Hi everyone! Once again life ran amuck with us. Yep. Dennis and I got together to have one of our little horror chats back in…. oh heck, mid-March!!! Whoops. It was my job to type up our booktalk notes, and here I am 4 months later finally getting around to it. Life is full of unexpected complications. It’s a pity more of them don’t lend themselves to being resolved quickly, but hey that’s life, isn’t it? We had such wonderful goals of getting back on a more regular schedule with this blog, but we are irredeemably irregular, as it turns out.
This installment of (207)TERROR is in honor of The Pike
by Cliff Twemlow!
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| The Pike in its original paperback format. Shiny! |
I found out about this fishtale from friend and documentary filmmaker John Campopiano (Unearthed & Untold: The Path to Pet Sematary [2017], Pennywise: The Story of It [2021], and Snapper: The Man-Eating Turtle Movie That Never Got Made [2022]). John was interested in The Pike’s status as one of those horror stories that was slated to be made into a major motion picture, but floundered and sank somewhere along the way as filming was getting going.
I’ll leave that story for John to tell you someday, but suffice it to say it is a gem buried back in the early 1980s, which was to gain its sparkle from the dazzling star Joan Collins and the picturesque location of the Lake District. The story’s events were set in and around Windermere in Cumbria, England. According to the book’s introduction, Hammer Film Studios had accepted a screenplay of The Pike for production before Twemlow wrote it out in novel form for publication.
The Pike by David Seltzer (1982)
“A cold relentless killer from the murky depths”
You had me at murky!!!
I will admit that I started this novel with few expectations, beyond a hope for plenty of monster fish. I was pleasantly surprised by the quality of the writing, which is surprisingly professional and all in all a very fun read. I’m not surprised it was picked up for adaptation! How disappointing that it prematurely disappeared from view.
Dennis and I sat down over drinks and snacks, and hashed out our reading experience. We both love the movie Jaws, and The Pike is clearly a descendant – as the introduction avers, “The Pike was Cliff’s answer to Jaws, and to the franchise that had given birth to.” One of the characters even has the last name Brodie -- too close to Chief Brody’s name to be anything but a planned coincidence!!! But -- “Is this even legal?!” Dennis jumped into the fray immediately, and was then shocked at my blasé response. “That didn’t bother you?!”
Au contraire! I relish a good effort in the vein of Jaws. Where’s my JAWS Bingo card? Let’s start with… a REGATTA!!! I really enjoy the many, many movies and stories that follow the Jaws formula. Snowbeast (1977) and Tentacles (also 1977!) are among my film favorites. So while I was gleefully marking off blocks on my JAWS Bingo card, Dennis was being bothered by all the Jaws tropes, which felt like cheating to him, rather than an homage.
I do recommend taking the JAWS Bingo approach. A boating/lake festival imminent in the next two days? Check. Hordes of badly-behaved boaters running amuck in the water trying to flush out the monster fish? Check. Wait wait wait – even a counterpart for Matt Hooper, shark specialist? CHECK!!! Bahahahaaaaaa!
As pike-specialist John Wilmslow comments, no doubt with accompanying eyeroll as he surveys the “savage glee” surrounding him on the lake, “Compared to some people, the behaviour of underwater predators was genteel.”
It just puts a big fat grin on my face, and turns Dennis into a Mr. Grumpy Pants. Earlier today, I asked him if he had any last-minute commentary about The Pike, and all he said was, “No final thoughts from me other than the book should’ve been illegal.” Which just made me start howling with laughter again.
I liked the use of a reporter for the main narrator, who joins up with a nicely varied team including a savvy local woman and the wildman local lake steward.
Dennis enjoyed the three-guy team that is the other viewpoint for storytelling. The three adventurers came kitted out to film a documentary about Lake Windermere, the longest ribbon lake in England, in which the team sees great potential for adventure. Its impressive length sets it above and beyond most idyllic holiday spots for divers and explorers alike, and their aim was to let the world know about its unparallelled options. They weren’t expecting to hear from the hotel bartender the news, “There’s something ghastly in it.” Uh oh! Oh YEAH. Game on!
Like Jaws, part of the drama in The Pike is generated by physical evidence left behind in the wake of bloody slaughter, once again illustrated in the form of a monstrous tooth. Not even a whole tooth – it’s just a sheared off portion of a tooth, found in the skull of the first known human victim of the beastly pike. Ah heck, the pike has around seven hundred teeth, he’s barely going to miss part of one.
There are some wonderfully awful deaths in the book, including poor Henry, early on in the third chapter. Nobody is spared, man or wildfowl, and there are no niceties involved. Just gore, dismemberments, and lots of panicked splashing. Pity the poor creatures who either witness the slaughter, or stumble across the pike’s leavings after the fact. A community member summed up Henry’s fate:
“She glanced over her shoulder as if something invisible had moved closer to listen. ‘Dead,’ she said, ‘Mutilated.’”
Diana, almost a hundred pages later, doesn’t fare well either, and we get to be plunged into the water with her every step of the way. It is quite delicately disgusting.
A cautionary soul warns others: “This fish has tasted human flesh. By now it may be looking for more.” And it’s not just any fish. Our expert estimates it is over 10 feet long, well over 200 pounds, and ”something this size wouldn’t put on the brakes for anything smaller than a rhinoceros.” The pike is no ordinary pike – no, it’s a giant, a freak – five or six times the size of the biggest officially recorded catches in the UK, even today.
Well guess what? Like the pike, and like Jaws before, our 3-man documentary team isn’t just any film crew, either. These guys are in it to win it. They won’t even be stopped by the lake water, which they refer to in their highly technical jargon. “Larry went to the rail and looked down at the water lapping the side of the boat. ‘It ain’t going to be easy. It’s creepy water.’” No, seriously – they give a definition for this condition. Because “things can sneak up on you in that stuff.”
As they get ready to dive, knowing they may encounter the monster at any moment, Joe says to Lars, their cameraman, “If it chews your leg off, try to face the camera while it’s doing it.”
Unlike Jaws, there is a twist ending in The Pike, which we can’t tell you about because that would ruin everything. Suffice it to say that it gives the last pages of the books a distinctly Scooby-Doo-for-adults flavor. It’s ludicrous and questionable, and really not a logical “ending” at all, so we both wondered if the author was in fact laying the groundwork for a sequel. Oh well, maybe someone else will write it someday!
As someone with very Fortean leanings, it was unsettling for me to encounter very anti-Fortean attitudes in the book. Absolutely nothing outside the average norm is allowed to exist (or at least is refused acknowledgement) in this prosaic universe. This outlook towards the UK’s infamous lake monsters was reflected by a 1982 series of articles for New Scientist, in which Maurice Burton posited that Nessie and the like could be logically explained away. Burton thought sightings might be the result of mistaken identification of innocuous fermenting Scots pine logs rising to the surface of the loch, their velocity generated by the release of gases during decomposition.
It is entirely possible that, alongside his intended mirroring of Jaws tropes, Twemlow was also using The Pike to thumb his nose at the dour men who poo-pooed the UK’s long history of lake sightings and water horses. As friend Brian Sterling-Vete points out in his chatty introduction, Twemlow “had always been fascinated by monsters, aliens, and the paranormal.” Not only that, but early on, “Cliff wanted to turn Manchester’s Belle Vue amusement park into an animated version of what we would now call Jurassic Park.” Twemlow was excited by the idea of the existence of monsters, whether mythical, real, or manmade.
In discussing the end of the book, Dennis noted the high level of denial amongst the characters (again, very like the plot track of Jaws). If local authorities can wade through the mysterious carnage, then wrap up the case and put a bow on it with an arrest, who needs to worry any more? Yes, let’s all blithely jump back into the water again.
YOU GO RIGHT AHEAD! Yes, YOU FIRST!!!
Happy summer, everyone!!!
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