Horror Review: Inhuman by John Russo (1986, Pocket Books)

George Romero gets all the credit these days, but John Russo was co-responsible for plotting out what eventually became Night of the Living Dead, the zombie film against which all other modern-era zombie films are compared. The story is very simplistic, with a group of unrelated individuals thrown together to defend an isolated farmhouse against an incursion of zombies. Why the dead are rising isn't addressed because it isn't the point--we just have to go along with Russo and Romero as they move a variety of people with a variety of opinions and ideas on what to do next from one disaster to the next. Russo wrote the novelization of Night of the Living Dead, and it's honestly a good thing I was aware of this prior to picking up Inhuman, because this book is practically the exact same story with the locations, protagonists, and antagonists changed to protect the innocent.

Despite what the cover might have you believe, there isn't a single scaly-skinned humanoid to be found across Inhuman's 220 pages. The cover artwork is a metaphor for the mental state of the bad guys, though they don't wind up that way until around halfway through the story. This is a pity, because a small group of resourceful survivors trying to defend their turf against rampaging lizard men could make for an epic horror story (or a Dungeons & Dragons campaign). Unfortunately Russo delivered this instead. Oh, what might have been...

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Inhuman is a book which comes off simultaneously as too short and too long. At slightly over two hundred pages, it's the horror equivalent of a 90-minute motion picture, so you know going in there's not going to be a lot of time for character development and there's a good chance most of the characters who do show up will be picked off early on to up the stakes for the designated survivors. That's totally cool, I can live with that. Sadly, Russo couldn't.

There are far too many characters and plot-lines running through Inhumans for its tiny page count. The book opens with a hardscrabble family eking out a living on their farm taking care of an invalid relative. This grandmother was lively and energetic before a snake scared the ever living hell out of her in the shed, and ever since the serpent dropped on her head, she's taken to her bed, where she has to be hand-fed meals and never speaks a word unless it's to utter prophecy about a coming event. Her most recent declaration on this front is that giant snakes are coming to kill them all, and as the family belongs to a Pentecostal sect of Christianity where snake-handling is the norm, the family assumes it has something to do with weekly service. If that was the case, the book would have been a hell of a lot better.

After introducing this family, we're next introduced to the husband-and-wife team of psychologists who have set up a second home on a restored Southern plantation, complete with a couple of live-in servants who handle things like cooking and clean-up while the owners of the plantation run a "marriage encounter" session for couples suffering relationship issues. Half a dozen troubles couples are on their way to the plantation house for this retreat, so they're working on getting everything set up to receive them later in the day. The husband turns on the TV early in the morning and watches the news, which talks about a bank robbery which has turned into a hostage situation several states north of them.

This sets up the next narrative jump, when we're introduced to the FBI agent on the scene in charge of the operation to apprehend the criminals, a group of Communist-sympathizing, Symbionese-Liberation-Army-emulating, rhetoric-spouting terrorists known as the Green Brigade, led from his prison cell by a man calling himself General Kintay. While Kintay and several of his co-conspirators are all behind bars, his second-in-command is not, and she's put together the robbery to both acquire cash and hostages. Her demands are simple: she wants her leader and comrades released from prison, and she wants a fully-fueled airplane to fly them south to Cuba, where they'll rendezvous with Fidel Castro and use the two million they've stolen to fund further uprisings against the US government. The FBI guy's a complete mess, trying to deal with his daughter's self-destructive behavior while also running the operation against the Green Brigade. He's all for storming the bank with a SWAT team and letting the corpses fall where they may, but the governor doesn't see things that way, and is ready to capitulate to the Brigade's demands, especially since they've threatened to kill hostages periodically until their requests are met.

The governor agrees to their demands, and soon the Brigade is being loaded on the plane. Unbeknownst to the terrorists however, the FBI has managed to get two of their men with piloting skill into the cockpit on the pretense of being pilot and co-pilot. The agent in charge has formulated a dangerous plan: once in flight, the plane will climb to 80,000 feet, where the thin oxygen will send terrorists and hostages alike scrambling to don their oxygen masks. Unbeknownst to anyone except the two men flying the plane though, the oxygen system aboard the plane has been disabled: the pilot and co-pilot will have working masks, but everyone else on the plane will be shit outta luck. Once deprived of oxygen, the terrorists and their hostages will faint, allowing the FBI to bring the plane down at a nearby airport, where law enforcement will raid it, capturing the Brigade and saving the hostages.

It shouldn't take you more than ten seconds to come up with any number of reasons why this is a horrible idea, but unfortunately you aren't the agent in charge of the operation, so the agency tries to pull it off. Things go badly, a scuffle between one of the hostages and one of the terrorists results in a grenade going off in the passenger area, and suddenly the pilots have to find a place to land their plane out in the middle of nowhere due to explosive decompression which threatens to kill everyone on board. The pilots do their best, but both are horribly injured in the resulting landing, and this leaves a group of around fifty passengers (hostages and terrorists) still alive, but in a severely brain-addled state due to prolonged lack of oxygen. The resultant damage has completely deactivated the higher brain functions, leaving only the lower, more primal and violent 'reptilian' areas to guide their behavior. As luck would have it, they've come down right smack dab in the middle of the area where both the family tending to the prophesying grandmother and the marriage counselors have set up shop, ensuring that no one in close proximity is going to have a good time.

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I'm a big fan of 'base under siege' stories, but Russo's Inhuman isn't a particularly good example of the genre. He wastes much of the first half of the book introducing us to the couples arriving at the retreat, explaining their problems, their motivations, and a bunch of other stuff that we really don't care about. Very few of the protagonists are actually worth caring about, and the villains are basically zombies only with slightly higher brain functions which include a rampant sex drive and the ability to fire guns. What hostages survived the initial robbery and subsequent landing have all been brain-addled to the point that they've basically joined with the terrorists, though not out of any respect for the cause. It's curious that there's almost no in-fighting within the group, considering how screwed up and base these people have all become: the bad guys wantonly slaughter any other people or animals that get in their way, but they're more than happy to put up with one another with no apparent problems.

The FBI man's sub-plot is absolutely worthless, serving to distract us from the main event, but since we can't bring ourselves to care about the guy (especially after he's shown to be a colossal sociopath), his inclusion produces more eye rolls than tension. Gee, do you think he's willing to do anything necessary to cover his tracks so he can't be blamed for the whole thing going pear-shaped? Like maybe killing innocent people, and lying to cover it up? Wow...didn't see that coming at all! (Note: sarcasm).

In the end, Inhuman is basically Night of the Living Dead only with fewer likable protagonists and a setup that, while imaginative, is handled ham-fistedly by the author. Given a higher page count and more deft handling by someone who actually knew what the hell they were talking about, this could have been a fine story. Hell, we know from the original Night of the Living Dead downer ending that Russo's got teeth and a willingness to wipe out everyone in the name of a good narrative. Somewhere along the way though it appears he was de-fanged, as the story ends on a mildly high note where all the people you expect will be rescued get rescued, all the people you presume will get killed wind up dead, and it all comes off as tone-deaf as the suddenly upbeat Raymond Burr narration which concludes the 1956 US release of Godzilla: sure, there was a catastrophic loss of life, but now it's over and the world can get back to normal! Hip hip hooray!

One star for the premise, one additional star because I actually finished the thing, but that's still probably half a star too many for this one. Don't waste your afternoon reading this one, watch Romero's Living Dead trilogy instead. Believe me, you'll walk away a lot happier.