Rating: 
Summary: Not what it appeared
Review: I picked up a used copy of The Totem recently thinking that it would be a standard horror novel. But after a promising start, this book became more of a medical thriller than horror novel. The character development was not particularly great and I found myself reading this to get through it rather than enjoying it. I know this is an early effort by Morrell and he has since moved into more the political intrigue genre but this book in my opinion is not worth the read.
Rating:
Summary: Not that great......from a great author
Review: I went to Half Priced Books one day, while rummaging around I came across this book "The Totem" it was praised for being one of the best horror novels ever written!, Imagine my excitement!!!. The Totem starts off pretty good(comes across as a supernatural thriller) but as you reach the middle of the story, it becomes a medical disaster story and not a very good one at that. David Morrell is a terrific writer, this must be one of his first novels. (I wonder if while writing The Totem someone said while halfway through that if he writes a horror story he'll be pigeonholed and won't be able to write anything else and so decided to change it), Oh well... who cares just skip it.
Rating:
Summary: Not that great......from a great author
Review: I went to Half Priced Books one day, while rummaging around I came across this book "The Totem" it was praised for being one of the best horror novels ever written!, Imagine my excitement!!!. The Totem starts off pretty good(comes across as a supernatural thriller) but as you reach the middle of the story, it becomes a medical disaster story and not a very good one at that. David Morrell is a terrific writer, this must be one of his first novels. (I wonder if while writing The Totem someone said while halfway through that if he writes a horror story he'll be pigeonholed and won't be able to write anything else and so decided to change it), Oh well... who cares just skip it.
Rating: 
Summary: Rough Going
Review: I, too, was recommended this book from the Horror 100 Best Books volume. The review written there spoke as if this were the Indy 500 of books--fast paced, quick reading. I found none of that here. At 50 pages in, I was not yet involved and began to put it down. At 100 pages, I got more interested, especially with the part about the kid. As things went further along, I was torn between wanting to finish it and moving on to something else. There were many things here that a seasoned writer should not have done. Several of the sentences pulled me out of the story, and I had trouble telling some of the characters apart. On the other hand, the suspenseful scenes were well done and I was drawn along with them. So, this is really a so-so book. I would be interested to read the book the reviewer read, instead of this mess--already rejected by his publisher once--that Morrell pulled out of his file cabinet.
Rating:
Summary: Rough Going
Review: I, too, was recommended this book from the Horror 100 Best Books volume. The review written there spoke as if this were the Indy 500 of books--fast paced, quick reading. I found none of that here. At 50 pages in, I was not yet involved and began to put it down. At 100 pages, I got more interested, especially with the part about the kid. As things went further along, I was torn between wanting to finish it and moving on to something else. There were many things here that a seasoned writer should not have done. Several of the sentences pulled me out of the story, and I had trouble telling some of the characters apart. On the other hand, the suspenseful scenes were well done and I was drawn along with them. So, this is really a so-so book. I would be interested to read the book the reviewer read, instead of this mess--already rejected by his publisher once--that Morrell pulled out of his file cabinet.
Rating:
Summary: SLOPPY SECONDS
Review: In the introduction to this so-called "horror" novel, Morrell explains quite egotistically that the original version of this book was rejected by his publisher and so Morrell amended it to fit his publisher's demands. However, when this book was re-released in the mid-nineties, Morrell chose to go back and do the book the way it was originally envisioned. Morrell's creative desires aside, I wonder if the original was any better. It couldn't have been any worse. I am only harsh on this book because it is heralded on the cover as one of the best horror novels of the past twenty years. Ooops...someone's tastes and mine are vastly different.
What do we have here anyway? It opens with a Marlboro-man clone (Sam Bodine) looking out over his vast property and then he goes down and finds his steer (they are not cows, as Morrell points out) horribly mutilated, but nothing was eaten. So did a wild animal do it? We then meet Nathan Slaughter, a relocated Detroit cop who was wounded in a gunfight in a convenience store, and who has come West to start a new, peaceful life. The problem with Slaughter is he is at heart a coward, he readily admits so. Then we meet all sorts of characters that piddle along and add to the body count. The Bodines disappear and we never find out what happened to them; a little boy gets bit by a raccoon and turns into a sniveling, carniverous animal, and we begin thinking perhaps this is a story about werewolves. Morrell gushes in his introduction that one of his favorite books was Stephen King's "Salem's Lot" which took the vampire legend and combined it with "Peyton Place" subplots, and he's right, "Salems Lot" is an incredibly good novel. But Morell missed the point severely. In trying to do the same, he comes out with little character development and an incoherent, muddled plot. Evidently some hippie commune in 1970 somehow got this mysterious virus (we never find out how), and they've turned into something like a werewolf, but not quite. We have to put up with a drunken, washed-up newsreporter who by the end of the book is a mute idiot, and the ending is so whitewashed and contrived, I almost laughed when I put the book down. And what is the totem? Morrell gives us the definition in the front of the book, but I can't quite seem to figure out what it has to do with anything.
Sorry, guys, this is in my opinion one of the worst horror books in the past twenty years. Now I see why he stuck to Rambo.
NOT RECOMMENDED. TWO STARS ONLY FOR SOME OF THE SCARY SCENES.
Rating: 
Summary: More than meets the eye
Review: In this, a re-issue of David Morrell's fourth novel (1979), the author, as stated in his introduction "experimented with a variety of formats, all linked by action"(xi) in his early career, from historical novels to action-chase novels, and to this one, in the horror genre. The first version of this story was apparently much different from what Morrell originally intended, edited down to what was thought appealing to readers in the 1970s: "half as long, twice as fast" (xiv). In reading this version, I cannot imagine the action being faster: as with all Morrell books I have previously read, the action comes fast and furious from the beginning, and this novel is no exception. You can see all the Morrell trademarks in this early work: a good protagonist (a sheriff with the great name of `Slaughter'); several antagonists (especially the town's mayor, Parsons); a mystery - in this case, something is mutilating animals and eventually people, with horrifying results for the town of Potter's Field, Wyoming; and a huge climax with Slaughter committing a gruesome, but heroic, act. There's also a theme of moral responsibility: several characters are faced with a choice of doing the right thing or doing nothing, and that adds another dimension to the action. Morrell also uses parallel imagery between the angry townspeople and the `hippies' who are blamed for the evils visited upon the town. Even the name of the town lends itself to the action, since a `potter's field' was where the poor and nameless were buried; there's some symbolism there! The hippy aspect of the story dates it a little bit - a modern audience born in the 1980s probably wouldn't understand the social divisions of 1970, but that historical reference is explained enough to give a younger reader the general picture.
Rating:
Summary: High adventure, low horror
Review: Regular readers of David Morrell expect a crisp writing style, brisk pacing, and above all, relentless action. Morrell delivers once again with The Totem, but this time there are elements of the classic horror story mixed in with the thrills. The residents of Potters Field, Wyoming, have fallen under the attack of wild animals that kill on sight, mutilating their prey. They hunt in packs, and their shadowed forms can be glimpsed running through the night forests, howling at the moon. Police Chief Nathan Slaughter soon discovers that these feral beasts are not animals at all, but the townspeople themselves. A new virus is loose in Potters Field, not entirely unlike rabies, that gives control back to a previously dormant area of the brain, in effect transforming men and women into the primal creature mankind was hundred of thousands of years ago. Morrell's writing is as clean and tense as always, yet the book does not live up to its horror billing. Action dominates, and while the author's take on the origins of the werewolf mythology serves to deepen the theme of the book, the horror elements are only a faint undercurrent in what is essentially an action/adventure tale.
Rating:
Summary: A good read
Review: The version of the book that I read is the one originally published back in 1979. It came out of a box in my friend's garage, and I decided to read it because he remembered liking it so much. I liked it, too. Although it is rather conventional in its structure and some aspects of the plot were left underdeveloped, I thought that David Morrell had a good handle on the genre and wrote some interesting characters--all men who have endured personal and professional failures and retreated to a small town in Wyoming to live life on a smaller scale. Their self-esteem as well as their lives is put on the line with the appearance of a mysterious virus that changes whatever it infects into a savage, murderous animal. I wonder if the makers of the film "28 Days" were familiar with this book.
Rating:
Summary: What happened to the horror novel?
Review: This book is a five-star novel for about 75% of the way, then completely degenerates. I was alerted to it by a book called "the 100 greatest horror novels," which gave me some good reading tips (Dan Simmons' Song of Kali) and bad ones (Whitley Streiber's The Wolfen). This book was somewhere in between. The first 150 pages or so are wonderfully creepy and disturbing. It's amazing that Morrell could have given something as apparently benign as a camp of hippies living in the woods such a sinister aspect (Blair Witch Project parallels are perhaps in order--there's something out there in the woods, we don't know what it is, but don't go out there.) But right when things are getting really good, the horror ends, and we have, as another reviewer commented, an action/adventure tale. It comes as no surprise that Morrell is the creator of the Rambo character. In The Totem, it's zombies getting blown away, instead of "commies." Overall, a great beginning and then a big disappointment.
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