Customer Reviews

The Totem

5 star:		(5)
4 star:		(7)
3 star:		(8)
2 star:		(5)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Regular readers of David Morrell expect a crisp writing style, brisk pacing, and above all, relentless action. Morrell delivers once again with The Totem, but this time there are elements of the classic horror story mixed in with the thrills.

The residents of Potters Field, Wyoming, have fallen under the attack of wild animals that kill on sight, mutilating their prey. They hunt in packs, and their shadowed forms can be glimpsed running through the night forests, howling at the moon. Police Chief Nathan Slaughter soon discovers that these feral beasts are not animals at all, but the townspeople themselves. A new virus is loose in Potters Field, not entirely unlike rabies, that gives control back to a previously dormant area of the brain, in effect transforming men and women into the primal creature mankind was hundred of thousands of years ago.

Morrell's writing is as clean and tense as always, yet the book does not live up to its horror billing. Action dominates, and while the author's take on the origins of the werewolf mythology serves to deepen the theme of the book, the horror elements are only a faint undercurrent in what is essentially an action/adventure tale.

In this, a re-issue of David Morrell's fourth novel (1979), the author, as stated in his introduction "experimented with a variety of formats, all linked by action"(xi) in his early career, from historical novels to action-chase novels, and to this one, in the horror genre. The first version of this story was apparently much different from what Morrell originally intended, edited down to what was thought appealing to readers in the 1970s: "half as long, twice as fast" (xiv). In reading this version, I cannot imagine the action being faster: as with all Morrell books I have previously read, the action comes fast and furious from the beginning, and this novel is no exception. You can see all the Morrell trademarks in this early work: a good protagonist (a sheriff with the great name of `Slaughter'); several antagonists (especially the town's mayor, Parsons); a mystery - in this case, something is mutilating animals and eventually people, with horrifying results for the town of Potter's Field, Wyoming; and a huge climax with Slaughter committing a gruesome, but heroic, act. There's also a theme of moral responsibility: several characters are faced with a choice of doing the right thing or doing nothing, and that adds another dimension to the action. Morrell also uses parallel imagery between the angry townspeople and the `hippies' who are blamed for the evils visited upon the town. Even the name of the town lends itself to the action, since a `potter's field' was where the poor and nameless were buried; there's some symbolism there! The hippy aspect of the story dates it a little bit - a modern audience born in the 1980s probably wouldn't understand the social divisions of 1970, but that historical reference is explained enough to give a younger reader the general picture.

I have been a great fan of David Morrell for many years. The first two novels I read were The Fifth Profession and Brotherhood of the Rose. Obviously I enjoy his action works. I have never read horror novels before this so this book intrigued me. I found it excellent. Morrell combines his classic high adventure style with incredibly descriptive knowledge of the fear that can be produced by dark and lonely wilderness areas. As a hunter and outdoorsman, I know that tight feeling in your throat when camped in a strange forest and you hear movement and see shadows but just are not sure what made them. I found this novel very exciting. Just do not read it at night while camping.

The Totem is promoted as being one of the 100 best horror novels ever written. Whoever put it in there hasn't read many a horror novel, or many good ones anyway. This is just another b grade horror novel at best, that if it didn't have Morrell's name on the cover would be sold in the cheap three for five bucks section of the local bookstore. None of the characters are memorable, nor is any part of the plot, in fact the only reason I kept going past the first few chapters was because it was written by Morrell and I thought it might get better, it didn't and the only reason I stuck to the end was that I went to all the effort of tracking down and ordering this thing in the first place.

David Morrell is a very, very good author. The decision to read if this was your first of his work, great novels such as The Brotherhood of the Rose, Burnt Sienna, The Fraternity of the Stone, The Protector and of course First Blood should not be made based on this very average story.

Basic plot of Totem is the small peaceful not much ever happens Wyoming town of Potter's Field is awakening to an ever increasing number of mutilations. Mostly animals at first but the ratio soon changes to humans. Having relocated from the Detroit police force due to not being handle it there anymore, after being shot and tormented in a convenience store robbery, now for Potter's Field police chief Slaughter, that peaceful easy life is over, and the need to face terror once again is about to reach new heights. Is it a rabies outbreak, is it werewolves, or something else?

I bought this book for the same reason you tend to buy a book at a train station or an airport: to pass time. I actually found myself unable to put it back down. Although the story line is pretty thin, the meat on the bone comes from the density of all characters, largely an effect of good human descriptions by the author. Also, Morrell is capable of diffusing a sense of fear in the reader's mind by cleverly opposing the beauty of pristine nature to this insanity that human beings are typically capable of displaying. Suspense and mystery have the reader "eat" one page after the other to get quicker to the conclusion of the story.

On the negative side, the writing itself is littered with missing rational elements and sometimes contradictions that act pretty much as gaps and holes in the overall framework. Like this: how come that a sizeable group of human beings reverts back to such a wild, animal-like condition whereas still capable of speaking (the guy found wandering on the road) and living in a semi-orderly social organization? I saw this as a real contradiction. Where did the virus -or whatever rage-bringing factor- come from? Why wasn't Slaughter infected when cut across his cheek? Also, the conclusion of the book comes way too fast. The final "battle" runs through a mere couple of pages.

But overall, this is a real, good, fast-paced horror book.

Furry antlered monsters run rampant spreading their virus to people and animals. The only one who can stop it, a police officer named Slaughter, gets locked up by the town's major but manages to escape in time to save the town from an ambush. This book keeps your attention. I don't read a whole lot of books because I have a short attention span, but I had no difficulty following this book, and at no point did I lose interest.

David Morrell's THE TOTEM was originally released in 1979 and is considered by some to be a classic of horror fiction. This novel was eventually re-released in the mid-1990s, in one of those expanded, author-approved versions. This is the version of the TOTEM I chose to read, and I strongly suspect I made the wrong decision.

My impression of this new version of THE TOTEM is that it's too long and bloated. This novel has a multitude of characters, and Morrell spends countless pages exploring the psyche of characters that don't play a large role in the plot. As another reviewer commented, most of this novel is an overly-long setup, leading up to a climax that is almost laughably short and unsatisfying. There are also way too many subplots stuffed into the storyline, which deprives the book of any real momentum. Morrell's prose is strong, and there are some great moments in this novel, but they just don't add up to a satsifying story in the end.

There's a reason why the 1979 version of THE TOTEM is half the size of this version -- a good editor saw the flaws in Morrell's original draft, and excised all the boring and irrelevant parts. My advice is to find that older version of this book, which is no doubt more tightly written than this rather bloated mish-mash of a book.

This book is a five-star novel for about 75% of the way, then completely degenerates. I was alerted to it by a book called "the 100 greatest horror novels," which gave me some good reading tips (Dan Simmons' Song of Kali) and bad ones (Whitley Streiber's The Wolfen). This book was somewhere in between. The first 150 pages or so are wonderfully creepy and disturbing. It's amazing that Morrell could have given something as apparently benign as a camp of hippies living in the woods such a sinister aspect (Blair Witch Project parallels are perhaps in order--there's something out there in the woods, we don't know what it is, but don't go out there.) But right when things are getting really good, the horror ends, and we have, as another reviewer commented, an action/adventure tale. It comes as no surprise that Morrell is the creator of the Rambo character. In The Totem, it's zombies getting blown away, instead of "commies." Overall, a great beginning and then a big disappointment.

I, too, was recommended this book from the Horror 100 Best Books volume. The review written there spoke as if this were the Indy 500 of books--fast paced, quick reading. I found none of that here.

At 50 pages in, I was not yet involved and began to put it down. At 100 pages, I got more interested, especially with the part about the kid. As things went further along, I was torn between wanting to finish it and moving on to something else.

There were many things here that a seasoned writer should not have done. Several of the sentences pulled me out of the story, and I had trouble telling some of the characters apart. On the other hand, the suspenseful scenes were well done and I was drawn along with them.

So, this is really a so-so book. I would be interested to read the book the reviewer read, instead of this mess--already rejected by his publisher once--that Morrell pulled out of his file cabinet.

There's lots to like about Totem (1979), and I liked it a lot. That being said, the novel isn't perfect; its loopy, but in a good way. It kept me reading and wondering: What exactly is killing animals/humans in and around rural Potters Field,Wyoming, and how do their corpses seem to arise from the dead? (To reveal the answer might cause some readers to lose interest and not to finish the novel.)

I can't stress just how much David Morrell's Totem is like Shelley Hyde's (Kit Reed's) Blood Fever (1986), although Totem, in my opinion, is the more accomplished of the two novels. In both cased, the same key townspeople: the mayor, the newspaper editor, and the police, conspire out of a fear of collapsing the local economy to keep the truth from escaping to the rest of the world.

From reading some of the other Amazon's reviews, I conclude: 1) there must be a long and a short version of the novel; 2) most people, who read the longer version, didn't think it was that much better than the shorter version, and 3) I read the original, shorter (butchered) version. I didn't detect glaring plot lapses, but there did seem to be a few loose ends, especially connected with the failed hippy cult and the cult leader's ownership/non-ownership of a mysteriously hidden sports car. Also, I'm not sure, but I suspect the book's title "Totem," might have had more punch/power if the cult stuff had been left in.

And I am still mystified about the significance of the novel's title, and the relationship it seem to share with the down-and-out, drunken, free-lance reporter haunted by his nightmare of becoming a horned/half-man/half-deer creature. Did his nightmare spring from his past coverage of the strange cult, and what exactly went down and was it covered in the novel's longer version? I suspect I'll have to read the longer version to find out for sure.