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.