The Accursed by Paul Boorstin

Title: The Accursed

Author: Paul Boorstin

Year: 1977

Publishing Details: Signet Classics, First Signet Printing, November 1977

Genre: Science Fiction, Horror

Topical Category: Animals Attack!

Synopsis and Background:

Full-disclosure, I decided to read this book based solely on the cover which gave me both infant Hercules and creepy baby Voldemort vibes. From the title I assumed that there might be some kind of supernatural or demonic shenanigans underway. This was not the case, but since I am a big fan of snakes generally, I was not too disappointed.

Our setting is a resource-strapped hospital in Clay-Ashland County, Georgia. The staff is indifferent or downright malicious, the air conditioning is terminally broken, and patients have begun dying mysteriously…oh and a neighboring snake-handler named Preacher Varek is up to no good.

The main character for the duration is an idealistic but burned-out young doctor who has been having marital problems with his wife related to his workaholic status and her impending pregnancy (see also my review of Prophecy. This must have been big in the 70s.) Dr. Adam Corbett is on a crusade to improve the lives of the surrounding swamp people but stymied at every turn by a greedy hospital administrator, Harris Straker, an over-sexed nurse, Sharlene Haines, and the general apathy of pretty much everyone else he works with. Against hospital policy, he delivers a baby for a poor couple, Mary Anne and Jesse, but is shocked to learn later that the baby has died overnight, a few hours after birth. The country coroner, the hospital administrator, and the nurse on duty clearly conspire to cover up what was not a natural death, so Adam resolves to get to the bottom of the problem.

While Dr. Corbett remains in the dark, however, the audience is clued in in only twenty pages. There is a 30 foot reticulated python dwelling in the hospital basement and coming out regularly to eat the inmates of the neonatal ward! How did this python end up in a Georgia hospital? The plot thickens.

As Dr. Corbett tries to solve the mystery of the increasingly odd hospital deaths, we are introduced to the other characters: a somewhat skeevy maintenance man named Lester with a heart of gold, various nurses, and Adam’s wife Jean who shows up out of the blue to reconcile with her estranged husband while heavily pregnant with their child. And to take up residence and probably give birth in the hospital infested with a 30 ft. baby-eating python. Oh no.

As the danger mounts, Sherlene and Harris Straker indulge in a sleazy affair built around fraud and medical malpractice. Meanwhile, Adam is busy and Jean befriends Lester and wanders into the evil influence of Preacher Varek. What are the snakehandler’s sinister intentions? What does he mean to do with Jean and her unborn baby? How is this connected to the marauding python? Continue reading to find out…

SPOILERS BELOW

My Thoughts:

As an ‘animals attack’ book the Jaws comparisons here are unavoidable. But it’s also impossible to avoid comparisons with Alien (1979) where an enormous predatory beast also stalks its human prey using air vents and is battled using flame throwers. Coincidence? This also cannot be the first piece of media where the ‘monster’ is defeated…only to reveal a second one just as deadly. The Accursed, in both execution and finale, has a lot on common with many of the movies and books to come after it. I wonder how widely read it was? The happy ending was well earned for our characters,and only slightly tainted by the reveal that the evil snake preacher had escaped and sent out more snakes to wreak havoc. Mostly the ‘evil’ characters got their just desserts. Oh, and of course, there were two giant snakes. One male one female. Wouldn’t it be disastrous if…

For such a short and rather rote book this is also well-written, well-paced, and pretty darn enjoyable. Paul Boorstin excels at using words to paint a picture or influence a mood. It’s hard to describe, but this book reads like a movie. A slasher movie with giant snakes, a nymphomaniac nurse, and a hospital director doing a discount impression of the mayor from Jaws. But still, downright cinematic. Horror movie jump scares included. 

My favorite cinematic moment is probably when the giant python accidently turns on an x-ray machine and proceeds to slither past, visible vertebra by vertebra on the glowing green cathode-ray tube screen. That should be filmed. Jean’s dream sequence where everyone tears off their surgical masks to reveal forked, flickering tongues is also gold.

Paul is a master of metaphor and simile. For example: “An oak root that had bored its way into the foundation over the decades pointed an accusing finger.” “Hunger consumed it regularly like the darkening of the moon” “Applying the salve of blandishment to his parched ego” “Jean heard him zipping up his jacket, sudden as the slitting of a throat.” His style is one of the major contributors to the smooth, atmospheric nature of the book. It is eminently readable in one sitting.

Additionally, the author appears to have actually researched snakes! Wonderful! All kinds of details are gotten right or close to right and there is never a feeling that the author is speculating wildly based on random hearsay or myths. Examples include: snakes do indeed ‘smell’ with their tongue and accompanying Jacobson’s organs, snakes do lack eardrums, their eyes do not have lids. Cobras and other members of Elapidae do have permanently erect fangs, snake venom is a neurotoxin, reticulated pythons do have heat-sensing pits and vertical pupils. Reticulated pythons can indeed reach 30 ft. lengths, constrictors do kill mainly by suffocation, when large snakes have been found to eat humans they do generally go for the young or for those injured or immobilized, pythons do extend their jaws with a mobile quadrate bone, they also sheath their tongues and pull their heads over their prey using their teeth. Rattlesnake venom does contain a variety of enzymes, reticulated pythons are iridescent, and they do have six rows of teeth and sensitive noses. Amazingly the given time for the evolution of the first snakes, ‘125 million years ago’, jives well with more current estimations of 128.5 mya based on fossils and DNA analysis unavailable in 1977. * 

This is not to say things don’t get pretty wacky. The old canard of constrictor snakes crushing the bones of their prey is here. Since he clearly did research, I can only assume Paul thought that this was just cooler. And then there was the scene where the python opens a fridge and proceeds to attack and drink a whole bunch of Type O blood bags. A snake that eats warm-blooded prey whole, I think, is unlikely to try to drink plastic bags of cold blood that it somehow(?) sensed through a closed fridge door. But the scene certainly added to the creepy verisimilitude. (I do wonder though how the python is supposed to be basking? Curling up under the boiler?)

A final note. Now, I am not a follower of Freud by any means but there are quite a number of times in this book that snakes are clearly likened or just flat-out described as similar to penises. “The cobra seemed spent, stilled like a sexual organ after the spasm of climax”. For a brief moment it looks like the python is going to go straight for the scrotum of an immobile burn victim. Also, “Jean stroked the snake’s smooth head. It throbbed like an enormous penis, erect and hard”. Then there’s the peninsular tiger snake that goes right for yet another man’s scrotum, successfully this time. Yeah. The cigar is not a cigar.

Nurse Sharlene, our bleach-blonde, libidinous, slasher-movie-victim is also the focus of some odd scenes, including one where Dr. Corbett convinces her to lay across his lap in an attempt to seduce him only for him to stab her in the butt with a syringe and accuse her of negligence. And then there is her murder in the bathtub by the enormous python, immediately followed by a discussion of how it was a ‘grotesque pantomime’ of her hidden rape fantasies. Uh… 

So I gotta wonder, Paul, did you have some kind of issue with snakes? Or women? Women and snakes? Maybe with penises? The book is dedicated to his wife Sharon, who he appears to still be married to as of 2023. Perhaps the whole thing was intended to titillate the audience. I dunno, 30ft. pythons are interesting enough, really. Personally, I would be fine with less descriptions of ‘fleshy buttocks’ or people’s boobs. But that’s just me.

The number of times during my reading marathon a pointless sex scene does nothing to advance the plot: Oddly, still 3. (Yeah. No one has actual sex in this book. It’s probably for the best.)

* Hsiang, A.Y., Field, D.J., Webster, T.H. et al. The origin of snakes: revealing the ecology, behavior, and evolutionary history of early snakes using genomics, phenomics, and the fossil record. BMC Evol Biol 15, 87 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1186/s12862-015-0358-5

Rating:

3/3 Entertainment Value: I was very entertained and despite the early reveal of the snake the author did a good job keeping suspense high. This book is short and gets where it’s going fast. I had fun.

2/3 Quality: This book is well-edited and proof-read. The story hangs together and nearly every element introduced plays some actual role in the plot. The only filler scenes here are the admittedly outsized number of ‘erotic’ or ‘sleazy’ scenes. They don’t really tie into the plot or the themes? They do fit the standard horror movie bill of ‘punishing the less than virtuous’ but I feel that it would have all felt like more of a piece if these scenes were somehow linked to the whole giant snake thing. Unless the snake throughout is intended to be symbolic of, I dunno, rampant male sexuality? In which case that theme was not conveyed effectively.

2/3 Originality: Again, we have a Jaws knock-off. A monstrous animal is loose killing people, the men in power don’t want to believe it or take action for corrupt reasons, etc. etc. But the snake elements were fun and well researched and I have a soft spot for reticulated pythons who are magnificent animals. But, I would agree, not something you want to see drop out of an air vent when you are in traction.

1/1 Exceeds Expectations:

Not so much the book as Jean the character. Set up as a credulous moper in need of protection, Jean surprised me pleasantly at the end by going full Final Girl. She breaks out of a locked hospital room by climbing from window to window, 45 feet up. Still woozy from labor, she finds the neonatal ward just as a second enormous python is about to devour the babies. She breaks down a door, rips a fire ax off the wall, and chops a 30ft. python into bits. I do wish she had had more agency throughout and been compared to a child less, but oh well it was the 70s. At least she had more initiative than her counterparts from Megalodon, Prophecy, and Orca. Hopefully I will see more badass females as the marathon continues.

Language was somewhat archaic, as expected. But in this case minimal use of the word ‘jap’ at least made some kind of sense given Lester’s service in the Pacific theater of the war. Which did ultimately tie into the plot with the flame throwers. And for a book set in the New South the racism was fairly non-existent. No one group of characters, educated or uneducated, black or white, seemed singled out for censure. In true horror movie fashion, it was the ‘evil’ characters who got dunked on the most. And the giant snake, of course.

Total Score: 8/10

Best Quote(s):

“Man’s world seemed a simple matter of neat geometry, straight lines precisely drawn to meet at sensible right angles. But this cold-blooded hunter curved, twisted, a devious, sinewy, supple being eluding rational explanations.”