Horror Wears Blue

Horror Wears Blue is a science fiction novel by Lin Carter, the fifth and last in his "Zarkon, Lord of the Unknown" series. It was first published in hardcover by Doubleday in November 1987. An ebook edition was issued by Thunderchild Publishing in December 2017.[1]

Horror Wears Blue
Cover of first edition
AuthorLin Carter
Cover artistCandy Jernigan
CountryUnited States
LanguageEnglish
SeriesZarkon series
GenreScience fiction
PublisherDoubleday
Publication date
1987
Media typePrint (hardcover)
Pages174
ISBN0-385-12504-6
Preceded byThe Earth-Shaker 

Summary

A warehouse robbery in London perplexes Scotland Yard. The perpetrators, dubbed the "Blue Men," seem impervious to bullets and other conventional weaponry, and are even unaffected by deadly gases. This is merely the first of their brazen crimes; they strike again and again, apparently unstoppable. Called in from Knickerbocker City, Prince Zarkon and his Omega Crew come to the rescue. They discover the mastermind behind the Blue Men is the mad scientist known as Vulture, who clothes them in their impenetrable blue auras.

Reception

Robert M. Price characterizes the Zarkon series as "five delightful novels ... Lin Carter's loving homage to Doc Savage and his creator Lester Dent." They celebrate "'the gloriously fourth-rate,' the pulps, radio, comics, and movies he loved as a kid." He notes that "[t]he novels manage quite successfully to walk the tightrope between salute and parody," and "the humor never seems to impede or undermine the action." While "[i]t is not difficult to pick out a flaw here and there" and the series is "not entirely free from Carter's later-career sloppiness ... on the whole these books are vastly superior to much of what else he was writing during the same period. The Zarkon novels all command a crisp, snappy prose, sometimes reminiscent of Lester Dent's."[2]

The book was also reviewed by Don D'Ammassa in Science Fiction Chronicle #101, February 1988, and anonymously in Pulp Vault, February 1988.[1]

Relationship to other works

Robert M. Price suggest the author may have lifted the name of the novel's antagonist from the Spider-Man villain of the same name. Carter had written scripts for the Spider-Man animated TV series in the late 1960s.[3]

Unfinished sequel

At the end of the novel, the author announces an upcoming sequel, The Moon Menace, that was never in fact published. According to Robert M. Price, Carter only completed three chapters and a synopsis of the remainder before his untimely passing. It was to feature the Vulture returning to join with Zarkon's recurring foe Lucifer in a plot to take Zarkon captive and divide the world between them. They were ultimately to be thwarted (as in Carter's 1975 Callisto novel Lankar of Callisto) by the actions of a loyal dog.[3]

Notes
  1. Horror Wears Blue title listing at the Internet Speculative Fiction Database
  2. Price, Robert M. Lin Carter: A Look Behind His Imaginary Worlds. Mercer Island, WA, Starmont House, 1991, pages 75-79.
  3. Price, Robert M. Lin Carter: A Look Behind His Imaginary Worlds. Mercer Island, WA, Starmont House, 1991, page 78.
gollark: Reward being defined as paperclips, because people kept putting that in somehow.
gollark: Mostly they just iterated over all possible computable theories which could possibly explain their reality, and used that to deduce the actions with the highest expected rewards.
gollark: We didn't really set that at all, I was just saying we had Turing-test-passing ones.
gollark: We have a bunch of those, but they kept converting reality into paperclips.
gollark: What if sidescrolling city-building simulation game?
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