Gun in Cheek (29 page)

T
he thrillers of the forties, fifties, and sixties tend to resemble those of the earlier years in format and style, utilizing the same basic elements. But during the past dozen years or so, the suspense novel has begun to evolve in a somewhat different direction. At times, today's thriller is indistinguishable from the straight or "mainstream" novel and has sometimes been, in fact, a roman a clef. It still has the "copious effusion of blood" and the "forlorn hopes, narrow shaves, last-minute rescues, and 'tense' situations" of its ancestors, but more often than not, it also contains varying amounts of scientific extrapolation, current events, cautionary advice, and overtones of the psychological and the sociological. High-level kidnappings, terrorist attacks on public conveyances and public officials, murder in the White House, earthquakes and other natural disasters, disease epidemics, occult manifestations, doomsday conspiracies—all these and many more are the stuff of the modern thriller.

Not that contemporary writers have altogether abandoned such old standbys as the supervillain. Bestselling thrillers of recent vintage—Lawrence Sanders's
The First Deadly Sin
is one example—still focus on head-to-head match-ups between masters of venality and their opposites, the guardians of justice. Yet supervillains need not be human in today's tale of suspense, as Peter Benchley proved with
Jaws
. Since the publication of that novel, dozens of others have come along to chronicle the activities of other predatory "monsters" of the animal and insect kingdoms—everything from giant whales (
Leviathan
) to bugs (
The Hephaestus Plague
).

Perhaps the most popular of these "evil creatures" of fiction, aside from the venerable shark, has been that symbol of evil, the snake. A great many people are afraid of these crawling reptiles, particularly those of the poisonous variety; their physical appearance and their biblical history make them a natural as villains to instill fear in the hearts of readers—as John Godey's
The Snake
and a number of other books have done quite nicely, thank you.

But in no other reptilian thriller will you find a more deadly, wicked, monstrous, cunning, all-around nasty snake than the taipan of Michael Maryk and Brent Monahan's
Death Bite
(1979). The taipan, we are told, is an ugly, black-brown snake indigenous to Australia and New Zealand that grows to between eight and eleven feet in length at maturity, contains enough venom to kill 173,912 mice (and any human being in three minutes), and is the most aggressive and intelligent of all species. The villain of
Death Bite
is no ordinary taipan, however. It is "a giant taipan, twice as large, twice as vicious, and three times as deadly as the normal Australian taipan," and its native habitat is "some obscure, uninhabited island" off the coast of New Guinea.

The name of this island is Naraka-Pintu, and the monster taipan is hunted down and captured thereon by a group of native snake catchers, after which it is smuggled into the United States to be displayed at a Miami serpentarium. In San Diego, awaiting transshipment, it escapes, kills a couple of people, and then goes looking for a topography similar to its natural habitat. This quest leads it, intelligent reptile that it is, to a biology extension campus near San Diego, in which vicinity it piles up more corpses, chases a cat inside a house, and with "eyes glistening with rage," attacks a girl while she's taking a shower by trying to climb up over the shower door. (Not only is this taipan the deadliest of all snakes, it is beyond any doubt the horniest.)

Three people set out either to capture or kill the taipan, Scott Miller, the owner of the Miami serpentarium; his Asian girl friend loka, who thinks tangerines are called tambourines; and a biology professor named Wrightson, who helped smuggle the snake into the country. The taipan leads them a grisly chase. It goes to a punk-rock concert given by a group calling itself Sudden Death, eventually causes a panic, and murders the pet boa constrictor of lead singer Rex Flint. (" 'Bruce!' he cried in a pathetic tone, cradling the mangled body tenderly in his arms, letting the real blood ooze across his two-thousand-dollar costume. Rex looked up at the shocked revelers, still cowering on the tabletops. 'Animals!!!' he roared at the top of his lungs, tossing back his tawny mane. 'You animals!!!") Then it heads into the Mission Ridge Mountains, where it knocks off a weekend horseback rider and one member of the search party that goes in after it.

Finally, Miller, Wrightson, and Ioka catchup with the taipan. Miller confronts it singlehanded, catches it, and there is a final death struggle in which Miller strangles the snake while it spits venom into his face. Some of the venom gets into facial wounds he sustained while scrambling down the face of a cliff, and "he knew then what caused the bubbly, dizzy feeling just under his hairline. A minute amount of the liquid death had worked its way into . . . his nervous system." But before he expires, he manages to finish off the taipan, and "with a final, superhuman effort, he sat up, pulled the snake into a convoluted mass, and hurled it down to the base of the mound." Finis. And not a moment too soon, either.

At an earlier point in the novel, while discussing death bites, Wrightson says to Miller, "What melodrama! What unadulterated bullshit!" An apt description of
Death Bite
itself, perhaps, although not a negative one.

What, after all, makes a good thriller but melodrama? And what helps make an alternative classic but a dollop of two of the aforementioned unadulterated substance?

the Attic

As their steps died away upstairs I shivered in spite of the fire. The great hail seemed so gloomy, the empty House around me treasured only its past, the only young person in it had gone off on his own business. Was I a fool to have landed myself here?

—Ray Dorien,

The House of Dread

I know now that there must have been a touch of madness in me that raw October night I went to Cemetery Key and the house of horror known as Stormhaven.

—Jennifer Hale,

Stormhaven

"A
gothic," Donald Westlake once said, "is a story about a girl who gets a house."

And so it is. Since the first Gothic novels of Horace Walpole, Ann Radcliffe, and Matthew Lewis, written in the last decade of the eighteenth century, the two primary ingredients of the form have been an imperiled woman and a sinister house. In the early days, gloomy old castles and dark monasteries or convents were the staple structures; and the beautiful heroine possessed an unblemished virtue, fainted at least a half-dozen times (especially when that unblemished virtue was threatened), and faced all sorts of natural and supernatural evil: abduction, seduction, lechery, treachery; wicked barons, monks, nuns, outlaws, and bogus lovers; ghosts, vampires, werewolves, shaggy gorillas, and other beasts.

But despite all her misadventures, the heroine almost always emerged with two things: her maidenhead intact and, through marriage or rightful inheritance, the deed to the castle. The only exceptions were those stories laid in monasteries or nunneries, which were of course purged of their venal monks and nuns and left in the hands of the righteous. The women in these Stories, however, unfailingly retained their virginity; the stories themselves were all that were ever laid in a monastery.

The Gothic formula, as established by Walpole and his contemporaries and nurtured through countless shilling shockers, story papers, penny dreadfuls, dime novels, hardcover romances, pulps, and paperback originals, has remained remarkably unchanged for close to two hundred years. Gothic women are still pure and still being menaced by all manner of dreadful things, though the emphasis on the supernatural is much less today than it used to be. Despite the best efforts of the feminist movement, they still faint at moments of high melodrama and are still prone to what Lee Wright, former mystery editor at Random House, characterizes as "the idiot heroine in the attic" syndrome; that is, when they encounter a hidden room, or a locked door "that must never be opened, my dear," or some other plot device that common sense tells them is fraught with danger, they invariably enter the room, or unlock the door, or do whatever else is contrary to logic, intelligence, and the basic rules of story plotting.

In the architectural sense, the Gothic-novel house is different today from those of the nineteenth century. Monasteries and nunneries have fallen into disfavor; castles are still permissible, but only in special European settings. The gloomy old country house, of the type popularized by the Brontë sisters and Jane Austen, continues to be a favorite, particularly if it is situated on a barren cliff overlooking the sea. Houses on islands, in swamps, on mountaintops, in jungles, or perched forbiddingly on crags high above isolated valleys are also acceptable.

The rest of the formula is
de rigueur
. The woman goes to the house as a servant or tutor, or because she is summoned by a relative, or because she marries or becomes betrothed to its owner. She faces her peril and does her "idiot heroine in the attic" number. She escapes all attempts on her life and sexual charms. She lives happily ever after with the handsome man of her dreams (not necessarily her husband or betrothed, who may turn out to be the villain of the piece). And, most important of all, she gets the house.

The Gothic novel has been popular in this country for most of its two-hundred-year history, but never more so, perhaps, than in the past three decades. The paperback boom of the sixties and seventies, when half of all soft-cover novels seemed to carry such titles as
Bride of Menace, The Secret of Devil's Cave
, and
Brooding Mansion
and had cover illustrations depicting a dark house with one lighted window and a woman fleeing from it in the foreground (also
de rigueur
), brought thousands of neoGothics to a predominantly female and evidently insatiable readership. Some of these rose above the average—those of Phyllis Whitney, Victoria Holt, Dorothy Eden, and Willo Davis Roberts, for instance. Most, however, were contemporary pastiches of The
Miseries of Miranda;
or,
The Cavern of Horror
and other shilling shockers of the early 1800s.

There is an infallible method for separating the classic from the median Gothic suspense novel. This is known as the first-paragraph test. Not all bad Gothics have commensurate opening paragraphs, but those that do are always and without fail bad Gothics.

Some examples:

Through all that queer business at Shadow Lodge, those days of accumulating excitement and terror, I was kept as much as possible in the dark. It seems to me now, looking back on it all, that if they hadn't treated me like a Peeping Tom, I would not have been half so curious, so intent on finding out the meaning of it all. I could have helped Dad more, I am sure, if he had told me of his suspicions and his fears, of his dealings with Eudora the medium, with Squint the spy, and the other complications of that summer. . .

Authors, I suppose, must hover for a trying yet fascinating period on the brink of their books, deciding just where to jump in. I'd hice ft1aIe time To aress up my adventures and make myself out the fearless and efficient heroine of this story, but the real truth is I've lived through such strange things that I can't write in cold blood about them. (Gertrude Knevels,
Out of the Dark
)

Two murders would probably have gone unsuspected during the last year if Eunice Hale had not eaten a chicken croquette of questionable virtue. . . . (Jean Lilly,
Death Thumbs a Ride
)

The old woman's breasts were balanced over her folded hands like the loaded scales of justice waiting for her final judgment. (Leslie Paige,
Queen of Hearts
)

Does the ghost of that thing we fear most hang with us always, peering over our shoulder like an omnipotent, though fallen, guardian angel? (Grace Corren,
Mansion of Deadly Dreams
)

It had always frightened her to be in the woods at night alone. But now she was not alone, and it was this realization that sent little shivers of fear dancing up and down the back of her neck. (Jan Alexander,
The Wolves of Craywood
)

Catkins shivered in the cold spring wind that blew bitter round Camilla Forest's ankles. Shivering too, she pulled her light shawl more closely round her and wished for the warm pelisse that lay in her box. (Jane Aiken Hodge,
Marry in Haste
)

The silver light of the storm shifted perceptibly as though a black velvet curtain had fallen over the mountains, enclosing the girl in the small car into a cube of impersonal aloneness without destination. The morning's May sunshine, which had turned the sea to azured splendor, might have been a dream or one of those glazed picture postcards which traveling friends and relatives send from Cannes or Venice or, for that matter, Santa Barbara in California. (Ruth McCarthy Sears,
Wind in the Cypress
)

Anne Gunther stopped her Volkswagen after a particularly bad pothole had jarred her against the car's roof for the third time since she had left the village of Allen's Grove. . . . Anne rubbed the top of her head, surprised to not find on it her own mountain range of lumps. She reached out and patted the instrument panel of the little car.