Best 1948 Adventures (10)

By: Joshua Glenn
July 14, 2018

One in a series of 10 posts identifying Josh Glenn’s favorite 1948 adventure novels. Happy 70th anniversary!

Vernon Sullivan (Boris Vian)’s sci-fi/crime adventure Et On Tuera Tous Les Affreux (To Hell with the Ugly).

Rocky Bailey, a magnificently handsome and athletic young man who runs with a fast Hollywood crowd, has decided to save himself for marriage; that is to say, he is determined to remain a virgin. Even when he’s knocked over the head, and wakes up in bed with a beautiful naked woman, he refuses to break his vow of abstinence. Alas, this means that his sperm must be extracted in a less pleasant fashion. He finds a dead body at the nightclub where he was abducted, and discovers that beautiful women have been disappearing lately… what’s going on? It turns out that a Dr. Schutz, is attempting to breed a master race of highly attractive people! Aided by some of the mad scientist’s imperfect experiments, not to mention US Marines and FBI agents, Rocky seeks to put the kibosh on this Dr. Moreau-like scheme. The action moves from a noir Los Angeles to Dr. Schutz’s island lair — it’s a genre-bending yarn, preposterous and pornographic all at once, anticipating everything from The Rocky Horror Picture Show to the Austin Powers movies.

Fun facts: Reissued by TamTam Books. Publisher Tosh Berman says: “Vian’s love of pulp literature is an outlet of his terror fantasies of what America is at the time of the writing of this novel — late 1940’s. This book reads like a Hardy Boys young adult novel with sex and mixed in the soup great pulp science fiction touches.”

***

Best 1948 Adventures (10)

Categories

Tags