Horror Review: Flesh Stealer by Pauline Dunn (1990, Zebra Publishing)

in #books5 years ago

William W. Johnstone set the template for the typical Zebra creature feature: a Vietnam vet protagonist at whom women throw themselves without a second thought, either living in or returning to "Smalltown, USA", butts heads with a nightmarish abomination which slaughters its way remorselessly through the population. Finally, through sheer determination, faith in God and the Republican party, and the judicious application of his Second Amendment rights, the terror stalking the small town is sent packing. All that's left is to clean up the bodies, mourn for the dead, and hope something didn't survive. Spoiler alert: something always survives, just in case sales numbers dictate the need for a sequel.

What we have in Flesh Stealer is two women writing under a pseudonym, borrowing the Johnstone formula, filing off the right-wing propaganda and gun fellatio, and turning in a straightforward Creature Feature with an absurdly high body count that works right up until the Epilogue destroys everything they've spent the last 300 pages building up.

Yup. It's a Zebra book all right...


The unimaginatively-named Cavern City, Kentucky is where the evil crops up this time. A sort of analog for the Green River valley in south central Kentucky where Mammoth Cave National Park is located, Cavern City's a one-horse burg kept running by a steady influx of tourists and sight-seers eager to explore the caves. Jeffrey "Cutter" Stone is one of the seasonal tour guides who leads groups through the underground and back to safety. A veteran of Vietnam, where he served as a helicopter pilot, Stone has a rough time staying in one place for too long, but he always comes back to Cavern City and the welcoming arms of Patty who loves him and hates herself for being unable to fix his wanderlust.

Now though, trouble has cropped up in Cavern City. The body of an out-of-towner is found near one of the unused cave entrances, his murder accomplished through the savage stripping of his skin, leaving him to bleed out and die of shock. The death is ruled an animal attack, but no one can figure out what would cause a wolf or a bear to eat the skin off its victim and leave the muscles and internal organs intact. Cutter hasn't seen anything like it since Vietnam: man is the only species that flays others alive.

The next victims are closer to home for Cutter, as the son and husband of the landlady he rents his trailer are attacked by the creature. After that, it's a couple of teenagers down by the lake, and then the landlady herself, who get the treatment, then another one of the Cavern City tour guides bites the dust, and Cutter joins the manhunt in the hopes of finding whatever's doing the killings before it takes any more victims...but this is only seventy pages in and Dunn has plenty more victims on the chopping block. By the time the book ends, we've had scientists from two different parts of the country arrive to help, a deluge of reporters have converged on the area to get the story (including one hotshot asshole who you just know is going to get it in the worst way possible), the state police, and finally the National Guard. Dunn might as well be laying out a smorgasbord for the creature, but as the saying goes, there's no kill like overkill, so come and get it!

Flesh Stealer may be a Johnstone rip-off from start to finish, but it's a more competently-written narrative than anything of Johnstone's that I've ever written...and believe it or not, that's a problem. Dunn makes an effort to build complex characters driven by different emotions, but in a story about a seventeen-hundred-year-old creature running around the Kentucky countryside skinning people alive because it needs flesh, this works to the story's detriment. With Johnstone, one at least has the ability to laugh at the cardboard victims and the equally-cardboard heroes who get ravaged by killer bats or over-muscled products of incest. Dunn wants us to take this story seriously, but the pair of women behind the pseudonym don't have the chops to pull this off the way, say, Gregory Douglas did with The Nest.

The result is a lot of plodding and narrative that slows the book down rather than driving it forward, making this 315-page story feel more bloated than a novel with a body count in excess of twenty-five victims should. There's plenty of action, there's quite a bit of sex (even if most of it happens "off-screen"), and tons of carnage as Dunn puts us in the minds of numerous victims and describes what they're thinking and feeling in their final moments. In some cases, these are odd musings indeed with one character so desperate to make a connection with this creature that he sabotages the efforts of the people trying to kill it, then masturbates about the fantasy shortly before he suffers the death you know is coming for him. It's, uh...well, it's the first time in my memory at least I can remember reading about a grown man furious and shamefully whacking off just before his own demise, so I guess it's got that going for it.

Surprisingly enough, there's no "fake out" moment in the book, where somebody kills an animal which had nothing to do with the deaths and everyone breathes a sigh of relief until the attacks begin anew. This isn't a complaint in the least, as it's one of the most common tropes in "animals attack" stories and it's refreshing to see Dunn's unwillingness to completely follow the script on this front. I was well on the way to awarding this one a solid three out of five, and then...the Epilogue.

Dear god, the Epilogue.

Listen, I'm not going to spoil it, but I need you to promise me one thing. I need you to promise that if you track down a copy of Flesh Stealer, you will stop reading on page 313. I know there are pages beyond that, I know they look like they are part of the actual story, but I assure you, if you read pages 314 - 317, you will hate yourself. More than that, you will hate Flesh Stealer, and you will hate "Pauline Dunn" for having written them, because they make zero goddamn sense in light of what just happened.

Now, if you can promise me this, I can promise you in return that you'll have a decent time with Flesh Stealer. It's not going to blow your mind, and it's not a roller coaster of jingoism and ammosexuality the way Johnstone's tales go, but it's a reasonably competent story hiding between the covers of a Zebra novel which goes completely off the rails in the last four pages.

Three skinned and still-twitching corpses out of five if you ignore the epilogue. Two out of five if you bumble into it and don't have the good sense to stop.

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Minimal. So delightful.

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