White Squaw 8: Horn of Plenty (1985, E.J. Hunter)

 

The eighth installment in the White Squaw series sees deviant author E.J. Hunter mix fact with fiction. This Rebecca Caldwell adventure being played out amidst the backdrop of the Battle of the Little Bighorn, hence Horn of Plenty. What else did you possibly think that title could be referring to? It is a piece of American history that held a personal connection for Hunter, who dedicates this White Squaw book to the ancestors of his that fought in this battle and 'happened to be on the winning side. Hoka hey!'. This revelation about Hunter's ancestry does tend to put a spin on how you view the White Squaw series, and explains the series' extensive knowledge of Native American culture.

Horn of Plenty finds Oglala chief Iron Calf in ailing health and therefore sending out a brave called Swift Bear to find his estranged daughter Sinaskawin -that's Rebecca Caldwell to you buddy- in order to reunite father and daughter before Iron Calf goes off to meet the Great Spirit. For Rebecca though, it’s business as usual as she and her faithful companion Brett Baylor aka Lone Wolf pursue her Uncle Ezekiel and his boss Roger Styles. Ezekiel (sometimes spelt Ezekial in the other books) isn't half the man he used to be. A bullet from Rebecca having immobilized his arm in a previous White Squaw installment. Uncle Ezekiel is also having to readjust to living as a man without stones, having had his balls cut off by Rebecca in the fifth book 'Buckskin Bombshell'. At the risk of sounding bloodthirsty myself, I fail to understand why Rebecca didn't take off the dick at the same time, thus putting an end to all the raping Ezekiel gets up too. After all Rebecca is acutely aware that being without stones doesn't mean a man can't function sexually. This we know, since she relates to Lone Wolf an eye watering anecdote about a young brave who was thrown from his horse at which point "a sharp pointed branch on a sagebrush ripped off his testicles". Still every cloud it seems has a silver lining, since the boy then found himself being used for sex by all the female members of his tribe, safe in the knowledge that he was incapable of getting them pregnant.

Hunter manages to restrain himself for about ten pages before reminding his readership of what a sick individual he was. An assault on a homestead by Ezekiel's men quickly takes out family patriarch Josh Talmadge and his young son Jimmy. Less fortunate is Josh's wife Dorrie, who is taken in the bedroom, gang raped and has her throat slit. The main focus of abuse though is the virgin daughter of the family, Luanna, who is raped by Petey Willis, one of the youngest of Ezekiel's men. A spectacle that gives Ezekiel his first successful hard on in months. Hunter is creepily keen to emphasize Petey's youth, as if he wished the character were actually younger than he made him. Petey is described as looking 'closer to twelve than the sixteen years he owned to'. Petey's only regret about raping Luanna is that he doesn't have more to offer the young lady 'Petey found himself wishing he had about nine inches instead of the paltry five he possessed'. Hunter being the consistent sicko, has Luanna eventually enjoy the experience ("Please" Luanna moaned, as she burned with the shame at the words she had to say "Please, please") and becoming a happy, sexual receptacle for the men who just wiped out her entire family.

Hunter follows that with another shocking scene -which seems to be catering to the raw poultry brigade- involving Timmy Phillips, a young boy tasked by his mother with overseeing the family's cattle (Timmy's father having been killed by the Sioux). For his troubles Timmy ends up being set upon by brutes in KKK style hoods who steal the animals and for extra kicks- as well as the fact that E.J. Hunter likes to write about things like this- strip Timmy naked and hang him upside down from a tree. Leaving Timmy to fret that he'll probably be beaten by his mother when she finds him like this. His mother having previously whipped him after catching Timmy skinny dipping in the creek with another young boy.

Maybe sensing that his audience needed a respite from the usual revenge plot, Horn of Plenty finds Rebecca distracted by both the plight of her father and the plight of Timmy's mother. A widow raising three small children, Grace Phillips is attempting to keep the family farm afloat despite opposition from a crooked bank manager and the hooded goons who put her son in bondage. This series' attitude towards women is utterly schizophrenic. Hunter appears to genuinely respect and admire tough, strong willed women like Grace Phillips and Rebecca herself, who defy the chauvinistic attitudes of their time. Horn of Plenty being yet another White Squaw book where Rebecca ruffles the feathers of stuffy old farts with her unladylike language and proud admission that she cut her Uncle's balls off. When it comes to younger females though, Hunter reverts to this drooling sex freak who gets a charge out of making them the subject of demeaning dirty talk. What with Luanna referred to as "steady pussy for the boys" who "could suck a pecker pretty good".

Although its the eight book, Horn of Plenty manages a few series' firsts. We get our first significant black character in the form of Marcus Roundtree, who is very much of the Turk Turpin school of black sexual brutality, telling Rebecca "I's gonna break yo'ah head- right after I split yo'ah crotch wits dis donkey-sized tallywhacker o'mine".
Hunter also stumbles onto a new sexual fetish for the series, Maiesiophilia, when Rebecca flashes back to being made love to by her husband, Four Horns, while she was carrying their child. "There is not much time left...you and I cannot lay together in the last months. It is not good for the child" Four Horns tells the sex mad Rebecca. Such tender moments are rare for this series, with this scene carrying extra poignancy, given that we know that both Four Horns and the child will die soon after.

It is always easy to tell when a big sex scene is about to go down in a White Squaw book, as Lone Wolf will find a reason to ride on ahead, leaving Rebecca and her love interest to get down to business, preferably by an outdoor fire. Lone Wolf's Native American abilities seemingly including a sixth sense of when three's company. Rebecca's main beau for this book is Swift Bear, who it turns out has loved Rebecca since she was enslaved by his tribe when he was just thirteen. Swift Bear felt a kinship with Rebecca, relating to her struggles to learn Sioux customs, on account of Swift Bear having been whisked away from his people by Jesuit priests and forced to learn the ways of the white man. It's his distinctly Native American chat up lines that get him into Rebecca's pants though. "You are m-more beautiful than the Ptesanwin. You are a gift from the Great Spirit" smooth talk that he sure didn't pick up from the Jesuits.

The Battle of the Little Bighorn is perhaps the weakest aspect to Horn of Plenty. As historic accuracy dictates that fictional characters can't play significant roles in real life events. This means that Rebecca, Roger Styles, Ezekiel et al have to be kept at arm's length from a major set piece in the book. There is little love loss for General George Armstrong Custer within these pages, with Hunter portraying him as a genocidal racist. When Custer is asked if the killing of Native American women bothers him, Custer cold bloodedly replies "nits make lice". As with the inclusion of Oscar Wilde in the 18th White Squaw book, Hunter's motivation for working a real life figure into the White Squaw world appears to be to give Custer a piece of his mind, with Rebecca Caldwell acting as his mouthpiece. The Custer subplot also allows Hunter to work in a reoccurring theme in the series. The white authorities' reluctance to act against white men who commit crimes against Indians. A constant source of frustration to Rebecca.

Hunter respectfully chooses to mostly have the Battle of the Little Bighorn play out off-page, with what little that is depicted being dealt with in a tasteful, non-explicit fashion, an uncharacteristic move for him. Indeed, the inclusion of a real life battle appears to bring out a more introspective, soul searching side to the White Squaw series than we have seen before. Being reunited with her father and his people, gives Rebecca a sense of belonging and pride in the Native American side of her identity. This however is immediately robbed from her by the Battle of the Little Bighorn. Observing the deaths of both whites and Indians, sickens the mixed race Rebecca 'Soldier or Sioux: at their savage worst she saw little to chose between them. Would she ever fit into either world'. In that sense, Horn of Plenty is the reverse of Soldier Blue, this being about a Native American woman lamenting the mass slaughter of whites and the moral stain on her culture that it will leave. Rebecca's fear that the victory at the Battle of the Little Bighorn will only increase the whites' fear and hatred of Indians is immediately realized when she and Brett- the heroes of the series- ride into a small town only to be met with threats and racial abuse. One wonders if Hunter, who like many Men's Adventures authors is rumoured to have served in Vietnam, personally related to the experience of expecting a hero's welcome only to be faced with contempt and hostility. Horn of Plenty ends with Rebecca seething at the way the White press martyrs Custer while demonizing the Sioux. Rebecca vows to rehabilitate the image of the Sioux as violent savages, while at the same time renewing her vow to hunt down, castrate and kill the white men who wronged her. What can I say, Miss Rebecca continues to be a woman of fascinating contradictions.

For a series driven by extreme gore and perverted sex, Horn of Plenty then ends up unexpectedly delivering food for thought o'plenty... as well as the inescapable sense that Custer sure had allot to answer for.

 

White Squaw 5: Buckskin Bombshell (1984, E.J. Hunter)

 

Some women are destined to break men's hearts, others are destined to break men's balls. Rebecca Caldwell gets to do her fair share of both in E.J. Hunter's notoriously revolting western series. Swearing vengeance on the men who done her wrong, the part Sioux, part White heroine isn't one to mince words "I want to kill each and everyone of them myself, I want to cut off their balls and shove them down their throats. I want to set fires on their bellies and listen to their screams as they die".

As this is an early entry in the White Squaw series, Rebecca's main quarry is still her Uncle Ezekial, the man who sold Rebecca into slavery, and Bitter Creek Jake Tulley, the leader of the Outlaw gang that her Uncle is a member of. Rebecca rides alongside Brett Baylor aka Lone Wolf, a white man who spent ten years living as a Crow brave and has now turned his back on the white man's culture. Lone Wolf's real ethnicity however means that he can blend back into white society if he and Rebecca's mission dictates it.

Buckskin Bombshell follows the same pattern as pretty much all the White Squaw series. Rebecca pursues some badmen who leave a trail of rape and murder in their wake...gets short shrift from the law on account of her being a woman and having Indian blood in her...wastes a few secondary goons only for the main villains to usually give her the slip at the end of the book...necessitating further White Squaw books in which the exact same thing happens again. There's also lots of sex along the trail, with Rebecca going through several sexual partners per book. The only exception being Lone Wolf, who tortures himself by taking a strict vow of celibacy. Buckskin Bombshell is notably big on fellatio, with Rebecca portrayed as the Old West's equivalent of Linda Lovelace. Her advanced knowledge of oral sex techniques having been drilled into her by her abusive former husband. In another feather to her Indian headband, we discover that Rebecca is able to hum a tune while going down on a guy "with lips and flying tongue, she worked on his fat cock while her body vibrated with suppressed desire and she hummed a pleasing Sioux love song".

The simplistic plot of Buckskin Bombshell sees Rebecca tracking down her Uncle Ezekial to an outlaw town where she hopes to finally geld him. Elsewhere young prostitutes, who've been kidnapped by Tulley, are forced to work in Ezekial's brothel 'The Bloody Gash' named for obvious reasons. In order to infiltrate a town full of raping wrong ‘uns, Rebecca has to perversely pass herself off as a sex crazed young boy "I've been wettin' my pecker since I was eleven". While US Marshal Rex Taylor, Rebecca's main love interest in this book, adopts the identity of Slim Garfield, an outlaw he'd personally slain. Only for Rex to be asked to literally prove his manhood to others in order to pass as the big dicked outlaw "Slim's supposed to have a cock that hangs down to his knees. You reckon you could show that much".

The White Squaw series is strong meat both in terms of sex, which is written on the level of hardcore pornography, and violence, which is on par with a splatterpunk novel. Heads are sliced into with tomahawks, balls cut off, entrails yanked out of people and limbs blown off. In short, you'd have to be as think skinned as a cigar store Indian not to be shocked by these books. One booktuber had planned to cover the entire 24 book long White Squaw series over yonder on YouTube, complete with Joe Bob Briggs style Drive-In Totals of each book's carnage count. Only to throw in the towel after a few entries. The unsettling aspect to the series- namely E.J. Hunter's fixation on child abuse- means these books don't really lend themselves well to Joe Bob type raucous, good time curation...there is too much 'Nonce-Fu' going on in these books for that.

At its mildest, the book features a young boy- who Hunter seems keen to describe as 'naked to the waist and barefoot' being violently slapped into unconsciousness and left in a dung heap. At its worst, the book establishes the villainy of Tulley's men by having them gang rape and butcher a young Native American girl called Shee-nah-ah. The first of three rapes in the book, all of which are described in an increasingly gloating fashion. While one of Jake's men dies at Rebecca's hands while regretting that he didn't take the opportunity to rape her while she was underage.

It is difficult to be around a White Squaw book for long without finding yourself asking questions like 'just what was wrong with this author', 'did he spend his spare time sniffing the seats of young girls' bicycles' and 'just who was the man behind the E.J. Hunter pen name'. Several online sources have pointed to Hunter being a pseudonym for Mark Kelly Roberts, who wrote numerous entries in 'The Penetrator' series of Men's Adventure books. Such is the morally suspect nature of the White Squaw series, you wouldn't want to point the finger at an innocent party, but all the evidence does appear to suggest that Roberts and E.J. Hunter were one in the same. The Penetrator series was a joint effort, with Roberts writing the odd numbered entries and another author, Chet Cunningham, writing the even numbered ones. Although that entire series is credited to the pen name 'Lionel Derrick', the odd entries contain a 'special acknowledgement to Mark K. Roberts' and the even ones 'special acknowledgement to Chet Cunningham'. Buckskin Bombshell continues this trend with its 'special acknowledgement to Mark K. Roberts' credit, indicating this was the publisher's coded way of crediting the real author. While I've yet to read any of The Penetrator books, they do appear to share some themes with the White Squaw series, namely a part White, part Indian protagonist and a knowledge of Native American culture that appears to hold up under close scrutiny for once. Going by the reviews of The Penetrator books on the glorious trash blog, the author's other specialist subject raises its ugly head in that series a couple of times too. The Penetrator #41: Hell's Hostages features an 'explicit flashback detailing Katrina's rape...at age 11' while in The Penetrator #43: Rampage in Rio 'a fat Nazi molests one of the captured children'. All of which sounds like E.J. Hunter up to his usual tricks.

Still to give credit where it is due, Hunter was a writer of some talent. The White Squaw books feel on the money in terms of period authenticity, are fast paced and ultra violent... I've yet to encounter a dud in the entire series. The books could have easily withstood losing their deviant aspect, yet when it comes to inappropriately writing about children, Hunter unfortunately seems like a man possessed.

Roberts' entries in The Penetrator series are said to be right leaning creations and there is spillover evidence of that in the White Squaw series. Rex Taylor has no time for chicken livered types who want to do away with the death penalty, spitting out contempt for "all the spineless, the weak willed and the cowardly, who would rather try to work out some kind of accommodation with the predators in our world". Tough, manly talk that has Rebecca puckering her lips and getting ready to hum another pleasing Sioux love song. As a lawman though, Rex insists on playing by the book, putting him at odds with Rebecca's growing need to take an eye for an eye. Rex's stance sending Rebecca off on some soul searching about whether her lust for revenge could be robbing her of her humanity. A reoccurring theme throughout the series. The politics of the White Squaw series are a little more complex than they first appear. Hunter doesn't quite fit the mold of your typical conservative author, given the series' sexual excess and highlighting of the injustices faced by Native Americans. There's also a surprisingly passionate outburst of feminism here, caused by Rex refusing to deputize Rebecca on account her being a woman. A decision that leaves Rebecca fuming "How dare he! A new form of passion flared her nostrils and set her heart to racing. Only a woman! Only an object to possess and to place aside on a shelf like some delicate keepsake of precious china! Damn him!".
Less anyone think that Hunter was some chicken livered liberal though, the White Squaw series does seek to distance itself from the inherent anti-whiteness of the revisionist western genre. Not all the whites who Rebecca encounters turn out to be bigots or hostile towards her. At one point in Buckskin Bombshell, Rebecca jumps to the defense of white men telling Shee-nah-ah that it is unfair to judge all of them on the actions of Tulley and his men "not all whites are like this. Kiyuksa...they break their own customs". Although as Rebecca tells Shee-nah-ah this while Shee-nah-ah dies in a pool of her own blood and the men's semen, Rebecca's words were probably cold comfort there.

Buckskin Bombshell also teaches us that the term 'White Squaw' is actually highly offensive to Rebecca. Her preferred term, and the one she's referred to by Native American characters being 'White Robe Girl'. Of course this didn't stop Hunter from going with the offending, but much more catchier White Squaw as the series title, after all sensitivity was never high on his list of priorities.

The Neophyte (1986, Guy N. Smith)

 

Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned, and you shouldn't get on the wrong side of a Charolais bull either, are but two of the life lessons to be learnt from this 1986 Guy N. Smith offering.

The Neophyte's main character, Joby Tarrat, is a misunderstood teen whose deceased parents' legacy of witchcraft, murder and adultery have made him something of a social outcast in his rural community. Joby's reputation as a pariah only increases when he accidentally decapitates a small child with a billhook. His only friend, schoolboy Ally Goode is convinced that Sally Ann Morris, the girl Joby loves from afar, possesses supernatural powers and is a bad influence on Joby. However, visitations from Sally Ann in Joby's horny dreams, accuse Ally of being the source of all of Joby's troubles. What's a boy to do?

While The Neophyte contains its fair share of supernatural carnage, the really disturbing aspects to this book tend to stem from Smith's portrayal of psychologically damaged young characters. Childhood abuse and a sense of alienation have left Joby Tarrat a paranoid head case who is convinced every person he meets, and a few farmyard animals, are all out to get him and harbor barely suppressed ill will towards him. Fortunately amidst all the teenage angst there is also plentiful evidence of Smith's jokey side in The Neophyte as well. Smith might play the horror elements in this book straight, but there are many moments when you can sense him mischievously sniggering away at what he was writing. Thinking especially here of the scene where the forces of darkness are used to make a dog urinate against a branch of Woolworths, the insights into the thoughts of a randy bull "let's get down to those cows", and a reference to the novelty hit 'The Birdie Song'.

For a man who was happily married to the same woman for decades until his death, Smith sure can write like a multiple times divorced cynic at times. The initial relationship in the book, between Joby's parents is riddled with infidelity, loathing and occult curses. While the bad relationship blues then get handed on down to Sally Ann's parents, her mother being an unfulfilled woman whose dullard husband has driven her into the arms of another man. Smith, the product of a controlling father and an elitist mother, had both father and mother issues that spill out into his books. However in The Neophyte, Smith is mainly concerned with taking bad mothers to task. Sally Ann's mother is a total snob who is aghast at her daughter mixing with the lower classes and Sally Ann's budding relationship with Joby, who until he accidentally hacked a kid's head off, was working as a labourer on the farm owned by Sally Ann's father. Joby's own mother, who held black masses and locked young Joby in a stair cupboard for hours on end, is hardly mother of the year material either.

There clearly is an autobiographical element to the majority of GNS' work. The Neophyte, like so many of his books, being set in a rural farming community, a world Smith knew well. I suspect that GNS may have also looked to his nearest and dearest for character inspiration too. The books Smith wrote when his own children were very young, like The Undead and Manitou Doll, imitate life by themselves featuring characters with young children. The autobiographical elements in those two books being particularly felt due to both concerning the parents of a young deaf child, one of Smith's daughters having been born deaf. Manitou Doll clearly arising from Smith's need to turn his deaf daughter into a character in one of his books, and have her kill someone with a giant axe! The GNS books that came along a few years later, like this one, tend to transfer the focus over to rebellious teenagers, with Smith likely drawing on his then status as the father of three teenagers. Sally Ann is going through a 'trendy, left-wing' phase, while Joby has picked up a guitar and has turned to music to ease his troubles. Suggesting that Joby might have been partly based on Smith's son Gavin, who has subsequently carved out a career for himself in the music industry and is currently part of a band called Bamboo Guerillas, named after one of his dad's most notorious books.

As you might expect from a GNS book, an air of horny, sexual frustration abounds in The Neophyte. Joby wanks off to the idea of a sexual encounter with Sally Ann only to then be consumed by masturbatory guilt, drilled into him by his deceased mother. Mum's influence having left Joby with a need to beat himself up over beating himself off. More unexpected is Ally's resentment of Joby's interest in Sally Ann, and Joby's interest in girls in general, leaving you in no doubt that Ally's feelings for Joby go beyond mere friendship. Not the kind of unrequited love that you'd expect a red blooded, straight writer like GNS to have even contemplated, let alone be writing about in the 1980s. If I didn't know better, I'd think that Smith was being intentionally subversive here. All of the relationships between men and women in The Neophyte lead to misery, bitterness and coercive behavior, while the forces of evil conspire to keep Joby and the closet gay schoolboy Ally apart.

The book's criticism of the upper classes' pursuit of fox hunting is another aspect of The Neophyte that took me aback, given that Smith was a well known advocate of hunting and very vocally went after animal rights activists in his books, most notably 'Crabs: The Human Sacrifice'. My guess is that while Smith approved of the killing of animals for food or for reasons of pest control, he was possibly less on board when it came to trophy hunting or hunting solely motivated by bloodlust. In 1978's Killer Crabs, Smith appeared to take great pleasure in exposing a rich man, with delusions of being a great white hunter, as being both inept as a huntsman and inadequate as a cocksman. The criticism of the hunting brigade in The Neophyte being that they are a bunch of Hooray Henries who arrogantly trample over private property, damage the livelihoods of honest, hardworking farmers and are an ineffective way of dealing with the problem at hand. As gamekeeper  Joe Rowell complains "they're not interested in killing foxes, all they want to do is get dressed up in their fancy clothes and go for a ride". Not that Smith doesn't have equally strong words for those on the other side of this issue. A scene set at an unethical circus, allows Smith the chance to attack members of the public who get 'irate about blood sports and vivisection, formed animal rights groups and raided silver fox farms, but they were quite happy to be entertained by wild animals kept in cruelty'. The impression you're left with is that Smith had little time for either the weekend huntsman or the weekend revolutionary.

The sympathetic portrayal of Joby, who spends a good deal of the book unemployed and living off state benefits, also goes against expectations from Smith, whose work was prone to blood boiling anger over those without work and relying on handouts. Smith even throws Joby some free benefits of the sexual variety in the form of Harriet Blake, who is every bit as vilified in the village as Joby, albeit for different reasons. A drunken, exhibitionist episode in the village having resulted in Harriet flashing her crotchless panties to all and sundry. Smith was always critical of characters who failed to live up to physical perfection, and Harriet becomes yet another Smith character to be slapped on the wrist by him for carrying around some extra weight. 'The fat on her bottom crinkled, there was a permanent elasticated mark where her pants attempted to hold her spare tyre in'. Still when you are an unemployed, serial masturbator who lives in a dilapidated farmhouse, I guess you have to take whatever is on offer, even if the spare tyre is included. Joby's awkward journey to manhood also sees him travelling to the rough area of a neighbouring town to seek out the services of a cheap prostitute. Infuriating Sally Ann whose supernatural abilities allow her to monitor his behaviour. A case of- to misquote Kenny Rogers- Joby don't take your love to town.

While the first half of The Neophyte (entitled Book One: The Spawn) concludes with the closest GNS ever came to writing a teenage coming of age drama, its second half (Book Two: The Evil) takes its foot off the brakes and veers into the fast lane when it comes to horror. As with many of his books from this period, like 'The Walking Dead', the narrative tends to get reduced to a connecting link between a series of outrageous set pieces whose offensiveness rarely fails to impress. Some if the depravity and madness Smith manages to crowbar into the second half of the book includes a raunchy encounter with a satanic cult, incest, auto erotic asphyxiation and death by rampaging elephant...but not necessarily in that order. In short, punters sure got their money's worth out of GNS with The Neophyte.

Such is the high sleaze and gore content of The Neophyte that it had the honour of being published in France in 1989 by the splatter loving publisher Fleuve Noir, as part of their 'Gore' series of extreme horror novels. The cover of the French edition of The Neophyte practically begs for a lawsuit from Sam Raimi, to this day I'm sure that actor Bruce Campbell is blissfully unaware that he's appeared on the cover of a Guy N. Smith book. The Fleuve Noir people always being especially bold when it came to ripping off Evil Dead 1 and 2 imagery.

Having read a large chunk of Smith's bibliography by now, I was beginning to get concerned that I'd consumed the best he had to offer, and that the remaining books would be a case of diminishing returns. However this and a recent read of 'The Knighton Vampires' have left me reassured that there are still a few gems to be found among the lesser known Smith books. Don't get me wrong, you'll encounter a few duds down the GNS rabbit hole, but The Neophyte has proven to be one of those much needed titles that reminds you of all the joy that can come from reading a Guy N. Smith book.

 

Morfie (1967, Linda DuBreuil)

"Lois, for the love of God! What is that thing hanging down there between Jolene's legs. It's like a man's...oh my GOD!"

Thus begins the remarkable Morfie, a 1967 look at the plight of a hermaphrodite, written by the prolific female author Linda DuBreuil, who it is claimed wrote over 300 books, mostly of a pornographic nature, before her death in 1980.

DuBreuil's protagonist Jolene Anderson is born with both male and female sex organs. Her wealthy mother, Lois, adores all things feminine, therefore it comes as no surprise that she chooses to raise her child as female. Jolene however is of the belief that she is male and begins to act accordingly. A visit to a carny, where a hermaphrodite (or morphedite to give the book's preferred term) is humiliatingly paraded about for leering straights, leads Jolene to the realization that she too is a Morfie. Jolene's path to maleness is unsurprisingly a difficult one. The neurotic, domineering Lois threatens to take her own life, by putting her head in the oven, every time Jolene won't shave her legs. Jolene skips her prom, instead choosing to party at a mixed race club, where she hangs out with pimps, hookers, alcoholics and junkies... beginning a pattern of Jolene identifying with outsiders. In the book's second act, Jolene who has now adopted a male appearance and the name Joe, travels across America. The pot of gold at the end of Joe's rainbow being an operation that will rid Joe of his female sex and allow him to live life as a heterosexual male.

DuBreuil certainly doesn't take the easy route of portraying Jolene/Joe as a victim or a character who actively seeks out our sympathy. On the contrary, Joe was Jolene is truly a ghastly excuse for a human being at times. As Jolene she cons a mentally troubled man into marriage, springing the surprise of a hidden cock on the mortified man and then raping him with it too. As Joe, he betrays his driving belief that he is a straight male, when he finds himself sexually attracted to a blind black man, dishonesty portraying himself as a straight woman who is looking for anonymous sex. Only for the blind black man to turn out to be more perceptive than Joe had reckoned on. During foreplay the man calls out Joe as a male homosexual, with it has to be said an unexpected degree of compassion and understanding "Don't bear a man who wants it that way with any malice. It just ain't my way, that's all". A display of kindness that Joe responds to by repeatedly kicking the blind man in the crotch and unleashing a slew of racial insults.

It is a big ask of an audience to forgive such abhorrent behavior. DuBreuil though certainly does leave you with conflicting emotions when it comes to her main character. There are moments when you hope Joe will find peace of mind, only to take it all back, and chastise yourself for ever giving a damn about such an out and out sociopath. Joe's folly being that in order to reinvent himself as the perfect heterosexual he ends up destroying the people- namely wives and an adopted son- who help built his image as this straight allow, pillar of the community.

The only other DuBreuil books I've read, 1970's 'Nightmare Baby' and 1979's Manson-esque 'Follow the Leader' were both underwhelming experiences. I'm happy to report then that DuBreuil has redeemed herself in my eyes with this earlier effort. Morfie must have packed quite the punch in 1967, many of the sleaze paperbacks from that period are a case of all sizzle and no steak, but Morfie is a mouth watering piece of meat. DuBreuil might forgo the opportunity for a positive portrayal of a sexual minority, but she does trample on taboos here like a rampaging elephant. Morfie's cavalcade of kinks including bondage, transvestism, lesbianism, nymphomania, with even a couple of flirtations with blasphemy when Joe begins to have visions of a black Jesus.

Just as its main character changes genders, the book itself switches genres several times over. Morphing from a sex change operation expose, to a road trip novel and then a courtroom drama. As well as taking on the appearance of a Tales from the Crypt story when Joe attempts to get away with murder by cooking a woman's flesh and grinding down her bones.

Morfie is a mind boggling, trash classic currently forgotten by the world, which would probably be given hell if it were to be rediscovered. I think though that you eventually reach the stage when you realize that life is too short to waste it reading non-offensive books. The book's cover by renowned sleaze paperback illustrator Robert Bonfils is quite simply a work of sordid art, that could easily be mistaken for a 1960s Italian horror movie poster. Wicked as it, I also couldn't help laugh out loud at Jolene's nonplussed reaction to discovering a male lover has killed himself, deciding to leave the unfortunate fellow hanging from a rope in favour of making coffee instead "looks like he kicked a little. He'd have a fit if he saw those scuff marks. I fill up the coffee pot with water and measure the coffee into the top. I never did care for the way he made coffee anyway. Too weak".

 

White Squaw 18: Hot Pursuit (1989, E.J. Hunter)

Hot Pursuit is number 18 in the lusty 'White Squaw' adult western series, which chronicled the adventures of Rebecca Caldwell, who is part White, part Sioux and all woman. In previous installments a 14 year old Rebecca had been betrayed by her Uncle Ezekiel and Uncle Virgil who sold the young girl and her mother to the Oglala tribe. Iron Calf, the leader of the tribe, just so happened to be Rebecca's real father, due to the fact that he raped Rebecca's mother 14 years previously. As an adult, Rebecca leaves the tribe and sets out to get revenge on her Uncles. She then sets out to get revenge on Bitter Creek Jake Tully, the leader of the outlaw gang that her Uncle Ezekiel and Uncle Virgil were a part of. She then sets out to get revenge on Roger Styles, the brains behind the the Bitter Creek Jake Tully gang that her uncles were a part of. Rebecca is nothing if not meticulous when it comes to hunting down men with an increasingly tenuous connection to her enslavement.

Pseudonymous author E.J. Hunter managed to get 24 books out of this saga, written between the early 1980s and the early 1990s, while simultaneously penning 13 books in the similar 'Head Hunter' adult western series. As you might expect, given such a heavy workload, the White Squaw series is assembly line in nature and prone to repetition. After you've gone through a few White Squaws, there is the inescapable feeling that once you've read one White Squaw book, you've pretty much read them all. In that sense I'd draw comparisons with the slasher movies from that period, who likewise rarely diverted from a basic formula yet whose audience still seemed happy to keep coming back for more and more of the same.

The White Squaw books are reliably committed to gratuitous sex and violence, rarely a chapter goes by without someone having their brains blown out, a throat being slashed, or a lengthy description of Rebecca's horizontal pleasures. Having entered the series as a dandyish white collar criminal with a greedy eye on power and wealth, Hot Pursuit finds Roger Styles at a low ebb. Having had too many of his money making schemes thwarted by Rebecca, Roger has been reduced to heading a gang of lowly bank robbers. Trouble is that he's not very good at it. Roger's ineptitude at executing bank robberies regularly reducing his men and innocent parties to bloody, bullet ridden messes, providing a chunk of Hot Pursuit's extreme gore content. Further gore highlights of the book include one of Roger's men having his eye gouged out by a snake, and another character being repeatedly shot in the stomach, then squirting liquid faeces out of the holes.

Much less welcome is Hunter's dedication to violence and sexual abuse aimed at children. It is the series' most distinct and uncomfortable characteristic, one that shows no signs of abating in Hot Pursuit. In the opening chapters alone, Hunter has a child shotgunned during a robbery, and another child crushed under the fleeing robbers' horses, followed by two little girls being used as target practice by Roger's men. Somewhere between books 6 and 10, Rebecca got to give Roger an almighty kick in the balls, an injury that turned him off adult women and somehow left him with an attraction to young boys and girls instead. In Hot Pursuit though, Roger shows some slight restraint by excluding himself when one of his men decides to rape a 13 year old girl during a raid on her family home. Leaving Roger to torture himself with regret 'small, young, vulnerable...god, how he wanted her'.

Rebecca herself isn't without an inappropriate side either. Early on in the book she is consumed by thoughts about Joey, who she left behind in her pursuit of Roger. Joey 'would run stark naked if he could get away with it...he had not the least inhibition about his body or it's functions'. Which doesn't sound too bad, until you realise that Joey is her 13 year old stepson. This troubling aspect to the entire White Squaw series could merely have been shock value on E.J. Hunter's part, or an attempt to demystify the old west as a place of chivalry or where the innocence of childhood was sacred. Even so, Hunter's inability to stay away from underage topics means that its hard not to end up thinking ill of him, and wonder if the man's circuits were rather haywire.

As the series progresses Rebecca's initial position as a sworn enemy of wrongdoers tends to take a backseat to Rebecca as a sworn enemy of virginity, with the White Squaw frequently helping young boys ease their way into manhood. Such is the case in Hot Pursuit, which is one of the White Squaw books that focuses more on the carnal side of Rebecca Caldwell...who is a very mucky squaw indeed in this one. Her initial love interest is 17 year old Andrew Purcell, a tongue tied, would be poet, who sets a fire in Rebecca's loins due to him reminding her of 'Four Horns' Rebecca's dead, native American husband. It's anyone's guess how a pail faced, sexually inexperienced, mother dominated wimp reminds Rebecca of a bronzed, muscular brave, who wasn't called Four Horns for nothing. Still Andrew makes for a keen student and an exhausting night with Rebecca leaves him smitten with her, if a little worse for wear "I was stiff all night and now I'm a bit sore" he admits. His enthusiasm to learn the art of lovemaking leads Rebecca to nickname him 'Randy Andy'. Yes, as if this book couldn't be more unsavoury it has a character who shares a nickname with the former Duke of York.

Hunter does at least allow Rebecca the freedom to have the same 'love em and leave em' attitude as male heroes in Men's Adventure books. Rebecca's exploits leaving behind a slew of menfolk who either die tragically at the end of these books, or are destined to get their hearts broken by Rebecca. Poor Randy Andy quickly gets given the push in favour of Robert Russel, an older, more manly, ranch owner. Tellingly even when he is writing sex scenes between consenting adults, Hunter can't help steering things back to his usual deviant territory. Rebecca getting her kicks by forcing Robert to embarrassingly recall his earliest attempts at masturbation and his childhood fumblings with a vaqueros' daughter.

Hot Pursuit does slightly distinguish itself from the White Squaw pack, by the fact that Oscar Wilde, of all people, shows up as a supporting character in it. Although to be honest, his appearance is something of a damp squib. Kept at arms length from the sex and violence, Wilde sticks around to deliver a few quips about America, before walking off in a huff after one too many gay put downs from Rebecca. I do find it hard to believe that a handbags at dawn confrontation between Oscar Wilde and Rebecca Caldwell would result in Rebecca emerging victorious and Wilde being left lost for words. Wilde's tremendous wit is thoroughly lacking in the portrayal of him here. This combined with the fact that Hunter doesn't appear to care much for him ("Sort of an out and out sissy, some folks say"), makes the motivation for dragging dear old Oscar into this one a doubly odd decision.

As you might expect from a later entry in a long running but quicky cranked out paperback series, Hot Pursuit is something of a congealed mess of ideas that don't really go anywhere. Oscar Wilde's appearance is an example of this, as is the Randy Andy subplot. Which sees him moping off in such a bitter, heartbroken mood that you expect Randy Andy to reappear later on in the book as an adversary of Rebecca or seeking a reconciliation, but never does. Maybe he ended up at Pizza Express instead. I suspect its a reflection on Hunter's weariness when it came to writing White Squaw books at this point, that the futility of her never ending quest for revenge is starting to take its toll on Rebecca. By the time of Hot Pursuit she's been on the road, hunting wrongdoers for several years and has lost so many people along the way, that she is starting to crave a way out and an exit into a civilised normality. Like Bronson's Paul Kersey though, all of Rebecca's attempts at a peaceful, pacifistic life seem destined to be shattered by bad guys with an unfortunate tendency to rape and murder all her loved ones. Forcing Rebecca back into Mrs. Vigilante mode and of course necessitating further sequels.

The White Squaw books are never dull, but they are constantly sick and disturbed. What's retrospectively amusing about the series is how- unlike XXX movie westerns such as A Dirty Western and Sweet Savage- on the surface these books could easily have been mistaken for mainstream westerns, rather than pages and pages of written hardcore pornography. Begging the question did anyone ever buy these books for siblings thinking they were innocuous, old fashioned yarns. A decision that would have given any western obsessed kid a treat, and any western obsessed grandparent a coronary. Needless to say, partner, best ya keep that White Squaw collection out of Gramp's reach, unless of course his name happens to be Big Chief Chickenhawk.

 

The Pleasuring of Rory Malone (1982, Charles Panati)

 

Forget what they say, sometimes you CAN judge a book by its cover. Such is the case with The Pleasuring of Rory Malone (you can also sometimes judge a book by its title too) in which the titular Rory, a 17 year old virgin, uses a combination of astral projection and telekinesis to undress and have sex with any woman he chooses. It's material that could have easily been fodder for one of the era's R-rated teen sex comedies, Zapped! comes to mind, but instead here is the basis for one of the most perverse horror paperbacks of the 1980s.

Rory is tutored by Dr Liz Hartman, who hopes to use his telekinetic abilities for the greater good and regards herself as a mother figure to the 17 year old boy. A perception not shared by the horny teenager himself 'she bent forward while working and her blouse hung free from her bra, revealing her full breasts and, through the stretched-thin beige fabric, huge brown nipples'. Rory is introduced trailing Kathy Sue Bauer -a popular girl in his school who he has a crush on- into the crowded NYC subway. Only for him to be consumed by guilt when molesting her in his astral form causes Kathy to take a tumble and fall in front of a train, losing a leg in the process. Was Rory's abilities the cause of her amputation?, or was the fact that Kathy was on the verge of a heavy period the reason she lost her balance?

The Pleasuring of Rory Malone is a book steeped in mixed messages and sexual dysfunction. Initially the book points to sexual repression being the source of Rory's problems. The victim of a catholic upbringing -you can always rely on those nuns to instill sexual shame in a young boy- Rory's salvation appears to be Dr Liz, who teaches him that there is nothing wrong with masturbation or looking at pornography. This stance however is countered by the good guy of the book, Thomas Webb, a police captain and psychologist, whose feminist girlfriend Carrie is heavily involved in the Women Against Pornography movement. Webb himself is garnering praise for his upcoming Messe Commission like paper, which aims to prove a definite link between violent pornography and male violence towards women. The Pleasuring of Rory Malone does lend a megaphone to anti-porn rhetoric, in one instance quite literally by including a scene set at a WAP protest. It also sets out to validate the feminist belief that all men are potential rapists by having just about every male character, even the WAP aligned Webb, admit that if they possessed Rory's powers they'd be tempted to use it in an identical fashion. The book poses questions over whether men projecting sexual fantasies onto women represents a form of sexual assault, and further attempts to win feminist favour with its frank and open discussions about female menstruation. The Pleasuring of Rory Malone certainly leaves you questioning which side of the porn wars it is on, with the lingering suspicion that it may be playing both sides off against each other. It's championing of anti-porn feminism seems at odds with a subplot about a constantly masturbating woman, Susan Stiner, whose fantasies are dominated by thoughts of being roughly taken by men. Singling her out as a potential victim for one of Rory's astral sex assaults.

If the author of the book was of the opinion that violent pornography adds to society's ills though, just why then is The Pleasuring of Rory Malone full of graphically described rape scenes perpetrated by an invisible assailant. One memorably depraved incident involves Rory entering a peep booth, jacking off to a stripper from behind glass, only to then astrally project himself so that he can fist the terrified and confused stripper 'the hotter he became, the greater the urge to ram her up to his elbow'. If ever there was a set piece guaranteed to null and void a book's feminist credentials, it was that.

The Pleasuring of Rory Malone also boasts an incriminating and extensive knowledge of the pornography available to New Yorkers at the time, as well as the XXX movie theatres and sex shops in which to find it. To the extent that you'd be forgiven for thinking you were reading a later issue in the original run of Sleazoid Express. 'All around him men passed into private booths, inserted quarters, viewed films of any sexual fantasy they desired, and when they left, the attendant mopped the floor. At this peak hour, though, it was impossible to keep pace with the flow of clients, and he'd entered one booth and skidded on the slippery floor, striking his shoulder against the wall'.

Rory himself emerges as a highly sympathetic figure, considered a 'freak' by his abusive father, frustrated by his prudish, strict catholic girlfriend and the victim of a society at war over the pros and cons of pornography. Rory's problems are added to by being marked for death by Lou Bauer, a racist, homophobic police sergeant who happens to be the uncle of the girl who lost her leg under the train. Lou's pursuit of vigilante justice leads him to Christopher Street 'if he found the kid in this fag ghetto, he might be able to kill a few freaks with one ballistic stone'. Lou is the angered epitome of conservative masculinity, who were this to have been on film would have probably been played by either Aldo Ray or Lawrence Tierney, Lou is that kind of guy. The Pleasuring of Rory Malone is the sort of book whose film adaptation would have surely have had to feature Joe Spinell in there somewhere too, the bullying, asshole father being the obvious Spinell casting choice.

As much as the book has Rory's back, it isn't above having some sadistic fun at his expense either. At one point the narrative puts Rory at the mercy of an older, predatory gay guy who grabs Rory's cock in the men's room of a porno theatre. Later, Rory seems on the verge of losing his cherry to a nice, sexually free girl called Jacqueline, only for life to deliver another cruel blow when Jacqueline turns out to be more of a handful than Rory expected. The fact that Rory's torment lies in his out of control heterosexuality, coupled with his violent lashing out at the same sex encounters that comes his way, makes you wonder if there isn't something deeper going on here. Rory's escape from the authorities being driven by a fear that they want to turn him into a woman. The only cure for his abilities seemingly being to fill him full of female hormones.

The Pleasuring of Rory Malone comes across like the paperback equivalent of movies that were around at the time like The Entity, Dressed to Kill and Incubus, whose classy veneer and intellectual pretentions belied an often incredibly crass attitude to sex and sexuality. In his introduction, the author credits several unnamed young men for helping him 'appreciate the attitudes of today's teenagers to the proliferation of easily accessible pornography magazines and films (a rarity in my own youth)'. A sentiment echoed in the book itself by Dr Liz's husband Gerhardt who secretly resents the sexual stimuli on offer to Rory's generation that wasn't available in his own youth 'he selfishly longed for halcyon days of strict morality- if Gerhardt Kiner couldn't have all those tender young things, no guy deserved them'. Making you wonder if envy or concern was the motivation for the book's preoccupation with pornography's effect on young men.

Still, you have to hand it to The Pleasuring of Rory Malone, its mixed messages remain as compelling as they are at times perplexing, and on a sleaze level it is a book that rams it up to the elbow. Making it all the more of a mystery why it has never attained the same level of notoriety as the Richard Laymon stuff. The book perfectly manages to sum up it's own contradictions, when it has Rory berate himself with 'you hypocrite. Before the day's through you'll be lusting after the very things you're condemning'. That, folks, is The Pleasuring of Rory Malone in a nutshell.

Welcome Sherazad (1969, Alfred Mazure)

Something of a legend in his homeland -due to his private detective creation Dick Bos- Dutch comics artist Alfred Mazure spent his final few years living and working in the UK. It was here that his talents turned to the topic of sexy female crime fighters. Lindy Leigh -Mazure's airheaded spy- had her own comic strip in Mayfair magazine and even made it to the big screen as a segment of Antony Balch's Secrets of Sex in 1969. The same year, Mazure brought the Lindy Leigh concept to book, eventually writing three paperbacks centred around the mono named Sherazad, a redheaded, slightly more intelligent, but no less glamorous version of Lindy Leigh.

The toast of fashionable London, Sherazad drives a jaguar, lives in Chelsea -but of course- and gets invited to all the finest LSD parties. She also finds the time to be a member of BOSC (Bureau of Special Cases) a top secret origination with headquarters located underneath a monastery, where her bosses are mock-friars Brother John and Brother Joshua.

It's a premise worthy of The Avengers, which I'd wager Mazure fell in love with during his time in blighty. Welcome Sherazad does pilfer a little blatantly from that show at times. While Emma Peel had an eye-shaped peephole in her door, Sherazad has a faux-donkey's head on hers, pull the donkey's tongue and a braying noise in her pad will alert Sherazad to your presence. Mazure also seems to have an eye in the direction of the ITC shows of the time, both as a source of inspiration and parody. Sherazad's initial assignment being to investigate several actresses who disappeared while starring in an action oriented TV series. In order to get to the bottom of the case, Sherazad has to rub shoulders with handsome toff John Hulme, who is renting out his Hampshire estate as a TV studio "I don't mind making money in vulgar ways, but I insist on enjoying it graciously". Hulme becomes Sherazad's latest squeeze or 'Heigh Ho' as the lady herself likes to call her love interests. Suspicion for the disappearances falls on TV mogul Alwyn Harpinger and King Ibn Fuad, the rich oil baron who Harpinger has been cozying up to. Fortunately as well as jiu-jitsu and being able quote Max Miller, Sherazad's talents include the ability to smell non-white villainy from a mile off "not only was she able to say that somebody had stood in that closet not long ago...but she was able to say the man was not white-skinned".

Even by the standards of the 1960s, Mazure does seem to have had issues with people of the camel travelling persuasion. Fuad is at one point referred to as an 'over sexed baboon', his followers 'ragged desert dwellers' while Fuad's heavies set off Sherazad's acute sense of smell 'they were undoubtedly Arabs, though this was no news to her-her nose had told her already'.

Welcome Sherazad does have an odd structure, the disappearing actresses/white slavery plot concluding very abruptly half way into the book, leaving a secondary storyline to come to the forefront. It is an experience akin to when ITC would combine two episodes of a TV series into a feature film, leaving the tell tale sign of the narrative ending then restarting in the middle of the 'movie'. A change is for the best here though, since while the initial sending up of the TV industry threatens to stagnate at times, Mazure gets his mojo back and goes marvelously nutzoid in the second half of the book. Thoroughly embracing the horror genre and English eccentricity, Mazure throws in a rich misogynist who enjoys cutting women's tongues out, a mad scientist on a Pavlovian kick, a lovesick gorilla and an army of naked part female, part wolf creatures. If anything Welcome Sherazad was even more tailor made for an Antony Balch movie adaptation than Lindy Leigh. Welcome Sherazad is also proof that any novel can be greatly enlivened by the presence of a lovesick gorilla, an army of naked wolf women sure helps as well.

So of the period that you feel as if wearing a cravat and a paisley shirt should be compulsory while reading it. How much passion you have for Swinging London artifacts will dictate whether you want to make Welcome Sherazad your latest Heigh Ho, or give the book the Heave Ho. Still when it comes to dolly birds doing the Bond bit, Miss Sherazad is undoubtedly sexier, wilder and of course groovier than James Moffatt's The Girl from H.A.R.D and Jimmy Sangster's Touchfeather books.

Jamie Dodgers (short story)

 

The latest issue of Penicillin magazine contains my short story 'Jamie Dodgers' in which the memory of a sexy sea siren called Jamie threatens to disrupt an amateur dramatics group...a cure for rabies is also involved. Penicillin 222 can be downloaded here, or alternatively you can read the story below.  Don't have nightmares.
 

Jamie Dodgers by Gavin Whitaker.

The Village Hall had seen better days, smelling of the unholy threesome that was damp, dust and digestive biscuits, still no one but Nigel Bagshaw seemed to notice. It was 1974 and amateur dramatics group 'The Players most Priestley' had spent weeks transforming the space into a 1940s airfield: sandbags stacked like graves, a mock Spitfire wing splintered from balsa, and a battered wireless crooning Vera Lynn between scenes. Tonight was the premiere of the play "The Brave who did not Bend” their earnest tribute to those who fought in the second world war, penned and directed by Aubrey Hargreaves, who had never forgiven history for rejecting him before he could even play a role in it. Aubrey had been eighteen in 1940, slender and sharp-featured, with a high voice that commanded second looks. When he presented himself at the recruiting office, full of patriotic fervour and a secret longing to be among men in uniform, the medical officer had taken one look, and said "I'm afraid you're too light on your feet for the service, old chap" sarcastically adding "why don't you try to help the war effort in another way, like taking up knitting".

What an absolute bitch, Aubrey had privately thought, his papers had been marked “unfit" and Aubrey knew why. The army didn’t want men who loved other men, didn't want queens even if they were willing to die for their King. The rejection burned deeper than any wound he might have earned in battle; resulting in a lifetime of directing village plays, mainly about young men in uniform and the heroism Aubrey was never allowed to share.

However Nigel Bagshaw—postman by day, thespian by delusion—carried his own ghosts from a different era. In 1960, during national service his commanding officer, Captain Ivor Dodgers, had made his life a living hell: endless punishments, verbal floggings, and nights scrubbing decks until his hands bled. All these years later Nigel could still hear Dodgers' voice bellowing "get on parade, you great big, useless turd", "dirty sod, you'll go blind doing that or end up in a mental asylum" and "Bagshaw, you're only fit to sweep the bleeding streets". The Captain’s paranoia had grown worse after he began to suspect his young wife, Edna, of infidelity. Dodgers fixated on Nigel, convinced the quiet, watchful rating was secretly rogering Edna. Nigel knew better. He had never had the pleasure of Edna —never even been alone with her—but he had overheard the whispers in the barracks, seen the knowing smirks. Edna was a right goer, a bloody nymphomaniac in fact. She had been entertaining two, sometimes three of the other lads at once, wild, laughing matings in the married quarters while Dodgers was away on exercises. Nigel kept silent, but silence was enough to feed the Captain’s jealousy. That dark, stormy night off the Cornish coast, when Dodgers insisted on he and Nigel setting out to sea in a small boat—just the two of them—Nigel was certain the Captain meant to kill him. He saw murder in Dodgers’ eyes, felt it in the way the man’s hand lingered near his coat pocket. Nigel struck first. As thunder cracked and waves lashed the hull, he seized a rusted fish knife, tackled the Captain from behind and slit Dodgers’ throat in one ragged stroke. Blood sprayed hot across Dodgers' face, black in the lightning flashes—thick arterial ropes that painted the gunwale and dripped into the sea in steaming ribbons. Nigel heaved the twitching body overboard, watching it vanish into the churning foam. He panicked; he hadn't really thought this through at all. Would the sea keep his secret like a trusted mistress? or would Dodgers' corpse incriminate him by washing up on shore a few days later? Suddenly the sea turned red around the small boat, multiple crimson bubbles rising to the surface as something feasted below. Sharks? wondered Nigel...no surely we don't have sharks in Cornwall, perhaps Piranhas...no, don't be such a silly sod, Nigel told himself. He had to know what beast or beasts had come to his aid, then he saw them clearly for the first time, horror set in as shapes rose from the depths. Several sea sirens, their scales iridescent and jagged, swarming around Dodgers' corpse. Blimey, they're starkers, Nigel thought, totally bleeding naked. Sure, he'd seen a girlie magazine before, even copped a feel of Doreen in the back row of the local fleapit, but these birds were something else. Truth be told, Nigel had never seen a woman totally naked before, nor had he seen a woman tear into male flesh with needle teeth, ripping it in bloody chunks. Nor had he seen a woman tear a liver free, shred lungs into pink froth, or pluck out a still-beating heart and devour it in glistening bites.
I clearly still have allot to learn about women, Nigel thought.

A mixture of fear and arousal overcame him, as could only be expected from a man who suddenly found himself surrounded by naked birds who were also bloodthirsty cannibals. He ran to the opposite side of the boat and retched into the sea. Then he saw her—perched on a jagged rock amid the storm. Her pale skin glistening with saltwater sheen, shoulder-length, reddish-brown hair with soft curls framing her face, a strong jaw line, full breasts heaving with each sultry breath, nipples hardened against the cold wind. Her curves were hypnotic, hips flaring wide in invitation, the promise of ecstasy and ruin.
'My name is Jamie'... he could hear her seductively say that in his head, though he wasn't sure if she had actually spoken those words in person. Her eyes like shattered peridot fixed on him, lips curved in a lascivious smile that parted to reveal sharp, pearl-white teeth. She called out in a voice that pierced the gale: “Murderer… Murderer… Murderer…”
Over and over, her laughter mingling with the sirens’ feeding frenzy below. Her throaty, erotic moan stirred unwelcome heat in Nigel’s loins even as terror gripped the rest of him. He rowed away, leaving behind a bloodbath of apocalyptic proportions, but the sea siren's accusation haunted him through the decades. He imagined her whispering to him in rain-slicked streets, saw her nude form flickering in steam-fogged pub windows, then there was the odd looks he'd gotten from birds over the years, when, during sex, he cried out the name 'Jamie'. The memory of her full breasts threatened his sanity, thoughts of her hips grinding in slow, teasing circles, mentally branding him anew each time with a mix of lust and dread.

The Village Hall was packed. From behind the stage curtains, Aubrey smiled, peeking at a large crowd, some members of the audience had even travelled from as far away as Scunthorpe to see the play. There were old men in blazers pinned with tarnished medals, their wives in wartime coats frayed at the hems, grandchildren fidgeting about, brought against their will for “a bit of culture.” Aubrey hoped that an encounter with amateur dramatics might steer the younger members of the audience away from watching too much television, mugging old ladies or taking up glue sniffing. Backstage, Nigel tunelessly wailed away in an infuriating and loud fashion, for not only did he fancy himself as a masterful actor, but he also thought he had what it took to be a great singer as well. "Mark my words, one day I'll be as big as Barry Blue and Zenda Jacks" was something told to all of the Players most Priestley, and believed by none of them.
"I bet you didn't know I could sing like what they do in opera, Aubrey" said Nigel as he walked past the fey, limp wristed theatre director, not waiting for a reply.
"Well, I sure knew you weren't a fucking actor" Aubrey muttered to himself.
The lights dimmed. The curtain shuddered upward. The play demanded atmosphere, and Aubrey was determined to give his audience some showbiz razzmatazz. To evoke a battleground, the Players Most Priestley had borrowed a fog machine from a shuttered pantomime troupe. Aubrey had also been delighted when in the basement of the Village Hall they had discovered a sealed military drum, the perfect prop for his play. Unbeknownst to the Players most Priestley was the fact that the sealed drum contained a deadly gas, the discarded result of a long forgotten attempt by the government to find a cure for rabies.

Onstage, Squadron Leader Alistair Thorne (Nigel in a cardboard helmet) built to his big speech about a fallen comrade, which in the context of the play he had come to deliver to the truelove of Thorne's decreased friend. Nigel had rehearsed the words in his head many times over “They found him at first light, expired on the battlefield. Poor Digby. He was killed by a German paratrooper". Nigel's eyes flicked to the audience, anticipating the big dramatic moment in the play when they discovered Digby's tragic fate. Nigel scanned the dim rows. There—third row centre, amid the sea of grey hair and horn rimmed spectacles—a figure that shouldn’t be there. Pale skin glistening like wet kelp, her body arched mockingly in a pose of raw seduction, full breasts thrust forward, nipples erect and begging for his touch, dripping with an otherworldly allure that made Nigel’s pulse throb with forbidden desire. Eyes glowing faintly green. Jamie. Totally bare...the shameless hussy...worse still she was dripping water all over the floor of the Village Hall. Jamie leaned forward, lips parting to deliver the words only he could hear: Murderer… Murderer…Murderer—her voice a husky whisper that caressed his ears like velvet, promising pleasures that would drown him in ecstasy. Nigel’s throat seized. Panic flooded him, the storm’s chill resurfacing in his veins, mingled with a shameful arousal. Then, fighting against what the audience assumed was stage fright, Nigel said the words...“They found him at first light, expired on the battlefield. Poor Digby. He was killed by a German parrot.”

Laughter erupted, sharp and unwelcome from an audience hit directly in the funny bone with the mental image of an evil parrot, driven by Nazi ideology, squawking 'Heil Hitler' before flying kamikaze style at poor Digby. An elderly, former wing commander rose in his seat, shaking his fist at the stage, “What disrespectful rot this is!” But Nigel stared, transfixed, as Jamie’s nude form dissolved into shadow, her whisper lingering: Murderer... Murderer… Murderer—her imagined touch ghosting over his skin, fingers trailing fire down his spine. Nigel stumbled around the stage, accidentally knocking over the sealed drum. Yellow-green vapour billowed from the stage, thick and oily, cascading into the stalls like a tidal wave of rot. At first, the crowd thought it theatrical flair, as they'd come to expect from Aubrey Hargreaves. Then Mrs. Prudence Protheroe in row three convulsed, her spine arching until her vertebrae cracked audibly. She clawed at her throat, nails gouging bloody furrows through wrinkled skin. Her mouth gaped in a silent scream before a geyser of blood-streaked bile erupted, followed by her stomach and intestines—slick, glistening ropes that slithered out in pulsating loops, splattering hot across her neighbours’ laps. Her husband beside her inhaled the gas and his face began to melt: skin bubbling and sliding off in translucent sheets, exposing raw muscle that twitched and wept crimson. In blind agony he dug his fingers into his own cheeks, ripping downward in long strips, peeling his face away to the bone in wet, sucking sounds, teeth clacking as the lower jaw hung by threads of tendon. Panic ignited. The former wing commander clutched his abdomen as his intestines burst through the wall of his belly in a sudden, wet explosion—coils of purple-grey bowel spilling over his medals in steaming heaps, blood pumping in rhythmic spurts from severed vessels. An old woman nearby shrieked as her eyes liquefied and burst, thick yellow fluid mixed with blood spraying in arcs; she raked her nails across her own scalp, tearing away hair and skin in bloody handfuls until skull gleamed white. Children screamed as beloved grandparents disemboweled themselves—fingers plunging into softening abdomens to haul out livers and spleens in quivering masses, arteries severed and fountaining dark red across the seats. Faces disintegrated under frantic claws: eyelids shredded, lips torn to ragged ribbons, tongues lolling in shredded mouths as victims tried to scream through collapsing throats. The floor became a slaughterhouse —gallons of blood, bile, and liquefied organs mingling into a viscous lake that lapped at ankles. Bodies slumped half-eviscerated, ribs cracked open like wet cages, hearts still fluttering weakly amid exposed cavities. Thinking fast, Aubrey made for a cardboard box containing gas masks for the play, distributing them to the Players most Priestley as they scarpered around backstage. Aubrey then yanked the fire alarm; it wailed like a siren’s call. The curtain went down, trapping the audience in a fog-shrouded tomb. By the time the fire brigade breached the doors, forty lay dead, bodies twisted in grotesque tableaux: torsos flayed open, entrails draped like garlands, faces reduced to glistening skulls half-covered in hanging meat, pools of blood and viscera inches deep across the floorboards.

Hours later, amid the flashing lights and the stench of death, Nigel sat on the edge of the stage, gas mask in his lap, nearly catatonic. Over and over he repeated: “German Parrot… German Parrot…Murderer....Murderer...Murderer”.
The siren...her call...Nigel's memory returned to that night, recalling details in more clarity than ever before. Long forgotten, long hidden memories. Captain Dodgers had brought aboard a crate of rusted drums marked with hazard symbols, the leftovers from an attempt to find a cure for rabies. Dodgers had taken a backhander to ensure they met with an illegal, deep-sea disposal.
“Get rid of them, do it bloody well now Bagshaw,” Dodgers had barked. “No bleeding questions. No bleeding records.”
They had heaved most overboard, the heavy drums vanishing into the black water with hollow splashes. Neither man could have suspected that their actions would cause gross offense to a sisterhood of sea sirens. Nigel, convinced the whole exercise was a ruse to isolate and murder him, had waited until only one drum remained. Then he had struck—slitting Dodgers’ throat in one ragged stroke. In the panic of escape, Nigel had forgotten about the final drum. He rowed to shore, hid it in the basement of the Village Hall under a pile of old hymnals, and buried the memory of the drum as deep as the captain’s body. He never thought of the drum again—until tonight. Why tonight, of all nights had Jamie and Dodgers decided to haunt his memories. It was if Dodgers had risen from the grave to thwart Nigel's acting career...aided and abetted by that trollop from the sea.

A young constable named Harris approached cautiously, notebook in one hand, a packet of biscuits in the other—pilfered from the neighbouring tea room where Aubrey and the rest of the Players most Priestley were being comforted.
“Mr. Bagshaw? Nigel? Here, have one of these" he produced a packet of Jammie Dodgers "Might settle the nerves a bit.”
He held out the biscuit, red jam glistening in the middle like fresh blood.
Jammie...Jamie...Dodgers!!!
The names collided in Nigel’s shattered mind, the captain’s bloodied throat flashing before him, the secret he had kept about Edna’s real lovers, Jamie’s naked accusation rising with it—her body writhing in his visions. Murderer… Murderer…With a guttural cry that echoed through the ruined hall, Nigel lunged. His fist drove upward in a savage arc, connecting squarely with the policeman’s groin. Harris doubled over instantly, a high-pitched wheeze escaping him as he crumpled to the floor, knees drawn up in fetal agony, hands clutching protectively over his bollocks. His mind overwhelmed by fears of never being able to achieve fatherhood. Nigel didn’t look back. He vaulted from the Village Hall, shoving past stunned paramedics, and vanished into the fog-shrouded night. The government inquiry predictably covered up the rusted drum and it's deadly contents. Nigel was never found. Three nights later, on a moonless tide, a lone figure walked the shingle at Priestley Cove. Nigel, barefoot and coatless, waded into the black water until it reached his waist, his chest, his throat. The cold no longer bit; it welcomed him like an old friend. Jamie rose first, naked and radiant, her voluptuous form undulating with predatory grace—breasts full and swaying, nipples taut with hunger, drawing him in with a siren’s primal allure. Her sisters circled beneath like pale shadows, their own nude bodies twisting in eager anticipation, tails flicking sprays of foam. She smiled—no longer accusing, but ravenous, her tongue darting out to taste the air, lips plump and parted in a moan of desire. They had waited decades for this meal, patient as the sea itself. Dodgers had been an appetiser, snatched too quickly. Nigel was the main course: guilt-marinated, tenderised by years of torment. He did not struggle as webbed claws raked his clothes away and needle teeth sank into living flesh. Skin tore in long strips from his back and thighs; muscle parted with wet, sucking sounds as chunks were ripped free and devoured. Blood poured into the water in thick clouds as arteries were severed—femoral, brachial, carotid—each bite sending fresh gouts spiraling into the dark. His abdomen was split open, intestines hauled out in steaming ropes and fought over, liver torn free in a hot, slippery mass. Ribs cracked like kindling as they burrowed to the heart, still beating, still trying to pump what little blood remained. Jamie’s mouth latched onto his throat, her breasts pressing hot against his chest in a final, twisted embrace, her body writhing against him in ecstatic feeding, the line between consumption and carnal union blurring in the bloody froth. He was worth the wait.