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Venom
ORIGINAL FIRST EDITION, Ballantine #25419, © March 1979. Paperback original, so stated, no previous hardcover. Plot summary: Cobras slither about a New York apartment building. Cover blurb: "Something Deadly Has Moved Into The City-Striking From The Dark Corners Of Your Worst Nightmares!" Original $1.95 cover price. Disc: Paperback, 168 pages, 18 cm.
- GenresHorror
168 pages, Mass Market Paperback
First published January 1, 1979
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Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews
August 5, 2020
An out-of-print creature feature! Snakes are my favorite beast to go berserk and here we have a satisfying nest of Indian cobras terrorizing a New York City apartment building. It's a good set-up that's just as zany as one would expect and hope for. Only slightly marred by a long list of characters who are probably given more attention than necessary.
That said, some of the characters are great. The herpetologist is a fully formed personality and even delivers an unexpectedly lovely Black Lives Matter-type speech when he berates a trigger-happy cop.
"The same God who created you created those snakes. They have as much right to live as you do...I have a feeling you'd shoot a black junkie in a Harlem doorway as quickly as you shot that snake—and with as little reason." (p. 163)
Another surprise is the vibrant depiction of a gay couple. Their relationship is a bit unconventional, perhaps, but for a few pages at least O'Neil presents a beautiful love story. I don't know if O'Neil himself was gay, but either way, the authenticity is wonderful to see in a 1970's horror novel.
Overall, if you can get through the slightly slow beginning—and super-weird masturbation fantasies—there's a jolly snakes gone wild rampage that keeps the pages turning. Enjoy!
That said, some of the characters are great. The herpetologist is a fully formed personality and even delivers an unexpectedly lovely Black Lives Matter-type speech when he berates a trigger-happy cop.
"The same God who created you created those snakes. They have as much right to live as you do...I have a feeling you'd shoot a black junkie in a Harlem doorway as quickly as you shot that snake—and with as little reason." (p. 163)
Another surprise is the vibrant depiction of a gay couple. Their relationship is a bit unconventional, perhaps, but for a few pages at least O'Neil presents a beautiful love story. I don't know if O'Neil himself was gay, but either way, the authenticity is wonderful to see in a 1970's horror novel.
Overall, if you can get through the slightly slow beginning—and super-weird masturbation fantasies—there's a jolly snakes gone wild rampage that keeps the pages turning. Enjoy!
February 27, 2020
Over the course of my study of animals-attack novels from 1974-1982, I've read some real stinkers. Occasionally, I come across some that are pretty good. While not a masterpiece, O'Neil's Venom is thoroughly enjoyable and considerably well-written.
The action begins with John Carver, a disaffected college dropout with wealthy parents wandering an open-air market in Benares, India, until he comes across a snake charmer. He negotiates until he eventually gets what he wants: four live cobras to smuggle back to his Manhattan apartment. An admitted ophidiophobe himself, Carver has a specific reason for stowing the serpents in his guitar and covering the hole: the death of his mother.
It seems neither Mrs. Carver or the late Mr. regarded their boy with much affection, only--to use O'Neil's term--indifference. "The atmosphere of John's early childhood had been so bereft of love and warmth that to this day he didn't know what those qualities were" (49). This has simmered and festered until, on this two-month-long holiday he spends mother's money to leave Europe for India and hatch his plan. "His indifference to his parents had evolved, first unto private bitterness, then into hatred as he realized that indifference was not a passive condition but a deliberate pursuit of a course of action" (50).
Mrs. Carver is scatterbrained and hardly sympathetic, though little details like her constant need for the noise of the television or her swapping of her "near" and "far" glasses since she refuses to get bifocals does add some comedic relief. When she scolds John for gallivanting abroad and insists that new restrictions are about to be laid down, the reader senses what will happen next. She then goes to draw her bath, "slowly" because it "aerates the water," John puts his plan into motion (67).
As is the case with the other two snake-themed novels I've studied from this period (Joseph L. Gilmore's Rattlers and John Godey's The Snake), Freudian archetypes are rife, and the Oedipal subtext is evident. I half expected Mrs. Carver to be naked and ready to step in the tub when the phallic aggressors are set loose on her. She is, however, lying in bed, reading a magazine and watching TV, consistently switching her glasses to do each, when the first snake comes into her vision, hood extended.
After the deed is done, John plans on setting off "an insect bomb large enough to kill a large dog," exterminating the snakes (71). From there, it's a manner of putting them in the incinerator and blaming it all on a heart attack. Of course, this is too simple. John is bitten in the face and runs out of the apartment, out of the building, and heads towards a nearby hospital where's he's just able to mutter "Snake ... snakebite ... cobra ... Indian cobra" before he passes out (83). Was he so careless as to leave every door in the apartment, even the ones leading to the terrace, open as he fled? Wouldn't be much of a story if he didn't.
In between the action, we've been introduced to a litany of supporting characters, tenants who range from arrogant to eccentric to milquetoast. All are now in danger. In order to avoid a panic, the superintendent Larry Cousins and a hastily summoned herpetologist from the Bronx Zoo named Dr. Stein must go floor-by-floor and evacuate the building.
Novels from the 70s often don't hold up well today. While the first few chapters of the novel and its descriptions of India offer an exoticizing, othering gaze of the nation, the rest of this book deals pretty even-handedly with race. The two black characters are well-developed and in no way caricature. ( Mild spoiler : Unlike even some contemporary horror films, they also both make it out alive.) There's even a line delivered by Dr. Stein that accuses a police captain of being trigger happy when it's a black perp, as prescient today as it was in 1979.
This is also only the second novel I've come across in this window of time that has even acknowledged that LGBT people exist--interestingly enough, the other being Gilmore's Rattlers. While Gilmore, however, treats the gay couple as icky and unnatural (while also going into titillating detail about a lesbian liaison), O'Neil paints George and Martin with humanity and pathos. Perhaps their boisterous arguing and ties to Broadway do fall into stereotypical territory, but overall, I think their appearance here is a progressive addition.
The author does very much enjoy the male gaze, however, with vivid descriptions of a affair John has with a girl in her late teens while still in India. Aside from a minor point of her assisting him in getting the cobras across customs (which, if Dr. Stein is right later, would not be a problem since it was not at the time illegal), it seems as though it's there only to serve as an obligatory sex scene. We do see a little more of John's character--the same indifference imbued on him by his parents extends to romantic encounters--but the book might have been better served if that subplot was cut in favor of a little more peril once the snakes are slithering in New York.
Which is a nice segue to another critique. While there is danger, there is suspense and tension, there are bites and venom, and even a little death, the action takes a long time to build and is over before it really gets started. In other words, the lead up doesn't deliver the best pay off. It's still fun, but I wanted a little more.
Lastly, I have to further remark on something I touched on earlier. That Freudian subtext? To paraphrase Giles from Buffy the Vampire Slayer, "the subtext rapidly becomes ... text." If you missed the mother/son tension early on, you could be forgiven. When Larry, however, comes across Kate, naked in bed with a sleeping cobra on her, it's a little harder . Armed with a bent clothes hanger and intent on keeping her still and calm as he rescues her, he "took the upper hem of the sheet and began to peel it away from under her chin. The skin of her light brown body appeared inch by inch: her shoulders, the gentle slope of her breasts up to the nipples ... From its head down, the snake lay diagonally across Kate's abdomen, along the left side of her pubic hair, across the inside of her thigh" (123). Awakening, the snake "flicked out its split tongue in curiosity, and the tongue brushed against the bottom of Kate's breast like a brief whisper" (123).
But it's not all the strange interplay of Eros and Thanatos. O'Neil has to make it a full-blown Psych 101 course, which would be incomplete without a little more Oedipal drama peppered with some castration anxiety. Dr. Stein wants to save the snakes if he can; he cares deeply for all the animals he treats. Why? We find out at nine-years old, he brought a harmless garter snake indoors. His father "made him watch as he cut of its head with a pair of paper scissors from his library desk" (142). Ouch.
All in all, I have to say it's a shame O'Neil's novel is out-of-print and largely forgotten. It is an interesting moment in this distinct phenomenon I am researching. The cover boasts "Something deadly has moved into the city--striking from the darkest corners of your worst nightmares!" Purple as that headline is, the snakes do prefer dark corners and do strike. But, like so many narratives about animals attacking, this book also reminds us in its denouement that the really terrifying, cruel monster still walks among us and always will. Though venomless, humankind is the most heartless beast of all.
The action begins with John Carver, a disaffected college dropout with wealthy parents wandering an open-air market in Benares, India, until he comes across a snake charmer. He negotiates until he eventually gets what he wants: four live cobras to smuggle back to his Manhattan apartment. An admitted ophidiophobe himself, Carver has a specific reason for stowing the serpents in his guitar and covering the hole: the death of his mother.
It seems neither Mrs. Carver or the late Mr. regarded their boy with much affection, only--to use O'Neil's term--indifference. "The atmosphere of John's early childhood had been so bereft of love and warmth that to this day he didn't know what those qualities were" (49). This has simmered and festered until, on this two-month-long holiday he spends mother's money to leave Europe for India and hatch his plan. "His indifference to his parents had evolved, first unto private bitterness, then into hatred as he realized that indifference was not a passive condition but a deliberate pursuit of a course of action" (50).
Mrs. Carver is scatterbrained and hardly sympathetic, though little details like her constant need for the noise of the television or her swapping of her "near" and "far" glasses since she refuses to get bifocals does add some comedic relief. When she scolds John for gallivanting abroad and insists that new restrictions are about to be laid down, the reader senses what will happen next. She then goes to draw her bath, "slowly" because it "aerates the water," John puts his plan into motion (67).
As is the case with the other two snake-themed novels I've studied from this period (Joseph L. Gilmore's Rattlers and John Godey's The Snake), Freudian archetypes are rife, and the Oedipal subtext is evident. I half expected Mrs. Carver to be naked and ready to step in the tub when the phallic aggressors are set loose on her. She is, however, lying in bed, reading a magazine and watching TV, consistently switching her glasses to do each, when the first snake comes into her vision, hood extended.
After the deed is done, John plans on setting off "an insect bomb large enough to kill a large dog," exterminating the snakes (71). From there, it's a manner of putting them in the incinerator and blaming it all on a heart attack. Of course, this is too simple. John is bitten in the face and runs out of the apartment, out of the building, and heads towards a nearby hospital where's he's just able to mutter "Snake ... snakebite ... cobra ... Indian cobra" before he passes out (83). Was he so careless as to leave every door in the apartment, even the ones leading to the terrace, open as he fled? Wouldn't be much of a story if he didn't.
In between the action, we've been introduced to a litany of supporting characters, tenants who range from arrogant to eccentric to milquetoast. All are now in danger. In order to avoid a panic, the superintendent Larry Cousins and a hastily summoned herpetologist from the Bronx Zoo named Dr. Stein must go floor-by-floor and evacuate the building.
Novels from the 70s often don't hold up well today. While the first few chapters of the novel and its descriptions of India offer an exoticizing, othering gaze of the nation, the rest of this book deals pretty even-handedly with race. The two black characters are well-developed and in no way caricature. ( Mild spoiler : Unlike even some contemporary horror films, they also both make it out alive.) There's even a line delivered by Dr. Stein that accuses a police captain of being trigger happy when it's a black perp, as prescient today as it was in 1979.
This is also only the second novel I've come across in this window of time that has even acknowledged that LGBT people exist--interestingly enough, the other being Gilmore's Rattlers. While Gilmore, however, treats the gay couple as icky and unnatural (while also going into titillating detail about a lesbian liaison), O'Neil paints George and Martin with humanity and pathos. Perhaps their boisterous arguing and ties to Broadway do fall into stereotypical territory, but overall, I think their appearance here is a progressive addition.
The author does very much enjoy the male gaze, however, with vivid descriptions of a affair John has with a girl in her late teens while still in India. Aside from a minor point of her assisting him in getting the cobras across customs (which, if Dr. Stein is right later, would not be a problem since it was not at the time illegal), it seems as though it's there only to serve as an obligatory sex scene. We do see a little more of John's character--the same indifference imbued on him by his parents extends to romantic encounters--but the book might have been better served if that subplot was cut in favor of a little more peril once the snakes are slithering in New York.
Which is a nice segue to another critique. While there is danger, there is suspense and tension, there are bites and venom, and even a little death, the action takes a long time to build and is over before it really gets started. In other words, the lead up doesn't deliver the best pay off. It's still fun, but I wanted a little more.
Lastly, I have to further remark on something I touched on earlier. That Freudian subtext? To paraphrase Giles from Buffy the Vampire Slayer, "the subtext rapidly becomes ... text." If you missed the mother/son tension early on, you could be forgiven. When Larry, however, comes across Kate, naked in bed with a sleeping cobra on her, it's a little harder . Armed with a bent clothes hanger and intent on keeping her still and calm as he rescues her, he "took the upper hem of the sheet and began to peel it away from under her chin. The skin of her light brown body appeared inch by inch: her shoulders, the gentle slope of her breasts up to the nipples ... From its head down, the snake lay diagonally across Kate's abdomen, along the left side of her pubic hair, across the inside of her thigh" (123). Awakening, the snake "flicked out its split tongue in curiosity, and the tongue brushed against the bottom of Kate's breast like a brief whisper" (123).
But it's not all the strange interplay of Eros and Thanatos. O'Neil has to make it a full-blown Psych 101 course, which would be incomplete without a little more Oedipal drama peppered with some castration anxiety. Dr. Stein wants to save the snakes if he can; he cares deeply for all the animals he treats. Why? We find out at nine-years old, he brought a harmless garter snake indoors. His father "made him watch as he cut of its head with a pair of paper scissors from his library desk" (142). Ouch.
All in all, I have to say it's a shame O'Neil's novel is out-of-print and largely forgotten. It is an interesting moment in this distinct phenomenon I am researching. The cover boasts "Something deadly has moved into the city--striking from the darkest corners of your worst nightmares!" Purple as that headline is, the snakes do prefer dark corners and do strike. But, like so many narratives about animals attacking, this book also reminds us in its denouement that the really terrifying, cruel monster still walks among us and always will. Though venomless, humankind is the most heartless beast of all.
September 2, 2017
I thought this my be another fairly bland 'creature' horror novel but I was very surprised by the quality of writing in this little novel. I must admit to having quite a phobia of snakes so anything with them in put me instantly on edge. More so with Venom as the snakes are incredibly well described and the nature of how they are smuggled into the States is fairly feasible.
I would point out that these are not mutated snakes, they have no special powers nor do they multiply by the thousands to wreck havoc upon New York. They are four Indian Cobras smuggled into the country for a specific purpose that then goes horribly wrong. The storyline is based around an apartment block which makes it a bit more believable and threatening. So believable in fact that I did have a minor nightmare that there was a cobra under my bed :(
Venom may not win many prizes for originality but it is well written and entertaining with just enough exoticism balanced with familiarity. It's a fine effort and one well worth checking out for fans of creature horror which boomed in the late seventies and early eighties.
I would point out that these are not mutated snakes, they have no special powers nor do they multiply by the thousands to wreck havoc upon New York. They are four Indian Cobras smuggled into the country for a specific purpose that then goes horribly wrong. The storyline is based around an apartment block which makes it a bit more believable and threatening. So believable in fact that I did have a minor nightmare that there was a cobra under my bed :(
Venom may not win many prizes for originality but it is well written and entertaining with just enough exoticism balanced with familiarity. It's a fine effort and one well worth checking out for fans of creature horror which boomed in the late seventies and early eighties.
October 28, 2020
So bad. So so bad. He was like def Into that snake too much. It was more of a love story between him and the cobra. Like a legit love story. He was just so Into those damn cobras
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews