ORGY OF THE BLOOD PARASITES
Jack (Kim Newman) Yeovil
Pocket Books, 1994
ISBN: 0-671-85109-8
I don’t know who the hell Jack Yeovil is, but when he’s Kim Newman he’s a well known film critic, journalist, award-winning novelist, and TV/Film personality that seems to be on a lot of the Blu-Ray’s I own talking about horror and science fiction films. He’s probably best known in the book world for his Anno Dracula series about an alternate history where Van Helsing and the boys failed to kill our friend Dracula at the end of Bram Stoker’s Dracula and then poof the world’s got a lot of vampires. That spawned a metafictional series that blended history with fiction. You might need annotations to get all the references but that’s part of the fun.
Not that Newman limited himself to Draculas, he also has written a ton of very good short stories and stand-alone novels in the horror field. Books with titles like Jago, Famous Monsters, and Bad Dreams. He’s even tackled Sherlock Holmes’s arch enemy Moriarty in The Hound of the D’Urbervilles. But that leaves out the best pure title, a title that really makes you want to read the book.
Let’s all say it as a class: Orgy of the Blood Parasites.
Yes, I can see you drooling now. The title was a bit of a theft from David Cronenberg since it was the working title to the 1975 film Shivers. That’s Kim Newman’s film scholarship coming through. And if you are going to swipe a little something, swipe from one of the best, eh?
Orgy of the Blood Parasites would have made a fantastic B-Horror film in the 80’s. It’s got a lot of great stuff and it runs a long at a brisk pace barely coming up for air once the horror starts. Brian Conners is a professor at a university in England. He’s one of those “cool” professors who has a past in student radicalism and a bad habit of sleeping with students. Bit gross but these were the early 90s after all. He’s got a son and a few female students around him. One of them is involved with a raid on a research facility on campus that does testing on animals, specifically rabbits. The raid goes south because-guess what-they scientists have just created something terrible and the rabbits break out with little evil parasites in them. They break out to get to an orgy, apparently.
So, Brian, his infected and totally violent 8-year-old son plus a bunch of students are blocked in campus as the government sends in total nut-job SWAT/army men to put the place on lockdown. The rabbits of course infect humans and what proceeds is wild body horror as the parasites change and mutate as they infect the students. There’s violent monster-sex, then flesh tears, body parts swell and pop and most importantly once infected they really want to murder everything once infected. There’s plenty of splatterpunk-ish descriptions and a hearty amount of gore that is once the book is finished setting up the characters in the first half. The second half of the book is pure mayhem.
By using the Jack Yeovil pseudonym that he usually used to tie-in novels for properties like Warhammer or the Mad Max-like RPG Dark Future it seems that Newman might have at least been slightly embarrassed by a wondrously trashy novel like Orgy of the Blood Parasites. Coming after his super-thick Stephen King-ish horror novel Jago, it might not have been great career-wise to publish a slim little slice of gore like Orgy of the Blood Parasites. Especially in the early 90s when looks of this length (a little over 200 pages) weren’t really getting published in mass. This was the era of the big ‘ol Dean Koontz books. But Newman knows there’s a place for the thin-paperback horror novel and I appreciate that. Not everything has to be, nor should it be The Stand.
Orgy of the Blood Parasites, which was also published later as Bloody Students, is a great time! It’s jam-packed with fun and ghastly stuff. The set-up might seem a little long in the tooth, but it works beautifully once all the horror starts. Even the set-up is interesting and foreboding enough to keep your interest. Some of the characters are fairly sympathetic and a lot of them are totally reprehensible, so it’s a nice treat or a shame when they get to their gory end. Some of the politics of the day i.e. Brian’s multiple relationships with younger female students are very gross these days but not every “hero” has to be fully likable and that kind of thing was a lot more common in fiction at the time. The only other drawback is reading the book in public, it's a provocative title, after all. You might get some side-eye’d looks.
If you're a fan of movies like Shivers, Night of the Creeps, and Slither this is right up your alley. That’s a small sub-section of horror right there. There’s also a huge debt owed to George A. Romero and Dawn of the Dead and Day of the Dead, especially but does enough of its own thing to be a wonderfully fun read.
Roy Nugen is an award-winning writer, producer, property master, plus actor. He comes from a family of musicians, engineers, wildcatters, cops, lion tamers, and carpet salesmen. Evil Dead II changed his life and he once partied with Lloyd Kaufman.
He has written 15 short films including Bag Full of Trouble, Potboiler, Handle With Care, Death in Lavender, Hole in the Ground, and the feature film Arrive Alive, many of which have played across the country. He has been the property master on 17 short films and 2 feature films.
Roy is also a prolific book reviewer and collector of vintage pulp paperback books. You can read his reviews on his blog Bloody, Spicy Books and multiple magazines including Paperback Fanatic, Hot Lead and Sleazy Reader. He has also written afterwards for novels and for various websites. He lives in the only city that once arrested L. Ron Hubbard with his wife and cats.