HELL HOUND
By
KEN GREENHALL (Zebra Books; 1977)
One of my longtime “Holy Grails” has been found!
You probably know of this extremely
obscure paperback original, if at all, as the source for the French cult
movie BAXTER. I’ve been
searching for this book ever since my initial viewing of the film back in
the early nineties, and had nearly concluded that HELL HOUND a).
didn’t really exist, b).
appeared only in a limited edition small press publication, or c).
was only published in France, where it appears to be readily available
under the title DES TUEURS PAS COMME LES AUTRES.
It didn’t help matters that I wasn’t able to find a single
review of the book or listing for it in any reference guide.
Now that I’ve finally managed to excavate a copy I can understand, at least
partially, why HELL HOUND by Ken Greenhall (whose other books include the
horror thrillers ELIZABETH, CHILDGRAVE, DEATH CHAIN and THE COMPANION, and
the historical drama LENOIR) has been so widely ignored: the cover art is
quite tacky, bringing to mind that aptly titled Alice Cooper flick MONSTER
DOG. The publisher was Zebra
Books, a tawdry paperback outfit known in the trade as the last resort for
manuscripts rejected by everyone else.
The majority of Zebra’s output is uninspiring, to say the least
(they’re responsible for airing the work of bottom-of-the-barrel hacks
like Ruby Jean Jensen and William Johnstone), but every once in a while
something of interest makes its way onto their imprint.
The early novels of John Shirley (TRANSMANIACON, THREE-RING PSYCHUS
and DRACULA IN LOVE) are examples of the latter, as is HELL HOUND.
Quite simply put, Ken Greenhall’s HELL HOUND is an unsung classic
of the bizarre and grotesque that ranks with CRASH and THE WASP FACTORY
(high praise indeed!). It is
at once an Orwellian satire of pet ownership in the modern world--“Maybe
that’s why we keep animals around us” one character muses, “to
remind us of something we have lost, an innocence”, when in fact the
eponymous canine is anything but
innocent!--and a horror story about the wily nature of evil and the way it
always seems to hide behind the most innocent of guises, as well as one of
the most unflinchingly corrosive portraits of small-town America ever
conceived.
The “Hell Hound” is Baxter, a white Bull Terrier who thinks
like a human--correction: like a deeply nasty, brutish human.
His thoughts are revealed via short first-person chapters in which
Baxter invariably laments his present situation and ponders how best to
free himself from it. As the
novel opens Baxter finds himself in the care of a lonely old woman who
nauseates him. He takes to spying on an attractive young couple next door,
wishing he were in their care; in order to facilitate this Baxter gives
the old bag a deadly spill down the stairs and ends up with the young
couple. Unfortunately the
wife is pregnant and Baxter doesn’t take to the child once it’s born;
he commits murder again, drowning the kid in a backyard pool, which
facilitates a final ownership change.
Baxter winds up with Carl, a deranged Hitler obsessed
twelve-year-old who likes to hang out in a junkyard where he’s set up a
makeshift bunker in honor of his idol’s place of death.
It might seem like Baxter’s found his ideal mate, but the boy and
dog are actually too much alike, leading to an inevitable showdown only
one will survive.
Orbiting this twisted drama is a rich and varied gallery of
individuals: Carl’s clueless parents and his sympathetic teacher, a
young girl and her callous father, a nubile female mutt and a decrepit old
man. Their presence gives
this otherwise painfully insular narrative a complex, multi-faceted arc,
yet Greenhall never loses focus. Nor
does he ever sell out his characters or plot strands, following each to
its inevitable conclusion, regardless of how ugly or depressing it may be
(a prime reason, I suspect, the book had trouble finding a reputable
publisher back in the don’t-worry-be-happy late seventies).
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