Well, the month’s more than half over, and this is the first post I’ve managed to cobble together. That says a lot about my mood lately. Things seem gray and pointless and not worth writing about.

I have a partial excuse for my long silence in that I did take a trip across the country last week. I spent one week stressing out over the preparations and, of course, spent another recuperating from the demands of the excursion.

But the trip itself was mostly OK. One highlight was discovering a really cool used-book store in Middlebury, VT: Otter Creek Used Books. It’s an unpretentious place, mainly a basement crammed full of inexpensive paperbacks. I only had about 30 minutes to spare, but I enjoyed poking through shelves full of mass-market horror and disaster novels (“The Prometheus Crisis”!) from the Seventies and Eighties, stuff I read in high school and college and haven’t much thought about since.

One of the books I purchased was “The Hephaestus Plague” by Thomas Page. I remember originally buying a copy when I was about 15. It was the cover that sold me:

They are large, blind, carbon-eating insects, each one capable of emitting a tiny flame, each one mysteriously incapable of reproducing. Their swarm is relentless and unstoppable, leaving a wake of death and charred ruin. Scientists struggle to destroy them before they destroy the earth. All but one man. He has discovered the creatures’ remarkable intelligence…and a way to breed them.

Super-intelligent bugs that shoot flames out their butts! What could be better than that?

Hollywood obviously saw the appeal. The novel was filmed as “Bug” in 1975, with Bradford Dillman as Professor James Parminter. Not a big hit, apparently.

I’d assumed that “The Hephaestus Plague” would be long forgotten, but it’s actually back in print, from a Dublin, Ireland publisher. Here’s a review by some guy who specializes in “boychik lit,” which is a new one on me. (The new cover doesn’t do it justice. Ladybugs? Feh.) Author Thomas Page is apparently alive and well and looking forward to re-publishing his novel “The Man Who Wouldn’t Die.”

So I guess there’s no point in despair quite yet. I can at least take solace in knowing that a disaster novel as endearingly wacky as “The Hephaestus Plague” can find a second life, even if it’s with a publisher called “Trashface.”

Tags: bugs, horror, paperbacks, science fiction

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