the crabs! the crabs!!

[thecatamites]

so i don’t flood the “things you read and want to share” topic here’s a place to dump my favourite quotes as i make my way through guy n smith’s “crabs: the human sacrifice” - part of the popular “crabs” series of books (killer crabs, night of the crabs, the origin of the crabs etc), i picked this up after starting to read “clickers” by j.f. gonzalez which is similarly about evil crabs. the topic lit a fire in my soul so i decided to read the two books in parallel to compare and contrast. who knew that crabs had such an appeal? apparently, the paperback writers of the world.

---

“clickers” (2000) is a very enjoyably terribly written book. i give this paragraph introducing the horror-writer hero as indicative of the general style, a mix of slapdash broad strokes and weirdly tangential detail that i personally find extremely endearing

Keeping one eye half glued to the wet road, he was able to procure the disc that his soul screamed for. He snapped the jewel box open with practiced dexterity, honed by years of navigating through the streets of his hometown of Philadelphia with one hand while performing any number of tasks with the other. Rick was positive that he was the expert of eating, shaving, donning a necktie, and changing CDs while navigating dangerous roadwork at eighty miles per hour. It beat being late for everything.
He slipped the disc into the dash-mounted compact disc system his agent had bought him last Christmas. A moment later the rust began to vibrate with the opening bars of Alice Cooper’s Billion Dollar Babies, one of his ten favorite albums.
He turned up the volume and resumed driving with two hands on the steering wheel. He bobbed his head in time with the music. He loved CDs.

unfortunately the utopia of CDs is shortlived:

He grinned and cranked the stereo up a notch. Alice Cooper bellowed that he was No More Mister Nice Guy.
The mood the weather was putting him in was perfect; he’d always been a sucker for this type of climate. It was straight out of a Hammer Horror film. He gripped the steering wheel tightly and grinned. The spark was ignited. His mind coalesced into power mode. Creative energy. His fingers itched for the hard, plastic keys of his computer keyboard. The urge to create had hit him with an ugly stick.
He was so into his anticipation for getting into work, letting the mood of the storm take him, that he failed to notice the large crustacean in the road in front of him.

so far the rest of it is pretty rote, it goes back and forth between introducing the quiet seaside town where everything takes place and having Action Chapters where a background character is introduced and violently killed. one of the latter is a crusty racist fisherman whose internal monologue includes sayings like

Some goddamned octopus is trying to steal my catch! Worse than a foreigner moving in next door to your house.

he gets stung(?) by a giant crab which has the effect of making his whole arm EXPLODE like a boil and then run in gooey chunks off of the bone, because the authors of these books are very generous with content that the readers are here to see. meanwhile our hero is getting horned up at a Dennys.

Rick ordered coffee and the waitress served it pronto. “Cream and sugar?” She looked at him shyly. Her hair fell in blonde ringlets over her forehead and down her shoulders. Her eyes were as blue as the sea, her dimpled face punctuated by a smiling mouth and a cute nose. Her body didn’t look that bad beneath the waitress uniform; her skirt was mid-thigh length, showing off tanned, muscular-yet-shapely legs. She reminded Rick of Alicia Silverstone; she had the same All-American girl looks. She was blonde, young, cute, but did not give the impression that she was hot-to-trot or flirtatious. When she turned to pick up an order off the counter, Rick couldn`t resist a peek at her rear. Nice. Rick sipped at his coffee. It was nice and hot. Just the way he liked it.

the day i am no longer delighted by authors describing their characters in terms of who should play them in a movie adaptation you can put me to bed for good

---

so far “crabs: the human sacrifice” (1988) is a weird thatcherite wet dream about evil vegan lefties killing innocent fox hunters and game shooters in a swamp some place in england. they all wear balaclavas, identified in the text as a once innocently rural item of headwear perverted by terrorists and extremists - the main guy likes to smash people’s prized antique shotguns in the name of human rights while simultaneously carrying around a gigantic curved sword he’s named “the executioner” inside his jacket and using it to chop people’s legs off. after which he delivers this nugget of wisdom:

‘He’ll die.’ The sword was out of sight now beneath his clothing. ‘Slowly. Maybe he’ll bleed to death. Or perhaps the tide will drown him. But more likely the crabs will find him first. They can smell blood a mile off, just like sharks.’

the tone in general is a lot more gory and unpleasant this time, but in kind of a hypnotic way. alicia silverstone would not last 10 minutes in this book before being dismembered by a crab (“…its ridiculously tiny face a mask of miniature hatred and evil, pinpoint orbs glinting balefully in the dazzling sunlight as it saw them…”)

so far the vegans have a higher kill count than the crabs but i will keep you updated as reports come in. we do get some very endearing capsule descriptions of characters returning from an earlier book:

Another drawing pin was pressed into the wall map in Professor Cliff Davenport’s office. The biologist sighed and hoped that the telephone would not ring again just yet. The door opened and Pat, his attractive wife whom he had met in those far-off days when the giant crabs first invaded the Welsh coast, entered carrying a mug of coffee.

lastly, an emotional outburst. whom amongst us cannot say the same?

Ever since we’ve been married our whole life has been dominated by these damned crabs!

[Tulpa]

Guy N Smith is such a direct antecedent to Garth Marenghi that they barely had to exaggerate his writing and personality

[thecatamites]

i’ve been trying to decide what my favourite marenghi-ism is from the book and it’s probably what follows the part where the villain decides to eat some rancid crab meat in a eucharist type ceremony

Somewhere he heard a faint whispering, an inner voice that spoke long-forgotten words in a wicked blasphemy. ‘Take, eat, for this is my body …’
No!
Yes! Holy meat, it had been delivered to him by those he served, cast up in his path. Food from the ocean depths. A last supper to celebrate the coming of the crabs, for surely their hour of triumph was nigh.

to which the hero’s response is:

‘They’d rigged up some kind of crab shrine in there and spewed all over it. Then lit out.’

[thecatamites]

anyway i finished crabs: the human sacrifice, as befits the 6th entry in what was by then a decade long series there’s some lore to keep track of, lots of interjected notes reading (see NIGHT OF THE CRABS), basically by this point the crabs are all dying of crab plague and so there’s more emphasis on the humans this time.
the plot involves TWO different, duelling ex-SAS men although weirdly the book never makes much of this similarity: the hero talks manfully about his overseas tour shooting people in northern ireland and seems alarmingly happy whenever he gets to torture someone with a lit cigarette (“before long this despicable specimen of loony libbers would be pleading for the police”). meanwhile the villain is the sword-carrying vegan leader who engages in more outdoorsy pursuits like staking naked women out on a moor to be eaten by crabs.

i give here my favourite passages from the rest of the book.

‘According to reports the crabs have killed hundreds of people since they first showed up ten years ago.’
‘Of course they fucking have and can you blame ’em?’ His bearded face was flushed with anger. ‘The crabs have been persecuted right from the start.’

It had not been a good PR demonstration of the war being fought against the crabs.

And the crabs are angry at the way they’re being shot at on sight. They know where the cancer came from too. And … they gotta be appeased, revenged.’
‘How?’ Again.
‘Like I said, we showed the hunt and the fowlers, didn’t we, scared the shit out of ’em. Well we gotta do the same to those who kill crabs. The crabs are demanding human flesh and blood and we gotta give it to ’em. Let me put it to you in two simple words - human sacrifices!’

‘No!’ Their leader knew what they were thinking, silenced their thoughts, dispelled any hopes they might have had of rape and orgy. ‘She’s not for us, brothers. Her flesh is already promised to the gods of the oceans.’

Why, oh why have they done this to me? I haven’t hurt anybody or anything. I haven’t killed any seals, neither has Daddy. Lots of women wear sealskin coats, there’s no harm in that. But whether she was innocent or guilty there was no getting away from her fate. They’re sacrificing me to the crabs!

All those who have harmed animals will be sacrificed to the crabs.

‘You dared to touch the Executioner, eh. Fucking my woman is one thing but soiling warrior steel is another!’

The crab, our god, demands human blood!

Gloating, but his obsession with the crabs was stronger than his lust for his mate.

He remembered the Falklands but that war had been nothing compared with this one.

David’s hand rested on the butt of the pistol in his pocket. Again he was tempted. No, he had to do it his way, SAS-style unarmed combat against the threat of deadly kung fu fighting. And the sword known as the Executioner.

[Rudie]

Source: The Specialist

[thecatamites]

crab report: i am still reading clickers. did you ever read one of those works that seems to exist solely as a vehicle for namedropping things the author liked… it’s maybe not the highest profile one but the archetypical example for me is that one “nancy” cartoonist who liked to put aunt fritzi in t-shirts for whatever country band he was into at the time, like the mirrorverse version of Questionable Content

anyway i usually find this pretty endearing but… but!!! i’m NINE chapters into clickers and so far the bulk of that has just been writer protagonist “rick” wandering around a quaint maine town laughing at his own jokes, pondering an empty microsoft word document, and talking about what bands he’s into. i don’t ever want to call a piece of art indulgent bc thats what art IS but i am starting to get a bit frazzled at reading paragraph after paragraph of the below

He stared blankly at the screen of his laptop. About the most he had done thus far was boot his system and go into Microsoft Word. He’d written the words PROLOGUE in the middle of the page, center space. Now the cursor was sitting at the left of the screen, waiting for the words. But none came. At least not yet.

Rick drummed his fingers on the desk. He’d called out for a pizza last night and chowed down in the den. There was a big screen TV, along with a big, comfy sofa. He’d popped in one of the Friday the Thirteenth movies that he found lying around and settled down for a couple hour’s worth of mindless, splattering entertainment. Once the pizza was consumed, he raided the refrigerator. Not much to be had, so he hiked to the local mini-market down the road and came back with a case of Black Label beer, two liters of Coke, a loaf of bread, lunch meats, ground beef, and some fruit. He also nabbed some microwave popcorn. He spent the rest of the evening watching VH1, drinking Coke and eating popcorn. He wanted to drink beer, but he’d taken the first of the prescribed painkillers Dr. Jorgensen had given him last night and he couldn’t drink alcohol while on them. Tanking up on massive quantities of carbonated beverages was the next best thing.

His thoughts started wandering and he fired up the CD player, which he’d set up in the office. Rush’s Hemispheres filled the room with its intricate melodies and progressive chord changes.

S.O.D.’s “Fuck the Middle East” was ending and a live version of “Douche Crew” was beginning. Rick started, eyebrows scrunched in confusion. S.O.D. only recorded one album and it wasn’t a live one. He stepped farther inside the store to get a further listen to the tape.

He’d bought a trade paperback consisting of reprints of the first six issues of DC’s Sandman series, the first four issues of Hellblazer, and this month’s issues of Nightbreed, Judge Dredd, Doom Patrol and Beautiful Stories for Ugly Children.

Rick couldn’t believe it. Jack Ripley, otherwise known as Ripper in the comic world, was one of the most respected, most widely-imitated artists and writers in the world of underground comics. He had emerged in the late sixties, reached his peak in the early seventies and rode the wave of his success to the beginning of the eighties. He hadn’t been heard from since. Rick felt himself glow at the thought of meeting the elusive artist. He had met other comic artists of equal reputation; Robert Crumb and Todd MacFarlane, among others, but this was different.

“comic artists of equal reputation” is the funniest crumb diss. anyway stephen king has a lot to answer for. when are we going to get to the crab factory?

[AutomaticTiger]

I can see this guy so clearly in my minds eye from this description.

[Tulpa]

This is the ultimate danger of that “write what you know” advice

[problyfine]

@thecatamites

did you ever read one of those works that seems to exist solely as a vehicle for namedropping things the author liked…

This is the only thing I remember about Ready Player One.

[Father.Torque]

In this house we call that “pullin’ a Cline”

[thecatamites]

progress slow, getting discouraged

Once he was semi-settled in, he called Cynthia Jacobs. His agent.
He rang her up from the extension in the office. She picked up on the first ring and sounded surprised to hear from him. “So, you made it to Phillipsport?” Her voice came in strong and syrupy, dripping with sex. It instantly reminded him of the first time they’d combined business with pleasure.

The woman caught his glance and smiled. Rick looked away and kept his gaze toward his house. He could feel her eyes lighting on him, inspecting him. He stole a quick glance out of the corner of his eye. Looking at her made him even more aroused.
Her skin was a rich, golden tan. Brown, shoulder length, curly hair framed a pretty face, punctuated by full lips, large hazel eyes and a nice, smooth face. She was wearing a large cashmere sweater and blue jeans. She had a voluptuous figure. Her breasts were large and full and he could make out their contours quite nicely beneath the sweater. A mouthful. All of this was packaged in a nice, five-foot-five frame.
The woman caught Rick checking her out. He caught a glimmer of a smile on her lips and he turned back. Yes, she was smiling and her eyes sparkled with interest. Rick felt himself blush and chastised himself. The vibes coming off her were strong. It was as if she had a huge Day-Glo sign over her head that read VERY INTERESTED. It would probably be good to take advantage of it.

this dude is 30 seconds away from being sold an issue of The Watchtower.

anyway things are starting to pick up in the Clickers universe. i was wondering if i could go on at the point where the love interest’s adorable son starts complimenting the main dude’s taste in vertigo comics, but in the next chapter the same moppet gets one of his fingers snipped off by a crab, so i figure it can’t be all bad. i’ll keep going unless there’s another scene where the hero explains to a lady that he’s writing a novel and she replies like this

“That sounds really interesting.” She looked sincere. He could read it in her features which glowed. Her eyes sparkled. “You’ll have to tell me more.”

also kids say the darndest things before being mutilated by a crab

Bobby Harrelson looked back toward the pier where his Mom and Rick were. He couldn’t see them from this vantage point, but he knew they were there, talking grown-up stuff. He knew Mom wanted to be alone with Rick the minute he saw her making goo-goo eyes at him. He had been around Mom enough times to know that she wanted to be left alone whenever she got that way. His buddy Richard told Bobby that his mom did that to his dad all the time. Whenever Moms did that it meant they wanted to get laid.

[skelephone]

The stuff you’ve found in this book is incredible. I wish the best for fingerless boy and everyone humbled and stressed by the war against the crabs.

The writing style and subject matter remind me of a book written by a relative of mine called Queen of the Cephalopods. This person published the book in I believe the late 90s or early 2000s back when self publishing was uncommon, and distributed copies to my family in an attempt to hype the book. Unfortunately everyone in my entire extended family at the time was either a child, a doctor, a middle school teacher of some kind, or a chef, so we had no connections to the arts and the literary world and were not good at hyping a book about violent and/or sexy encounters with octopuses to anyone. My immediate family received one copy of the book which they gave to me… I will have to dig it up.

There must be a thing that makes aspiring Michael Chrichtons write about sea creatures in this particular way because the vibes of this Clickers book are giving me serious deja-vu about it.

[thecatamites]

I’d love to read any fragments of that if you find it! The title makes me think of like Anne Rice but for octopuses.

this book is kind of making me want to go back and reread stephen king for comparison bc this feels like something that was written by someone who took stephen-king-ness as like a universal template rather than the work of one particular guy, just swap out the monsters and the 70s rock references as needed to generate your own novel… i feel like crichton books have a similar effect but maybe a slightly different cultural skew, like the stock villains there are liberals and ex-wives while here it’s a bigoted sheriff who hates the protagonist on sight bc he has shoulder-length hair. which feels like a bit of a stretch for something set in y2k era rather than 70s Maine but maybe i’m wrong? maybe he just really hates Hanson

anyway i’m ultimately glad i stuck with Clickers bc right after my last post i found one of the greatest visual descriptions of all time

The man shrieked as the venom inflated his neck like an inner tube and simultaneously dissolved the flesh. His stomach expanded and finally burst like a ripe melon. It looked like a balloon filled with sausages soaked in barbecue sauce exploding.

things are heating up!!

[skelephone]

Ahh yeah QotC is more of a Crichton vibes one as far as I remember—when I read it as a teen I was reminded of Jurassic Park and it definitely had some flavor of the bitter possibly-divorced male protagonist thing going on, but I’m sure if I read it now I would be less impressed haha.

I think I still have the book somewhere, I have been the keeper of it for my family for like 20 years now, but apparently if I don’t still have it I could probably get it on Amazon, where it appears to occasionally show up for super cheap. I’ll have to investigate!

[thecatamites]

clickers report: i finished clickers and have very disappointing news. the entire last half of the book is not actually about evil crabs - instead it turns out the clickers were themselves fleeing a race of giant lizard guys called “the Dark Ones” and implied to be some kind of lovecraft reference, the lizard guys are super fast and also super strong and can break through walls and punch people to death and in the first five minutes after their appearance they are stated as killing a full third of the town. it is not stated whether or not they are also able to fly and go super saiyan and etc. this is all very unsatisfactory to me but there are at least some redeeming conventions, such as having a single giant “boss monster” fish guy to fight at the end, and also 70% of the way through the book they find a functional rocket launcher + ammunition in the police station of the quaint maine fishing town

The barrel was huge and heavy. Rick picked it up, noting the body of the weapon, marveling at its weight. He saw a box near it and bent down to examine it closer. He noticed with amazement that the box contained ammunition for the rocket launcher. What the hell is a small town police force doing with something like this? he thought. But then he realized the obvious. Sheriff Conklin had seemed like the type to have a weapon like this around. Why not?

why not indeed!! other good resident evil touches incl some ambient sound effects

The yelling outside intensified, and he heard a terrified voice screaming “No, no, no aaaaahhhhh!” And then it was cut off.

there are many more horrible / inexplicable food metaphors:

Her body expanded and blew up like a hot water balloon, inflating to almost double her size before the skin split and reddish, meaty goo splashed over the crabs, drenching them in Old Woman Sauce.

The Dark One lifted its head after taking Janice’s head in its mouth and chewed, like a child eating the top of a hot dog.

rip to janice, the “VERY INTERESTED” single mom from my post above, who lasts 90% of the book before getting chomped right at the end. fortunately the sexy waitress has already been established and is waiting to escape with our hero at the end despite being absent for most of the book!! love wins. i do give the book a little credit for killing off the moppet eventually too.

in conclusion,

They mewled and growled in rage; it was obvious that the fire was holding them back and for a moment the line from the film Bride of Frankenstein came to mind: fire—baaaddd! He almost burst out laughing, it was so comical. They were reacting just as any typical monster would, and while it was true that fire would probably kill most anything, the scenario he was in surely lent weight to the credo that art imitated life.

[eska]

art (Clickers by J. F. Gonzalez and Mark Williams) imitates life (fire is very hot)

[VastleCania]

@thecatamites

drenching them in Old Woman Sauce

Oh my god this is incredible

[Mikey]

@thecatamites

crab report: i am still reading clickers. did you ever read one of those works that seems to exist solely as a vehicle for namedropping things the author liked

There’s so many drug-store novels out there where the author seems to think (or perhaps knows?) that their readers want a breakdown of the brand every character wears/drives/drinks etc. If I read the word “Rolex” in a book I know it’s going to make me dumber

[Tulpa]

William Gibson novels lol

[Father.Torque]

I know too much about Gibson as a person now and so realize that he’s doing it because he thinks it’s cool but in the context of the books it always reads as part of the cyberpunk critique, how in a world owned by corporations the characters can’t help but think in brands.