The Nest by Gregory A Douglas
The Nest by Gregory A Douglas.
Thanks to the Paperbacks from Hell re-prints by Valancourt books, I first came across this.
I had not realised it was the basis for a 1987 Roger Corman-produced movie of the same name I had seen some years back.
The author wrote two other novels, The Unholy Smile and The Rite, and was the pseudonym for Author Eli Cantor.
The Valancourt re-print is a fairly slim tome at 292 pages using the spectacular original art from the US version originally published in 1980. The NEL version was published in 1982, with its terrible Minimal white cover, clocks in at 448! That’s almost double! Why? The typeset is enormous for some reason! I suspect they wanted to bulk it out so it looked the same as a Stephen King book!
What we have here is a B-horror classic. A wonderfully entertaining animal attack novel. It’s Jaws meets mutated cockroaches on the rampage.
“. It was just an ordinary garbage dump on peaceful Cape Cod. No one ever imagined that conditions were perfect for multiple breeding, that it was a warm womb, fetid, moist, and with food so plentiful that everything crawling, creeping, and slithering could gorge to satiation. Then the change in poison control was made and the huge mutants began to leave their nest — in search of human flesh…”
So, thanks to some new chemicals that have leaked into the local dump, cockroaches mutate, grow large, become intelligent, and start to feed on the Cape Cods resident’s pets and the residents themselves.
Our main protagonist, Elizabeth, is visiting her grandfather’s place on the island with a friend over the summer. All the classic tropes are played out. The mystery of what is terrifying the rats at the landfill to an attack on a beloved family dog. Luckily an expert from Harvard is called in to investigate. So, we soon have our rag-tag team trying to sort out what is happening and what to do about it. As they try to figure out how to kill them, various members get devoured as the story continues and it all concludes in a finale that is very reminiscent of the final scenes of Aliens in the egg room.
The story is filled with a face-ripping, eye-gouging, flesh-chomping, gory disgusting delight that revels in its descriptions of the various deaths by marauding roaches. Unfortunately, it also has some drawn-out science-based clunky exposition in between the spectacular bouts of mandible chewing nightmares. We have a typical 80’s cheesy, cringy romance thrown in for good measure. When the various characters discuss the plans and the situations they need to deal with, they are long and dull conversations. The over-explained science just gets annoying.
However, if you can get past these boring passages, the gore-filled descriptions of blood-splattered, flesh-burrowing, sometimes flying killer roaches more than made up for this. The terrifying sense of claustrophobia as the sea of roaches, moving as one unending horror, envelopes the victims, burrowing into eyes and filling open mouths, eating them from the insides out is skin crawling and stomach churning. There is also an infamous scene that’s so weird it has to be read to be believed.
He may not be the greatest of authors, but Douglas has done a brilliant job of creating some entertaining frights! This is a bonkers horror novel, with gore to the wall, and a gross-out fun creature feature that, if you can get past the dull parts, I highly recommend!
