Killer Flies – Mark Kendall
Signet – 1983
I knew nothing about this book when I started reading it, but if you had asked me to guess the plot, my guess would have been very accurate. Honestly, this says more about the book than my expertise.
This is a book about a swarm of genetically altered flies who turn bad and start killing everything in sight. It was so similar to Gila! by Kathryn Ptacek that I wondered if both Kendall and Ptacek had attended the same “write your own animal attacks horror novel” workshop. One book is about lizards and the other flies, but episodically they’re almost identical. When I looked through the goodreads reviews after finishing the book, I noticed that I was not the only person to notice the similarities here. Killer Flies came out two years after Gila! too, so it looks like it was the rip-off. Apparently Mark Kendall is a pseudonym for a writer called Melissa Snodgrass, and it seems like she is not hugely proud of this work.
Honestly, this was pure trash. It’s exactly as bad as it looks. In the end, the main characters, 2 men and a woman who are involved in a ridiculous love triangle, kill the flies by playing a song at them.
Apparently this was quite a difficult book to track down for a while, but it was recently republished by Encylopocalypse. I love that there are publishers getting this kind of crap back into print. It would be a great shame for a person to have to pay more than a few dollars for trash like this.
The above comments may seem quite critical, but although they are all true, I did actually quite enjoy this very silly piece of trash novel about killer flies.
Nocturnal Revelries 