The Flesh Eaters
L.A. Morse
Warner Books, 1979
ISBN: 0-446-82633-2
Hungry? I got a little history nugget for you. Somewhere back in the 16th Century there was a dude named Sawney Bean who had a bunch of pals, let’s call ‘em a clan who had some peculiar dining habits. See, they were cannibals. The story goes that they supposedly killed AND ate over 1000 people. Seems a bit like gluttony to me. Eventually they ate enough people for King Henry VI to notice and he ruined their dinner plans.
Sound familiar? Well the story became something of a Medieval Urban Legend. So much so now it’s in question if Sawney actually existed but either way he’s had an impact. He’s almost ground zero for the “travelers meeting deranged country folk” trope. Without the legend there’s no Deliverance, no Hills Have Eyes, no Just Before Dawn, no Hills Have Eyes 2. Without Sawney there would have never been a flashback from the point of view of a dog in the history of cinema.
L.A. Morse had a fairly brief literary career, appearing out of nowhere with The Flesh Eaters in 1979, he followed that up with a trio of hardboiled (maybe overboiled) mystery fiction with The Old Dick, Sleaze and The Big Enchilada. Most of his work has the blistering action/gore of a writer having a good time behind the keys. Outside of The Flesh Eaters, I think Morse had his tongue in his cheek a bit. Especially when you take in consideration his work outside of fiction when he wrote two awesome video guide books Video Trash and Treasures 1 and Video Trash and Treasure 2 where he reviews a lot of the low-budget action, sci-fi and horror movies that filled the video store shelves. He clearly had some love for the sleazier/campy side of life.
With The Flesh Eaters, Morse is reveling in the sleaze. Not a disgusting turn is left untaken. The book throws you into the hellish world of the 15th century. All the romanticism is thrown out the window like it was in a slop bucket. We follow Sawney as he realizes his purpose in life to in fact kill and eat people. He’s into it. He’s REAL into it, if you catch my drift. He escapes the Edinburgh and takes to the caves with his equally crazy bride and once they have a kid Sawney figures out if there were a bunch more of them, they could cause more damage and we’re off and running. There’s a dumb sheriff doing dumb sheriff things as the town begins to realize that travelers are going missing. Talk of demons, Priests called in and then finally the King gets a posse together and they go into the woods hunting the hunters.
What follows is a buffet of some of the roughest stuff I have ever read in a mass-produced (with a Frank Franzetta cover, no less) paperback. Seriously, only strong stomachs for this one. Morse pushes the boundaries to the point where you think he can’t push any longer and then he pushes it some more. Gore, mutilations, gross sex, gore, despicable people, gore, and more gore is in the story for you if you open this one up. Morse is a strong writer and I can see the hardboiled-fiction influence in The Flesh Eaters. It’s got a fairly straightforward “just the facts, ma’am,” style of storytelling and a faux “based on a true story,” which is setting you up the way the opening narration of The Texas Chain Saw Massacre does, to make you sweat just a little bit more.
Books this hardcore were few and far between at the time this came out and it’s easy to see why gorehounds of the time held this in high regard and passed it around because it out splatterpunks most splatterpunk books. It’s a slim book full of a lot of stock characters to get killed but it never bogs down and Morse does make the terrible/gross things that Sawney and his clan do fully interesting throughout. It’s a shame Morse didn’t try his hand at horror again afterward.
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.