Friday 5 April 2024
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
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.
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.