Summer of Sleaze is 2014’s turbo-charged trash safari where Will Errickson of Too Much Horror Fiction and Grady Hendrix of The Great Stephen King Reread plunge into the bowels of vintage paperback horror fiction, unearthing treasures and trauma in equal measure.
John Christopher (born Samuel Youd) is an author best known for his young adult science fiction stories that were turned into comics in Boy’s Life magazine, most notably The White Mountains, The City of Gold and Lead, and The Pool of Fire. But he also wrote for adults, and his The Little People published in 1966 has a cover by Hector Garrido (reproduced here) that might be paperback publishing’s Mona Lisa.
Unfortunately, that Hector Garrido cover is arguably the best thing about the book. Despite the Nazi Leprechauns on the cover (Gestapochauns? LepreNazis?), this is a book of quiet horror in which Christopher slowly draws his tapestry of flawed characters into a situation that starts out as merely uncanny and then gradually darkens into pure terror. Pure terror filled with Leprechauns.
Considering that the main characters in this book are a gorgeous secretary who inherits an Irish castle from a distant relative, her patronizing lawyer/fiance who only wants her for her body, an Irish dreamboat who slowly sinks into alcoholism (the “curse of his race,” Christopher helpfully points out), a married German couple who met when he was an officer in the SS and she was a Jewish prisoner in a concentration camp (the flashback to their romance is When Harry Met Sally meets Schindler’s List), two bickering American parents, and their hot-to-trot seventeen-year-old daughter, you’d think that Christopher might be predisposed towards the gonzo stuff teased on the cover rather than the quiet horror contained within, but the man wants to write quiet horror no matter how badly we want him to write Gestapochauns II: The Whipping.
The beautiful secretary decides to turn her inherited Irish castle into a B&B to show her horndog lawyer/fiance she can stand on her own two feet (with the occasional support of the friendly Irish alcoholic). The other characters (Mr. & Mrs. Bickerson and their nympho daughter along with the Nazi Odd Couple) come to stay and then stand around in dark rooms after dinner exploring the nooks and crannies of their souls with long internal monologues.
After every nook has been explored at least twice, and each cranny three times, Christopher takes pity and introduces us to the Gestapochauns: a gang of miniature people living in the castle and battling rats with their tiny bullwhips. He then clears the hurdle and jumps the shark all at once by letting us know that these are not just any Nazi leprechauns. These are Jewish psychic Nazi leprechauns who enjoy S&M, are covered with scars from pleasure/pain sessions with their creator, were trained as sex slaves for full-sized human men, and are actually stunted fetuses taken from Jewish concentration camp victims. And one of them is named Adolph.
Take a moment to wipe the sweat from your brow.
While all this information is being hosed into the reader’s eyes like a geyser of crazy, this book rockets from 0 to 60 on the Loony-meter and over-delivers on practically every front. From the moment the Gestapochauns play a mean practical joke on the old Irish washerwoman who works in the kitchen to the moment the lawyer/fiance realizes exactly what—my God!—the tiny Nazi Leprechaun named Greta is actually up to inside his pants, it’s one long, 50-page passage in which this book is firing on every cylinder, and then some cylinders that don’t even exist in our dimension.
At this point, you get the impression that Christopher probably showed his 2/3’s completed manuscript to a friend who took him aside and had a Very Serious Conversation with him about his career, after which he devoted the remaining 40 pages of the book to a discrete psychic battle that takes place in the dreams of the non-psychic, non-Nazi, non-Leprechaun members of the cast. In other words: The Boring People.
The Gestapochauns are completely absent from the last 30 pages of this book and it ends on an anticlimactic note, leaving the reader with nothing but the taste of ashes and dashed expectations in their mouths and a distant memory of those 50 pages in the middle when things were happening that are not talked about in respectable homes. Christopher and his Gestapochauns fly so high and so far in those middle passages that he practically touches the sun, but the genius is sandwiched between two long sections so dense with soul-searching that they extinguish all the joy in your heart. I never thought I’d write this sentence, but the Gestapochaun sex and violence orgy is too little, and it comes too late. But, just as Bogie and Bergman will always have Paris, we, the readers of The Little People, will always have that cover.
Grady Hendrix is the author of Satan Loves You, Occupy Space, and he’s the co-author of Dirt Candy: A Cookbook, the first graphic novel cookbook. He’s written for publications ranging from Playboy to World Literature Today and his story, “Mofongo Knows” appears in the anthology, The Mad Scientist’s Guide to World Domination.
The series you mention that starts with The White Mountains is fun YA ahead of its time I think. There’s a prequel called “When the Tripods Came” that was written much later. His Sword of Spirits trilogy is good too. It’s not great literature necessarily, but it wrestles with big questions of who has the right to rule, means justifying the end, etc. while I don’t remember much YA from my 80’s youth doing that.
@1: Christopher was capable of being pretty good: The Death of Grass is a grittier rival to Wyndham’s “cosy catastrophes”, though I generally find Wyndham more satisfying. Sadly, on my (admittedly infrequent) re-reads, I find that the majority of his work doesn’t exactly stand up against, say, The Black Cloud or Pavane. Perhaps it’s because of his strange way of working: before The White Mountains, he didn’t rewrite anything after the first chapter! Still, the Tripods and Swords books were to me what Andre Norton was to a couple of generations of American SF fans.
As a horror novel, I would say that The Possessors probably holds up better than The Little People, though I doubt that this column is the right place for good fiction…
And it carries a blurb from the NY Times. Truly, this is the King of the Paperback Covers!
I have really not read much scifi/fantasy for a number of years, but I found this site a couple of months ago and especially love the short stories, not to mention some of the most hilarious reviews ever. This one had me cracking up. I’ve not read any John Christopher, but this review itself is priceless. :D
Nazi leprechauns? Why wasn’t this made into a Roger Corman movie or a Hammer film?
:P
@3: While the art is quite hideous (it’s the third worst on Good Show Sir with a score of 9.03) and the very small “Novel of pure terror” is an inspired touch, there’s still room for improvement in my view.
For a start, the quote needs an ellipsis to remove some derogatory remark made in the original review. There could also be several quotes (in different fonts) that sound impressive but don’t actually mean anything, like “#1 NYT Bestseller!” and “Nebula Nominee!”. Maybe we could throw in a quote from a better-known author who has clearly never read the book in question…
@5: Syfy were working on an adaptation of Christopher’s The Lotus Caves which sounded suitably trashy. The novel is about two boys in a lunar colony who encounter a strange lunar lifeform and are posed with questions about responsibility and authority. The Bryan Fuller pilot (I am not making this up) was retitled High Moon and reportedly featured a “hard-as-nails American Army General,” environmentalism, power struggles and explosions. Shame it got cancelled, really.
I totally have to read this now.
Good Lord. What really baffles me is to think of all the things in the slush pile that the editor rejected in favour of publishing this. Or the comments that he made on the manuscript to get it into publishable form. “This bit’s too weird, John. Why not have something a bit more normal like psychic Nazi leprechauns instead?”
@8: You may be interested to know that it was initially serialised in F & SF, so it was edited by Ed Ferman.
This is up there with the NY Times book review of Crabs on the Rampage.
SchuylerH (@6): Oh, you are just begging to have a Michael Moorcock “As good as Tolkien!” dropped onto this threat to reader/browser sanity, aren’t you?
Aaaand, now we know what Bryan Fuller will be doing after Hannibal wraps …
@11: Yes. Yes I am. (I think there’s an edition of The Jewel in the Skull that says that the History of the Runestaff “will rank with the Lord of the Rings trilogy.” Mike can’t have been happy!)
Don’t get your hopes up about Fuller: they apparently dropped High Moon back in April so they could go forward with Matalas & Fickett’s 12 Monkeys.
“Gestapochauns? LepreNazis?”
I know I’m late here, but I believe what you’re looking for is, “Lep-Reich-chauns”.
I’d just like to correct you on two points.
* Stefan is never confirmed to have been in the SS in the book
* He and Hanni only met after the war and she was never in a camp, but spent the war at her German father’s house.
* The Lady Leprechauns up to do the naughty isn’t Greta but Emma. The one that looks like she’ll be the Ayesha/Evil Nazi Queen of the Leprechauns but who never really comes up after that scene you’re thinking of.
I bought this in a used book store when I was in high school back in the seventies. Sold by the image on the cover that instantly pegged the needle on the crazy detector. Not as bad a read as some have claimed.