Review
Lizard City
2014
Spanking Pulp Press
Review by Peter Young in The Thai Literary Supplement #15 (April 2019).
The 2nd edition of Newman’s pulp horror tale comes with a neat slasher cover, and the book itself, as we say in the UK, “does exactly what it says on the tin”.
The pulp writer Johnny Coca-Cola has quit drinking and spent time at a Bangkok temple that offers a perfect cure. But if he drinks again, he will see the feral lizards that people really are underneath, and they will see him. However, courtesy of a mad Bangkok scientist, it turns out these reptiles are for real; teaming up with a beautiful ex-hooker and other macho dudes, he must rid Bangkok of this infestation with a cache of guns, explosives and a bronze amulet, before the US Army nukes the place.
First off, I’m wary of protagonists who are also writers – I always suspect there are some short-cuts being taken with character development, but that’s not really an issue when the protagonist himself is a pulp horror writer inhabiting a pulp horror universe. So then, so far, so good; writer and reader agree there’s not an especially high bar being set here.
Except that Lizard City starts especially well: taut writing that hinted at a story that might subtly suggest psychological horrors rather than fling them graphically in your face, which, this being a pulp horror novel, I really should have prefigured would happen soon enough. The story really is as luridly green and red and often as sexual as you might expect, although I often felt there was a lack of attention to some necessary copy-editing (one character, Frisk, somehow becomes Fritz without Newman noticing). If you want cheap, garish thrills this novella is pitched at just the right level, but thankfully Newman’s development as an author hasn’t been nearly so arrested. He has written far better, and other fiction titles, such as his Joe Dylan detective series, deliver a far more sustained performance.