Post by Katzenbalger on Aug 20, 2019 14:21:08 GMT
I love trash horror. I love books about monsters eating people and all the sort of pulpy garbage that they really don’t make anymore. The few bookstore chains that still exist don’t really have a horror section anymore (it’s usually discreetly piled into ‘Sci-fi and Fantasy’ or outright replaced by…ugh…’Paranormal Romance’). Sure, there’re still horror novels being written, but few of the just outright dumb nonsense that I crave.
Thankfully second hand bookstores still remain a treasure trove of junk. So every now and then I’ll try my luck and hopefully come away with some glorious garbage. Eat Them Alive counts in the garbage department at least. It’s profoundly stupid.
What’s it about? Giant praying mantises that eat people alive. And that’s pretty much it. Oh sure, there’s the thinnest of plots, involving an ex-criminal getting revenge against the gang that left him for dead (a revenge that utilises giant praying mantises). That’s not really important at all. What is important is how committed the book is to delivering on its title. A whole lot of people get eaten alive, and in ridiculously gruesome detail. If you ever wanted to write a book about people getting eaten alive by giant praying mantises, then this is the book for you. Oh sure, it’s badly written and full of nonsense, but it delivers on its title over and over and over again.
And so now, for your perusal, I’ve written out a synopsis of what the hell this nonsense book is about. So strap in.
Dyke Mellis is our awful, unlikeable protagonist, a whiny former criminal living a solitary life in the Caribbean. Why is he whiny? Well, eleven years ago he was part of an evil multi-ethnic gang of thugs who brutally robbed, tortured and murdered a Texas millionaire. Dyke attempted to doublecross the gang, but failed miserably and they retaliated by torturing the shit out of him (they cut him to ribbons and beat him so bad he’s got poor vision and constant headaches) and leaving him for dead in the desert. Oh, and they also castrated him. I probably should have lead with that since it’s Dyke’s main hang-up. He spends most of his time whining about it and about getting revenge.
Anyway an earthquake on a small Caribbean island opens up an underground cavern that is full of giant praying mantises, which proceed to eat everyone on the island. Dyke, passing by on a boat, watches the whole ordeal and decides that the giant praying mantises are exactly the right tool for him to get his revenge and comes up with a plan to tame them to fulfil his needs.
Thanks to the power of coincidences/sloppy writing, Dyke just so happens to have the right materials he needs for capturing/feeding/taming giant killer praying mantises on his boat. Like, exactly the right things; giant cage, ropes, nets, a seemingly endless supply of meat, etc.
He manages to lure the biggest mantis onto the boat, manages to get it caged and over the course of a few days attempts to tame it by feeding it animal meat. He also somehow develops a ‘mantis repellent poison’ he lathers onto himself so the mantis won’t eat him. He then paints its head red, puts a (giant mantis sized?) collar on it and calls it ‘Slayer’, because he apparently has the mind of an emo teenaged boy. He manages to tame Slayer to the point where the thing actually understands English commands, which is absurd. He then somehow has Slayer tame the rest of the mantises.
Then, because he’s a dick, Dyke goes to a nearby village of people he’d befriended, convinces them all to get on his boat (women and children included) and then drops them off onto Mantis Island so he can watch them all get eaten alive. In particular, Dyke is super-interested in watching women get eaten, a sentiment that seems to be shared by the writer.
A massive amount of the book is dedicated to absurdly detailed and specific descriptions of women getting eaten alive by giant praying mantises. Like, a sizeable percentage. A concerning percentage. It’s a slim volume, only 158 pages long, and at least a dozen of them are dedicated to women getting ripped apart and eaten by praying mantises. In particular, expect to hear about breasts being cut off and eaten in lurid detail about a dozen times. It’s apparently the Giant Killer Mantises’ favourite food. Expect to read the words ‘woman-meat’ a lot.
Here’s an interesting factoid: Eat Them Alive was written by a woman under a pen-name. This raises questions.
The next part of the book is absurdly repetitive – Dyke takes his pack of trained giant praying mantises to Colombia (conveniently all four members live there), loads them all into a truck…somehow (the size of the mantises seems to change page to page), tracks down and visits the home of one of his assailants and then has them and their entire families eaten alive, with specific and special attention given to their wives. This happens four times in a row.
During this time, where something in the realm of seventy people (mostly women and children) are massacred in Colombia by a dude driving around in a giant truck packed full of giant praying mantises in broad daylight, apparently nobody notices or does anything – there’s no police response, no countryside panic or anything.
I’d also like to note the way that Dyke looks for his former gang members, which involves just literally looking for them. He turns up in Colombia with a vague notion that it’s probably where they’d have gone, and then proceeds to wander the streets just staring at people, heading into shops and buildings to see who is in there in the hope that he’ll somehow come across one of his gang members. Which, due to bad writing, he just so happens to do.
With the gang eaten alive and his revenge complete, Dyke returns home with his giant mantises, passing through some more villages to feed them, and then just sort of hangs out for three months like an idiot. Then, in the last five pages, the story wraps itself up in the dumbest, most convenient way possible.
So Dyke’s island of giant killer mantises is suddenly attacked by a different army of giant killer mantises lead by a family member of one of the gang members who managed to survive Dyke’s revenge tour. That person then managed to coincidentally find another island full of killer mantises and tamed them (apparently it’s really, really easy to tame giant killer mantises?). He also built himself a suit of mantis-proof armour…which he immediately takes off, like an idiot. All the mantises kill each other, except for Slayer who shows up and eats the guy, but not before he manages to shoot Dyke in the chest, mortally wounding him. Then Slayer starts to eat Dyke, but because he’s still covered in poison Slayer dies and then Dyke dies and the book ends.
It’s…a bad book. That should be pretty clear. It oddly manages to make a story about giant praying mantises eating people alive monotonous. Sure, the first few instances of people being eaten alive have shock value for how luridly gruesome they are, but it happens literally dozens of times as the book goes on. It’s the one gimmick the story has, and the author runs it firmly into the ground long before the story is over. There’re only so many times you can read about people being eaten alive before it gets dull. Hell, by the end even the author seems to get bored by it and cuts the hyper-detailed multi-paragraph descriptions down to single sentences. There’s no depth to any of it, so beyond the ridiculousness of the plot and the shock value there’s little to it.
The characters all suck and there’s nobody relatable or likeable. Dyke is our POV character, so we’re completely stuck with him the entire time and he’s so unlikeable. The others are barely characters at all, since they just exist to be eaten. That means no discernible personalities and nobody to care about. The book is also racist in that blatant, blunt, ridiculous way a lot of 70s/80s horror was. Dyke’s multi-ethnic gang lets the writer make digs at African-Americans, Indians and the Irish, Mexicans are derided for no reason while everybody in the Caribbean are portrayed as naïve simpletons who live in huts.
Dialogue is the worst by far. I haven’t touched on it but holy hell is it abysmal. Dyke tends to make huge, rambling proclamations, often aloud and to himself because he’s on his own for the vast majority of the story. So he’s constantly either just rambling to nobody, or speaking directly to giant praying mantises that may or may not be able to understand him (though the story seems to hint that, yes, the mantises can fully comprehend his orders).
There’s a total lack of understanding of human biology, which makes the long descriptions of people getting ripped open and eaten alive more funny than disturbing. Just how much dismemberment and disembowelment a human being can withstand before finally dying is comical. It gets so ridiculous that even the moments that are meant to be horrific just end up being silly. One woman has her breasts, arms and legs ripped off, her eyes gouged out and her stomach split open, and only dies when her head is removed. Most other victims have a similar level of superhuman resilience.
The author also doesn’t seem to know anything about praying mantises at all, which is a bit odd considering they’re the central premise of the book. You’d think the author would have done a little research, but it seems the extent of it was they saw a praying mantis once and just made a bunch of assumptions. They don’t even use the correct terms in describing their anatomy (the words ‘mandible’ and ‘thorax’ are never used, and you really feel they should).
All complaints aside, I really do have to commend Eat Them Alive for being exactly what it advertised itself as. No one can deny that it is about giant praying mantises eating people alive. As stupid and bloody and repetitive as it ended up being, it delivered on its premise in abundance. Hell, within the first five pages somebody is being eaten alive, and it only continues on from there. I have to give credit for getting right to the point and committing to it’s violent, stupid premise so completely.
But there’s definitely hugely missed potential in the ‘giant killer mantises’ story. For one, it doesn’t really work as a horror story because there’s no sense of tension or danger to any of it. The gore is there but if you don’t care who it happens to the impact is gone. It has the narrative thrust of a shopping list, with its barebones plot and plainly straightforward approach to it. There’re no characters to care about, so the tension is gone. The mantises are portrayed as completely unstoppable until the last few pages, but since they’re constantly on the loose there’s no real sense of foreboding dread. None of the victims even try to fight them or escape; they all just stand around helplessly as they’re torn to pieces so there’s no excitement. Even the shittiest horror books I’ve read at least have moments of actual, page-turning tension, where you keep reading because you need to know what happens and whether the characters survive. There’s none of that in Eat Them Alive.
Another (better) author could do something good with the premise. Well, ‘good’ for a genre effort at least. There’s a decent horror novel potential to be salvaged in there. And it’d be really easy too.
First, you’d have to actually have a real protagonist. That’d be easy enough – make one of the other gang members likeable and focus on them, or a member of their family (like their wife or child or something). Just make them a witness of Dyke’s maiming, and not an active participant. Have them now-retired, their criminal ways behind them as they have a new life with a loving family. Have a loving partner, and age up any kids to their teens. Alternatively, have the gang member be horrible and due their comeuppance, but focus on one of their kids.
Concurrently have Dyke still do his ‘tame giant mantis’ thing happen, but clearly position him as the villain, because that’s obviously what he is. Cut right down on all of his rambling, whiny nonsense and get rid of all his stupid monologues. And make him actually fearsome in some way, instead of just being a whiny loser.
Then, and here’s the big, difficult part; delay the ‘eaten alive’ stuff as much as possible until the finale.
You still have Dyke’s mantises eat people along the way, but don’t go into quite as excessive detail yet. Maybe have people find the aftermath, or allude to the horror. Y’know, build up a feeling of tension and dread over the course of the book, knowing that the giant mantises are, eventually, inevitably going to collide with the protagonists the reader has grown to like.
And then, in the finale, unleash the praying mantises. Have the protagonists at some event, be it a big party or a carnival or something, and then have Dyke and his mantises show up. Then you can have a big, gory climax, and go into all the horrific, multi-page gruesomeness as all hell breaks loose. You won’t have worn out your welcome, and the horrible, gruesome stuff will be fresh and shocking. If you’ve done the groundwork to make the main characters likeable, then you’ve got tension as they fight to survive.
Or at least that’s what I would have done with it. Part of my fascination with it is that it’s the sort of book I’d probably write. Big dumb monsters going on a rampage is definitely my jam, and the ridiculously gruesome deaths are my thing. I'd just make sure the skeleton the book hangs on it sturdy and has some meat on it first.
Thankfully second hand bookstores still remain a treasure trove of junk. So every now and then I’ll try my luck and hopefully come away with some glorious garbage. Eat Them Alive counts in the garbage department at least. It’s profoundly stupid.
What’s it about? Giant praying mantises that eat people alive. And that’s pretty much it. Oh sure, there’s the thinnest of plots, involving an ex-criminal getting revenge against the gang that left him for dead (a revenge that utilises giant praying mantises). That’s not really important at all. What is important is how committed the book is to delivering on its title. A whole lot of people get eaten alive, and in ridiculously gruesome detail. If you ever wanted to write a book about people getting eaten alive by giant praying mantises, then this is the book for you. Oh sure, it’s badly written and full of nonsense, but it delivers on its title over and over and over again.
And so now, for your perusal, I’ve written out a synopsis of what the hell this nonsense book is about. So strap in.
Dyke Mellis is our awful, unlikeable protagonist, a whiny former criminal living a solitary life in the Caribbean. Why is he whiny? Well, eleven years ago he was part of an evil multi-ethnic gang of thugs who brutally robbed, tortured and murdered a Texas millionaire. Dyke attempted to doublecross the gang, but failed miserably and they retaliated by torturing the shit out of him (they cut him to ribbons and beat him so bad he’s got poor vision and constant headaches) and leaving him for dead in the desert. Oh, and they also castrated him. I probably should have lead with that since it’s Dyke’s main hang-up. He spends most of his time whining about it and about getting revenge.
Anyway an earthquake on a small Caribbean island opens up an underground cavern that is full of giant praying mantises, which proceed to eat everyone on the island. Dyke, passing by on a boat, watches the whole ordeal and decides that the giant praying mantises are exactly the right tool for him to get his revenge and comes up with a plan to tame them to fulfil his needs.
Thanks to the power of coincidences/sloppy writing, Dyke just so happens to have the right materials he needs for capturing/feeding/taming giant killer praying mantises on his boat. Like, exactly the right things; giant cage, ropes, nets, a seemingly endless supply of meat, etc.
He manages to lure the biggest mantis onto the boat, manages to get it caged and over the course of a few days attempts to tame it by feeding it animal meat. He also somehow develops a ‘mantis repellent poison’ he lathers onto himself so the mantis won’t eat him. He then paints its head red, puts a (giant mantis sized?) collar on it and calls it ‘Slayer’, because he apparently has the mind of an emo teenaged boy. He manages to tame Slayer to the point where the thing actually understands English commands, which is absurd. He then somehow has Slayer tame the rest of the mantises.
Then, because he’s a dick, Dyke goes to a nearby village of people he’d befriended, convinces them all to get on his boat (women and children included) and then drops them off onto Mantis Island so he can watch them all get eaten alive. In particular, Dyke is super-interested in watching women get eaten, a sentiment that seems to be shared by the writer.
A massive amount of the book is dedicated to absurdly detailed and specific descriptions of women getting eaten alive by giant praying mantises. Like, a sizeable percentage. A concerning percentage. It’s a slim volume, only 158 pages long, and at least a dozen of them are dedicated to women getting ripped apart and eaten by praying mantises. In particular, expect to hear about breasts being cut off and eaten in lurid detail about a dozen times. It’s apparently the Giant Killer Mantises’ favourite food. Expect to read the words ‘woman-meat’ a lot.
Here’s an interesting factoid: Eat Them Alive was written by a woman under a pen-name. This raises questions.
The next part of the book is absurdly repetitive – Dyke takes his pack of trained giant praying mantises to Colombia (conveniently all four members live there), loads them all into a truck…somehow (the size of the mantises seems to change page to page), tracks down and visits the home of one of his assailants and then has them and their entire families eaten alive, with specific and special attention given to their wives. This happens four times in a row.
During this time, where something in the realm of seventy people (mostly women and children) are massacred in Colombia by a dude driving around in a giant truck packed full of giant praying mantises in broad daylight, apparently nobody notices or does anything – there’s no police response, no countryside panic or anything.
I’d also like to note the way that Dyke looks for his former gang members, which involves just literally looking for them. He turns up in Colombia with a vague notion that it’s probably where they’d have gone, and then proceeds to wander the streets just staring at people, heading into shops and buildings to see who is in there in the hope that he’ll somehow come across one of his gang members. Which, due to bad writing, he just so happens to do.
With the gang eaten alive and his revenge complete, Dyke returns home with his giant mantises, passing through some more villages to feed them, and then just sort of hangs out for three months like an idiot. Then, in the last five pages, the story wraps itself up in the dumbest, most convenient way possible.
So Dyke’s island of giant killer mantises is suddenly attacked by a different army of giant killer mantises lead by a family member of one of the gang members who managed to survive Dyke’s revenge tour. That person then managed to coincidentally find another island full of killer mantises and tamed them (apparently it’s really, really easy to tame giant killer mantises?). He also built himself a suit of mantis-proof armour…which he immediately takes off, like an idiot. All the mantises kill each other, except for Slayer who shows up and eats the guy, but not before he manages to shoot Dyke in the chest, mortally wounding him. Then Slayer starts to eat Dyke, but because he’s still covered in poison Slayer dies and then Dyke dies and the book ends.
It’s…a bad book. That should be pretty clear. It oddly manages to make a story about giant praying mantises eating people alive monotonous. Sure, the first few instances of people being eaten alive have shock value for how luridly gruesome they are, but it happens literally dozens of times as the book goes on. It’s the one gimmick the story has, and the author runs it firmly into the ground long before the story is over. There’re only so many times you can read about people being eaten alive before it gets dull. Hell, by the end even the author seems to get bored by it and cuts the hyper-detailed multi-paragraph descriptions down to single sentences. There’s no depth to any of it, so beyond the ridiculousness of the plot and the shock value there’s little to it.
The characters all suck and there’s nobody relatable or likeable. Dyke is our POV character, so we’re completely stuck with him the entire time and he’s so unlikeable. The others are barely characters at all, since they just exist to be eaten. That means no discernible personalities and nobody to care about. The book is also racist in that blatant, blunt, ridiculous way a lot of 70s/80s horror was. Dyke’s multi-ethnic gang lets the writer make digs at African-Americans, Indians and the Irish, Mexicans are derided for no reason while everybody in the Caribbean are portrayed as naïve simpletons who live in huts.
Dialogue is the worst by far. I haven’t touched on it but holy hell is it abysmal. Dyke tends to make huge, rambling proclamations, often aloud and to himself because he’s on his own for the vast majority of the story. So he’s constantly either just rambling to nobody, or speaking directly to giant praying mantises that may or may not be able to understand him (though the story seems to hint that, yes, the mantises can fully comprehend his orders).
There’s a total lack of understanding of human biology, which makes the long descriptions of people getting ripped open and eaten alive more funny than disturbing. Just how much dismemberment and disembowelment a human being can withstand before finally dying is comical. It gets so ridiculous that even the moments that are meant to be horrific just end up being silly. One woman has her breasts, arms and legs ripped off, her eyes gouged out and her stomach split open, and only dies when her head is removed. Most other victims have a similar level of superhuman resilience.
The author also doesn’t seem to know anything about praying mantises at all, which is a bit odd considering they’re the central premise of the book. You’d think the author would have done a little research, but it seems the extent of it was they saw a praying mantis once and just made a bunch of assumptions. They don’t even use the correct terms in describing their anatomy (the words ‘mandible’ and ‘thorax’ are never used, and you really feel they should).
All complaints aside, I really do have to commend Eat Them Alive for being exactly what it advertised itself as. No one can deny that it is about giant praying mantises eating people alive. As stupid and bloody and repetitive as it ended up being, it delivered on its premise in abundance. Hell, within the first five pages somebody is being eaten alive, and it only continues on from there. I have to give credit for getting right to the point and committing to it’s violent, stupid premise so completely.
But there’s definitely hugely missed potential in the ‘giant killer mantises’ story. For one, it doesn’t really work as a horror story because there’s no sense of tension or danger to any of it. The gore is there but if you don’t care who it happens to the impact is gone. It has the narrative thrust of a shopping list, with its barebones plot and plainly straightforward approach to it. There’re no characters to care about, so the tension is gone. The mantises are portrayed as completely unstoppable until the last few pages, but since they’re constantly on the loose there’s no real sense of foreboding dread. None of the victims even try to fight them or escape; they all just stand around helplessly as they’re torn to pieces so there’s no excitement. Even the shittiest horror books I’ve read at least have moments of actual, page-turning tension, where you keep reading because you need to know what happens and whether the characters survive. There’s none of that in Eat Them Alive.
Another (better) author could do something good with the premise. Well, ‘good’ for a genre effort at least. There’s a decent horror novel potential to be salvaged in there. And it’d be really easy too.
First, you’d have to actually have a real protagonist. That’d be easy enough – make one of the other gang members likeable and focus on them, or a member of their family (like their wife or child or something). Just make them a witness of Dyke’s maiming, and not an active participant. Have them now-retired, their criminal ways behind them as they have a new life with a loving family. Have a loving partner, and age up any kids to their teens. Alternatively, have the gang member be horrible and due their comeuppance, but focus on one of their kids.
Concurrently have Dyke still do his ‘tame giant mantis’ thing happen, but clearly position him as the villain, because that’s obviously what he is. Cut right down on all of his rambling, whiny nonsense and get rid of all his stupid monologues. And make him actually fearsome in some way, instead of just being a whiny loser.
Then, and here’s the big, difficult part; delay the ‘eaten alive’ stuff as much as possible until the finale.
You still have Dyke’s mantises eat people along the way, but don’t go into quite as excessive detail yet. Maybe have people find the aftermath, or allude to the horror. Y’know, build up a feeling of tension and dread over the course of the book, knowing that the giant mantises are, eventually, inevitably going to collide with the protagonists the reader has grown to like.
And then, in the finale, unleash the praying mantises. Have the protagonists at some event, be it a big party or a carnival or something, and then have Dyke and his mantises show up. Then you can have a big, gory climax, and go into all the horrific, multi-page gruesomeness as all hell breaks loose. You won’t have worn out your welcome, and the horrible, gruesome stuff will be fresh and shocking. If you’ve done the groundwork to make the main characters likeable, then you’ve got tension as they fight to survive.
Or at least that’s what I would have done with it. Part of my fascination with it is that it’s the sort of book I’d probably write. Big dumb monsters going on a rampage is definitely my jam, and the ridiculously gruesome deaths are my thing. I'd just make sure the skeleton the book hangs on it sturdy and has some meat on it first.