Twisting
Duncan Fallowell
Julia Peter Straub (Cape, £2.95) The Vampire of Mons Desmond Stewart (Hamish Hamilton, £3.50) The Cat's Eye Monica Furlong (Weidenfeld and Nicolson, £3.25)
Laura, Penelope, Rebecca, Indira, and now— Julia! Ghastly feminist sexist names to strike terror and suicidal passion into the heart of man or, if possible, men. Before the psychertelaissance came to liberate our loins from apoplexia nervosa, this singular invocative—Laurrraaa, aaaaagh!—was sufficient to raise an overpowering apprehension of 'something bigger than both of them', beside which Morality was small beer on a pink placard. In those days of labial tyrann3; 'men' were acutely vulnerable to a plunging liquefaction of the muscles in the region of the underpant, sheer erectile awe, followed by a manic need to boost the nicotine content' of the bloodstream to a level where all could safely be butch behind the wheel of a surrogate phallus.
Actually there are no Bram Stokers in Julia, and most of the victims are women. No matter. The intention is there, to have gentlemen gritting their legs rather more tightly than the BMC recommends, and for the ladies to wise up to the fact that they are sitting on a bomb of monstrous powers. Besides, it is the fashion. Peter Straub is American and therefore sensitive to the opportunities which public taste presents. He is not interested in being seminal if it means uncrossing men's legs, merely in being profitable. Straub's ability to tell a swift, meaty hair-raiser and his talent for obliquely nauseating detail such as tracheotomy is his ,primary claim upon your pockets.
It was also a find idea of Straub's t° move to London so that his broth of tragedy, possession and radiators that thunder in the night acquires a higher quiveratiOn quotient than would have been possible in the Bronx. It is set in a house beside Holland Park where, even though that hole in the fence has now been plugged, strange thihgs still creep about after dark.
Women put in no appearances "at all in The Vampire of Mons, unless ybu count the assistant house master's.Egyptian wife who stuns people from the saddle of a bicycle by posing as the speechless repository of all that is in'comprehensible and compulsive The feminist gobbling role is however capably taken up by the housemaster himself, who at the height of one dramatic episode is called a Mons House is the mist Germanic subdivision of an oppressively dim school, filled with jock-strapping youth who flick wet towels at each other in the showers. Rules are rules and ne'er the swain shall meet—except that Mr Stewart sees that they do. it is 1940, the lads lounge Oro" vocatively in OTC cOmbats, and the narrator, Clive S-winburne, worries all the time about whit the fates havp in store for his two aesthetic chums, Theodore and Darwin. There are a couple of precocious groans and the housemaster, doublY damned as a foreigner and a musician, is feeding off their vitals via a malevolent cabal of garlic-bread-eating freaks known as the Film SOciety. In' a rage of jealoasY brought about by severe sensual deprivation Clive immolates the predatory monster bY throwing a hand grenade into his tower' The school' is brilliantly drawn. In the space of 169 pages we. are set right doWn in the midst of a large orifiCial cemmunitY of, elaborate design. With such volati/e raw materials so capably ushered it regrettable that the story line should turn, out to be something you nornially fin? on bathroom flannels. Mr Stewart's knao; of entering into boys' minds however, an° corresponding deficiency in presenting adults in anything 'more fleshed than pasteboard, provides the right con
spiratorial claustrophobia. ld
Monica Furlong's The Cat's Eye won also have been exceHent had it 'not lacked push. It is an intelligently written run-uf to somethitig which is then .thnitte. Having introduced us into a bourgeo's family of sexy demigods with a talent ttio bemuse, Miss Furlong then abandons us te a blink on the Cornish Riviera under ti'
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impression that• to leave everything .1,0 mid-air is to say something extremelY deep, mystically.
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