When picking these old paperbacks from the depths of my collection, it's always a bit of a gamble. For many of them, the cover is the best thing about them,
This one is as good as the cover.
When building works uncover the tomb of an ancient evil, it rises to spread terror on the populace. lots of shreddies meet their doom and the evil fetishises endlessly over our brave hero's girlfriend.
There are some strange narrative choices in this book, particularly the fact that in all sections from the point of view of the ancient evil creature, it refers to humans as Homos. Even when the book was written, that was odd.
This is better than many books of this type despite that. The prose is workmanlike and packed full of typos (I'm guessing spellcheck didn't exist back then), but the story stays mostly coherent, and once its internal logic is in place it sticks to it.
The characters are one dimensional, but that's one dimension more than the characters in something like Cat's Cradle that I read a few months back. The romance between Robert Welman and the beautiful Jane Kelly borders on the saccharine but from the wrong direction. I don't mean that travelling from sour through to sweet to saccharine it stops short, I mean, whatever is on the other side of saccharine...
The sex scenes are laughably bad. The humour is hit and miss. The final showdown and the sting in the tail are well delivered (mostly).
One thing I did appreciate was that the characters didn't instantly go along with the supernatural explanations. The writer does make them argue against it until they have no choice but to believe.
It is definitely a product of its time with some of the attitudes and stereotypes on display, but I can ride with those.
Overall it's a fun piece of hokum. I'm not rushing out to find more of his books, but I'm not disappointed with this one. My expectations weren't high, and it met them easily.
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