Monster of the Day #948

Updated on July 14, 2014 By Ken Begg 29 Comments

What can I say, I loves me some Samson. Probably not quite as much as Kona, but those are pretty much all by the boards now.

And this is perfect; I was hoping for a week of killer crustaceans originally, but weirdly they got a LOT less love from pulps and comics than octopi. There was the Guy Smith series of awful killer crabs books from the ’80s, but most of those books featured the giant crabs without anything to give them scale, which is highly lame.

Samson to the rescue, then!

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  • Ericb

    Oh no! What will Samson do without his useless friends?!

  • sandra

    I guess it’s crab cakes for dinner tonight.

  • bgbear_rnh

    I am a lobster dammit, that is why I hate you puny humans, you can’t tell us crustaceans apart!.

  • Gamera977

    Ya know they don’t turn red till you cook them, unless the lobster was cooked by the radiation that turned it into a giant.

  • Beckoning Chasm

    Yeah, those Guy Smith books were pretty terrible, but they certainly moved along in full pulp fashion. And as I recall, the covers just showed one of the crabs without, as you say, anything to give it perspective size-wise.

  • Ken_Begg

    Yes, one lonely cover had a person being crushed in a giant crab claw, sort of like that shot in Attack of the Crab Monsters. But all the other editions of the various series entries I’ve seen just have crabs standing on a shore or beach with nothing nearby to provide perspective. Since they are giant crabs, not killer normal-sized ones, that seems weird to me.

  • bgbear_rnh

    Maybe Samson told him a dirty joke.

  • Ericb

    I never found crustaceans all that scary. Sure a giant one can do some damage but it doesn’t have the creep factor of an arachnid or an insect. Grading on a curve for arthropods most crustaceans are kind of cute.

  • Flangepart

    And why is that? I’d wager edibility…not that I would eat them underwater bugs.

    Still, if Samson gets that thing into boiling water, it’s lobster for months!
    Now if they could only find a tanker full of…drawn butter.
    It was a Roooock, lobstah!
    Big finish, Frank, big finish!…

  • Ericb

    That and they don’t have fangs or stingers, aren’t poisonous, don’t live in machine-like hive societies, don’t suck your blood or liquify your insides … stuff like that.

  • Rock Baker

    “Don’t worry, Skipper. You can bite him back at dinner tonight.”

  • Beckoning Chasm

    By the way, is Samson missing an eye? I assume that since all these covers show him with that odd cloth thing covering one eye.

  • bgbear_rnh

    I keep wondering why none of the critters he fights attack him from his blind side.

  • Ericb

    The gargon herds are enjoying their new home.

  • Eric Hinkle

    “Guy Smith series of awful killer crab books’ — am I wrong, or were this set in England? I could swear I saw the whole series being sold in a bookstore back then, along with one about alien werewolves who disguised themselves with ‘people suits’. Including masks that could apparently cover the prominent canine muzzles.

  • Eric Hinkle

    Maybe the lobster is a communist?

  • Eric Hinkle

    In case you’re interested, they’re selling the whole series on Kindle at Amazon. I think it’s the same series, maybe. Here’s a quote:

    “Their claws were strong enough to snap a man in
    half. Their shells were impenetrable, even by a six-inch naval gun.
    Their eyes glowed with malevolence, and as they tore their victims limb
    from limb they seemed to grin with sadistic delight. Never before had
    the world seen such an army.”

    That sound familiar?

  • Petoht

    The joke’s on Samson. All the butter’s long since spoiled.

  • Ken_Begg

    Yes, that’s them. They are very poorly written, but if you’re in the right mood, engagingly so.

  • Eric Hinkle

    I downloaded sample chapters to my laptop Kindle, so I’ll have to see just how good-bad they are.

  • The Rev.

    Scott Foy did a dramatic reading of one of those stories during one of his Foycasts years ago. It was jaw-dropping. I seem to recall stumbling across one of those books at Ken’s house and reading a couple of stories. I’m guessing I was in the right frame of mind due to B-Fest being imminent, as I was quite tickled.

    I don’t have a Kindle, but I wonder if I could get those for my Nexus? We got rid of cable a week and a half ago, so along with having more time to watch movies I have more time to read; and that’d keep me occupied for a while, I’d wager.

  • The Rev.

    You’re right. I mean, watch out for the claws, but other than that there’s nothing there that’s too scary. Hell, I think crabs are rather cute (with the possible exception of the really big ones, like spider crabs and coconut crabs). Crawdads/lobsters are the same.

  • Flangepart

    Yeah. It’s a long catalog of pulp absurdity…is that redundant?…but as far as a riffable book, yeah baby!
    Brits getting dismembered left and right (arm) and tank fire that just bounces off…okay, had problems with that.
    Maybe I know too much as an armchair general, but unless it’s a kaiju level wee beastie, I wanna see a progression of damage. Hit levels, dammit!
    One three man tank (Therefor an Alvis Scorpion light tank with a 76mm gun) can’t stop the crabs…a scorpion can’t stop the crabs…that sounds dirty…and the crew drown when the crabs throw the tank into the sea.
    But saying a Centurion with a 105mm can’t even slow them down with a ‘mobility kill’ (Shoot off a leg) really bugs me. And a 155mm at point blank range? NO! Ain’t suspending my belief baby. Try again!
    A 2000lb bunker buster with laser guidance means one thing…a big a$$ crab dinner.
    (Sigh) Rant mode off.

  • Beckoning Chasm

    I believe they were all set in England, somewhere up the coast in an a relatively isolated area. I read a couple of them a few years ago, and a few months ago finished one on the Kindle. (All the titles are very generic so I couldn’t tell you which ones I read.)

    They are stupid and not-well-written, but they do move along if you’re in the right mood.

  • Eric Hinkle

    I can deal with books that are stupid, but fun. Heck, back in the 80’s I used to read the ghastly WHITE SQUAW ‘adult western’ series. ‘Stupid, pretentious, and humorless’ books are something else again.

  • sandra

    My bad. Okay, so its lobster bisque for dinner.

  • sandra

    I;d love to read the “alien werewolves who disguise themselves in people suits’ books.

  • Gamera977

    Yeah, steel kinda trumps flesh and chitin. I think the BS explanation on the Godzilla Millennium films was that his ‘G-Factor’ allows him to quickly regenerate his wounds.

  • Eric Hinkle

    I’d point them out to you, if I could remember the name of the series. The best I can remember right now is that the main characters were some high school kids. That and the werewolves all needed this weird ‘medical’ patch on their sides or they’d die from something in Earth’s atmosphere.