PLASMID
Jo Gannon and Robert Knight
Star, 1980
ISBN: 0-352-306831
Movie novelizations are gateway books I think. I can flashback to being a younger version of myself and reading Face/Off by Clark Charlton or Robert Tine’s Demolition Man during class or on a long car ride and desperately trying to picture the whole film in my head to stave off boredom. They were a transitional stage between, say comic books to “real” novels. They’re sort of dismissed as “hack” work, but translating a screenplay into full text seems pretty challenging to me. But they can suffer in comparison to the film running in your head. Prickly problem. So, what’s the solution?
A novelization of a movie that was never made.
Plasmid was apparently supposed to be a motion picture by the British company Salon Pictures, the screenplay being written by Jo Gannon, which obviously never got made. The British didn’t make many full-on horror flicks in the 80s, so I wonder if it was cold feet or just a classic case of funding that prevented it from being filmed. It must have gotten close enough to production to warrant the commission of a novelization by Robert Knight by Star Books. With no film to compare it too you’ll just have to roll one in your head as you read.
Like a lot of novelizers Robert Knight is a pseudonym for Dr. Christopher Evans who wrote for medical publications and also did some horror anthologies with titles like Mind at Bay and Mind in Chains. Plasmid seems to be one of his only foray into the novelization world, the other being the Joe Dante classic Innerspace. He also had a fairly long side-career as a science fiction writer with other pseudonym work with series like Star Pirates, Hood’s Army and various stand-alones. On top of that he had ties to the world of British film, being the technical advisor on the TV show The Tomorrow People. Plus he was friends with J.G. Ballard and he was partly responsible for the inspection of Ballard’s novel Crash and inspired a character. The varied life a paperback writer.
So, how does a man of science do with a tale of a rampaging science experiment gone wrong? Pretty good and pretty gross. The Fairfield Institute is near a small town on the coast of England, you know the set-up, they are performing some very valuable experiments in turning convicts into killing machines. Unfortunately for the characters in the book (fortunately for us) one of these prisoners escapes into the sewers and is now a super-strong mutant-man. Hence the book's (great) tag-line: “They took to the sewers in a Holocaust of Horror...pray you’ll never be this scared.” Now that’s how you sell a book.
We follow radio determined newswoman Paula Scott as she drives around in her radio-news wagon and investigates. All the while the government and the fairly evil Dr. Fraser tries to cover up the mutant-man and the resulting blood-baths. The mutant who now can’t come out into the daylight because of the experiment, so all his murdering must be done by the dark of night and don’t forget the infecting. Soon the little town has a small pack of zombies in their sewers. The mutant attacks a minorly gorey with a lot of the limb-ripping a such done “off-screen.” I wonder if that’s a hold over from the screenplay and worries about the film’s rating or Dr. Evans personal preference.
The novel is part mutants on a rampage but a lot of it is dedicated to the non-mutant plight, government conspiracies, science-stuff, and little snippets of the towns life before their deaths. The story definitely flows in a film way, the chapters run by basically switching between giving us exposition and then giving us a little monster-attack. Dr. Evans obviously knew his science bits, because they all at least sounded plausible. The characters were all at least a little rounded, with Paula Scott being a fun protagonist who is a bit of an archetype but enough of a person to care about. The side characters (and victims) are fairly distinct from each other and some of the border on interesting. Plus the book is fairly short, say 98 minutes or so.
It’s not quite the horrific tale that the cover would leave you to believe, but this a solidly fun book if you are in the right mood. If you're like me and are always on the hunt for the paperback version of a B-Movie from the 80s this is literally that. It’s soaked in the 80s, with glam-rock stars, the radio, mutants, cold war paranoia, bad-guy government types, journalist heroes, and cats named Fido.
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.