Three Quarters

by Graeme De Timms

1963: A stand-alone novel by Graeme De Timms.

Plague brings the world to an end in an insane frenzy of lust and violence - and a party of survivors search for reason in a holocaust of decaying humanity.

- Extract: Jelly fish, stewed in the boiling sea, flopped around his head. The sand was red and sizzled; the pebbles burned and a prune walked across his stomach. In his mouth, where the teeth were crumbling lemon pips, where the tongue lay stiff and ragged, his brain poured in. The sky, black and thick, fell. His feet screamed and floated away across the steaming water and, still screaming, sank. He tried to howl, but between the lipless hole the brain, grey and steamy red, came and clogged his cry. Across the sands his hands fled on bloody fingers. The sand sank and he lay, pulsating and throbbing, in a wealth of rum. He soaked it like a sponge. He dissolved in a fleshy vapour. And he knew - somehow - that here was Hell.-

158 pages, Mass Market Paperback

Published January 1, 1963

Reviews

[Snood]

“Three Quarters” starts terribly with a barely intelligible chapter describing the protagonist waking up from a near fatal alcohol binge: “Jelly fish, stewed in the boiling sea, flopped around his head. The sand was red and sizzled; the pebbles burned and a prune walked across his stomach. In his mouth, where the teeth were crumbling lemon pips, where the tongue lay stiff and ragged, his brain poured in. The sky, black and thick, fell.”It’s a combination of poetic language and complete nonsense that leaves you more dazed than dazzled.

What follows is a competent but standard zombie apocalypse story, though it notably predated Night of the Living Dead by several years. The normalcy ends up shattered by a troupe of man-hating warrior women who are bested by our unlikable hero and join their group. What follows is a rape, a failed attempt to murder the rapist, a rescue of a crossdressing Catholic teen they left behind in a church, and then the grand reveal…

All the world’s ills are caused by an alien race who arrived hundreds of years ago to destroy the planet, forgot they were aliens, and somehow their hate released a plague that killed most of the world population, including them. Now it’s up to the true humans to eliminate the aliens and rehabilitate the newts (alien human hybrids). The warrior women claim to be the real humans, the rabble outside claim to be the real humans, and our protagonist is riddled with bullets before giving a final monologue about how the two cannot survive without the other.

The book has a lot of themes and threads, but so few of them lead anywhere that I’m forced to believe this is a paycheck novel Timms wrote as he went along. Catholicism and the rapture, what it means to be human in an inhumane world, gender identity, feminism, the “rape” possibly having been consensual sex, the redemption of evil people, and an entire alien invasion. All of these are picked up and dropped on a whim.

All in all it’s a curiosity piece, but I can’t say I recommend it to any regular readers.

If you’re wondering what the title means, I have no idea even after finishing the book. Is that the percent of the population killed by the plague? No, much more died. Maybe the book cost 75¢ and they messed up the font size.