Bloody NEL: Croc by David James (1977)

Chapter Fourteen

Officer Glenn Stapleton entered the precinct arrest and booking room with a black rubber boot filled with a badly mangled human foot and lower leg wrapped in his jacket. He had been ok riding across town with the grisly thing in the trunk of his car, but the sweat had popped out on his forehead when he carried it into the station, and now his stomach was doing flipflops, threatening at any moment to send him into dry heaves. Last night’s party wasn’t helping his situation much either, and he vowed, like he had many times before, not to do it again.

----

Speaking of monsters, here’s an absolute whopper from New English Library’s glory days of posy-‘Jaws’ monsterism. Just look at that damned thing! Magnificent. (Tragically, an artwork credit once again eludes me.)

Given that this is a reprint of an American novel clearly modelled on the success of ‘Jaws’, I can’t get over the sheer gall of declaring it to be “in the tradition of ‘Night of the Crabs’”, given that NEL first published the latter book - by Shropshire-based author and rarely acknowledged BITR hero Guy N. Smith – in 1976, the same year that Belmont Tower released ‘Croc’ in the U.S. I mean, I don’t have the actual months of publication to hand, but that “tradition” must have taken root pretty damn quickly on both sides of the Atlantic, I suppose..?