The Nest

by Gregory A. Douglas

  THE NEST

  Gregory A. Douglas

  Introduction by

  WILL ERRICKSON

  VALANCOURT BOOKS

  The Nest by Gregory A. Douglas

  Originally published by Zebra Books in 1980

  First Valancourt Books edition 2019

  Copyright © 1980 by the Estate of Eli Cantor

  Introduction © 2019 by Will Errickson

  “Paperbacks from Hell” logo designed by Timothy O’Donnell. © 2017 Quirk Books. Used under license. All rights reserved.

  Published by Valancourt Books, Richmond, Virginia

  http://www.valancourtbooks.com

  All rights reserved. The use of any part of this publication reproduced, transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, or stored in a retrieval system, without prior written consent of the publisher, constitutes an infringement of the copyright law.

  The Publisher has pursued every conceivable line of investigation and inquiry in an attempt to trace the identity of the cover artist and/or the copyright holder of the cover illustration. Anyone with information is requested to please contact the Publisher.

  INTRODUCTION

  Horror paperbacks published by Zebra Books in the 1980s are some of the most highly sought-after collectibles for genre fans who crave the tacky, lurid, ridiculously creepy—in other words, totally awesome—cover art. But what lies within, many a vintage horror reader will tell you, is quite often less than awesome. Zebra saw a buck could be made, and as long as the cover art—usually by artist unknown, as Zebra left out artists’ credits on the copyright page—struck the potential buyer’s eye, that was all that mattered; the story and the style within were simply an afterthought. They went all in on imagery: Skeleton sniffing a flower? Check. Skeleton in slippers and robe? Check. Satanic hologram faces? Check. Fruit sliced up by knives and razors in a crude visual pun? Check. A lone, precisely rendered cockroach beneath a full moon in a dark forest? Oh check. Like those fly-by-night film producers of yore, who had a movie title and poster prepackaged long before some poor soul was hired to write the script, it was all about that image.

  But back to that lone cockroach. This moody, eerie landscape is featured on the cover of Zebra’s 1980 previously unheralded offering, The Nest. This novel is in the grand tradition of “animal attack” fiction, best exemplified by of course the 1974 publication of both Jaws and The Rats, and continued through two more decades. For visceral, unrestrained thrills and chills, I’d put The Nest right up there with those two classic creature horrors. This is one case in which story and cover align in unholy matrimony; it’s the kind of paperback pulp horror that I wish there were more of.

  Written under the pseudonym Gregory A. Douglas by one Eli Cantor, there is a conviction and a dedication to horror, disgust, and despair that one doesn’t often find in the genre, believe it or not. Recall what Stephen King said about Rats author James Herbert in Danse Macabre (1981): “He does not just write, he puts on his combat boots and goes out to assault the reader with horror.” That’s precisely what Douglas/Cantor does in The Nest. No one is spared: not pets, not children, not innocents, not lovers, not the goodhearted. A pall of doom, hinted at in the sickly blue-green of that unholy cover, hovers over the entire tale. This is a good thing.

  Reading Cantor’s obituary in the Sarasota Herald-­Tribune (he died aged 93 in 2006), it’s easy to see why The Nest has a satisfying quality so many other paperback horrors do not. “He was the ultimate renaissance man,” his daughter stated. An award-winning writer going back to the 1940s, Bronx-born Cantor wrote plays, stories, poetry, and musical compositions, studied law and journalism, worked in the First Golden Age of Television, and ran a printing press, and was highly successful and well-­recognized in all these fields for decades before he wrote The Nest. In other words, Cantor lived, and loved, the creative process, and was committed to it. This is not always true of paperback writers, for whom the term “hack” is a bit above the pay-grade. Cantor was simply over-qualified, and his dipping into the sleaze is something we should be thankful for.

  All of these attributes contribute to the success of The Nest, purple prose and all. Like the pulp writers of yore, who wrote for a penny a word, or something probably even less, Cantor goes all out. He works for those pennies, skimping on no detail (like how the insects eat through the victim’s eyes into the brain). Early on, he gives a picture-postcard tour of his Cape Cod town of Yarkie, describing history, houses, buildings, and citizens to ground his tale in the everyday. Does that mean the story is padded and perhaps overlong at 448 pages? Maybe, but the scenes of cockroach horror are so powerful, so merciless, so unforgiving, that they more than make up for Cantor’s overzealousness in other areas.

  And overzealous describes Cantor’s creatures too: if everyday roaches are disgusting, six-inch-long roaches with mandibles of chewing death are immeasurably more disgusting! A swarm of mutated cockroaches has somehow “organized” themselves by some unknowable miracle of evolution into a thinking organism, each individual creature a cell in the larger mass. As a biologist explains to the townspeople who have thus far avoided being roach fodder, “the Yarkie roaches are being directed by what I can only describe as a brain.” Iiiick. (On the attribution page Cantor thanks famed sociobiologist E.O. Wilson for his insights into insect behavior; do you think Cantor sent him an autographed copy of the book? In a perfect world: yes).

  I mentioned purple prose; there are so many amazing passages in The Nest, I will only give you a taste of this ripe and rotting fruit:

  Having partaken of human meat and drunk human blood, the new cockroach breed was ravenous for more... they could not get enough of the human taste and would seek it endlessly, implacably, and with many more victories... She had to live with the inconceivable sight of great cockroaches coating her husband’s face, a vicious, quivering crust of filth... It was intolerable to watch his companion choking to death because cockroaches were crammed in her nose and throat… to see these scurfy roaches drill into the body of his dear and cherished friend…

  How did I discover The Nest, you ask. Why, through the internet, of course, where I stumbled upon its glorious cover art and knew I had to own it (and maybe even read it!) About four years ago I found myself in a Salt Lake City used bookstore, one of those really spectacular ones crammed full of not just used books but also all the dusty ephemera of our pop culture past. Their horror section was overloaded with paperback goodies, and lo and behold, a copy of The Nest was burrowed back in the shelves. When I placed my selections on the counter, the grizzled old owner tapped one nicotine-yellow fingertip on its cover and in his grizzled old smoker’s voice gleefully said, “This book? Scare the shit outta ya!” (I do hope the Valancourt guys see fit to put that blurb on this new edition). He was not wrong, I was delighted to discover, and I am delighted again to present it to you in this reprint line of horror novels under the banner of Paperbacks from Hell.

  With its delirious lapses in good taste, The Nest is a shuddering, creepy-crawly scarefest that attacks the reader with one revolting sensation after another. In vintage 1980s schlock-horror, you can’t ask for more than that. So thank you, Mr. Cantor, for your commitment to scaring the shit outta us.

  Will Errickson

  Will Errickson is a lifelong horror enthusiast. Born in southern New Jersey, he first encountered the paperback horrors of Lovecraft and Stephen King in the early 1980s. After high school he worked in a used bookstore during the horror boom of the ’80s and early ’90s, which deepened his appreciation for horror fiction. Many years later, in 2010, he revisited that era when he began his blog Too Much Horror Fiction, rereading old favorites, rediscovering forgotten titles and writers, and celebrating the genre�
�s resplendent cover art. With Grady Hendrix in 2017, he co-wrote the Bram Stoker Award-winning Paperbacks from Hell, which featured many books from his personal collection. Today Will resides in Portland, OR, with his wife Ashley and his ever-growing library of vintage horror paperbacks.

  Thanks are due to novelist Eli Cantor for suggesting that an island could be as terrorized by an invasion of mutant insects as by killer sharks off its beaches.

  The author gratefully acknowledges the studies in animal behavior of Dr. B. Faber of the American Museum of Natural History and Columbia University; and the publications on insect sociobiology of Professor E. O. Wilson of Harvard University. Any errors of science are the author’s own, as is the fictional hypothesis of the insect mutation imagined in these pages.

  —G.A.D.

  TREMORS

  ONE

  Under a luminous moon, the garbage dump on Yarkie Island off Cape Cod began to shudder and vibrate grotesquely. It might have seemed an illusion of the moonlight on the quiet Atlantic that serene summer night, but the strange phenomenon near the beach was no mirage. It was as unmistakable as it was mysterious and ominous.

  The thin topsoil over the island’s refuse was trembling with an eerie drift. It was a sluggish and sickly motion, as if the mounds had turned into a viscous muck, or were mucidly floating on a hermetic current oozing from the depths. Without seeming reason, the slimy flux would stop and then pulse again. Sometimes an unearthly bulge appeared, like a tumor or festering pustule that seemed ready to split open, almost as if a buried-alive victim were straining to push out of a mouldy grave. A viewer might, with stopped heart, expect to see the excrescence burst, and a cadaverous hand lift a bony claw into the night.

  But there were no witnesses to the shifting motion, or to the maddened rats that began to fling themselves wildly out of the garbage piles.

  The vermin were squealing with agony as they sprang into the night air. Their writhing bodies were as bizarre as their gyrations and screaking; they were covered not with fur but with what seemed to be shells, scintillating in the moonlight. The pinpricks of fire on their rodent bodies flashed crazily over the dump with a metallic sheen until there was a quick change to the crimson of blood. The rats were cloaked in sequins of death; a nightmare scene out of an animal hell.

  Routine poisons normally controlled the noxious creatures everyone knew and tacitly accepted as living in the dump. Wafarins held the inevitable rat population in check, and the cockroach broods were standardly contained by pyrethrum and sodium fluoride. Since the prevailing southwest winds carried the stench conveniently out to sea, it was easy for the dump—out of the sight and smell of Yarkie’s homes—to remain out of mind.

  Thus, no one marked, suspected, or theorized about the slithering mass of preternatural life seething through the stinking intercises. No one considered or remarked that conditions were ideal for breeding in geometric multiplication. For cockroaches, particularly, the ever-enlarging dump was a great progenitive womb—warm, fetid, moist, with food so cornucopianly plentiful that everything crawling, creeping, and scurrying through the foulness could gorge to satiation.

  Until the change in Yarkie’s poison controls by unwitting health officials upset the balance Nature had contrived, and unleashed a new appetite that bloodless garbage could not satisfy.

  Aside from the dump’s ugly acre at the northeast tip of Yarkie, the island was travelogue-picturesque. It sat “like a bowler hat” in the sea off the Cape some ten miles eastward of Chatham. It was about two miles wide, and four miles long, running south-north; with a central, forested dome—the “bowler”—bordered with beaches broken sharply by steep cliffs and ridges.

  The village of Yarkie rose on the west side, facing toward the Cape, above a deep-water harbor crowded with working fishing boats. The small town made a tidy New England grid of prim lawns and white spires amid tree-lined, red-bricked sidewalks. The old homes of long ago whaling captains stood doughtily behind boxwood hedges and whitewashed fences “making good neighbors.” Outside the town, the Yarkie houses were scattered on a lace of lanes, once cart and wagon roads and a challenge to the few cars that used them. Bikes and shank’s mare were more common on the island.

  Most of the buildings were crisp white or gray shingles on hewn oak, what Thoreau had described as “sober-­looking, and reflecting the (Cape Cod) virtues of thrift, neatness and independence.” Almost all were topped with widow walks from which Yarkie wives and children had, as long ago as the late 1600s, scanned the surrounding waters for the first sign of sail of husband, son, brother, lover.

  The four hundred-odd inhabitants of Yarkie were no-nonsense. They pretty much held with what one long-faded Cape newspaper had noted for posterity: A person would be “warned out of town” if he were not “twenty-one years old, of sober peaceable conversation, orthodox in religion, and possessed of saleable estate to the value of twenty pounds.” In modern Yarkie, this proscription took the form of discouraging tourists and all publicity about the island’s very existence. One ferry a day served more than adequately between Chatham and Yarkie even in midsummer.

  It was not so much that the people were unfriendly as that they were self-satisfied; not so much uncharitable as parochial. They were quietly proud of their wealth and their heritage as whaling men, mariners, jack tars and fisher­men (if not pirates and buccaneers), and they preferred to keep their island free of the vacationists who flooded Martha’s Vineyard and Nantucket.

  The Yarkie-ites continued to be “. . . of sober peace­able conversation.” The redoubtable Johnson clan had produced one firebrand, a daughter named Jessica, now married to a Harvard biology professor, Richard Carr. But their daughter, Elizabeth Carr, visiting her grandfather, Elias, was more like the conservative old man than her activist mother. Captain Elias Johnson’s view, expressed with some force, was that women, modern or old-­fashioned, had enough to do making a home and raising children.

  This summer, Elizabeth was clearly a child no longer. At twenty, she was to start her senior year at Radcliffe in the fall, and not even her deep love for Yarkie and her grandfather would keep her returning to the island many more years. On this visit she had displayed some of her mother’s independence by bringing a black classmate as her companion. The islanders were standoffish at first, but the young woman was warm, honest, and dusky beautiful. She won over the people, and they won her over. Elizabeth was delighted. She had feared a fuss, at just the time she herself wanted the island’s quiet perspective “to get her own act together.” She had barely passed her junior-year classes, and was restless without any clear idea of a career ahead. There seemed an embarrassment of choices and a poverty of inner conviction.

  For her friend’s part, Bonnie Taylor was in love with Yarkie at first sight. She had expected to find the island as charming as Elizabeth had promised, but nothing had prepared her for the eighteenth century world she entered when she stepped off the small ferry. It was hard to believe that many homes used only kerosene lamps and candles for lighting, and wood and coal stoves for cooking. It was both enchanting and refreshing. She was amazed to find how quickly one learned to rise at dawn, wash with gasps of incredibility in cold water, warm one’s hands (and rear end) thankfully at the kitchen stove, and feel a steaming breakfast mug of coffee washing down to heat the stomach and the cockles of one’s heart.

  She was half sorry to learn that these experiences had only been due to a temporary problem with Captain Johnson’s generator, which otherwise supplied modern lights, heat, and hot water.

  Bonnie’s regret on this summer day of a planned picnic in the woods on Yarkie’s High Ridge was that Elizabeth could not join her. The captain had celebrated his seventy-­fifth birthday too enthusiastically the night before, and was resting a bruised toe and frayed temper. Elizabeth had insisted that Bonnie take the lunch basket, and—though there was nothing to be saved from on the island—the captain’s dog, Sharky. The small, frisky animal was as brave as his breed was nondescript. Two ye
ars before, when an imprudent youngster plunged from the captain’s fishing boat for an unscheduled swim, it was Sharky who had cata­pulted into the water to savage the Mako shark attracted by the boy’s splashing. It was the day the dog’s name was changed from Pooch.

  “Just stay on the path,” Elizabeth told Bonnie as she started her off at the edge of the Yarkie woods. “Don’t go past the pine grove. You’ll recognize it by a little waterfall there and the picnic tables. The path beyond goes to the town dump. You don’t want that one.”

  “No way,” Bonnie agreed, laughing. Dumps were what she was spending her life leaving behind.

  Bonnie found the grove a sylvan setting out of a Maxfield Parrish painting. The morning sun was slatting down between high tree branches, striping golden bars on a carpet of leaves and pine needles inches thick. The air’s freshness seemed almost tangible to Bonnie, as if she could rub it like a lotion between her palms and smooth it over her body. Being alone, she considered stripping, but thought it would be imprudent in case anyone else appeared.

  As she spread her blanket, the woman noticed that the dog was sniffing nervously where an opening in the trees led out of the circle of the grove. That was the way to the dump, she remembered. Sharky’s sharp nose was probably picking up the odor. Smiling, Bonnie considered this was one time it was better to have duller senses. Let Sharky romp his own way.

  She paid no attention to the dog’s soft growling that turned suddenly into little yipping barks. It was Sharky’s way of enjoying the outing, Bonnie thought as she lay down comfortably amid the pine fragrance. The hushing trickle of the small waterfall was a magic of its own. It brought to her mind quiet Japanese gardens and Zen koans, the settling peace of the simple acknowledgments of nature—the sky she could see vaulting above the treetops, the delightful bird songs all about. Boston was another planet. She called pleasantly to Sharky. He came to her slowly. She wondered why his little body was trembling under her stroking fingers. He was panting as if he had been running hard. He continued to turn his head toward the path, growling again. Bonnie considered it was probably the dog’s asking why Elizabeth wasn’t with them. She kept stroking the soft coat, but the trembling did not stop. On the contrary, the woman felt the animal’s heart beat faster under her hand.