Day 13 of Blogtober, a Friday the 13th! Which makes it an appropriate time to talk about a real classic!

I have a special fondness for paperback horror of the 1980s, as that was the era that I first started getting really into horror fiction. I still have vivid memories of visiting Oakbrook Center in the Chicago suburbs and going to the now-vanished local bookstore chain Kroch’s and Brentano’s to hunt for new horror to read. There, in the back of the store, I could find all the twisted and often absurd titles, like Crabs on the Rampage by Guy N. Smith.

It was a golden age of horror, and you could even find paperbacks in the local grocery stores. I still vividly remember picking up my copy of Ramsey Campbell’s amazing novel Ancient Images at the local Jewel, which led me to a lifelong love of Campbell’s works. In 2017, Grady Hendrix wrote a definitive history of that era of paperback horror supremacy, Paperbacks from Hell, and many of the books he discussed are being rereleased by publishers such as Valancourt Books today, as horror has again grown in popularity.

Last year, Valancourt Books also released one of the cult classic paperback horror novels of that era, Carnosaur (1984), by Harry Adam Knight, and I jumped at the chance to finally read one of the books I missed as a teenager.

If you are not familiar with Carnosaur, you will be surprised at the similarities between this cult classic and a book that came out six years later! It is simultaneously a novel that really anticipated the future yet was also very much a product of its time, and overall very fun to read.

The novel is set in the sleepy English town of Warchester, a town that local journalist David Pascal is desperate to escape for bigger cities and bigger stories. When a local farmer is found brutally killed, torn apart by some sort of large animal, David suspects that he may have the story that can help him break free of Warchester. The rich and reclusive Sir Darren Penward tells the police that a white Siberian tiger escaped from his private zoo and is to blame for the death, but David suspects that Penward is hiding something big. When a survivor of a later attack describes the creature that attacked them as something that has not been seen alive on Earth for 65 million years, Pascal decides that he’s willing to do anything to get to the bottom of the mystery… and to get into Penward’s estate, where the wealthy hunter is growing a deadly menagerie. A menagerie that could threaten the entire town, and possibly the entire world.

Carnosaur is a fun ride that, unsurprisingly, is about a rich person who has a zoo of deadly dinosaurs. What is even more remarkable, and is commented on in the Valancourt edition introduction, is how closely the story of Carnosaur matches the much better known and much later Jurassic Park, which came out in 1990. In both books, a wealthy man makes it his obsession to bring back the dinosaurs by harvesting their DNA and mixing it with a living species, and in both books the creatures eventually escape, with predictably horrible results. In Jurassic Park, the DNA is harvested from the blood of mosquitoes trapped in amber, whereas in Carnosaur the DNA comes from rare non-fossilized mummified specimens of dinosaurs. In Jurassic Park, the missing gaps in dinosaur DNA are filled in with amphibian DNA, where in Carnosaur the gaps are filled in using bird DNA, which actually seems more plausible. It is intriguing to imagine that Crichton may have read Carnosaur and been inspired by it to write his own story; however, it may also be that it was just the right time for “dinosaurs from DNA” to become a plot device, and the similarities are a coincidence. In science, this happens all the time, such as the famous example where Newton and Leibniz both independently developed calculus — and accused each other of plagiarism for it afterwards!

I was smiling throughout my read of Carnosaur because it really does read like one of the many horror paperbacks of that era, particularly in its very male-focused gaze and perspective. For example, when we first meet Pascal’s love interest Jenny, this is how she is described:

She was twenty-three years old, tall, slim and possessed of a unique kind of beauty. She wasn’t pretty in the conventional sense; her nose was a little too broad and one of her front teeth was slightly crooked but the combination of large green eyes, wide, sensuous mouth, flawless skin and shoulder-length tumble of curly black hair was irresistible.

Since most of the novels of this era were being written by men, for men, these sorts of descriptions were common. Carnosaur also contains another staple of that era: an unnecessarily explicit sex scene, presumably to provide some titillation for the reader.

One other aspect of Carnosaur seemed pretty familiar to me, what I might call a “laundry list” of killings. In such a list, we get several rapid-fire anecdotes in a row where we are quickly introduced to a victim or set of victims in their current circumstances, only to get an explicit description of their horrifying deaths! This happens at the beginning of the novel when only one dinosaur has escaped into the wild; by the end of the book, all of them have escape and we get an even more extensive laundry list of deaths!

I found Carnosaur to be a bit slow-going at first; the early chapters focus on relationship drama between Jenny and Pascal and Pascal’s first fruitless attempts to figure out Sir Penward’s secret. But once David sneaks onto Penward’s estate, things kick into high gear and the utter chaos of various dinosaurs running around is great, gory fun. There’s even a healthy amount of twisted humor in the later chapters.

The book ends with one more trope of that era, I would say: one last expected nasty “kick” just when you think everything has been sorted out. It felt a little cruel and unnecessary, but definitely in line with “paperbacks from hell.”

Harry Adam Knight is apparently the pen name of Australian writer John Raymond Brosnan, who appears to have written science fiction under his own name and used “Harry Adam Knight” for his freaky horror, which includes The Fungus, a super-gross book that I’ve never been able to finish reading!

But Carnosaur is a lot of fun! It is definitely a product of its time, but it still holds up as a crazy “killer dinosaur” story. In fact, it was made into a series of films by Roger Corman to capitalize on Jurassic Park‘s success. The films are mediocre, but the book is well worth reading.