Morrell is best known for his 1972 novel First Blood, featuring Rambo the disturbed Vietnam vet, who in later movie instalments grew a lot bigger and became something else entirely. Great choice for an action novel, but in horror mood and description count for a lot. Even the language is drained of anything extra. The chapters are short, the action fast and precise, with very little room for anything else. The version I have at hand is, however, the first version, which is all muscle and no fat, and so lean it hurts. The novel was apparently significantly altered according to the publisher’s wishes, prompting Morrell to replace all future editions with his author’s cut in the mid-1990s. The hippies are almost an afterthought, as in oh yeah, those guys, whatever happened to them? I wonder indeed. A corpse disappears from the morgue, animals attack, something stalks the shadows between the chapters, and the reporter keeps wondering about a red Corvette. Slaughter the improbably named ex-cop from Detroit is the lawman in these here parts, and the designated main character, accompanied by a borderline necrophiliac coroner and a drunk reporter.
Told in a vague manner so concise it makes Hemingway seem loquacious, Morrell’s first horror novel is a good idea wrapped in a far too tight packaging. There are frostbitten hippies in the mountains and they’ve got rabies? Or so goes the plot in David Morrell’s The Totem, a story about a remote Wyoming town plagued by animal attacks.
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