and their little going-ons for a few brief chapters, then disaster strikes. A monstrous American cargo plane suffers some sort of malfunction and crashes straight through the village during a traffic jam. Cars and semis are flung every which way, houses topple and crumble, and a giant jet fuel conflagration breaks out in the city, instantly immolating almost all in its path. The scene is terrible: bodies blackened and fused to their melted cars, buildings completely destroyed or in flames, and families and sexed-up affairs separated through the confusion.

Really bizarre cover, and the version I have. Makes it look like this dude  caused the entire catastrophe.

Before long the military is called in, but it's not just for cleanup efforts. Something was in that American plane, and its gotta be contained before it spreads to the neighboring villages and London. Well, someone gets ahold of whatever it is, and pretty soon it starts to slowly spread. Think Emil from Robocop, all boiled up and mutated and falling apart, shambling around the street, and that's a pretty good description of what happens to a select few that come in contact with the stuff.

And that's where it unfortunately drops off a bit. The disaster doesn't reach full-scale dreamworld chaos that I desired, where bubonic mutant folk descend onto London. It's more of a countdown to containing this so it all doesn't go to hell, with most of the madness ending after the initial explosion/conflagration.

But not to be too harsh, because it's a quick read, and for the most part it delivers the goods, with descriptions of lovers being smashed under concrete and hardass military men having to gun down their best buds after they contract the bad stuff. I guess I always want things to go south and never come up for air.