The Orpheus Process

by Daniel H. Gower

Dr. Helmond discovers a method of reanimating the dead with a violet amniotic fluid but oversteps the bounds of science when he tries the experiment on his senselessly murdered daughter, who is revived, but altered.

Genres: Horror, Zombies, Pulp, Fiction

432 pages, Mass Market Paperback

First published January 4, 1992

Reviews

[Grady Hendrix · Rating 4 out of 5]

With chapter titles like the track listing from a lost black metal concept album ("Breakfast of Crucifixions" "Solution of Finality") this is a blast of deranged vagina monsters from the outermost fringes of Cleveland directly onto your face.

[Phil · Rating 3 out of 5]

Outside of a few titles like The Cipher, I have never been too impressed with Dell's Abyss line, which promised to bring a new spin to the horror genre. That stated, I did not expect Gower's The Orpheus Process to be such a campy read. What does camp have to do with (as Abyss promised) 'a line of cutting-edge psychological horror and dark fiction'? Have to ask the editors about that 🙄. Anyway, reading this constantly reminded me of the classic cult film Re-Animator, but this was even campier and more OTT. If you go into this expecting scares and creeps, you will be disappointed.

Our lead, one Dr. Orville Helmond ('Len') come off as your classic mad scientist. In his spare time, he devised a means to reanimate the dead. Nothing as simple as the serum from the film, but close enough; he created a 'soup' of proteins, amino acids, etc. which he places the dead in, and then subjects the tank to some sort of radiation and presto! life returns. He started testing the process with rats and then moved on to more complex animals like dogs and cats. The book starts when he finally moved on to monkeys (with disastrous results!). A university in Illinois sponsors his research now (it started in his basement) and so far, so good! The lab is filled with 'reans' and he has cute names for the process as a whole.

Well, one day his lovely 7 yo daughter gets gunned down by some crazy Vietnam Vet on a spree and Lenny just has to reanimate her; what else would a father do? She seems normal at first, even forgetting the incident where she was splattered by the guy's M-16 (oh, the process also heals the wounds during reanimation). Yet, it soon comes to pass that her personality may be changing...

Gower's prose fits the campy tale perfectly, as do the characters. Lenny, a real nerd, still somehow gets the ladies. His eldest daughter, age 14, hangs out with punk rockers and dresses accordingly, doing dope and such. Lenny, a child of the 60s, just lets this go 'as a phase'. Gower divides the book into three parts, and the last part became so OTT it made me grin while reading it. I lost count of the bodies and the gruesomeness became comical pretty quickly. As I mentioned earlier, do not expect horror and chills, but even expecting camp (and you will after reading this a bit), this did not really scratch that camp itch. Yes, some giggles, but the camp felt too forced at times. Good cult titles and films often attempt to be serious with the humor accidental; think Plan 9 from outer space. I thought Gower was going for cult/camp here from the get go and it shows. 3 OTT stars!

[Brandon · Rating 4 out of 5]

What a wild book! One that I put off for a while, because I hate zombie nocels, and this, at it's core, is a zombie novel...but ultimately, it paid off and I'm proud to say, beyond the surface level, The Orpheus Process is way more loopy sci-fi horror than zombie farce.

The polar opposite of quiet horror, Daniel H. Gower's debut is certainly not for everyone, but for those of us who love the more outrageous side of horror paperbacks, I think The Orpheus Process will be well-enjoyed.

The gore quotient is to the brim, the insanity is to the wall, and the story is in strongly rooted in this bizarre hybrid of family drama, batshit sci-fi horror and literary approaches to pulp. If anything can be said about The Orpheus Process, is that it's a quite unique book.

Helmond, an impossible mish-mash of stereotypes, (family man, brilliant scientist/professor, irresistible playboy and later on, a Rambo esque ghoul assassin), has discovered a fluid that reanimates dead creatures, starting with rats and such, working his way up to monkies, namely a rhesus named Lazarus.

Lazarus becomes his family pet, but then has some increasingly nasty side effects. During the escalation of Laz becoming a mutant flesh eating mummy-creature, his daughter, Eunice, is murdered by a Vietnam veteran experiencing a PTSD-infused psychotic episode.

And if you guessed that Helmond uses his solution to resurrect his daughter, you'd guess right. If you guess that she returns "not quite the same", you'd also guess right.

What you didn't guess right is just how absolutely insane this story gets from there. Of note, nothing I have given away about the book, can't be pulled from the back synopsis, so a whole SLEW of wild shit pops off, that the reader just doesn't see coming.

Tons of reanimated creatures, people and animals alike, vagina slug-monsters who turn to ghoulie children, Freudian conflict that leads to the most bizarre bouts of incest this side of V.C. Andrews, a whole hellscape of monsters and spooky stuff gets cracked open...just everything turned to 11, plus the kitchen sink.

If anything can be said about The Orpheus Process is that once your hooked, you're HOOKED, even despite it's glaring flaws. I read half of the 420 page book in a 2 hour flight.

It's a bit slow to get going, but once it's going, it's a mile-a-minute of frantic storytelling.

The bad? Incredibly unrealistic characterizations (which I'm coming to find is par for the course with 80s/90s pulp horror) where characters are so over-the-top in their presentation of whatever stereotype they're meant to convey that it is entirely unbelievable. The most heinous of this being the books main protagonist, Dr. Orville "Lenny" Helmond. This guy is so unlikeable and impossible, I had a hard time with him being the hero.

My least favorite trait of the title, is the pages and pages of psuedo-science. Ugh. All of THESE do that, but this one goes overboard with it and distracted me from the story.

Finally, the scope becomes far too wide in the last hundred pages or so, biting off way more than Gower can chew, and effectively portray to the reader. The Orpheus Process goes so insane, that it almost collapses under the weight of its own craziness.

That being said, if you like this sort of thing, you will definitely like The Orpheus Process, even in spite of it's flaws.

Think Pet Semetary meets Re-Animator meets a tinge of Hellraiser, but released by Troma. And Stuart Gordon absolutely directed it.

[Ken Saunders · Rating 2 out of 5]

Pretty lousy overall, but the phantasmagorical silliness in the book's last third is amusing. My advice would be to skip right to Chapter 16, "Beasts of the Street", on page 239. You won't miss anything that doesn't get repeated a few more times. THE ORPHEUS PROCESS mostly combines banal philosophical riffs, about the difference between the body and the soul, with hilariously overwrought prose and a collection of sexist tropes so tone-deaf that Ron Burgundy really should record the audiobook.
That's because this is the story of super-stud genius Dr. Len Orville Helmond. So virile that he conquers death! So brilliant that the annoying animal rights protesters chanting outside his lab change their minds and go home when he mansplains! So sexy that his wife, a former bra-burning feminist who now "just plain loves taking care of a house", turns into a helplessly orgasmic beast in the sack. So charmed that the teenaged loser 'dating' his daughter YES! dies in a car accident. Naturally his lab assistant (and, really, EVERY other female in his presence) is hot for his body, turned on by his potent pheromones. And that pretty much sums up the first half of the book. Here's a quote that sums up the rest: "Ally had always thought of her father as a thinker and a lover; it was scary but kind of reassuring to learn that he could also be a fighter." Because once the gates of Hell fly open, mild-mannered Dr. Len turns into a zombie-fighting Rambo.

I won't spell out the book's most outrageous violation (later revealed to be completely unnecessary BTW). But considering that desecration's detailed description gets an entire page shows this book's priorities. Meanwhile the monster's first, and arguably most tragic, victim dies off stage and barely even gets one line or notice.

Plainly I could have abandoned this book at any point. But there is something compulsively readable about its consistent willingness to probe every cellular and cosmic extreme and its insistence on reconciling atheist principles with the troubling implications of zombies having personalities by piling on additional layers of BS. Meanwhile every page is full of sentences like "the glistening black diamond of her ego was fracturing into flaws of madness at its center."

It's too bad, the book suggests, this Alice did not possess Dr. Helmond's surely massive testosterone fountain, or learn his most important lesson, that no woman or buffoon can be trusted with the universal power he invented. If only she could have realized the problem all along was his inferior subjects- if anyone would know best how to manage hypervitality (or whatever), it could only be a being as supreme as himself.

[Thomas · Rating 2 out of 5]

The Orpheus Process was lucky thirteen in the Dell/Abyss line of books, so of course it has to be a good one, right? It won't be as bad as either of the Ron Dee books, right? I'm not just trying to pump myself up for reading another crappy horror novel, right?

Unfortunately, no. The Orpheus Process doesn't delve as deeply into the pointlessness that Dusk, Obsessed, or Descent did, but it's hardly a good book. It has a dry, unemotional style that feels very tell-y, while also having a melodramatic, over-the-top feel to how Gower tells the story. It's filled with stilted dialogue and inconsistent characters who flip-flop on their decisions without much reason why. I pegged that much of it within the first fifty pages, but the rest of the book revealed bad science, gratuitous violence, and ridiculous plotting. The book is readable, and doesn't tread the misogyny line as much as those other three books (though there is a heavy dose of sexism), but that's about the best I can say for it.

This isn't a book that makes me want to throw it into the fire, but neither is it a book I would ever want to re-read, nor is it one I would recommend. To paraphrase Eric Idle, this isn't a book for reading; this is a book for laying down and avoiding. I have fond memories of this publishing line, but I should have remembered Sturgeon's Law before attempting this reading project, as I have regrets.

[DBeen · Rating 2 out of 5]

This is a story about dread.

During the first couple of chapters I was initially concerned about the quality. The characters are fairly wooden, and pretty much all of the dialogue would be awkward and ridiculous if actually spoken aloud by any real person. The writing style is lackluster, though it has its moments. As the book unfolded it it grew enough on me to prevent the technical shortcomings from bothering me and I accepted it as the literary equivalent to a B movie. Low budget and not the most sleek or stylish read, it still works fine if you allow yourself to identify with the emotional situation and put yourself in the character's position.

The compelling force behind the book is a slow buildup of anxiety and an awful, growing inevitability that some sketchy behavior will eventually come to light in a multi-life destroying way as things go more and more wrong. It's the process of despair that might be felt upon (seriously, imagine this) realizing that a hole you'd been digging in a you-should-have-known-better place while searching for something you thought was valuable is now too deep to get out of, even though you're still alive down there and have to try. You also happen to know if you don't find your way out literally everybody important to you is going to fall in there pretty soon and break their neck right in front of you, but not die right away and sit there gurgling painfully for hours or days. But you can't actually fix it and you kind of know that already and the gurgling isn't there yet but it's getting closer and closer arrrrgh anxiety despair despair!

To be honest, I didn't care much about the fates of anybody in the story. The third part (of three) dragged on and on, much like how goth clubs continue to drag on playing the same exact gothic oldies they've been playing for the past 40+ years. I make that analogy because there are several little not that clever wink winks in the text signaling the author's familiarity with old goth bands and punky aesthetic, in what seems to me like a silly bid for kinship among his readers that transcends the actual book. I lost interest and skimmed through the last 40 or so pages in seconds, then read pieces of the last few just so I'd get some sort vague conclusion, even though at that point I barely cared. Everything up until then was basically readable for me, with the proper B-lit mindset.

Now the moment you've all been reading for. I humbly present a masterful poem I wrote, inspired of course by The Orpheus Process and my own dark nature.

Dread
I wanted to do things right
But I messed up
Because I'm dumb-headed
In oh so many ways
Now slow, ever-nearing
Desperation
Wait, there's still a way
Motivation
But no, it's too late
My mistakes finally
Inevitably
Hold me tight against the wall
Slicing my face slow and ragged
With a jagged
Claw (The Sisters of Mercy play in the background)
I and my loved ones
Have become victims of the relentless force
Of my own nonsensical science

* Permission granted to read the above poem at any 90s coffeeshop open mic

[Sean McDonough · Rating 4 out of 5]

Collapses under its own weight towards the end, but the first 3/4 are gruesome and intensely engrossing. Would have benefited from a narrower scope at the climax.

[Anthony · Rating 4 out of 5]

Ummmm,, holy crap! This was bonkers, grotesque,macabre,humorous,vile,offensive, etc. This was a combination of Re-Animator and Pet Cemetary. Sort of?? One of the better Dell/Abyss titles I have read. Horror mixed with scientific experimentation. The last 100 pages of this book is nuts.

[zudie · Rating 2 out of 5]

I don't even know what I just read

[Debra]

Stephen King endorsed the entire Dell Abyss Horror line. Here is his blurb:

"Thank you for introducing me to the remarkable line of novels currently being issued under Dell's Abyss imprint. I have given a great many blurbs over the last twelve years or so, but this one marks two firsts: first unsolicited blurb (I called you) and the first time I have blurbed a whole line of books. In terms of quality, production, and plain old story-telling reliability (that's the bottom line, isn't it), Dell's new line is amazingly satisfying...a rare and wonderful bargain for readers. I hope to be looking into the Abyss for a long time to come."

[Jessica King · Rating 3 out of 5]

I definitely could have done without the rapey parts. Otherwise, it was a slightly dated but fun, lighter spin on Frankenstein (my all time favorite story)...except with more of a view of the egocentric doctor/scientist than the opposite of the wiser, more humane monster that this book contains. It's the monster I love about Frankenstein, but the view of the over-zealous doctor/scientist in this one that I liked.

[Konstantine · Rating 3 out of 5]

kind of generous with the rating here but the Re-Animator/Street Trash sort of craziness in the back half is entertaining and campy enough to keep me on board, way better offering than most of the other Dell Abyss titles

[Lorenza · Rating 2 out of 5]

È stato un libro da 4 stelle fino a metà... Poi l'autore ha voluto esagerare e ho dovuto trascinare la lettura fino alla fine con scarso entusiasmo. Non consigliato

[Roger Leonhardt · Rating 4 out of 5]

Pet Semetary type novel

[Amthony · Rating 4 out of 5]

3.5/5

This book is definitely more than a reanimation or zombie book. It goes in depth about the empirical sort of processes the main character, Helmond, goes through. He's a scientist working at a small university in Berkshire, Ohio. His efforts to find the proper and healthy way of reanimating the dead turn away when he lets go of them, and lets his own feelings override the science he follows. The reason for this override is compelling, but still sort of reckless to me. To his chagrin, things obviously go wrong and hell breaks loose. As many of these other reviews say, the book does fall under its own weight during the end. The pacing disappears and lots feels crammed in the last 100 pages. I liked the ending of it; it was purposefully ironic (I hope). The writing is good, but I personally always got lost in the long scientific explanations because it's just not my thing. The family scenes were written well too, except for how mood-swingy Helmond's wife would be at times. The funniest example is when she's explaining how she doesn't really like that her husband experiments with life and death, but then she just gives him a blowjob in the living room. The tings of incest came off as weird at times, but they do end up serving the story. To finally get to the story, I don't have very many problems with it, but I find it very hard to believe that someone's actually found a way to raise the dead and literally no one cares about it until a certain paper gets published. The Characters were written well, most of the time. Helmond was kind of hard to like. Like many books from this era, it falls in the "if you can find it cheap, get it" category. Overall, good.

[Midas68 · Rating 3 out of 5]

I gave this a 4+ star review when I was a kid. But I usually jacked em up a little.
I'm guessing its probably more 3.