This review first appeared on scifiandscary.com
Look at that cover! The promise of giant marauding ants roaming the land like Guy N Smith’s crabs, devouring any unfortunates in their way. Sadly, my friends and fellow horror fans, the cover lies. The ants are big, but big by the standards of common or garden ants, not huge freakish monsters like those in the movie ‘Them!’. They are, in fact, about an inch long. To be fair there are a lot of them, and they do swarm over people and eat them and stuff, but I couldn’t help but be disappointed.
What makes this even worse is that when I was looking at books to read for 1979, I could have picked ‘Lair’, James Herbert’s sequel to ‘The Rats’, or ‘Origin of the Crabs’, the third of Guy N Smith’s Crabs books. But both those choices seemed a bit redundant, as I’ve already covered previous books in their respective series. So instead I plumped for ‘The Ants’, partly because of that giant-ant-promising-cover. I’m pretty sure I’d have had more fun with the rats or crabs.
‘The Ants’ is barely a horror novel at all, it’s much more like a jungle adventure story from the 30s. It’s set in Brazil (making it the first book I’ve done for Carry on Screaming with no UK locations) and features a Lara Croft-esque English heroine, a dashing American pilot and a supporting cast of stereotyped locals. The horror is low-key to the point of being kind of dull and even the adventure scenes aren’t that great. To be fair to Peter Tremayne though, the fault might lay partly with the cover artist. Once I realised the ants weren’t giant, I found myself rushing through the book wanting it to end so I may have missed some good bits.
Tremayne is someone I’ve never read before despite the fact that he was so prolific in the horror genre in the 70s and 80s. He published Dracula and Frankenstein related novels before starting to write more original works. Many of his books have attention grabbing exclamation marks – ‘The Morgow Rises!’, ‘Snowbeast!’, ‘Swamp!’. Having read ‘The Ants’, I can’t help wondering if the over enthusiastic punctuation is there to compensate for a lack of real talent on his part. Maybe I’m being unfair, but on the basis of ‘The Ants’ he feels like a Carry on Screaming also ran.

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