retrotrash: eat them alive by pierce nace

earthquake! tidal wave! fire! "halves of dogs and people" tossing on the waves like kindling! suddenly hordes of giant prehistoric praying mantises are crawling up through the fissures in the earth, released from their million-year subterranean sleep! and now the lucky souls who survived the earthquake the tidal wave and the fires are devoured alive by the ravenous insects!

that brings us to page seven.

dyke mellis watches as his neighbor, kello, is eaten alive:

"how can i be so tied to the sight that i can't look away, that i want to see every bite the mantis takes of old kello? why do i want to watch the creature as he eats the flesh and sucks the blood? . . . i only know the feeling is in me, is taking me over . . . now i've got something to live for, because i love watching a man being eaten by a monster!"

so does the author, apparently, because the lovingly detailed description lasts two pages.

the mellifluously-named dyke mellis is a two bit criminal and sadist who tortures and kills innocent people for kicks. he's five-foot-two, covered in scars, never stops talking to himself and has no penis. clearly one of the most appealing characters in fiction. he captures a giant mantis which he plans to train to do his killing for him.

"he muttered aloud, 'a name. the thing's got to have a name. animals learn their names right off. when i was a kid my dogs always came when i called them. i'll teach this mantis to know who he is and to come when i call. but what will it be? how do you name a beast whose sole purpose is acting as your instrument of boiling revenge, of mind-racking torture, of slow and horrrendous death? well, how about slayer? this man-sized bug is going to slay for me . . . i can already see that both he and i will like the killing so well that we'll spend the rest of our lives doing it. slayer will be the torturer, but i'll be the watcher, the enjoyer, the cheerer-on. i'll love watching my great green mantis as he rips into bodies and eats them part by part. i'll feel excited, obsessed . . . i'll help slayer gouge out thier eyes a rip off their ears and every semblance of their maleness.'"

yeah, i sometimes talk to myself too, but it's usually just things like "where did i put my keys?"

around page 76 we get a second two-page-long description of the mantis eating a man alive, this time more of a catalog of which parts he eats in which order. he likes to save the brain for last.

dyke needs to keep slayer caged, but he needs to travel for supplies too. slayer will only eat live prey. how can he keep slayer fed while he's away? well, he mixes up blood and sugar and leaves a trail through the jungle, right into slayers cage. every jungle animal likes one or the other, so a steady stream of them will just keep walking right into the cage to be devoured the whole time he's gone.

dyke goes to an indian village and just 10 pages after watching the mantis eat a man, watches a man eat . . . a racoon. he shares the raw bloody heart with his girlfriend. "they were a handsome couple." six pages later dyke is back home watching slayer eat a baby puma lured into his cage by the sugar, apparetnly.

"'chew him up, slayer! . . . learn to love flesh and blood more everytime you kill! . . . eat, slayer, eat your fill! get all the blood you can out of that pup! i like to watch you chew, you marvelous killer!'"

10 pages later there's a lenghty description of how slayer eats a snake, first rippping it open to eat the eggs that the snake ate still in its belly. the author is really stuck for ideas at this point, and less than halfway through the novel. things eat other things. 250 pages.

if dyke mellis seemed too good to be true before, get this. to protect himself from being eaten by his own pet mantis, he smears his body all over with a mixture of all the foul-smelling things he can find, including "polecat spray he had once caught in a can when a skunk let go at him."

caught in a can! how could he even do that? why would he even do that? why would he have saved it? just in case he one day caught a giant praying mantis he wanted to train to kill people? and just how many skunks and raccoons are wandering around the tropical jungles of south american islands? i didn't even mention the aardvarks. three times the author writes that aardvarks are native to columbia.

now dyke, the tiny white man who stinks to high heaven, goes to a little indian village and convinces the people to get on his boat and sail to monster island with him. by this time they all know about the giant mantises and are terrified of them, but dyke assures them it's safe and they believe him and grab their babies and climb on board.

"clouds raced above the island . . . they looked heavy with rain and hail. perhaps they were even brewing a fresh quake."

clouds cause earthquakes.

the author really has his rhythm going now. ten pages after the snake-eating, the sea-goers watch as a giant mantis eats another giant mantis on the beach. now two more giant mantises eat that one, ripping open his belly and eating the undigested pieces of the mantis he just ate "now rendered twice-eaten."

what happens next is beyond ludicrous. the indians file off the boat onto the beach right into the claws of the waiting insects, then act shocked when they are eaten alive. one man even starts up a conversation with dyke as he's being devoured, asking if it was all a ruse or just an honest mistake. the mantises rip babies in half. they snatch the heads off men and crack them open on rocks to get the brains. they snatch the breasts off women:

"the breast stood upright in his claws, the brown nipple pointed toward the clouded sky, the round flesh quivering in the creature's hold. the mantis raised the breast high, sucking it for the blood that ran from it, drinking every drop he could pull from the soft flesh . . . before the mantis rent the organs from the chest and stomach cavities, he bent low over the girl and filled his maw with all that stamped the body as female. watching, dyke thought, god, i could eat that part myself."

dyke's reaction to all the carnage: "he stood on the rock, raised his hands high, placed his feet wide apart, and shouted, 'this is beauty, this is happiness . . . i'm rich, i'm magnificent, i'm a human being with human joy all over me!'"

an uniterrupted series of slaughters follows. dyke packs 10 mantises into a truck and goes on a road trip to get revenge on the four men who castrated him 11 years ago. in texas. by a happy and totally plausible coincidence they all live in columbia now. along the way he stops at villages to let the mantises feed. they rip the breasts off the women and the women run around in circles screaming. when he tracks down his enemies it's always the same. they beg him please do whatever you want to me but spare the women and children. no, dyke says, it has to be this way, you must watch your wife and children being eaten alive first, then it's your turn. not only that but all the servants, dinner guests and even pets must be eaten alive. then dyke loots the place.

he returns to his island paradise with his vengeance satisfied, tremendous wealth, and an army of killer insects. the last line of the chapter reads "could anything unhappy occur after all this happiness?"

there's 15 more pages so i'm guessing yes.

one morning dyke awakes to find the island in a state of war. enemy mantises are killing his own. it turns out one of the men he killed had a brother who has now come for revenge the only way he knew how: by training his own army of killer mantises! he confronts dyke and slayer inside the house and explains it all.

"i made myself a suit of armor that they couldn't bite through--it's outside your door now--and i took them a lot to eat."

no explanation is given as to why, in the middle of a battle of thousands of giant flesh-eating praying mantises, he took off the suit of armor and left it outside. you know what happens. they both get eaten. but it's a happy death for dyke mellis. as he lies dying he thinks "oh, well, no matter. i have lived my life. i have met my most important goals."

that's the end of the book, so i guess the moral is reach for the stars.

he closest thing i can compare this to is a guy n. smith book, but as i recall (it's been 20 years since i've read one) they were actually better than this. or maybe j.g. ballard's crash. it's a safe bet pierce nace is a pseudonym (not to mention an anagram--you can figure it out) and no one seems to know who really wrote this, or rather the fellow who did doesn't want anyone to know.