Book Review: GILA!

“The cloud welled up, expanding, towering, looming, blossoming. Up, up, up into the shape of a mushroom. The wind surged, screaming and sweeping outward in a circle of total destruction. Plants withered, animals died, stone and sand melted and fused.

The wind of destruction and change spread.

Then, abruptly, the destruction lessened, decreased. The radiation had already seeped, changing what it touched.

And on the fringes of that wide circle, the lizards watched.”

From Gila! by Kathryn Ptacek (as Les Simons, 1981).

Dr. Kate Dwyer, lead herpetologist at the University of Albuquerque, has no idea why she's been summoned to a clandestine meeting with the governor of New Mexico. But Dwyer gets an explanation quick enough when she's shown the charred remnants of what appears to be a lizard's tail; most likely from a Gila monster.

But why all the hush-hush hubub? Well, this dismembered appendage makes no sense, biologically speaking, due to its abnormal size. And if you extrapolate from what's left, the rest of the critter would be some fifteen to twenty feet long. Which is impossible, right? Wrong. Dead wrong.

For even though Dr. Dwyer doesn't know what's really going on as she plunges into this nigh inexplicable mystery, the reader sure does. And do we ever! See, some thirty years after all those atomic bomb tests near White Sands, all that released radiation has spawned something both ridiculously deadly and deadly ridiculous -- a strain of giant Gila monster:

“Thickset giant lizards, their orange-and-black-banded hides, crawled on fat legs down the main street of the fairgrounds. The rounded muzzles and flattened heads swung from side to side, while yellow eyes glared malevolently in the gloom. The tails, fat and blunt and heavy, dragged behind the mammoth creatures, leaving a trench of crushed dirt and grass. Greenish-yellow ooze dripped from the open mouths, mouths filled with deadly sharp teeth.” (From Gila!, 1981).

And not just one, but a whole herd (knot? gaggle?) of these deadly beasts that are currently laying waste to a good chunk of southern New Mexico, leaving no survivors at a wrecked diner and a mysterious bus accident (-- from which the tail was pulled), just carnage and half-eaten body parts, which only deepens this mystery for those trying to unravel it.

Thus, will Dr. Dwyer discover the truth and formulate a plan to stop these rampaging lizards before it's too late? Well, that all kinda depends on whether or not she can stop having sex with an old flame long enough to be bothered with finding a solution. No. Really. It's true.

Kathryn Ptacek

Born in Omaha, Nebraska, but raised in Albuquerque, New Mexico, Gila! was author Kathryn Ptacek's first novel -- published under the pseudonym of Les Simons, and it really and truly is amazing. Ludicrously so.

“Given that the world of publishing can be somewhat wacky, topsy-turvy, and utterly perplexing, Gila! was the third novel I sold, but was the very first one to show up in print,” said Ptacek (Author’s Foreword, Gila!, 2012 edition). The book was penned by ‘Les Simons’ -- my dad’s name was Lester, but he was called Les, so this was a tip of my writer’s hat to him, and, well, Simons was nice and s-s-sibilant.” (For those unaware, that was a joke; as sibilant means something phonetically said with a hiss.)

Honestly less The Giant Gila Monster (1959), from which the majority of the art for this post was pilfered, and more THEM! (1953) or Night of the Lepus (1972), plot-wise, this tale is nothing more than a good old fashioned Monster Movie; and taken on those terms, this thing is an absolute riot.

“At the time (of the early 1980s), the folks at New American Library were publishing what we called ‘big bug’ books, even though the critters weren’t all bugs or huge,” said Ptacek. “But they were out of control -- nature gone amok! Leeches. Slugs. Bats. Crabs … When I started reading them, I thought, hey, I can write one of these. It would be fun!”

But why a giant Gila monster? Well, “The very first thing I thought about as my ‘big bug’ was Gila monsters,” recalled Ptacek. “As it happens, when I was only four or five, I went to the Albuquerque Zoo with a kindergarten class. We saw lots of animals, ate lots of junk food that probably made us sick, and the only thing I could talk about, and indeed, the only thing I remember from that excursion, was the Gila monster lounging on a flat rock. I don’t remember any cute fuzzy animals … I just remember this incredibly striking black and orange lizard.”

Ptacek then concluded the origins of her book, saying, “Of course, because I lived in New Mexico, and all those intriguing yet cheesy movies of the 1950s and ‘60s had overly-large critters in them, all mutated by -- EVERYONE SAY IT TOGETHER! -- radiation! And, yes, New Mexico was home to the Trinity Site, where the first atomic bomb was tested. How could I not connect the two?”

To me, the author just has an uncanny knack for sketching out disposable characters, with just enough flesh on them to get a reader invested, only to tear each and every one of them asunder as they're ground-up and dismembered by the rampaging Gilas' powerful jaws, shredded by their poisonous fangs, or just flattened underneath their feet and massive tails:

“The boy shrieked over and over as giant jaws closed about his torso, snapping him in the middle as if his body were a twig. Maria watched in mute horror as the creature raised its head, Skippy’s arms flailing. She watched the blood drip from the nightmare’s jaw, heard the crunch of teeth against bone. Bits of warm flesh slipped from the mouth, dripping down on the bed and on the girl, who was frozen to the spot. An overwhelming rotting odor flooded the room and she gagged, one small hand over her nose and mouth. Maria tried to cry, but there were no tears. She began to pray as the orange-and-black creature opened its mouth, what remained of Skippy’s body sliding out. The nightmare reached for her.” (From Gila!, 1981).

I'm telling you, Ptacek gleefully paints the mayhem and its aftermath with all the restraint of a Mars Attacks trading card. And I, for one, relished each descriptive paragraph of people being relentlessly and methodically masticated into mulch:

“The creature’s head reached down and picked up the man, whose screams of agony pierced Julia’s skull. The lizard chewed sideways and the man’s body slowly disappeared, as gobbets of wet flesh dripped unnoticed from the reptile’s mouth. Blood seeped down the creature’s chest, staining the beady hide red. The dirt beneath the reptile was crimson and wet.” (From Gila!, 1981).

But then, in between the lizard attacks, the author stumbles a bit and trips over a fairly asinine concurrent plot to stop them that isn't helped by the "Dear Playgirl Magazine, I didn't think this could ever happen to me, but, I was a lonely herpetology professor at a small New Mexico college" subplot of Dwyer hooking up with an old flame named Chato, a Native American.

I shit you not, this thing was bluer than those old Monarch adaptations of Konga (1961), Gorgo (1961) and Reptillicus (1961).

Seriously. There'd be a lizard attack somewhere; they'd get there too late; they'd survey the carnage; they'd go back to the hotel; they'd say, Wow, that was really terrible; shrug; and then hop into bed and knock some plaster off the adobe walls:

“She let her long dark lashes fall over her blue eyes, and she could hear him gasp. He growled and pressed his mouth down on hers. Then his hands were moving all over her soft body, fanning fires like those across the prairie. His hands were skilled, exacting, and made her feel so good. She cried out, demanding that he come into her, and with one fluid motion he entered her and thrust deep. She wiggled under him and laughed as delicious feelings rolled over her. Over and over she was lifted high on this wave of sensation, until at last, with a muted cry, [lets just say he finished].” (From Gila!, 1981)

I wish I was exaggerating. But not even a little, am I, as this scenario is then repeated almost verbatim again. And again. Aaaaaaand again -- with each encounter more absurdly inappropriate than the last. (I kept envisioning Ken Tobey teasing Mara Corday's breasts, trying to tune in Tokyo during these scenes. This … did not compute.)

Thankfully, the incongruity between the carnage and the carnal only adds another layer of  delirium to the whole thing. And honestly, it pales when stacked up against the mounting stupidity of the conspiracy surrounding the governor's slow reaction to this crisis.

And like with The Giant Claw (1957), with the bird, the bird as big as a battleship, the author gets kinda stuck on one solitary metaphor to announce the Gila monster's impending attack: a leaking tire (-- though the one time the hissing actually was just a flat tire was kinda funny.)

Now, I also have very little patience with phonetic spelling to convey a yokel's accent, with Governor Bubba being the absolute worst offender. Still, my only real beef with the book was due to the fictionalized incompetence of the New Mexico National Guard, which denied me, and you, a battle between a flock of giant Gila monsters and a column of armored tanks. Fie and Pfui on that, says I!

Aerial bombings with napalm prove just as ineffective due to the lizard's burrowing ability. And after laying waste to the New Mexico State Fair (my favorite part) and flattening an Air Force base, the giant lizards continue their relentless march north, drawing a bead on Albuquerque itself:

“The Gila monster reached its massive head down and began chewing on the bodies at its feet, pawing through them as though searching for a choice morsel. Legs, arms, and torsos disappeared into the cavernous maw. Disjointed bones, flesh still clinging to them, were scattered. When it was finished with its meal, the lizard crawled on, the weight of its body and fat tail pushing corpses flat into the ground. Some flesh adhered to the beady skin and was dragged along, becoming coated with bloody mud.” (From Gila!, 1981).

And with conventional weapons failing on all fronts (-- those tanks should’ve been given a second chance, dammit, and I would've loved to see what a bazooka round would do against the lizard's hide), our heroine comes up with a possible solution -- if anyone is still listening to her. And just like with many B-movies of old, just when you think it's all over, it isn't.

Look. All I know is when I got to the last few chapters of this book, I didn't want to read them. I simply did not want this insanity to end. Nay. I wanted this rampage to continue on indefinitely. And I sort of got my wish, as the last page is a perfect set-up for a sequel that, alas, hasn't happened yet.

At a brisk 160 pages, this was a quick read that had me barking out loud with laughter with nearly every page turned. The Simons Signet paperback is long out of print and has gotten terribly expensive since I got mine -- if you can even find a hard copy.

The good news is, you can now purchase a digital version on Amazon listed under the author's real name dirt cheap. But fair warning, when you get into the later chapters the digital edition, it appears the proof reader slacked off and it's plagued with spelling errors that tend to derail things a bit, just when things were really getting good. Not so in the print version. 

Whichever version you choose, get to reading Gila! as soon as possible for a gruesomely good time. Trust me.

Originally published on June 3, 2014, at Micro-Brewed Reviews.