Monday 18 March 2024

Mama (1972, Peter Cave)

 



Even Angels get the blues, and this sequel to 1971’s Chopper finds the Hells Angels from that book at their lowest ebb.  ‘Chopper’ Harris is dead, and continuing his run of bad luck in life, suffers the indignity of being buried in civilian civvies at the instance of his long estranged parents.  “If a Hells Angel had a soul, then Chopper’s would at that moment be screaming with anger and frustration”.  Marty ‘Big M’ Gresham, the head of the Angels, is forced to hang up his Nazi Helmet for good, having lost the respect of his fellow Angels, and takes the walk of shame to civilian anonymity. 

Bored, directionless and leaderless, the remainder of the Angels squabble amongst each other and threaten to implode as a group.  It’s left to Elaine –Gresham’s girlfriend who’d transferred her elegance and affections to Chopper- to pull the Hells Angels back together and give the club its mojo back.  Haunted by the death of her lover, Elaine vows to do right by Chopper, by making the Hells Angels a more greater, feared and powerful force than ever before...it’s what Chop would have wanted.  Reinventing herself by donning a one-piece leather outfit and adopting the nickname ‘Mama’, Elaine loudly announces herself as the new leader of the Angels by riding Chopper’s Harley into the cafe that his former comrades frequent.  The King is dead, long live the Queen.

It does come as a surprise that the sequel to Chopper makes Elaine the central character, especially as the original book gave the impression that author Peter Cave wasn’t much of a fan of hers.  Indeed, in the previous book, she was the type of woman who gives all the others a bad name.  A heartless schemer whose sex appeal caused Chopper to go against his Angel principles and make a power grab that proved to be his and Elaine’s downfall.  Usually when sequel novels turn a secondary character into the protagonist they are humanised, rendered more sympathetic and relatable, but Cave goes in the opposite direction with Mama.  Reincarnating Elaine as a tough, Angel Queen who has all the male bikers queuing up to lick her leather boots.  Given that the female characters in Cave’s biker novels tend to be subservient girlfriends or sexual receptacles, I did fear that the idea of a woman as head of the Angels would be a hard sell, but it is actually one of the more convincing aspects to the book.  The slightest unzipping of her leather one-piece outfit has the horny guys eating out of her hand, or failing that a swift, hard kick in the balls silences her chauvinistic critics.  At various points in the book Elaine is compared to Lady Macbeth, Bonnie Parker, the Goddess Kali and Joan of Arc, a fighting combination of genes if ever there was one.  In the original book, Chopper stood accused as being a sucker for this hot blonde, for the sequel its Cave himself who seems to fall under Elaine’s sexy spell.  Mama is a book that rarely lets you forget that Elaine is totally naked under that leather one-piece, attempting to get male readers hot under the collar with descriptions of ‘the sexy feel of the cool leather against her bare flesh’ and ‘the proud swell of her breasts, the tightness of her narrow waist and the smooth, rounded shape of her hips and buttocks’.

Often New English Library’s choice of cover photos felt like a random grab for the nearest photo of a ‘tearaway’ they had to hand, but in the case of Mama, the unknown model seen on the cover in all her fag ash Lil glory really nails the not-to-be-messed-with attitude of the character.  She IS Mama, and as well as that iconic image also graced the cover of another NEL Biker novel ‘A Place in Hell’ published the same year. 



Mama leads you to wonder if Cave didn’t have a competitive streak when it came to James ‘Richard Allen’ Moffatt’s Skinhead novels, the chief competition to Cave’s biker books at NEL.  Moffatt’s 1970 book ‘Skinhead’ had kicked off NEL’s turn towards the youthsploitation market, and Cave announced his biker characters in Chopper by having them give an almighty beating to a gang of skinheads.  In the interim, Moffatt wrote his sequel novel ‘Suedehead’ and here Cave has Elaine assert her right to lead the Angels by masterminding an assault on a bunch of luckless Suedeheads.  It’s as if anyone Moffatt wrote about was destined to get the shit kicked out of them in a Peter Cave book.  The message the Cave books sent out to the schoolyards was that those skins and suedeheads were a right bunch of pansies compared to the Hells Angels, and it’s the likes of Chopper and Mama that all the cool kids should be reading about.

Mama might bring back all the characters from the first book –Nick the Greek, Irish Mick, Freaky, Danny the Deathlover- but it is no retread that merely switches the gender of the main character.  Instead, Cave pitches Mama as a biker variation on the ‘rise and fall of a small time hood’ gangster story.  In that sense, Elaine is less Lady Macbeth and more Lady Scarface.  Whereas in the first book the Hells Angels’ actions were mainly reckless and thrill seeking, here Elaine attempts to build up a criminal organisation, funded by robberies, extortion and drug dealing.  A move that causes friction between newer, younger members who merely want to have fun and ride motorcycles, and older, more hard-bitten Angels who want to fully embody their outlaw image. 

As well as the regular gang, Mama also introduces new biker characters, ‘Juice’ James so named for his IV drug use, Adolph named in honour of his Aryan blonde hair.  Most notable Cave gives us his first black character, Winston Oliver, who Elaine re-names ‘Superspade’.  After facing all the prejudice you’d expect from a book written in the early 1970s, Supes ultimately earns the respect of whitey due to a combination of motorcycle skills, judo fighting techniques and a hatred of Pakistanis.  Enough for him to be ‘initiated’ into the Angels, thus Supes becomes the first black man in England to have the honour of being spat at, pissed on and puked on by Hells Angels and emerge from that mess a bona fide Hells Angel himself.  A fine day for racial equality.

I’m curious how much basis in reality ‘Superspade’ had.  In a 1973 Man Alive documentary about the British Hells Angels, one of their number, Mad John, complains about the number of imitation Hells Angels clubs springing up in the UK, and mentions having pushed a large black man from a bike, due to the man sporting fake Hells Angels insignias.  So if we are to believe a man called Mad John, it is possible that there were black Hells Angels in Britain at the time, at least on an unofficial level.  Even so, an outsider’s glimpse into the British Hells Angels scene of today, suggests Cave’s crystal ball was malfunctioning when it came to his prediction here that the Hells Angels would soon become a matriarchal, racially inclusive society.

Cave’s approach to his biker novels isn’t dissimilar to that of a mondo movie, with a tabloidish sense of giving the public what it wants, he cuts straight to the bizarre, sensationalist spectacles.  Serving up an edited highlights reel that trims out the mundane aspects of the Angels lives.  We never hear about their unglamorous day jobs, their worldly responsibilities or interactions with family members...only their lives on the hogs, and the kicks.  Had Mama been a mondo movie, its poster would no doubt have been plastered with ballyhoo like ‘witness the Angels’ wedding rituals’, ‘be prepared to be shocked as an Angel shoots up’, ‘what is the shameful secret Elaine keeps locked away in her room’, and ‘see the horrific battle between the Angels and the Pakistanis’.  In the early stages of the book, Cave maintains the stance of an impartial reporter, neither moralising about their lifestyle, or giving the impression that he has their backs.  It’s only in a rare, introspective moment in the book, where Elaine does some soul searching, that Cave seizes the chance to let loose with what he really thinks about the Angels “they were merely a pathetic band of failures- dropouts from a civilisation they couldn’t cope with”. 

What with Cave having put distance between himself and the people he was writing about, and seemingly broken the sexy spell that Elaine had over him, this is significantly also the point in the book that the Angels’ behaviour turns truly heinous and beyond the pale.  Much of Mama’s notoriety rightly rests on the part of the book where the Angels decide to celebrate Christmas by terrorising a Pakistani community centre, having become incensed at one of the Angels having been beaten up by Pakistani men.  Cave never displayed the same eagerness to mine the vein of race-hate that James Moffatt did, but on the rare occasions that he did trespass into Gentleman Jim Moffatt territory, there certainly wasn’t any half measures.  Just about every racial insult is freely thrown about, as the Angels drink heavily, use speed and work themselves up into a bigoted frenzy, with one of them joking that he’d have no qualms about running over black people as “they just fill up the holes in the tarmac”.  The Angels then ride to Stepney, grabbing hold of one unfortunate black youth, who is bombarded by kicks and racial expletives, before Elaine orders him to be taken away and “turn him into curry”.  Despite the Angels’ expectations of a full on gang fight with Pakistani youths, the community centre is mainly populated by kids and old people who cower in a corner as the Angels trash the centre, and viciously beat with knuckledusters anyone ballsy enough to stand up to them.  Thick skinned, 1970s trash fiction without mercy.  It’s a genuinely harrowing, tough to read chapter, concluding with the sickening revelation that the kid who got grabbed by the Angels outside the centre ended up being scalped by them, and the ironic comment ‘it was a happy Christmas all round’.  Echoing the sentiments of the skinheads interviewed in the 1969 Man Alive documentary- ‘What’s the Truth about Hells Angels and Skinheads’- who try and justify their attacks on Pakistanis by claiming “it’s not their colour, cause we like the Jamaicans, they’re alright, we mix with the Jamaicans”, Cave’s Hells Angels don’t seem to hate everyone with black skin, and draw a similar line between Jamaican and Pakistani cultures.  Earlier on in the book, a reggae number being played in a pub causes an appreciative Elaine to hustle the Go-Go Dancers off the stage in order to dance and strip to the music herself ‘Elaine caught the beat and started to shake her hips in perfect time’.  In sharp contrast, hearing Sitar music being played at the community centre results in Elaine storming the stage to stomp all over the musical instrument in a symbolic rejection of Pakistani culture ‘the instrument folded up into a wreckage which would never play another note’.  While them heavy boss sounds from Jamaica brings out the proper rude girl in Elaine, the sound of Sitars unleashes her inner Bernard Manning.  It is said that the well thumbed copies of Chopper that were pasted around schoolyards in the 1970s had a tendency to always open on page 93 –which is the ‘very rude part’ of that book- but had the pages of Mama fell open anywhere between chapters 8 and 9, well... you wouldn’t have wanted to be a Pakistani kid in that school.

On the rare occasions that Mama threatens to become a re-write of Chopper, Cave cleverly uses the opportunity to go against expectations set by the first book.  A run to Bournemouth initially looks to be a repeat of the Angels’ assault on Seaforth in Chopper.  However, whereas their Seaforth jaunt saw the Hells Angels victoriously terrorise the seaside town and run rings around the police, in Bournemouth the fuzz have the upper hand and the Angels are reduced to such petty, pathetic antics as destroying a flower bed and strangling seagulls.  Bournemouth might be a damp squib for the Angels, but Mama comes back strongly for its finale, as Elaine plans one ‘big job’ that will get them enough money to make the pilgrimage to the highways of America.  Naturally, it doesn’t go to plan. 

Cave was always a safe bet when it came to doozy endings, and Mama doesn’t disappoint, having its cake and eating it by offering up a satisfying comeuppance for the characters who deserved it, while dishing out a tragic, violent demise to the sole character in the book who’d developed a moral compass.  Peter Cave books are unforgiving by nature.

In the world of trash fiction at least, men and women were equal in the 1970s, and Mama seems to have been every bit the success that Chopper was.  First published in March 1972, the book was reprinted in February and June 1973 and was into its fourth edition by 1974.  Elaine was very much in demand back then.  Like its predecessor, Mama was also revived in the 1990s, when it was republished by Nigel Wingrove’s Redemption company, whose forays into book publishing were destined to be overshadowed by their VHS arm.

It has to be said, you truly feel alive while you’re reading a Peter Cave book.  Still in his early 30s when he wrote Mama, a constant charge of youthful energy and crass willingness to shock runs through its pages.  Mama adds up to a good time with a bad girl.   



Friday 8 March 2024

Speed Freaks (1973, Peter Cave)

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Manchester Sleaze Tour 2024

The sun continues to set on sleaze in Manchester, judging by my visit to the city centre earlier in the week. The Arndale book exchange is now a open three days a week affair, the sex shop on Thomas Street- near Rambos- now sells vinyl records instead. The Love Boutique on Hilton Street has weathered the storm, but the fleshpots on Tib street remain as derelict and shuttered up looking as they were when I last photographed them in 2022.

























Monday 4 March 2024

Chopper (1971, Peter Cave)

Now on YouTube, me, Clive and Nick marvel at Peter Cave's Chopper , the seminal 1971 biker novel, while puzzling over the comparatively lack of British biker movies and imagining a world in which Cannon made movie adaptations of Guy N Smith's crabs books.



Horsing around with Joe D'Amato

 Clive, Nick and me look at even more D'Amato movies.



Thursday 1 February 2024

The Thousand and One Nights of Joe D'Amato

Now on YouTube: Me, Clive and Nick and embark on an epic quest to watch every single Joe D'Amato movie...who will survive and what will be left of them?





Thursday 18 January 2024

Eat Them Alive (1977, Pierce Nace)

 


Ever since I started getting a taste for trash fiction, I had people telling me that I needed to read Eat Them Alive by Pierce Nace, that this was the ultimate bad taste book, the most nastiest, most bloodiest, most lacking in artistic merit piece of writing ever to darken the bookstands.  Its plot alone... a castrated man seeks revenge on his torturers with the assistance of giant praying mantises... screams out for your attention.  That is one hell of a pitch for a book.

Of course, hearing about Eat Them Alive is easy, finding a physical copy is the hard part.  Out of print in the English language since the late 1970s, the price for a copy of Eat Them Alive has skyrocketed from the 75p it cost back then, with copies on Ebay and Amazon currently being sold for £60, £100 and £156.72.  Since the idea of selling a kidney in order to read the book didn’t appeal, I turned to the person who’d been constantly egging me on to read and write about Eat Them Alive.  After practically begging me to lend their copy, I finally took him up on his generous offer, gave him my address to send it to by recorded delivery (on the understanding that I send it back by recorded D also).  Then I waited, and waited, and waited.  Eventually concerned that a highly valuable book had gotten lost in the post, I decided to get back in touch with the grim news that I hadn’t received the book.  Only to receive no answer, in fact I’ve never heard from him since.  Was this part of some cruel mind game, designed to get me chomping at the bit to read this book he’d been so luridly hyping, only to go AWOL when it came to deliver.  Who can tell, for all I know the he was set upon and devoured by giant praying mantises on the way to the post office.

The easiest way to currently ‘experience’ Eat Them Alive is an unofficial fan-made audio book that is available on Youtube, but...and it’s a big but...in a baffling decision the audio-book version only transcribed 11 of the book’s 15 chapters...leaving listeners in the lurch as to how the book ends.  Essentially the audio-book equivalent of getting a book out of the library, only to find the last couple of pages have been torn out.

For the longest time this book became my ‘Fly Fishing by J.R. Hartley’, I haunted the charity and second hand bookshops of England, hoping against hope that a stray copy might have slipped through the net at a sane, affordable price.  The world in which books like this still sell for close to their original retail price has however long since faded.  Eventually, I had to stop dreaming and concede that a considerable hit to the wallet was going to be the only way I could get to read all 15 chapters of Eat Them Alive.  By Eat Them Alive standards I did get the book at a relatively low price.  The damage done to my wallet, being nursed slightly by the knowledge that I’d offered far more to ‘or best offer’ Ebay sellers, who had greedily turned me down. 

Imagine every Video Nasty rolled into one, and then compressed into 158 pages...that’s Eat Them Alive.  By rights this book should have been a first time writing effort by a 13 year old boy, who’d grow up to become a famous serial killer, causing people to look back on Eat Them Alive and say ‘why didn’t we see the warning signs when young Pierce Nace started writing those disgusting stories about giant praying mantises eating people’.  The reality of who ‘Pierce Nace’ actually is, happens to be one of those cases where fact is stranger than fiction, and given that the fiction here involves a castrated man befriending a giant praying mantis, that gives you an idea of how strange the truth is.



Eat Them Alive’s obsessive, driving force is Dyke Mellis, a man without scruples... a man without stones, who has been left a shadow of himself after being tortured and castrated by his former friends.  Having spent eleven long years keeping a low profile on his adopted home of Malpelo, a Caribbean Island, Dyke’s world is rocked by an Earthquake that releases hundreds and hundreds of giant praying mantises upon Malpelo.  In the process, Dyke gets his zest for life back, and realises he gains enormous satisfaction from watching the mantises’ torture, dismember and devour his elderly neighbour, old Kello. “Now I’ve got something to live for...because I love watching a man being eaten by a monster!  Maybe it’s a substitute for my lost virility, I don’t know.  But I know it’s a joy I thought I’d never feel again”.  Following this epiphany, Dyke sets out on a complex plan against the men who robbed him of his genitals.  Deciding to try and capture one of the Mantises, then attempting to turn the mantis- who he names ‘Slayer’- into his instrument of revenge.  All of this goes down in the first chapter. 

One of the accusations frequently levelled at ‘animals attack’ pulp horror is that they tend to adhere to a wash, rinse, repeat formula... giant sized animals attack and kill a bunch of people, then they attack and kill another bunch of people... and so on, and so on, until a deus ex machina is discovered to curtail the beasts in the last chapter.  After delivering the giant mantis carnage upfront, however, Eat Them Alive turns into a multi-genred affair.  Unexpectedly taking on the appearance of a 1950s Juvenile Delinquent novel, when the focus turns to Dyke’s wayward childhood and the events that ultimately led to him losing his manhood.  As an angry, mad at the world, punk, Dyke got into a knife fight at aged 15 with his own father, pulled the legs off small animals and enjoyed driving nails through the hands of bankers during robberies.  One of the most unnerving aspects to Eat Them Alive is how casual and matter of fact it presents such anti-social behaviour, as if these were standard, youthful right of passages that Pierce Nace expects us all to be able to relate to.  Needless to say if you do happen to enjoy pulling the legs off small animals and driving nails through people’s hands, then you’re gonna love Eat Them Alive. 

Every character is this book is irredeemably cold blooded and without conscience, including the gang that Dyke becomes part of.  One that consists of whites Zeb Hillburn and Kane Garrister, Native American Ryan Gaut, and ghetto firebrand Pete Stuart.  Out of all the characters in this book Pete is the only one to hold a candle to Dyke when it comes to being a mean bastard.  How mean is Pete Stuart? “His best leisure activity was chopping small animals to bits or maiming children who came close to him”, Pete also was “white enough to pass but gouging out the eyes of any man- or woman- who called him anything but black”.  Pete also allows Pierce Nace to work race-hate elements into Eat Them Alive, making Pete a character so consumed by hatred towards non-blacks that he can barely get a sentence out without working in his favourite racial slur.  “What about it, you dumb whiteys”, “you damn whiteys can come along or not”, “unlock the screen, old whitey”.  It’s the first give-away that Eat Them Alive was the work of an American author, rather than a cheeky British hack trying to pass the buck and disguise their nationality by setting the book in the States and the Caribbean.  ‘Whitey’ tending to be a racial insult that rarely travelled outside of America, whereas ‘honkey’ was the anti-white slur that took off in the UK, and the one that a British author would have gravitated towards. 

Having already spanned monster, Juvenile Delinquent and race-hate genres, Eat Them Alive then finds itself travelling down the dusty dirt road of a modern day Western.  As the gang take to the old west in search of an isolated ranch and Old Man Shield, a crazy coot said to possess a fortune that Dyke and Co are eager to get their amoral hands on.  The gangs’ killing of Old Man Shield is excruciating and prolonged, even by Eat Them Alive standards.  In keeping with the book’s underlining theme of violence becoming a male substitute for sex, Old Man Shield’s death resembles a gang bang, with each of the men having their turn at beating, stabbing and dismembering...and enjoying every second of it.  A turn of events initiated by sadistic Pete “cuttin’ your guy up is half the damned fun”, and with the inexperienced Ryan eager to learn “I never seen ears cut off. Go ahead and do it, let me see if I like it as well”. 

In true Western style the bandits get away with the loot, only for Dyke to succumb to paranoia and greed, deciding to do unto others before they do unto him.  An attempt to make off with the money proves to be Dyke’s undoing.  Caught in the act, Dyke finds himself at the mercy of his former friends, who having developed a love of cuttin’, think nothing of knife torturing Dyke.  The unkindest cut comes... natch’ at the hands of Pete Stuart, who excitedly hollers “I gonna cut off his nuts” ignoring Dyke’s pleading of “No, No, Don’t cut me there, Slice off anything, but leave me that”.

Eat Them Alive then anticipates the Italian cannibal genre, as Dyke’s revenge plan takes a sideways glance at a Malpelo tribe, who Dyke suspects are descended from cannibals.  Which would explain their ritualistic habits of slicing up live racoons with machetes, and offering freshly ripped out hearts to loved ones.  A romantic gesture to these uneducated, primitives.  Eyeing them up as a trial run for his revenge, Dyke manages to talk to gullible tribesmen into taking their entire families on a day out to Malpelo to meet those delightful, big green giant bugs that of course mean them absolutely no harm whatsoever, no siree, you can trust the white man when it comes to that. 

A quick, painless death is a luxury that eludes everyone in Eat Them Alive.  Prior to reading Nace’s book, I’d just gotten through Blood Worm (1987) by John Halkin, which I felt short charged the reader when it came to writing around deaths, preferring subtle metaphors for characters meeting their maker ‘he was falling, a long slow freefall...a rich velvet blackness’ over gory incidents.  An accusation that you couldn’t aim at Eat Them Alive, which endlessly dwells on mantises plucking out eyeballs, biting off noses, severing limbs, yanking out intestines, severing heads, cracking skulls, eating brains.  Nace’s writing never flinches or looks away until characters are reduced to well gnawed on bones.  Deaths in Eat Them Alive inadvertently remind you of the song ‘Brave Sir Robin’ from Monty Python and the Holy Grail, with its lengthy list of indignities that Sir Robin isn’t afraid to have done to him “He was not in the least bit scared, to be mashed into a pulp. Or to have his eyes gouged out, and his elbows broken. To have his kneecaps split, and his body burned away, and his limbs all hacked and mangled…His head smashed in, and his heart cut out, and his liver removed” etc etc.  That’s exactly how characters die in Eat Them Alive.

Each chapter of Eat Them Alive frog matches you ever further and further from reality and deeper and deeper into the type of delirious wilderness that causes you to question the mental stability of its author.  Amongst the incidents you are unreasonably asked to except here includes Dyke giving Slayer a paint job, painting his head red to signify his superiority to other mantises.  Dyke inventing a smelly potion that he doses himself with, allowing him to live among the mantises who are repelled by it.  Dyke chaperoning nine, now subservient, mantises around in a truck, and Dyke imagining he can read Slayer’s thoughts and hold imaginary conversation with his mantis buddy.  Along the way we’re also subjected to a relentless stream of gloriously ridiculous dialogue “remember me now, Pete? Or shall I take off my pants and let my castration jog your memory”, “I’m going to cripple you in a few spots and then let you watch my beast eat your woman”, not forgetting “White man knew. White man bring villagers here for big bugs to eat”.  Rarely has such a cold, unfeeling, anti-humanity book been able to generate so much laughter from its readership.

Only towards the end of Eat Them Alive does the book suffer from repetition.  The third act consisting of Dyke driving a truck load of mantises to the abodes of his castrators, executing them with a suspenseless ease and lack of obstruction.  While Eat Them Alive admittedly gets samey around this point, Nace’s inventive, loyalty to the gore remains a strong point.  One of Dyke’s despised enemies has his nose, mouth and ears hacked off by machete.  While another is stripped and stoned to death by Dyke, who in a near literal example of ‘An Eye for an Eye’ vengeance manages to sever the man’s penis with one of the jagged stones.  It’s also worth sticking around for Dyke’s confrontation with Zeb, who absolutely refuses to take the situation seriously, dismissing Slayer as ‘a big stuffed toy’.  It’s inconceivable to Zeb that a man he’d left naked, bleeding and castrated 11 years earlier really might hold a grudge…and isn’t just pulling his leg by showing up on his doorstep with a giant praying mantis.  Even after Dyke shoots him in the shoulder and announces his intention to turn Zeb into a sieve, Zeb still thinks the two of them can work out their differences “Damn you, Dyke, cut it out”.  If you’ve only opted for the cheap route and listened to the 11 chapter audio-book, you’re missing out on Dyke getting into blackface, plus one final opportunity for Nace’s writing to cause you to face-palm yourself, with an out of left field plot twist that sees Eat Them Alive do one last genre-twist into a war novel. 

So just who was Pierce Nace?  Trash fiction has seen many unlikely contributors whose real identities have turned out to be far removed from their writing.  There was ‘Richard Allen’ whose skinhead novels caused his youthful readership to cast the author as a real life skin who earned extra money by writing about the racism, hooliganism and rape he got up to in-between novels.  Whereas in reality Allen was a portly, middle aged Canadian hack by the name of James Moffatt, who lived in Devon.  Then there was John Halkin, who when not writing pulp horror like ‘Slither’ and ‘Squelch’, held political aspirations, running as an MEP for the liberal democrat party under his real name John Parry.  Even in this company though, the real identity of Pierce Nace takes some beating.  It seems that when it came to writing a book likely to cause the average reader to throw up, the best man for the job was in fact a woman.  The evidence as to the identity of the person behind the ‘Pierce Nace’ nom de plume, all pointing in the direction of Evelyn Pierce Nace, a housewife and part time secretary based out of Pampa, Texas.  Nace was born Evelyn Louise Pierce in Kansas in 1912, making her in her mid-sixties when she wrote Eat Them Alive.  



Married to Delmar ‘Otis’ Nace since 1937, her writing career began in 1939.  While Otis was off fighting in WW2, Evelyn sold short stories to magazines like ‘Romantic Love Stories’ and ‘Ideal Love’ a far cry from the gore epic that would become her magnum opus.  A move into detective and true crime stories saw the creation of her ‘Pierce Nace’ pen name, an amalgamation of her and her husbands’ surnames, said to have been adopted out of fears that readers of Men’s Magazines wouldn’t accept a broad as a writer of pulp fiction.  Going with the times, by the late sixties, Evelyn’s writing took a racy turn as co-author of sex-ed books like ‘A Doctor Dares You: Score Six for Sex’ (1969) and ‘Sex for Women over 40’ (1968) which tackled the taboo of sex being ‘increasingly pleasurable, even after the menopause’.  The inevitable companion piece ‘Sex for Men over 40’ (1968) offers a possible insight into the genesis of Eat Them Alive.  Did researching male sexual problems and frustrations lead Evelyn down a rabbit role, one that she found Dyke Mellis at the bottom of?



The revelation of the author’s gender sheds a whole new, unexpected light on Eat Them Alive.  Whatever one makes of Nace’s writing- the crude, demented style here often belies a writer enjoying nearly four decades of being published- there can be little doubt that Evelyn Nace was a master of disguise.  There is nothing remotely feminine about Eat Them Alive, with its themes of emasculation, revenge and male betrayal.  Did all those years hiding her real identity from Men’s Magazine readers, cause Evelyn to adopt a hard boiled, hyper masculine facade to her writing?  The ultimate humiliation of men in Eat Them Alive is not the destruction of their bodies, rather its being forced into showing their emotions in the company of other men.  Only when he witnesses his enemies crying, pleading for their lives and that of their loved ones, does Dyke Mellis know true satisfaction.  Even in this day and age society still tends to hold women to higher standards than men, expecting them to be a little more sensitive towards violence, especially violence towards animals and children.  Expectations that are torn into dismembered chunks by Eat Them Alive.  The level of animal abuse in this book is off the scale, and Eat Them Alive has no qualms about depicting babies being torn in half by greedy mantises, nor Zeb and Kane getting all nostalgic for “when we wacked off the ears of that kid in Dallas”.  Good times, according to Zeb and Kane. 

Eat Them Alive might be drowning in male castration anxiety, but Nace doesn’t let her own gender off the hook when it comes to sexual mutilation.  Slayer turns out to be quite the boob crazy mantis, who just can’t get enough of tearing the tits off unfortunate females.  In one depraved instance performing mass mastectomies on tribeswomen, chopping down on their breasts then leaving the rest for other, lesser mantises. “One by one he threw women to the ground and tore off their sweet-tasting breasts”.  For all of the evidence that points to Evelyn Nace being the author of this book, it is still hard to get your head around the idea that a woman wrote a book in which her male lead fantasizes about joining praying mantises as they devour a woman’s private parts “he bent over the girl and filled his great maw with all that stamped the body as female.  Watching, Dyke thought, God, I think I could eat that part myself”.



Was Nace holding up a mirror to the times she had lived through?  The bloody specter of Charles Manson hangs over scenes of Dyke and his subservient mantises breaking into the houses of rich people, whose pleas for mercy, and offers of money, fall on deaf ears.  There is also a Manson vibe about Eat Them Alive’s attempts to give whitey the fear about angry, militant blacks, who –quite literally in the case of Pete Stuart- want to emasculate the white man. 

Given Evelyn Nace’s apparent lack of experience in writing horror, it is possible that the extremist elements of Eat Them Alive were purely accidental.  If she had no reference point for pulp horror, and based Eat Them Alive off faded memories of Eisenhower-era monster movies that must have blew through Pampa in the 1950s, it is conceivable that she believed all horror films and books to be none stop orgies of blood and guts, and was unaware of the envelope pushing effort she had created.  Whether it was through accident or design, Eat Them Alive, like Guy N Smith’s work, succeeded in dragging creature features of the Bert I. Gordon and AIP variety into the sicko, savage 1970s.  Like Smith’s books, Eat Them Alive is a work that seems destined to never translate to the big screen.  Its concept demanding the kind of big budget Hollywood treatment that would also require its excessive gore to be watered down beyond recognition.  True, in these days of CGI, Eat Them Alive might be pulled off on a lower-budget, but let’s be careful what we wish for.  We have Dario Argento’s Dracula to remind us how shitty a CGI praying mantis can look.  



I wouldn’t wish that on ol’Slayer, and just who would play Dyke Mellis?  In days gone by Klaus Kinski would have been a natural shoe-in for the role of a sexually frustrated megalomaniac, Harvey Keitel is always good for outbursts of self-pitying male wailing…but the only current actor who springs to mind is Nicolas Cage.  Dyke Mellis’ unbalanced, blood caked, monologues are practically crying out for the Nic Cage treatment “I think I could see Slayer swim in a sea of blood- and I could swim in it with him, especially if it was the blood of people, of men, the four men I hate with all my guts…I could spend my whole life seeing him eat men alive”.  Someone needs to slip Cage a copy of Eat Them Alive and bring him to the realization that his career so far has been but a prelude to playing Dyke Mellis.

Nace was to writing what Ed Wood was to filmmaking, and The Shaggs were to music.  Their anti-professionalism creating a work far more memorable than had it been entrusted to competent individuals.  In a disposable medium like pulp horror, where books were written to be consumed during plane journeys or cheap foreign holidays then forgotten about, Eat Them Alive is a keeper.  Once read, impossible to unread, for better or ill, Eat Them Alive will stay with you forever.  Its either a book you’ll take to your breast, or regard as the biggest, most insulting, piece of shit you’ve ever laid eyes on, there is no middle ground with Eat Them Alive.  One small step for female writers, one giant leap for mantis kind, Eat Them Alive proved that a woman’s place isn’t in the kitchen, it is being hunched over a typewriter, knocking out page after page of people being dismembered by giant mantises.  Evelyn Pierce Nace’s lasting gift to humanity being images of Dyke Mellis and Slayer forever swimming together in a sea of human blood.