…WALKERS
Gary Brandner
Fawcett Gold Medal Books, 1980
ISBN: 0-449-14319-8
Gary Brandner hit it moderately big with The Howling, though these days it’s just a side-note to the classic Joe Dante film. The Howling turned Brandner into a horror author, before that he mostly penned tawdry airport-type novels, work in the mystery magazine scene, and the wonderfully weird Big Brain series of Men’s Adventure novels. Which features a man with an exposed brain on the covers, but sadly not in the books. He pretty much stuck to churning out horror until he died in 2013, but never quite hit it as big as he did with werewolves.
The Howling trilogy is his most popular and well known and is probably his best chunk of work. The rest of his horror books are usually centered around one singular interesting idea with the horror spun off from there, like here in The Brain Eaters it’s a mysterious illness that turns people into maniac killers. In Cameron’s Closet it's a child's imaginary friend that isn’t so imaginary and also pretty evil. Or The Boiling Pooling where a housing development literally has a pool from hell. With a good hook he’d then lay down a roller coaster pulp horror tale.
He’s an underrated author with a professional, no-frills writing style that makes the pages fly by. He’s not top-shelf when it comes to 80s horror paperbacks, you’ll never mistake him for a King or a Straub. But at least his version of The Howling II wasn’t subtitled: Your Sister is a Werewolf. But then again it didn’t have Christopher Lee in it either, so I guess that’s a bit of a draw.
In ...Walkers (yes, it does have the ellipses in the title) Brandner spins a yarn about a woman Joanna who lives in a groovy apartment complex and has a paperback-type love triangle with two guys (one maybe a psychic) and oh yeah, she’s supposed to be DEAD! After she dies in the pool and is brought back to life, death seems to be after her. Death in the form of “Walkers,” folks that don’t seem right, in fact they already seemed to be dead when they die. Call them a cousin to zombies. They are the people who were traveling up with Joanna toward the light and resent her for going back and being a living person again. Which is a bit petty of them, I think. So, it’s a book full of near-misses and close calls with these Walkers trying to hunt Joanna down and take her with them. Naturally she doesn’t want to die so with the help of a friendly doctor and her boy toys she has to figure a way to rid herself of her “should-be-dead-ness.”
Make no mistake, all these characters are fairly “stock,” the increasingly scared woman, the steady boyfriend, the wishy-washy psychic, the kindly and curious doctor. But Brandner does give each character enough little personality, quirks and foibles to shake things up a bit. This is a book written to entertain you on a surface level, much like a television show. Or since this was the era of the T.V. movie (which this book was turned into) where the characters are there to act out the plot and get on with it. Which can be refreshing in this day in age of bloated doorstop novels of slow-moving plots, deeply introspective protagonists and multi-book series. It’s a nice little slice of non-complicated horror.
Brandner lays this all out fairly smooth over the two hundred something pages. It’s interesting these days with the idea of zombies being fully formed (and fully George A. Romero) but there was a time when it was a lot looser in the media. It’s obviously hard to not think of these Walkers as zombies, but if you were to recommend this novel on the basis of it being a zombie novel, I’d imagine you’d be disappointed. Since there’s no apocalypse or cities of the living dead. Zombie-type monsters are something that Brander went back to a few times in Quintana Roo but with a Indiana Jones twist and The Brain Easters with a virus twist. It was clearly something he had stuck in his mind. The HORROR element of the book is definitely more the mood and spookiness kind with little gory details, don’t expect splatterpunk scenes which is also something fairly common in Brander’s work.
...Walkers came out in 1980 but it feels fully funky-70s through a through. You can practically feel the shag carpet, smell the Aqua Velva and taste the fondu. If you have a love of the 70’s you’ll have fun just picture all the wood-paneling and the gas-guzzling cars. The horror paperback market was still ramping up in 1980 and Brandner was one of the ones leading the pack. I’ve personally never been disappointed by a Gary Brander novel, but like everything in life and art you have to adjust your expectations with each passing day or page. In the right mood you’ll have a blast with ...Walkers and you might have to keep an eye out for any weird zombies following you around.
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.