A few months ago, I did a post on some novels by Harry Adam Knight. Harry Adam Knight wasn’t a real person. It was a pseudonym used by John Brosnan and his friend Leroy Kettle. When writing that post, I discovered that Brosnan and Kettle had collaborated on more horror stuff under another name, Simon Ian Childer. I enjoyed the HAK books so much, I had to track down the SIC stuff. (Both of these books have been out of print since the 80s though, so they’re a bit harder to find.)
Tendrils
Hunter Publishing – 1986
A plague of “worms” wreaks havoc on some small English towns while the only scientist who understands the situation enters into a complicated relationship with a journalist. Published one year after Squelch, the final entry in John Halkin’s Slither series, the first half of Tendrils feels very much like a slightly grislier version of Halkin’s books. After a while, the “worms” are revealed to be the tendrils of a far larger subcthonic entity that has been lying dormant since causing the extinction of the dinosaurs. This was a nice touch, but ultimately not enough to make Tendrils a novel worth writing home about.
I read this book and wrote the above summary in July. I thought I had written a more in-depth piece of literary analysis, but I guess not. It’s a pity, because I don’t remember much about this book. It was ok, but very forgettable. I have read so many books about worms this year that I’m finding it difficult to distinguish this one from all the others. It only took me a couple of days to read it though, so it can’t have been painfully bad.
Worm
Grafton – 1987
Tendrils was alright, but it wasn’t quite as good as the Harry Adam Knight books I had read. I thought that the authors may have decided to use the Simon Ian Childer pseudonym for works of less literary merit. On top of this, I have read more than my fair share of horror novels about worms this year. I didn’t have particularly high hopes when I started into Worm.
Honestly, this was one of the most enjoyable books I read in 2020. From the repulsive surgery of the opening chapter to the awfully satisfying ending, this book was fantastic. Don’t get me wrong, this pretty low brow stuff, but God damn it was fun. (Low brow as it is, there’s an implicit critique of British colonialism in the book’s plot that I quite enjoyed. The author was Australian, but Brosnan is a good Irish name. Good man Johnny.)
A giant carnivorous worm is found inside the body of a patient in a mysterious private hospital, and it’s up to Detective Ed Causey to figure out what’s going on. This is a crime noir adventure with flesh hungry worms. Fuck yes.
Brosnan wrote this one by himself, and it has everything I enjoyed about his other books; interesting characters, really gross bits and competent story telling. A few weeks ago, I read and reviewed John Halkin’s Blood Worm, another novel about giant worms eating the civilians of London. It was so terrible that it made me want to read less trashy 80s horror fiction. Reading Worm had the exact opposite effect. Finding a gem like this makes wading through the shit worthwhile. This one is the rarer of the two SIC books, so grab it if you find it.
I don’t know why Brosnan and Kettle used two different pseudonyms to write novels that belonged to the same genre, but I discovered that a later edition of Worm was put out under the Harry Adam Knight pseudonym. All of their books are pretty good though, and I am going to seek out Brosnan’s other novels. Fortunately, most of the stuff he put out under his own name is available as e-books.
Nocturnal Revelries 