Seven Tickets to Hell

Robert Moore Williams Seven Tickets to Hell (1972)
Aside from occasional encounters with Abbott and Costello, little is known of the activities of Frankenstein's monster after the events of Mary Shelley's book, not least his brief career in publishing which brought us the Frankenstein Horror Series back in the early seventies. Frank Belknap Long wrote one, and this is by Robert Moore Williams, of whom I've become quite the fan.

Perhaps anticipating a variant audience to that which presumably read his science-fiction novels, Williams seems to have played it safe with this one in certain respects, channeling his love of Abraham Merritt into a relatively generic adventure which would probably transfer to the big screen with ease, rather than making it up as he went along and stuffing it full of his weirder ideas about the universe and our place therein. It's still reasonably strange given Williams choosing to write in second person, swapping between two main characters addressed as you.

The men you can face. Perhaps they were not as badly wounded as you had thought. This is what you tell yourself. You know this isn't true, you know these men were dead, but you can lie to yourself about them.

He sustains this for the full 190 pages, which is impressive, and the prose positively crackles with that weird energy found in his best books, or his strangest books depending on how you look at it.

Should he require introduction, Williams was a man with certain psychological issues which informed much of his fiction, and many of his common preoccupations and themes appear here as detail to what is more or less Indiana Jones taking on the Mexican narcotics trade, liberally spiced with a heap of mythology-cum-pseudoscience. Of Williams' staples, we get the sacred mountain, ancient underground races, that which man once knew but has since forgotten, a vague cosmic connection, biological robots, and love as a mysterious universal force. There's enough Mexican mythology to suggest the man did his research, and although he gets it somewhat skew-whiff in places, you don't mind because it's Robert Moore Williams and you keep reading just to find out what the hell he's going to do next. Unfortunately what he does next betrays the influence of Merritt more than is usual for this author, so Seven Tickets to Hell isn't anything like so unpredictable or arrestingly weird as Beachhead Planet or The Bell from Infinity; having said which, he's always worth reading, and this one still delivers much more than is promised by the cover - excepting the female secret agent who doesn't seem to be in the book at all, but then it was the seventies.