Richard Bachman – The Long Walk

Richard Bachman – The Long Walk    (NEL, Sept. 1989)

Cover: Gerald Grace

Blurb:
In the America of the not-too-distant future, authority wears a uniform and stands above the law.

The nation’s top sports event is a 450-mile marathon walk, a gruelling road race for the fittest young men in the land, a terror trek where a single wrong slip is probably the last.

Victory means fortune and fame. There’s only one winner and there are no losers.

Tomorrow’s world is a place where failure is against the rules.

Bari Wood – The Tribe

Bari Wood – The Tribe  (NEL, Oct. 1982)

Blurb:
Hut 554 in Belzec Extermination Camp was different. The inmates were alive.
Shabby, pale, but in good health and well-stocked with food – official supplies that were better than even the German Army had by 1945.

But amongst the horror of the camp and the relief that some at least had sur­vived, one man noticed something strange about the Jews of Hut 554: a fine greyish dust that coated the interior and clung to their clothing. A small mystery that could be part of the big mystery: why had this one small group been kept carefully alive?
Thirty-five years later, in Brooklyn, police burst into the basement hideout -of a teenage gang. This time the in­mates were dead. Brutally killed, bat­tered to death and torn limb from limb. And again, amongst the bloodbath, something strange: a fine greyish dust, scattered and clinging to the bodies.

” . . an ultra-readable story of occult sus­pense.’    Daily Mirror

Charles L. Grant – In A Dark Dream

Charles L. Grant – In A Dark Dream   (NEL, 1990: originally TOR, 1989)

Blurb:
`Something bad coming. Something bad … ‘

She huddled, shivering and sobbing against her father.

`Something bad..’

The nightmare she could barely explain.

New England summer. School’s out and the small town waiting for the arrival of the summer people, the cottage owners. The months of swimming in the lake, cookouts, woodsmoke and summer love. The carefree time.

But something bad coming. Something twisted and vile, prefigured in dark, tormented dreams. Evil, tracking and sniffing its way towards them, slithering out of imagination into reality.

Hans Heinrich Ziemann – The Explosion

Hans Heinrich Ziemann – The Explosion  (NEL, June 1979)

Blurb:
The scientists said it could never happen:
how wrong they were ….

On a hot July day in the heart of the Rhine valley; the GREATEST UNCONTROLLABLE ATOMIC REACTION happens.

“By an author who has plainly made a thorough study of the hazards of a nuclear explosion.
Definitely not a book for the squearnish”.- MANCHESTER EVENING NEWS

Translated from the German by Joachim Neugroschel

Marc Marais – Duel For A Dark Angel

Marc Marais – Duel For A Dark Angel   (NEL, April 1976 )

Blurb
A wave of sickening murders hits the streets of Paris. The bodies of beautiful women are being found, almost casually, in rivers or up back alleys, by passers-by. The corpses have been killed and mutilated with a brutality that rivals Jack the Ripper. Claude Delorme, of the special branch of Paris Sûret, faces growing pressure to solve these crimes as panic mounts daily among the Parisians.

But he is faced by a baffling lack of clues and suspects. After many false starts and near disaster he at last stumbles upon what seems to be the trail, yet it leads him to the twilight world of the supernatural. Those who dabble with the Occult he finds, are now playing with human lives. Against the shadow of menace that threatens not only Delorme, but the whole of Paris, police methods are useless. It can only be dealt with on its own terms.

Thanks to Sara of the very beautiful My Love Haunted Heart blog for providing cover scan, blurb and a super review.