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Ancient Enemy
Book by Thompson, Donald
- GenresHorror
Mass Market Paperback
First published January 1, 1979
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Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews
September 9, 2022
I was promised a book about cockroaches swarming a town and causing mayhem. Instead, we show up after the deaths occur and then get about fifteen pages of cockroach and 180 pages of melodrama, bikers graphically raping and torturing a woman, and a lot of godawful dialogue. Mix in a bevy of grammatical errors and printing mistakes and it’s just a crummy time all around. This might hit the “schlock” factor for some, but I was let down by the lack of roaches in favor of over-the-top human scum.
January 23, 2018
What starts out as a vacation in Nevada turns into a hideous nightmare for young Dr. Roberto Costaign. Like others before him, he finds himself face to face with a horrifying and deadly plague- a plague that threatens to destroy the entire country side!
EWW! Roaches! Lots and LOTS of roaches! This book was quick, which was good... because the book itself was not that great. It was meh. The reasoning for why the roaches were doing what they were doing was kinda weak. I didn't really care for the super shallow, sexist vibe the author had. I get it, it's an older book, yeah yeah, \that's very true when you are reading something from the 40's or 50's, but this book was from 1979. He laid it on a little too thick for '79. Also, everyone's life is threatened by killer roaches storming the house AND a crazy band of 'nam bikers with M-16s, so, let's all have sex now!! Really? -.-; It was a little ridiculous. Ok, fine, one couple... ok, sure, there are horny people who will still want to get it on when the world is going to shit, but when basically every main character in the book (except one) is busy having sex in the middle of all this danger, it feels a little stupid.
It was an ok read. Mildly entertaining and quick.
EWW! Roaches! Lots and LOTS of roaches! This book was quick, which was good... because the book itself was not that great. It was meh. The reasoning for why the roaches were doing what they were doing was kinda weak. I didn't really care for the super shallow, sexist vibe the author had. I get it, it's an older book, yeah yeah, \that's very true when you are reading something from the 40's or 50's, but this book was from 1979. He laid it on a little too thick for '79. Also, everyone's life is threatened by killer roaches storming the house AND a crazy band of 'nam bikers with M-16s, so, let's all have sex now!! Really? -.-; It was a little ridiculous. Ok, fine, one couple... ok, sure, there are horny people who will still want to get it on when the world is going to shit, but when basically every main character in the book (except one) is busy having sex in the middle of all this danger, it feels a little stupid.
It was an ok read. Mildly entertaining and quick.
March 11, 2021
“Cockroaches! Trillions of roiling, bubbling, seething, crawling, slithering, scratching cockroaches!”
Dr. Roberto Costaign is on vacation, and what a vacation it will be. Something to write in the history books. Costaign takes a wrong turn and ends up meeting a naked woman, scraped, peeled, and torn. He takes her into the nearby town of Cherakowa where he meets Sheriff Anton Whitney, who has ended up in Cherakowa due to being involved in a scandal in Chicago that had caused him to resign and leave town.
It is determined that the woman had come from the Eros Ranch, a near-by bunny ranch. Roberto and Anton decide to take a trip to the bunny ranch to ask some questions.
When they get up to the ranch, they initially find it wrapped in an eerie silence, then they find it bathed in bloody carnage. Carnage as in twenty-nine peeled dead bodies in various places around the hacienda.
The sheriff is clearly out-of-his-depth, and, so, contacts the local health department, who end up sending Dr. Patricia Symington to investigate the deaths, after he goes back to town. It’s Dr. Symington that finds that everybody at the ranch had died from a massive cockroach attack.
Then things start to get complicated as a big white Cadillac turns up with three hookers, Irene, Candy, and Katie, and two of their customers, Big Jim Goodman, and Long John Markley, from a nearby construction site. They’ve just spent the night together in a love shack away from the fracas that has happened at the bunny, I love saying that, ranch of death. They also mention that the road up to the Eros Ranch has been blocked off.
Meanwhile, in the sheriff’s jail the biker Banzo is cooling his heels in the town jail for various anti-social behaviors. Because the Sheriff’s getting a lot of pressure from the Mayor, and because Cherakowa is having a big week-long festival, Sheriff Whitney makes Banzo an offer he can’t refuse.
Meanwhile, back at the ranch, our merry bunch is wondering what’s keeping the police, and the crime scene specialists, from showing up at the bunny farm to investigate the deaths, only to find out the phone lines have been cut.
Soon afterwards, when some of the bunny ranch’s new occupants try to leave, they find that they are under siege from Banzo’s biker gang “The Slavers”. Unfortunately for all involved, the siege continues past nighttime, and that’s when the roaches start swarming. And they’re hungry. And indiscriminate in what they eat. They then attack the good along with the bad, and both sides are barely able escape.
It’s here that things start to get a bit tricky as The Slavers are upset that they almost got ate by the roaches, and they want to leave, while the Sheriff wants them to stay and finish the job of keeping the occupants of the bunny ranch at the Eros Ranch pinned down until the end of Cherakowa’s festivities.
But it ain’t gonna happen, and the bikers leave, only to find that the Sheriff has put warrants out on them.
After the dust up between the Sheriff and the bikers, the Sheriff ends up at the bunny ranch with the worn survivors of the night’s roach attack.
Upset that the sheriff has withdrawn his support, and that he has put warrants out on them, Banzo declares war on the Sheriff at all costs. So, the novel settles down into a siege story, as the inhabitants of the ranch try to escape, the bikers try to kill them, and roaches are out to kill them all.
The Ancient Enemy by Donald Thompson appeared in 1975 on the heels of Peter Benchley’s Jaws, and you can tell. Still, Thompson wasn’t alone as his contemporaries James Herbert, Guy N. Smith, and Richard Lewis were all making their bones in this horror sub-genre at the same time.
Quite frankly, Thompson just isn’t up to the above writer’s standards as the prose is clunky and incompetent, the plot is predictable, the characters are cliched, the melodrama is embarrassingly bad, there is numbingly bad dialogue, and the story has enough holes in it to pass as swiss cheese. Let’s face it, this is certainly not a novel meant for the ages. The Ancient Enemy even reads like a novelization of a bad “B” drive-in movie. But . . . I was never bored, it had a splashy ending, and if anybody whose reading this review tells anybody that I DID enjoy this novel, I’ll have to track you down and kill you all.
Still, if you are a fan of bad horror books, or the nature-strikes back genre, you’ll probably enjoy this slightly sleazy novel. A guilty pleasure, but I still can’t give it more than three stars.
Dr. Roberto Costaign is on vacation, and what a vacation it will be. Something to write in the history books. Costaign takes a wrong turn and ends up meeting a naked woman, scraped, peeled, and torn. He takes her into the nearby town of Cherakowa where he meets Sheriff Anton Whitney, who has ended up in Cherakowa due to being involved in a scandal in Chicago that had caused him to resign and leave town.
It is determined that the woman had come from the Eros Ranch, a near-by bunny ranch. Roberto and Anton decide to take a trip to the bunny ranch to ask some questions.
When they get up to the ranch, they initially find it wrapped in an eerie silence, then they find it bathed in bloody carnage. Carnage as in twenty-nine peeled dead bodies in various places around the hacienda.
The sheriff is clearly out-of-his-depth, and, so, contacts the local health department, who end up sending Dr. Patricia Symington to investigate the deaths, after he goes back to town. It’s Dr. Symington that finds that everybody at the ranch had died from a massive cockroach attack.
Then things start to get complicated as a big white Cadillac turns up with three hookers, Irene, Candy, and Katie, and two of their customers, Big Jim Goodman, and Long John Markley, from a nearby construction site. They’ve just spent the night together in a love shack away from the fracas that has happened at the bunny, I love saying that, ranch of death. They also mention that the road up to the Eros Ranch has been blocked off.
Meanwhile, in the sheriff’s jail the biker Banzo is cooling his heels in the town jail for various anti-social behaviors. Because the Sheriff’s getting a lot of pressure from the Mayor, and because Cherakowa is having a big week-long festival, Sheriff Whitney makes Banzo an offer he can’t refuse.
Meanwhile, back at the ranch, our merry bunch is wondering what’s keeping the police, and the crime scene specialists, from showing up at the bunny farm to investigate the deaths, only to find out the phone lines have been cut.
Soon afterwards, when some of the bunny ranch’s new occupants try to leave, they find that they are under siege from Banzo’s biker gang “The Slavers”. Unfortunately for all involved, the siege continues past nighttime, and that’s when the roaches start swarming. And they’re hungry. And indiscriminate in what they eat. They then attack the good along with the bad, and both sides are barely able escape.
It’s here that things start to get a bit tricky as The Slavers are upset that they almost got ate by the roaches, and they want to leave, while the Sheriff wants them to stay and finish the job of keeping the occupants of the bunny ranch at the Eros Ranch pinned down until the end of Cherakowa’s festivities.
But it ain’t gonna happen, and the bikers leave, only to find that the Sheriff has put warrants out on them.
After the dust up between the Sheriff and the bikers, the Sheriff ends up at the bunny ranch with the worn survivors of the night’s roach attack.
Upset that the sheriff has withdrawn his support, and that he has put warrants out on them, Banzo declares war on the Sheriff at all costs. So, the novel settles down into a siege story, as the inhabitants of the ranch try to escape, the bikers try to kill them, and roaches are out to kill them all.
The Ancient Enemy by Donald Thompson appeared in 1975 on the heels of Peter Benchley’s Jaws, and you can tell. Still, Thompson wasn’t alone as his contemporaries James Herbert, Guy N. Smith, and Richard Lewis were all making their bones in this horror sub-genre at the same time.
Quite frankly, Thompson just isn’t up to the above writer’s standards as the prose is clunky and incompetent, the plot is predictable, the characters are cliched, the melodrama is embarrassingly bad, there is numbingly bad dialogue, and the story has enough holes in it to pass as swiss cheese. Let’s face it, this is certainly not a novel meant for the ages. The Ancient Enemy even reads like a novelization of a bad “B” drive-in movie. But . . . I was never bored, it had a splashy ending, and if anybody whose reading this review tells anybody that I DID enjoy this novel, I’ll have to track you down and kill you all.
Still, if you are a fan of bad horror books, or the nature-strikes back genre, you’ll probably enjoy this slightly sleazy novel. A guilty pleasure, but I still can’t give it more than three stars.
October 25, 2023
"Only you and I, Bob, have never faced an enemy. When we did it turned out to be the oldest enemy mankind has, except death. Cockroaches. Did you know that? Did you know there are two thousand two hundred and fifty separate species? Did you know they've been around two hundred and fifty thousand years? They've been the enemy since we all lived in caves. They're the only enemy we've never beaten."
I love finding a classic horror in a charity shop and this one didn't disappoint.
Set in the Nevada plains two doctors, two former army veterans, three sex workers, a corrupt sheriff and a biker gang converge on a remote townhouse brothel where they must face the most terrifying of threats; a trillion swarming cockroaches!!!
Fast paced with unlikely friendships and relationships blossoming despite the trauma and tragedy being witnessed, this is very much a question of who will survive the ordeal. 4 stars.
I love finding a classic horror in a charity shop and this one didn't disappoint.
Set in the Nevada plains two doctors, two former army veterans, three sex workers, a corrupt sheriff and a biker gang converge on a remote townhouse brothel where they must face the most terrifying of threats; a trillion swarming cockroaches!!!
Fast paced with unlikely friendships and relationships blossoming despite the trauma and tragedy being witnessed, this is very much a question of who will survive the ordeal. 4 stars.
May 6, 2019
The book had almost as much Wat going for it as Wild Animus. It's half nature-run-amok book ala The Swarm and half late '60s biker movie. Neither halves add up to much.
September 3, 2025
A young doctor out for a weekend away in the Nevada desert finds himself caught up in a struggle between a biker gang and the local sheriff, some clients and girls from the local cathouse and a massive swarm of cockroaches that threaten them all
Not a bad read really but not enough insect action and no real explanations as to why they are there or where they came from
Not a bad read really but not enough insect action and no real explanations as to why they are there or where they came from
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January 25, 2021Full review: https://monsterbookclub.com/2021/01/2...
Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews