Blood Fever [Paperback]

The fun premise that conned me into buying this book was a disease that turns females into super-strong, fast zombies (not undead, just reduced to a pure rage/hunger animalistic state, kind of like 28 Days Later (Widescreen Special Edition), but with a longer incubation time. Unfortunately, the book is so badly written and ridiculous that I had a hard time getting much enjoyment out of it.

By fifty pages in, I began skimming pages to get to the next zombie scene because I absolutely did not care or believe in any of the characters. The men are written so unconvincingly as to be laughable, in the way only a bad female writer can, with plenty of introspection and thinking/obsessing about their feelings, and it being okay for other men to lay a reassuring hand on each other's arm. You know, all the stuff guys don't do in real life. And the majority of the characters are male. The female characters, while more believably written, all fall into pathetic stereotypes (bitter divorced feminist man-hater, conflicted self-sacrificing career woman stifled by her husband, the smothering, obsessed mom who lives only through her son, etc.).

The writing style is bad, bad, bad. Lots of needlessly big words are tossed in, like "contrapuntally," a word I've never heard of in my life and I bet 99.9% of people alive back then or today are clueless about its meaning, too. There is endless, painful dialogue and interior monologues, a preachy women's lib tone, and worst of all, plenty of telling and not showing the reader what's going on. Like multiple attack scenes told in omniscient POV in that robs the scenes of any sense of suspense or horror.

The author is way too focused on covering the story in as broad an overview of the town as possible, instead of focusing on developing a few tight-knit characters I might actually like to read about. Also, the ten day incubation time is too long, and lets the action stop and start, and that too robs the book of much of its power. It's like the world's slowest, dumbest zombie plague, where the apocalypse happens in such slow motion it could have been easily prevented. Except everyone in town is a moron. The way the book plays out with the bungled race for the cure, internment camp, and extermination squads, it's more like George Romero's original 70s version of The Crazies than 28 Days Later, only poorly done.

In the hands of a more talented writer, this could have been an amazingly fun story. But the way Shelley Hyde (pen name of Kit Reed) tells it, it sucks. Because I'm a sucker for anything zombie-related and liked the basic idea and twisted imagery of feral diseased mutant animal/zombie women, I'm giving Blood Fever two stars, but that's being generous. This is really just another of those rock-bottom, crap-horror paperbacks that flooded the market back in the 70s and 80s. Ah, but at least it had potential . . .

Not sure if I liked Blood Fever (1982) by Shelley Hyde (pronounced: Shall He Hide; an insider author joke, considering the novel's storyline?), pen name for Kit Reed. It's an easy read, 188 pages, but it's truly twisted, maybe even disturbed. First thought: the author is putting me on: a disease that only affects/kills one sex with the other sex completely immune to it. But the more I thought about it, the more shocking the idea became. I liked the scenes at the city dump and the Wilson farm where the once diseased, but now deceased, congregate in hunger. I thought the reason why the newspaper editor allowed the city mayor to censor the story from the rest of the world (out of fear his wife might kick him out of his editorial job because of a one time sexual indiscretion he had with the mayor), and the reason why the city's mayor didn't want the story to break (Malfia would cut off his hands for non-payment of gambling debts because he mishandled the disease, got fired as Mayor, and lost access to city funds causing gambling debts to go unpaid) to be preposterous. And talk about misbehavior directed at one sex and an unfair ending: all the heroes are killed or are secretly forced to relocate while the villains remain in power. But all may not bode well for the mayor-and-company because the diease has mutated and is bidding its time in an extended dormant state.

This is a 1982 paperback. Although Amazon indicates that it is published by Harlequin, the copy I have is Pocket Books through S&S. It has the same ISBN though. The author is Shelley Hyde.

Things are usually quiet in the little town of Broughton. Kids go to school, moms make dinner and keep house, dads go to work, and everyone cheers on the local football heroes of the town's only high school. But when Harry Timmons leaves his job at the virology lab to come home to his beloved wife Arlene, he can't begin to imagine what he'll find there. The snarling, homicidal beast he meets in the dark is not the gentle, timid woman he fell in love with back in high school. One by one the women of this small town start going berserk and kill any male that crosses their path. Police investigator Ralph Peterson senses that something just isn't right when Harry is brought in for murder. Once tragedy strikes his own family, Peterson begins to pursue the case in hopes of uncovering the forces at work in his town as well as a way to stop it before it spreads.

This is a typical cheesey horror book of the late 70s/early 80s. The cover is screamingly funny, and the author really makes no effort to hide the "We are surpressed women, and this is what happens when men don't listen to us" symbolism of the story. It's light, it's a quick read, and it's actually rather funny because the story makes no sense at all. It's perfect reading for when you don't want to think for a couple of hours!
(mellion108 from Michigan)

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