Watch out New Mexico!

Your long history of atomic testing is coming back to haunt you in the form of giant Gila Monsters!  Hiss, they say before they attack.  Hiss, they say as they look at the severed body parts that inevitably show up as a result of their rampages.  Hiss, they say as they make their way across the desert.  Hiss, hiss, hiss!

(Thanks a lot, Oppenheimer!)

Admirably, the 1981 novel Gila! is pretty straight-forward.  It’s about giant Gila monsters and it doesn’t pretend to be anything more than quick and rather pulpy read.  With the lizards cutting a path of destructing through New Mexico, Governor Bubba J. Roy wants something done and he wants it done now!

Heh heh — seriously, his name is Bubba J. Roy.  All of his dialogue is written phonetically, as if we might otherwise not guess that a character named Bubba J. Roy would have a fairly strong Southwestern accent.  That’s the type of novel this is.

It’s up to Dr. Kate Dwyer and her Native American lover, Chato Del KIinne, to figure out how to stop the mutated lizards.  It won’t be easy, both because the lizards are really big and, as always happens in this type of situation, there’s a bunch of ambitious bureaucrats who think they know better.  Before the humans can figure out a way to deal with the giant lizards, the monsters wipe out the patrons of a diner, the passengers on a school bus, and a huge amount of fairgoers, along with several soldiers and more than a few reporters.

(As I read the book, it occurred to me that perhaps the best solution would have been to build an electric fence around New Mexico and just let the Gila monsters have it.  Seriously, my family briefly lived in New Mexico and not one of us has ever had any great desire to go back.  I nearly stepped on a rattlesnake at one point.  Agck!  The state is dangerous enough even without all of the atomic monsters.)

Gila! is basically a throw-back to the classic giant monster movies of the 50s, though this book features a lot more sex than any of those films.  It’s relatively tame sex but still, there’s a surprisingly large amount for a relatively short novel about killer lizard.  Obviously, the writer knew what her readers were looking for and, to her credit, she gave it to them.

(It’s a bit of a shame that Gila! was apparently never turned into a movie.  Reading it, I kept thinking about how much this seemed like the type of story that just cried out to be the type of 70s movie that Leslie Nielsen made before he started doing comedies.  Ali MacGraw could have played Kate.  Burt Reynolds could have played Chato.  Bubba J. Roy?  Ned Beatty, of course!)

It’s a deeply silly book but entertaining and a quick read.  I picked up a beat-up paperback copy while visiting Snooper’s Book Barn in Fort Smith, Arkansas and I read the book the same day.