The Loch Ness Terror by Bron Fane (Lionel Fanthorpe)

The Loch Ness Terror
by Bron Fane (Lionel Fanthorpe)
Supernatural Stories 38 1960

http://www.peltorro.com/

Part of a series involving reporter of the supernatural, Val Stearman.  Stearman receives news of a Loch Ness Monster sighting and visits a professor, who fills some pages with Loch Ness lore.  The professor recognizes Stearman from his articles:

"Don't I remember you from the black magic cult incident?"
"Yes, that was me."
"And then you faced a ghoul in the next issue."
"Right again."

At least ten times by my count.  Ten f*$#ing times he recaps prior issues.  We're now almost 2/3rds of the way through the "story".

Stearman goes scuba diving in the Loch and gets snatched up in Nessie's mouth.  Nessie takes him to an underwater grotto and psychically send him visions of men shooting down and slaughtering Loch Ness monsters.  Stearman returns to the shore and was it all an hallucination?

Horrible, just horrible.  It's like he's been told to write a story, obstinately refuses to and just rambles for pages, then reluctantly gives us two pages of "stuff" before slamming it shut.  If anything, it's harder to drag out nothingness for that long as opposed to just making up a story.

I'm glad I read more Fanthorpe before blowing all my allowance on all the cheap ebooks available on Amazon.  I can't even hate-read him anymore.

If you hate yourself as much as Lionel Fanthorpe hates the reading public, you can read it for free here.

The In-World

The In-World
by Lionel & Patricia Fanthorpe as Lionel Roberts
1960? Badger Books

I ignored the warnings at my own peril.  Lionel Fanthorpe is the coolest guy to be the most horrible writer there ever was.

I've seen writers described as Pantsers (just writing by the seat of their pants) or Plotters (developing a detailed outline and gradually adding detail and dialogue until they have a book).  Fanthorpe is so much of a Pantser that he doesn't know what to write until the book is already over.

The first 10% of the book establishes rural England as our setting.  At this point he decides it's really future year 1980 rural England, which is exactly like 1960 rural England.  Then he goes on and on about pre-modern UFO phenomena - Charles Fort, airship sightings, blah blah blah.  This is because UFOs are attacking!

Not attacking rural England, mind you, we don't go back there again.  They attack Holland or something (I'm not going back to check, you can't make me), and they are immune to missile attacks and planes.  Maybe we can use our space rockets, because we have those now in 1980.

A journalist that might have been mentioned in the rural England stuff is aboard a rocket ship that rams into the UFO.  The journo space walks into the other ship and shoots a couple of aliens with a pistol.  The aliens are very briefly described as half-toad, half-chair, which would be interesting, so let's not spoil it by going into any detail.

The journo hides in the ship, which flies down to a hole in Antarctica to an underground cavern.  The aliens didn't come from Mars or Venus, so they must have come from the hollow earth.  Journo walks through a tunnel or something, falls asleep, and is awakened by a bearded man.

Beardy belongs to an offshoot of the human race that lives underground and uses magic instead of technology.  They are the Yeti and Bigfoot and fairies, too.  Don't know what the guy looks like aside from the "Beaver" on his face, which I'm guessing meant something different in the 60s.

The aliens are aliens after all.  The come from outer space to visit the underground people every 100 years and for some reason they're being mean now.  Beardy uses magic to teleport Journo onto their ship.  Journo shoots one of them, and he saved the world, hurray!

But it's so, so much worse than this.  Fanthorpe's writing style was to dictate his story while hiding under a blanket to block off the outside world.  He clearly had no idea what he was writing about for a good chunk of the story, and instead of fleshing out a bare bones outline, he LITERALLY REPEATED EVERY SENTENCE THREE TIMES WITH SLIGHTLY DIFFERENT WORDS.

We've got spaceships, frog chair aliens, underground labyrinths, and a splinter race of humanity - and I have no idea what any of them look like.  Want to fill out page length, Fanthorpe?  How about you tell me what a frog chair alien looks like?  Or have some characters.  Maybe have them talk to each other.  Or have them do stuff.  It took a good 80% of the story to have anything resembling a scene.

Honestly, I think it takes a lot of effort to write this badly.  This is sci fi pulp, just throw in more monsters and spaceships and cities being blown up.  Takes a lot less effort than figuring out three ways of typing the same sentence.  It would sure take less effort to read.

Lionel Fanthorpe

I've run across Rev. Lionel Fanthorpe in the past, mainly as the presenter of Fortean TV, a series I haven't managed to get through thanks to the aggressive obnoxiousness of British 90's-ness.


I've run across him again recently, this time as the author of well over a hundred pulp sci-fi paperbacks in the 50s and 60s.  Operating under multiple pen names, he wrote most of the sci-fi and supernatural titles for Badger Books, an outfit had authors churn out fiction to match the covers they had procured.  Check out their awesomeness here.

He's still active, known mostly now for Fortean books and showing up on British TV.  I was thrilled to find a ton of his Badger Books stuff reasonably priced on Amazon, but I had some mixed feelings about the presentation.

The majority of the titles have a generic cover, though a few have the Badger classics.  The books are out by Hachette Book Group, one of the Big Five publishers.  One would think they would package the books more professionally, but I can understand the choice not to.  Based on some of my knowledge of Amazon ranking, I can tell that some of these titles have not sold a single copy in two years.

I would love to see these with the original covers, but it probably doesn't make sense financially.  Even if they still owned the covers, the rights management of it would cost more than they would recoup.  As it is, even if they already had nicely formatted .doc files of the text and just had an intern dump them all into KDP, they're losing money.  I'd rather have these gems available cheaply (or at all), than have to hunt them on ebay because it doesn't pay to reissue them.