Kronos

HUGH ENFIELD
Kronos

Fontana, London, 1972
(price: 25p; 128 pages)

The blurb on the back:

Kronos gave a great karate shout of 'Ha!' which echoed through the air like a shot from gun. He countered Hagen's first terrible lunge and their swords locked at the hilt.
Hagen, his face transfigured with hellish glee, fought like a maniac and yelled as he felt his sword sink into the soft muscles of Kronos's arm. Kronos dropped his weapon, but he backed swiftly and warily towards the stairs, and, snatching up a rapier from the wall, plunged its point deep in Hagen's chest. It pierced his trunk and protruded from his back.
With red hatred in his eyes and his fangs protruding, Hagen stepped back a few paces and shouted in triumph, 'You can't hurt me, Kronos! No one can do that...!'

opening lines:
The sky was heavy with ominous slow-moving clouds. The sun broke through them occasionally, sending a yellow beam, unnaturally lurid, artificial, across the land below.

Kronos, slightly better known as Captain Kronos, Vampire Hunter was a late entrant in the Hammer catalogue, and it's not exactly celebrated by a mass audience. It is, however, quite a decent little film, with the script and direction coming from TV veteran Brian Clemens, and it turned up a few variations on the vampire theme. Amongst them is the rapid aging of a vampire's victim (later seen in The Hunger) and, most significantly, a transformation in the status of the vampire-hunter: no longer a professorial Van Helsing type, now we had a fearless, swashbuckling soldier, whose interest in the subject stems from the time when he had to slay both his infected parents.

It was intended to be more fun than your average horror movie, and indeed it was.

This novelization, on the other hand, isn't. It's as ropey as the cover. And (to mix my metaphors) it clunks with would-be period dialogue. Here's Kronos on his companion: 'What Grost doesn't know about vampires wouldn't fill a gnat's codpiece.' (p.28)

I don't know anything about Hugh Enfield - the only other book listed under the name in the British Library is a 1967 volume entitled 101 Ways to Improve Your Word Power - but I suspect it's a pen-name.

from a vampiric case-study
before and after an attack

ARTISTIC MERIT: 1/5
ENTERTAINMENT VALUE: 2/5
HIPNESS QUOTIENT: 3/5

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