165. The Totem (David Morrell, 1979)
It all starts with the disembowelment of livestock in the small Wyoming town of Potter's Field. Sheriff Frank Slaughter finds himself quickly caught up a pretty big problem, kind of hyper virulent strain of rabies that turns people into mindless, vicious killers. With the help of the local coroner and an alcoholic reporter, Slaughter must try to defeat this menace while battling his own internal demons, at times in direct opposition to the mayor and townspeople who just want to keep things quiet so as not to affect their livelihoods.
This book was originally released back in 1979 in an edited down version by the publisher that re-arranged and trimmed out several plot points Morrell felt helped the overall richness of characterization in the book. Morrell himself went back in 1994 and re-edited the book, restoring it to his original manuscript form. This was the version I read which included an introduction by Morrell describing the publishing history of the book and what was restored. I obviously haven't read the original edited version, so I can't speak to how it flowed, but from just a base point of comparison, the edited version clocks in at 256 pages while the unedited one is 448 pages, nearly twice as long. Regardless, The Totem is actually a pretty solid, albeit fairly straightforward story the goes in a distinctly weird direction by the end. I could see some complaining about it being a little slow in the first half, and I wonder if this is where the edited version removes some of the characterization to streamline it. While The Totem was Morrell's first horror novel, it's still evident that he has an interest in writing action sequences, which is more aligned to where many of his novels would fall (including his famous debut First Blood which introduced the world to John Rambo). While I don't think this is as good as his novelette including in Prime Evil "Orange Is for Anguish, Blue Is for Insanity" which was one of the best stories in that collection, The Totem is still a fun, brisk read that offers a proper, exciting climax involving super-rabies infected hippy zombies. So that's something.
To Read (133)
| Title | Author |
| The Passage | Justin Cronin |
| We Have Always Lived in the Castle | Shirley Jackson |
| The Historian | Elizabeth Kostova |
| The Wasp Factory | Iain Banks |
| Hell House | Richard Matheson |
| The Silent Companions | Laura Purcell |
| Her Fearful Symmetry | Audrey Niffenegger |
| Fledgling | Octavia E. Butler |
| The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket | Edgar Allan Poe |
| Zone One | Colson Whitehead |
| Ring | Koji Suzuki |
| The Changeling | Victor LaValle |
| HEX | Thomas Olde Heuvelt |
| Pandemonium | Daryl Gregory |
| Winter Tide | Ruthanna Emrys |
| Last Days | Brian Evenson |
| Heart-Shaped Box | Joe Hill |
| The Case Against Satan | Ray Russell |
| Drawing Blood | Poppy Z. Brite |
| The Last Werewolf | Glen Duncan |
| Lovecraft Country | Matt Ruff |
| Three Moments of an Explosion: Stories | China Miéville |
| The Walls Around Us | Nova Ren Suma |
| Mr. Shivers | Robert Jackson Bennett |
| Fiend: A Novel | Peter Stenson |
| The Frangipani Hotel: Fiction | Violet Kupersmith |
| Those Across the River | Christpher Buehlman |
| The Collector | John Fowles |
| World War Z | Max Brooks |
| "Young Goodman Brown" | Nathaniel Hawthorne |
| Down a Dark Hall | Lois Duncan |
| Intensity | Dean Koontz |
| The Atrocity Archives | Charles Stross |
| Bloodchild | Octavia E. Butler |
| The Screwfly Solution | James Tiptree Jr. |
| Elizabeth | Ken Greenhall |
| "Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?" | Joyce Carol Oates |
| Goosebumps (The Complete Series #1-#62) | R.L. Stine |
| Lunar Park | Bret Easton Ellis |
| Minion | L.A. Banks |
| The Weird: A Compendium of Strange and Dark Stories | Edited by Ann VanderMeer |
| The Imago Sequence and Other Stories | Laird Barron |
| The Jumbies | Tracey Baptiste |
| The Werewolf of Paris | Guy Endore |
| "Left Foot, Right Foot" | Nalo Hopkinson |
| John Dies at the End | David Wong |
| Grendel | John Gardner |
| Northanger Abbey | Jane Austen |
| Uncle Silas | Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu |
| Conjure Wife | Fritz Lieber |
| The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch | Phillip K. Dick |
| Worse Things Waiting | Manly Wade Wellman |
| The Trial | Franz Kafka |
| The Land of Laughs | Jonathan Carroll |
| She | H. Rider Haggard |
| The Painted Bird | Jerzy Kosiński |
| The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner | James Hogg |
| Hawksmoor | Peter Ackroyd |
| Song of Kali | Dan Simmons |
| Caleb Williams | William Godwin |
| The Confidence-Man: His Masquerade | Herman Melville |
| The Crystal World | J.G. Ballard |
| The Dark Tower and Other Stories | C.S. Lewis |
| The Green Man | Kingsley Amis |
| The Lurker at the Threshold | H.P. Lovecraft, August Derleth |
| The Black Spider | Jeremias Gotthelf |
| The Wolfen | Whitley Strieber |
| The Arabian Nightmare | Robert Irwin |
| The White Devil | John Webster |
| Something about Eve : a comedy of fig-leaves | James Branch Cabell |
| Night has a Thousand Eyes | Carnell Woolrich |
| The Compleat Werewolf and Other Stories of Fantasy and Science Fiction | Anthony Boucher |
| Sweetheart, Sweetheart | Bernard Taylor |
| The Dark Country | Dennis Etchison |
| Quatermass and the Pit | Nigel Kneale |
| Who Made Stevie Crye? | Michael Bishop |
| In a Lonely Place | Karl Edward Wagner |
| The Track of the Cat | Walter Van Tilburg Clark |
| The Cadaver of Gideon Wyck | Alexander Lang |
| John Silence, Physician Extraordinary | Algernon Blackwood |
| Dark Feasts | Ramsey Campbell |
| And the Darkness Falls | Edited by Boris Karloff |
| Deliver Me from Eva | Paul Bailey |
| The Last Bouquet: Some Twilight Tales | Marjorie Bowen |
| The Sleeping and the Dead | August Derleth |
| The Monk | Matthew Lewis |
| The Hound of the Baskervilles | Sir Arthur Conan Doyle |
| The Picture of Dorian Gray | Oscar Wilde |
| Lost Worlds | Clark Ashton Smith |
| Edge of Running Water | William Sloane |
| The Weirdstone of Brisingamen | Alan Garner |
| The Book of Skulls | Robert Silverberg |
| The Boats of the "Glen Carrig" | William Hope Hodgson |
| The Midwich Cuckoos | John Wyndham |
| The Collected Stories of Elizabeth Bowen | Elizabeth Bowen |
| Tales from the Nightside | Charles L. Grant |
| The Hunger and Other Stories | Charles Beaumont |
| The Cement Garden | Ian McEwan |
| Lost Souls | Poppy Z. Brite |
| Outer Dark | Cormac McCarthy |
| The Manuscript Found in Saragossa | Jan Potocki |
| New Grub Street | George Gissing |
| Peace | Gene Wolfe |
| They Thirst | Robert McCammon |
| The Dark Descent | David G. Hartwell |
| Fantômas | Marcel Allain |
| Flicker | Theodore Roszak |
| The Devil Rides Out | Dennis Wheatley |
| The Course of the Heart | M. John Harrison |
| Darkness Weaves | Karl Edward Wagner |
| The Nightmare Factory | Thomas Ligotti |
| A Wrinkle in the Skin | John Christopher |
| Skin | Kathe Koja |
| The Trail of Fu Manchu | Sax Rohmer |
| Tales of Horror and the Supernatural | Arthur Machen |
| By Bizarre Hands | Joe R. Lansdale |
| A Scent of New-Mown Hay | John Blackburn |
| The Opener of the Way | Robert Bloch |
| The Playboy Book of Horror and the Supernatural | Editors of Playboy |
| X,Y | Michael Blumlein |
| More Tomorrow & Other Stories | Michael Marshall Smith |
| The Third Ghost Book | Edited by Lady Cynthia Asquith |
| The Off Season | Jack Cady |
| Blood Sport | Robert F. Jones |
| Creep, Shadow! | Abraham Merritt |
| Reprisal | Mitchell Smith |
| Feesters in the Lake | Bob Leman |
| They Return at Evening | H. Russell Wakefield |
| Jumbee and Other Uncanny Tales | Henry S. Whitehead |
| A Haunting Beauty | Charles Birkin |
| Year of the Sex Olympics: Three Television Plays | Nigel Kneale |
| Throat Sprockets | Tim Lucas |
Read (206)
| Title | Author |
| "The Lottery" | Shirley Jackson |
| Lord of the Flies | William Golding |
| "The Body" | Stephen King |
| "The Monkey's Paw" | W.W. Jacobs |
| Sandman | Neil Gaiman |
| The Turn of the Screw | Henry James |
| "The Tell-Tale Heart" | Edgar Allan Poe |
| The House Next Door | Anne Rivers Siddons |
| "Shadow Over Innsmouth" | H.P. Lovecraft |
| The October Country | Ray Bradbury |
| Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark | Alvin Schwartz |
| 30 Days of Night | Steve Niles, Ben Templesmith |
| Ghost Story | Peter Straub |
| The Fall of the House of Usher and Other Tales | Edgar Allan Poe |
| Carrie | Stephen King |
| It | Stephen King |
| Something Wicked This Way Comes | Ray Bradbury |
| Books of Blood 1 - 3 | Clive Barker |
| House of Leaves | Mark Z. Danielewski |
| Carmilla | Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu |
| Uzumaki | Junji Ito |
| "At the Mountains of Madness" | H.P. Lovecraft |
| Haunting of Hill House | Shirley Jackson |
| Frankenstein | Mary Shelley |
| The Shining | Stephen King |
| Dracula | Bram Stoker |
| A Head Full of Ghosts | Paul Tremblay |
| The Ruins | Scott Smith |
| MacBeth | William Shakespeare |
| The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde | Robert Louis Stevenson |
| Heart of Darkness | Joseph Conrad |
| Salem's Lot | Stephen King |
| The Man Who Was Thursday | G.K. Chesterton |
| The Lurking Fear and Other Stories | H.P. Lovecraft |
| Deathbird Stories | Harlan Ellison |
| Johnny Got His Gun | Dalton Trumbo |
| The Damnation Game | Clive Barker |
| A Christmas Carol | Charles Dickens |
| The War of the Worlds | H.G. Wells |
| 1984 | George Orwell |
| American Psycho | Bret Easton Ellis |
| Pet Sematary | Stephen King |
| Misery | Stephen King |
| The Phantom of the Opera | Gaston Leroux |
| Coraline | Neil Gaiman |
| Horrorstör | Grady Hendrix |
| The Jewel of Seven Stars | Bram Stoker |
| "The Yellow Wallpaper" | Charlotte Perkins Gilman |
| Doctor Faustus | Christopher Marlowe |
| Twice-Told Tales | Nathaniel Hawthorne |
| Red Dragon | Thomas Harris |
| "I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream" | Harlan Ellison |
| Penpal | Dathan Auerbach |
| Widdershins | Oliver Onions |
| The Island of Dr. Moreau | H.G. Wells |
| Goblin Market | Christina Rossetti |
| Burnt Offerings | Robert Marasco |
| The Road | Cormac McCarthy |
| Invasion of the Body Snatchers | Jack Finney |
| The Devil in America | Kai Ashante Wilson |
| "Please Momma" | Cheysa Burke |
| Meddling Kids | Edgar Cantero |
| Wylding Hall | Elizabeth Hand |
| From Hell | Alan Moore, Eddie Campbell |
| The Stranger | Albert Camus |
| Melmoth the Wanderer | Charles Maturin |
| Infidel | Pornsak Pichetshote |
| The Terror | Dan Simmons |
| The Night They Missed the Horror Show | Joe R. Lansdale |
| Anna Dressed in Blood | Kendare Blake |
| Skin Folk | Nalo Hopkinson |
| Interview with the Vampire | Anne Rice |
| Come Closer | Sara Gran |
| The Blind Owl | Sadegh Heydayat |
| The Exorcist | William Peter Blatty |
| City of Glass | Paul Auster |
| The Devil in Silver | Victor LaValle |
| The Fisherman | John Langan |
| The Mask | Dean Koontz |
| Psycho | Robert Bloch |
| Gothic Tales | Elizabeth Gaskell |
| The Queen of Spades | Alexander Pushkin |
| NOS4A2: A Novel | Joe Hill |
| The Beauty | Aliya Whiteley |
| The Fifth Child | Doris Lessing |
| The Six-Gun Tarot | R.S. Belcher |
| Tales of Terror | Charles Higham |
| The Bloody Chamber | Angela Carter |
| The House on the Borderland | William Hope Hodgson |
| The Girl with All the Gifts | M.R. Carey |
| Experimental Film | Gemma Files |
| I Am Legend | Richard Matheson |
| Beloved | Toni Morrison |
| Horror Horn | E. F. Benson |
| Our Lady of Darkness | Fritz Lieber |
| The Killer Inside Me | Jim Thompson |
| Dark Forces | Edited by Kirby McCauley |
| Dread Nation | Justina Ireland |
| Mongrels: A Novel | Stephen Graham Jones |
| The Grip of It | Jac Jemc |
| The King in Yellow | Robert W. Chambers |
| The Woman In Black | Susan Hill |
| The Anubis Gates | Tim Powers |
| Pages from Cold Point | Paul Bowles |
| The Pet | Charles L. Grant |
| Swan Song | Robert McCammon |
| Her Body and Other Parties: Stories | Carmen Maria Machado |
| Perfume: The Story of a Murderer | Patrick Süskind |
| Parasite Eve | Hideaki Sena |
| The Lesser Dead | Christopher Buehlman |
| Fever Dream | Samanta Schweblin |
| Bird Box | Josh Malerman |
| Exquisite Corpse | Poppy Z. Brite |
| Rotters | Daniel Kraus |
| The Croning | Laird Barron |
| The Cellar | Richard Laymon |
| Collected Ghost Stories* | M.R. James |
| Nightshade | Derek Marlowe |
| The Vampire Lestat | Anne Rice |
| The Troop | Nick Cutter |
| The Sound of his Horn | Sarban |
| White is for Witching | Helen Oyeyemi |
| The Haunted Omnibus | Edited by Alexander Laing |
| Through the Woods | Emily Carroll |
| Mythago Wood | Robert Holdstock |
| "All Our Salt-Bottled Hearts" | Sonya Taaffe |
| The Call of Cthulhu and Other Weird Stories | H.P. Lovecraft |
| The Outsider, and Others | H.P. Lovecraft |
| The Case of Charles Dexter Ward | H.P. Lovecraft |
| The Ballad of Black Tom | Victor LaValle |
| A Nest of Nightmares | Lisa Tuttle |
| Dark Matter | Michelle Paver |
| A Sight for Sore Eyes | Ruth Rendell |
| Strange Toys | Patricia Geary |
| The Best Tales of Hoffmann | E. T. A. Hoffmann |
| Shutter | Courtney Alameda |
| Some of Your Blood | Theodore Sturgeon |
| The Bone Key | Sarah Monette |
| The Elementals | Michael McDowell |
| The Sheep Look Up | John Brunner |
| Obscura | Joe Hart |
| Finishing Touches | Thomas Tessler |
| Alone with the Horrors | Ramsey Campbell |
| "The Willows" | Algernon Blackwood |
| The Revenger's Tragedy | Thomas Middleton |
| Medusa : a Story of Mystery, and Ecstasy & Strange Horror | E. H. Visiak |
| "It's a Good Life" | Jerome Bixby |
| Broken Monsters | Lauren Beukes |
| The Keep | F. Paul Wilson |
| The House of Souls*** | Arthur Machen |
| The Talented Mr. Ripley | Patricia Highsmith |
| The Drowning Girl | Caitlin R. Kiernan |
| Communion | Whitley Strieber |
| The Other | Thomas Tryon |
| Darker Than You Think | Jack Williamson |
| Feed | Mira Grant |
| Falling Angel | William Hjortsberg |
| Things We Lost in the Fire: Stories | Mariana Enriquez |
| Great Tales of Terror and the Supernatural | Edited by Phyllis Fraser, Herbert Wise |
| The Grotesque | Patrick McGrath |
| The Collected Works of Ambrose Bierce | Ambrose Bierce |
| The Ceremonies | T. E. D. Klein |
| The Hunger | Alma Katsu |
| Carnacki, the Ghost Finder | William Hope Hodgson |
| The Face That Must Die | Ramsey Campbell |
| Rebecca | Daphne Du Maurier |
| Hammers on Bone | Cassandra Khaw |
| Maplecroft | Cherie Priest |
| The Night Stalker | Jeff Rice |
| The Girl Next Door | Jack Ketchum |
| A Stir of Echoes | Richard Matheson |
| Nine Horrors and a Dream | Joseph Payne Brennan |
| Silence of the Lambs | Thomas Harris |
| The Bad Seed | William March |
| Frankenstein in Baghdad | Ahmed Saadawi |
| Shadowland | Peter Straub |
| The Second Century of Creepy Stories | Sir Hugh Walpole |
| The Good House | Tananarive Due |
| The Handmaid's Tale | Margaret Atwood |
| House of Flesh | Bruno Fischer |
| The Red Tree | Caitlin R. Kiernan |
| The House with a Clock in its Walls | John Bellairs |
| Murgunstrumm and Others | Hugh B. Cave |
| Spirit Hunters | Ellen Oh |
| The Wandering Jew | Eugène Sue |
| Whispers | Dean Koontz |
| Kindred: A Graphic Novel Adaptation | Octavia E. Butler, John Jennings and Damian Duffy |
| The Snowman | Jo Nesbø |
| Out of Space and Time | Clark Ashton Smith |
| Fancies and Goodnights | John Collier |
| Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street | Stephen Sondheim |
| The Cipher | Kathe Koja |
| Gormenghast | Mervyn Peake |
| Night Film | Marissa Pessl |
| Prime Evil: New Stories by the Masters of Modern Horror | Edited by Douglas E. Winter |
| Who Fears the Devil? | Manly Wade Wellman |
| A Voyage to Arcturus | Dave Lindsay |
| Let the Right One In | John Ajvide Lindqvist |
| Sleep No More | August Derleth |
| Carrion Comfort | Dan Simmons |
| Furnace | Livia Llewellyn |
| Harvest Home | Thomas Tryon |
| Jane Eyre | Charlotte Brontë |
| Sub Rosa: Strange Tales | Robert Aikman |
| Queen of the Damned | Anne Rice |
| Rosemary's Baby | Ira Levin |
| The Totem | David Morrell |
