Saturday, July 25, 2009

Paperback 264: The Monster From Earth's End / Murray Leinster (Gold Medal s832)

Paperback 264: Gold Medal s832 (PBO, 1959)

Title: The Monster from Earth's End
Author: Murray Leinster
Cover artist: Muni (anyone got a full name? — my kingdom for a paperback cover artist database!)

Yours for: $14


Best things about this cover:

  • More unusualness. An abstract painting — Pollack meets psychedelic meets third-grader — with naked upside-down girl thrown in for a representational, realistic touch. Did I just call a naked woman with gravity-defying breasts hanging from cartoonish green snot vines "realistic?" Yes. I believe I did.
  • More hot font action. 1957-62 was like some kind of paperback cover font Golden Age.
  • "There was nothing on the island big enough to kill a man..." Nerd raises hand: "Um, excuse me, am I to believe there is nothing on the island bigger than a small spider, because there are small spiders that can kill a man. To say nothing of microbes. Your assertion is highly dubious. Laughable, even. [Chortle]"

Best things about this back cover:
  • "And the plane crashed straight into the world's largest whale (not pictured). The end."
  • Love how the cover copy is laid out as free verse. "Formatting's for squares, man. You gotta let the words go where they want."

Page 123~

Four Adelie penguins came ashore and washed solemnly up the beach. They'd been feeding on infinitesimal green things in the current that flowed past the island. They regarded the men with zestful interest, their unhappy experience of capture and imprisonment in cages now forgotten. They crowded about the men, uttering the fluting notes of penguin conversation.


Ray, to Joe: "Please tell me you hear them talking too."

~RP

[Follow Rex Parker on Twitter]

8 comments:

Alix said...

Behold, the the original "Lost" pilot.

pious agnostic said...

That is one exiting back-cover blurb. I really want to read more.

JamiSings said...

You sure it's a paperback book and none one of those Japanese tentacle-rape comic books?

Veronika said...

For someone hanging over a swirling vortex of ink by a flimsy party streamer this woman sure feels very protective about her breast implants.

Suicidal pilots are no joke! After scaring the $h!t out of his passengers with the kamikaze landing, Byron realized he'll never be able to do it - he'll never be able to die in a great ball of fire like the song playing in his head told him to. It was time for plan B[ullet]

Jerry House said...

BTW: This way the basis of the Oscar-worthy Mamie Van Doren flick, Navy Vs. The Night Monsters.

Dirt Diggler said...

The cover reminds me of so many opening James Bond movies where random women are swimming or free-falling in various suggestive positions. I expect music to cue, "Mucous is forever ... fo-evuh ... fo-ev-ah!"

Nicole "Gidget" Kalstein said...

Inexplicably naked blonde: "My, this is inconvenient."

Tammi found that the island was the only place she could practice her nude acrobatic act without interruption.

Tammi was stuck. There was no way she could escape from the vines that were suspending her from the mountain. Suddenly, she remembered that she was naked. She hurried to cover her ample bosom.

I could go on forever. There are a million different ways she could have ended up like that, and I want to know which one it is!

Anonymous said...

Leinster was an above-average hack and MONSTER is definitely worth your time. It was filmed (sort of) as NAVY VS. THE NIGHT MONSTERS with Anthony Eisley And Mamie Van Doren.

And sorry, there are no nudes in book or movie, suspended or otherwise.