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.