BRIDGE, THE

Rating:
Summary: The Bridge: A Horror Story by John Skipp, Craig Spector
Review: *
Simply put, The Bridge is one of the finest horror novels I've ever read. If you enjoy your horror on an epic, apocalyptic scale, then this is one book that is sure to delight. There are only a handful of books in this genre that deserve to be mentioned in the same breath as The Bridge: The Stand by S. King, Phantoms by D. Koontz, Swan Song and They Thirst both by R. McCammon, Deus-X by J. Citro, Imajica by C. Barker (although some might argue that this title is better classified as fantasy). However, make no mistake, The Bridge is an altogether unique effort. I refuse to give any particular plot points away. In brief, The Bridge deals w/ the ultimate ecological nightmare scenario. It is absolutely riveting and features and ending that creeped me out for days-weeks-months! (Heck, I read this book over a decade ago and IT STILL CREEPS ME OUT!!)

If you a remember a rather [bad] horror movie from 1979 called Prophecy w/ Talia Shire(not to be confused with The 1995 film The Prophecy starring Chris Walken) that dealt with the monstrous consequences of man's reckless polluting of the environment and suspected that there was real potential for a truly great story embedded deep within that cheesy...film, then this book confirms those suspicions!

I truly believe that if adapted for the screen by the right filmmaker - Kubrick would have been my ideal choice, - it could potentially scare today's jaded and desensitized audiences on a level heretofore reached only by the likes of The Exorcist.

To take any stock in Robert P. Beveridge's bone-to-pick review of this fine book (which unfortunatlely occupies the pole-position in the reviews for this book) would be an enormous misatake on your part. Trust me! If you're looking for THE wild ride, then this is it. Mr. Beveridge claims that this is not the case, stating that The Bridge is "...so much less fun than Skipp and Spector's first five wild rides." Nonsense! Mr. Beveridge simply appears to be an unfortunate gent whose intellectual capacity causes him to take himself way too seriously. Lighten up, bro!

There are few books that I would go through the effort of bashing a reviewer who had in turn bashed it . This is one of those books. I simply don't want to see any of you folks miss out on one helluva good read because of someone's scathingly negative over-analytic review of a true horror classic.

Peace.

Rating:
Summary: Awesome Ride to the end of OUR World
Review: An Absolute MUST-READ, this one grabs you by the throat and doesn't let go until it has shredded your sensibilities and made you think twice about even turning on the water faucet. With characters you care about, Bad and Good, and an inexorable march to destruction that seems to have No savior...heroes still emerge and save what they can in a hopeless situation. The writing is excellent with details that are vivid but never diving into gore overdrive.....well, maybe a little but what the hell. These guys bring the goods and not only do they not "pull any punches"...they punch through your skull and rip out your cerebral cortex.......If you find it .....BUY IT......

Rating:
Summary: speeds like runaway train towards a devastating conclusion
Review: Environmental horror is actually a thriving subgenre. Virtually all those fifties giant-bug movies were warnings about the mistreatment of nature, but none were as direct and fierce in their warnings as these two guys are. In 'The Bridge' a local environmental disaster assumes global proportions as a group of well-drawn characters struggle to survive when a horrible new life-form is created in a chemical-waste dump site. This book is like a runaway express train, leading to an inevitable, but still devestating, ending. I read it in one sitting. Well worth your time

Rating:
Summary: Of their first six, Skipp and Spector's worst by far
Review: John Skipp and Craig Spector, The Bridge (Bantam, 1991)

Skipp and Spector wrote seven novels together, of which The Bridge is the sixth. The first five are inconsistent, but pretty bang-up thrill rides all the same. When they started on the downhill slide, they started steep.

The premise is pretty simple and very well-used in the atomic age: a whole bunch of toxic waste that's been dumped in one particular site starts mutating things and eventually takes on a will of its own. Hard to go wrong with that one, eh?

It's hard to pinpoint what, exactly, it is about The Bridge that makes it so much less fun than Skipp and Spector's first five wild rides (I have yet to track down a copy of their final collaboration, Animals, which many fans consider their finest). Perhaps it's the kludgy, overbearing moralizing mixed in with Skipp and Spector's usual closet-romance-novel style (one-sentence paragraphs liberally used, large chunks of melodramatic prose, that sort of thing). Perhaps it's an unsuccessful attempt to combat one of horror's most glaring problems-- the "I need some minor characters to kill off, so I'll just put them in the chapter where they die" problem-- by introducing almost every minor character in one previous chapter before they get offed. (Not necessarily THE previous chapter, just A previous chapter.) But hey, at least they made the effort, even if it didn't work too well. Perhaps it's the feeling that there really ARE no major characters here. But then, that ties back into the first problem, which violates the One Sacred Rule of Art: if you have a Big Sociopolitical Idea you want to get across, make sure you have a good enough framework to carry it (or, to once again misquote McLuhan, "the medium IS the message"). Idea Novels that push for social change are almost uniformly bad. As much as I hate to say it, this one is no exception.

That's not to say that there's nothing good about this novel. If you know Skipp and Spector, you know you're in for a gleeful ride through the wonderful world of splatterpunk, where nothing is sacred and every cow gets shish-kebabed before the book ends. All of the unwritten rules get broken here in throughly disgusting ways (the "toddler bouilliabasse" is a particularly nasty moment, I must say). Even with all the moralizing, the lack of connection to the characters, the usual genre-based bad editing, it was still fun. And then I got to the ending.

Not the ending of the novel. The ending of the novel is actually bloody fantastic for a horrorbook. Not a single punch is pulled.

But what happens after the ending of the novel.

(Note: the above is the kind of emotionally manipulative one-sentence paragraph to be found at least twice per page in this book.)

What happens after the ending of the novel as that John and Craig trump their overbearing morality by adding a whole lot of nonfiction morality that's even MORE overbearing. The "please save our earth" appendix chops a star off the book's rating by itself. Note to authors: once you've slapped raders in the face with a dead fish, proceeding to then cram it down their throats is a real good way to anger them. **

Rating:
Summary: Devastating, painful, and brilliant
Review: Nature evolves according to its environment and the changes in its ecosystem. Poison it too much, and it will compensate in the most horrific way possible.

This book was very painful to read, like watching a train speed off its tracks into a playground full of children. Relentless and unforgiving, its plot held me captive from start to finish, unable to put it down no matter how much I wanted to.

This is not a book you will read over and over again, but it is a book you should read at least once.

Rating:
Summary: Simply the greatest horror I've ever read!
Review: This is far and away the greatest horror I have read. Nailed clean in the style that Skipp and Spector mastered so well, a craftily ironic tone that your own mind uses in its more honest moments, this constantly claustrophobicly narrowing vision of the environmental haulocaust to come grabs you by the short and curlies demands that you should SIT RIGHT BACK and hear of the coming tribulation. The deftness which with it was handled, the delecate suspension of disbelief holds even with the fantastic swirling and gelling. They were the best horror going in the '80s and early '90s, no debate and bar none. I miss them all the time, and boys and girls, this is as good as it got. Maybe the best it could get.