By BARBARA ANSON (Leisure; 1978)
There exist several interesting artistic treatments of the legend of the golem. This GOLEM, hailing from the premiere decade of both the horror boom and the Leisure Books imprint, is not among those interesting treatments. It’s downright lousy, in fact, although given the circumstances of its publication (Leisure in the seventies wasn’t an especially prestigious name), expecting greatness, or even goodness, is out of the question.
The golem is a figure from Jewish folklore. Created from clay, this personage was (according to the most famous golem narrative) brought to life by a 16th Century rabbi via Hebrew chants and incantations, and used to defend the Prague ghetto from antisemitic attacks. From this legend emerged Mary Shelley’s FRANKENSTEIN, the 1920 German film DER GOLEM, Gustav Meyrink’s 1914 novel THE GOLEM, the 1967 kaiju classic DAIMAJIN and the 2013 novel THE GOLEM AND THE JINNI by Helene Wecker (to name but a few examples).
The late Barbara Anson, an actress and author, was evidently quite invested in Golem lore, and provides a reasonably through history of it in a convincingly rendered Jewish setting. Those are about the only noteworthy things she provides, as the novel is otherwise a hastily written, poorly plotted cliché-fest that starts out slowly and only gets progressively more leaden, wheezing to a conclusion that can’t even be termed a whimper.
It begins with the death of one Rabbi Benjamin Demneck on Halloween night. That death is ruled an accident, but the Rabbi’s grief-stricken son, a wheelchair-bound ‘Nam vet named David, suspects his old man was murdered, especially after uncovering another killing of a religious figure that occurred on Halloween night of the previous year. Nobody, alas, will go along with David’s hypothesis. What to do?
Create a golem, of course! This David accomplishes by inputting all the relevant info into his computer, which helps EVILSPEAK-like to conjure up the creature. Perfunctorily described (much is made of its “pale green eyes”), this golem is quite a capable organism, taking David to a gathering where several of his former acquaintances are engaged in a never-explained Satanic ritual, from which David deduces that it was they who were behind the killing of his father, and the golem goes to work TERMINATOR-like, tracking down and killing off each member of the group until none remain and the book ends.