THE CURSE OF LATOMBABy EDWARD HYDE (Tabloid Horrors; 1988) Here’s
an interesting artifact I recently unearthed from my closet: a horror
novel packaged as a tabloid newspaper, complete with (bogus) ads and
photos. Printed in South
Carolina by someone calling himself “Edward Hyde” (a pen name,
obviously), it’s a lurid first person account of a cannibalistic serial
killer named Edgar, told in the form of a lengthy letter he writes to a
supermarket rag called “The Grapevine.”
It seems Ed and his buddies Lonnie and Bruce tried to steal a
priceless treasure from the tomb of Latomba, an African witch doctor.
In doing so, however, they were slapped with a curse that causes
‘em to live like Latomba’s people--as cannibalistic maniacs, in other
words. The spirit of Latomba
wastes no time putting its spell into action, as the plane ferrying our
“heroes” back from Africa crashes in the The
guys are rescued, but things only get worse once they return to
civilization and split up. Ed,
who’s remarkably composed despite having just survived a horrific plane
crash, finds his cannibalistic urges boiling to the surface.
He embarks on a killing spree in which he “takes to lunch”
quite a few unsuspecting folks, raping a woman and nearly disemboweling
his young daughter while he’s at it.
Nasty though all this is, Jack Ketchum it ain’t.
The writing is endearingly crude at best, with frequent attempts at
“humor” that aren’t terribly humorous (i.e.
the idea that Latomba’s spirit has picked
To continue: Edgar meets back up with Lonnie and Bruce and
discovers they too have been taking people to lunch.
The three decide to open a fast food joint and serve their
customers some “choice cuts.” What
this has to do with the curse of the title I’m not sure, but they
succeed in serving up the flesh of several young boys they lure into a
cave and then beat to death. They
also run down hitchhikers for fun and circumcise Lonnie’s wife.
The narrative is erratically paced and overstays its welcome,
particularly in the final third, during which Edgar is reduced to auto
cannibalism inside a trailer; for some reason the author wimps out here,
referring us to Stephen King’s story “Survivor Type” in place of
flesh-and-blood (pun intended) descriptions. The
final pages, taken up with psychiatric studies and eyewitness accounts of
Edgar’s psychosis, also fall flat, as the story is simply too ludicrous
to support such things.
That leaves the ads and photos.
As I said up front, the novel is done up as a tabloid newspaper,
with cheap newsprint and printing that’s grouped into four columns on
each page (making it a bitch to read).
The fake ads are the best part of the package: they include a full
page spread promoting a diet that promises its users “the muscles of a
bull” and a small caption for “Holy Joe, the World’s Greatest Psychic”, promising that “if
you call within the next thirty days, he will give you a personal message from Elvis from the other side.”
There’s also a photo spread of Edgar’s victims and the
locations where they met their demise, with occasionally funny
captions--my favorite was the one accompanying a picture of a boarded-up
building, apparently “once a thriving restaurant before Edgar’s sick
vision of twisted revenge turned it into a Ho-Jo for cannibals.”
If unique packaging were enough to guarantee success, THE CURSE OF
LATOMBA wouldn’t have met the fate it did.
I ordered it out of the April 1988 issue of THE TWILIGHT ZONE
MAGAZINE, which ran a small piece on the project (claiming it “deserves
high marks for original presentation”) and its author, who planned “to
market LATOMBA in small horror magazines this winter and try for newsstand
distribution next summer.” Success
proved elusive, however, and this endearingly odd package remains as
obscure as it was back in ’88, if not more so.
It deserves a look nonetheless, as an experiment in creative
publishing of which today’s horrormeisters should really take heed.
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