The Boogens by Robert Weverka (1981, Bantam Books)
Film: https://youtu.be/fUq5C8MiCwA
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Are you looking for a novel where young men and women from several directions arrive at a nearly abandoned Colorado silver mining town, band together to thwart a rich local villain, then risk life and limb underground to seal-up tentacled, acid-oozing creatures forever?
If so, look elsewhere.
The Boogens is not that novel.
Despite what filmgoers and video renters have seen for the last three decades, the moral of The Boogens is: you can't win. [I'm not sure what motivated last-minute changes to the film, or whether they were even last-minute, but it does make the novelization's climax more interesting, and perhaps more "real," or "realistic."]
Whether visiting Summit, CO to reopen a neglected family home for horny college-age renters, or arriving to inspect the serially abandoned Hatcher Mine on behalf of a new owner, humans do not have the last laugh. The Boogens do.
And so does wheel-chair-bound local magnate Otis Blanchard. Which seems fitting, since the Boogens put him in the wheelchair when he was previously trapped in the Hatcher Mine, trying to find a way to swindle his partners.
….God, how he hated those things. Every morning when he swung his shriveled legs out of bed, he had a painful reminder of the damage they could inflict. The ones that had attacked him had been no more than five or six inches across, but there had been dozens of them, all clamped to his legs and over his groin, their yellow poison eating into him.
When Victor had finally found him in that mine shaft, Blanchard had been mercifully unconscious and as close to death as a man could get. And now he was an impotent cripple. He was lucky, the doctors in Denver had said. He was lucky that the upper part of his body had been buried in enough debris to keep the creatures from feasting on nothing more than his legs and genitals.
That was the price he had paid for the gold. And that was the gold that Tolivar and Lucas wanted him to share with them, the gold that Tolivar suggested he might have to pay back to the owners of the Hatcher mine. He would be happy to give the gold back—or share it with anybody—if in return they could make his body whole again.
Well, it didn't matter now. The Boogens would soon be spilling out of every hole in that mountain. Blanchard didn't care. He had sold his house and all his property in Pineglen; the papers had all been signed in Denver last night. He would be gone, and it didn't matter to him if those monsters spilled out all the way down to Bealton or across the Rockies to Denver.
"Shall we go, sir?" Victor asked.
Blanchard nodded. "Don't forget that car over by the mine entrance."
"No, sir," Victor said. "I'll take care of it."
As they moved quietly down the road, Blanchard peered off at the mountains to the west. It looked like the skies were clearing. A few shafts of sunlight were breaking through. It might turn out to be a nice day after all.
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Jay
27 June 2020
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