The Rule of the Pagbeasts (AKA The Fittest) by J T McIntosh

I am not exactly a fan of J. T. McIntosh, having denounced several of his productions here at this blog.  But when I saw Crest Book's 1956 paperback edition of 1955's The Fittest, retitled The Rule of the Pagbeasts, going for $1.25 at an antiques mall, I could not resist its fascinating cover with its wild female figure and its over-the-top come-on text ("impossible to put the book down"; "THE MOST STARTLING STORY YOU EVER READ.")  Alright, we'll give it a shot.

You'll notice there is no animal on the cover of the copy of this book I purchased, just a woman with long blonde hair, a narrow waist, an impressive torso and powerful limbs.  Pity about that skull-like physiognomy, which is mesmerizing in its own way.)  I thought blondie here with the deep set eyes was a pagbeast, some kind of android or alien or something.  But looking at other editions of the novel online I see they have images of dogs and mice on them and make it clear The Rule of the Pagbeasts is a story about quadrupeds challenging human rule of the Earth!  I would not have bought any of those editions; I am not interested in stories about canines and vermin taking over the Earth--I am interested in stories about hot chicks taking over the Earth!  But following the sunk cost fallacy, having bought the book and scanned the cover and looked up publication dates and so forth, we are going forward with reading it.

The Rule of the Pagbeasts comes to us in 24 chapters.  Chapter 1 is an exercise in misogyny and exploitative horror and also reminded me of hard-boiled detective fiction.  The narrator indicates that he found his wife dead and then, sadistically and/or masochistically, theorized about her last moments, the physical and psychological agony she suffered, and then he shares his detailed imaginings with us readers!

Gloria was an American-born beauty with a perfect body and great fashion sense, but she lacked "guts" and the healthy human instinct to desire children.  Left alone in a French farm house, she was attacked by an intelligent dog, intelligent mice and an intelligent cat, and her husband and McIntosh describe her frenzied fear and her physical wounds as the animals toyed with her and eventually drove her to jump out a window to her death.  (I've noticed exploitative violence, particularly against women, in McIntosh's work before.)  This chapter might be seen as kind of gross, but it is actually pretty well-written and effective in achieving its apparent goals--if you want to read about a vapid beautiful woman being tortured and killed, well, here is a good example of the genre.

Chapter 1 introduces us to, and succeeding chapters dole out in dribs and drabs the details about, the setting of the novel--a midcentury world sinking into postapocalypticism because an American scientist, Paget, increased the intelligence of dogs, cats, rats and mice to about the human level and these uplifted quadrupeds aren't using their smarts to listen to Tchaikovsky and read T. S. Eliot but to wage war and inflict torture on the human race:

They're animals whose brains have been forced a few million years further along the evolutionary highway....But they're animals, with animal motivations, savagery, tradition, and temperament.  As such they're automatically enemies of any other creatures which threaten their own survival, particularly men.

Our narrator identifies himself, and here we have the sole joke McIntosh offers in this blood-and-guts serious novel, as Don Page-Turner, and he tells us he is unsentimental, and then demonstrates his lack of sentimentality. Don leaves Gloria's body behind, unburied, and walks to the nearest village.  The village police arrest him on suspicion of murdering his wife, but a competent Englishwoman who needs his help gets him out of jail and steals one of the few cars still running (the rats and mice have been sabotaging automobiles and locomotives the world over as part of their war against us bipeds.)  This Englishwoman is an expert at jailbreaks and car theft but she can't drive--that is why she needs Page-Turner to help her get back to Albion.

All through the book, Page-Turner compares women to the dead Gloria, for example, stressing how his sister Mil and this new woman, Ginette, have guts and can get things done, unlike Gloria, who was a one in a million beauty but couldn't look after herself.  Though she is dead on the first page of this 185 or so page novel, she is actually one of the book's main characters.   And Exhibit A in the prosecution of the novel's central theme that certain people are the fittest to survive and certain people, should the shit hit the fan, are ngmi.     

Ginette is one prickly individual, very independent-minded and sarcastic, a woman who keeps saying she doesn't want to stay with Page-Turner and wants instead to be dropped off here or there.  This hard-to-get routine inspires in Page-Turner a desire to control her.  On the ferry to the green and pleasant land she vomits, either because of sea sickness or because of expository dialogue about the development of the pagbeasts, including the narrator's description of them swarming over a human victim.  Upon arriving in England, Ginette leaves Page-Turner and the car she stole and he immediately starts searching for her, fantasizing about using physical force to make her stay with him.  He soon finds her; she has been injured in a fight with a pagdog, giving our hero a chance to take off her bra and apply iodine to her wounds.  This book is full of women suffering indignities.

A tall man, Dave, formerly an editor at a newspaper, joins Don and Ginette as the third wheel of the crew of the stolen French car.  Our three heroes stay the night with a friend of Dave's in London; they find Londontown almost without electricity as well as automobiles.  The gas lines are also being cut by the pagmice and pagrats.  Page-Turner flirts with Ginette and when she comments that he doesn't seem to miss his wife, who died like two days ago, Page-Turner slaps her so hard it sounds like a "whipcrack" and makes the sarcastic bitch stagger.

Ginette again leaves behind the car and the two men, this time in the environs of Cambridge, despite Page-Turner's efforts to convince her to stay, which include grabbing her and kissing her.  McIntosh again and again reminds you of how the narrator can just manhandle Ginette if he chooses to.  Maybe this is a reminder that in society the law, customs, and norms, keep the strong from dominating the weak, and in a postapocalyptic situation those laws and norms go right out the window and the strong do what they will while the weak suffer what they must.  

Alone with him now, Dave says he thinks the narrator's real name is Paget and that he is connected to the Paget who created the monsters who are destroying society.  Our narrator tells his story.  He is the son of the scientist who created the pagbeasts and hails from Chicago, scion of a wealthy family.  Dad died coincidentally in a car wreck before the monsters he had created escaped and began their war on humanity.  When the scope of the pagbeast menace became apparent, mobs of disgruntled citizens came after Dan the narrator and his brother Stan and his sister Carol.  (Sister Mil was in England with her English husband, who is now dead.)  Carol was gangraped, but survived, but some weeks later Don witnessed Stanley shot dead by a mob which murdered Carol in a gruesome fashion that perhaps symbolizes the Pagets' elite status and their distinction from the common masses.  The police helped Don and Gloria sneak away to France, where the pagbeasts hadn't spread in volume yet, though soon enough the monsters had.

Halfway through the novel Don and Dave arrive at Mil's country estate.  Mil is a no-nonsense capable sort, and she has a sort of fortified manor house and a band of comrades who are able to defend themselves from the pagbeasts and in the short term from a local human menace, a multi-ethnic band of gypsies and circus performers, thieves and expert knife throwers.  This element of the story comes across as pretty racist, at least by today's standards.  Mil's crew is less than a dozen people, four attractive middle-class women and a bunch of dimwitted, unattractive, proletarian men, so the fifty gypsies could overwhelm Mil's estate if they were willing to suffer heavy losses.  (Mil's group has conventional low-intelligence dogs who help keep out the pagbeasts.)

A substantial part of the second half of the novel consists of Dan and Dave, who kind of take over management of Mil's operations, trying to recruit additional young and middle-aged people to join Mil's settlement, expanding the estate's agricultural output, and then dealing with the gypsies.  We get plenty of psychology-of-leadership material as Don decides who to recruit and how to manage them.  But we also get a large helping of sexual politics psychology as Don and Dave interact with the women of the settlement, deciding who to take as a wife and then convincing them to succumb.  Of course Ginette reappears and becomes Don's wife, but there is another woman, Eva, who is in love with Don and this causes complications--in true male wish-fulfillment fashion, Don decides Eva is the girl for him because Ginette is so difficult, and Don and Eva have sex right before the big battle with the gypsies, and then during the battle Eva's morale fails and she panics and gets herself captured by the enemy, tortured and murdered, so Don ends up with suitable wife Ginette after having sexually conquered and enjoyed the unsuitable Eva.  (All you pervs will be glad to hear that Don has his hands all over Eva's "beautiful supple body" in her last moments as he struggles to revive her via artificial respiration.)

Women cause all manner of trouble in this novel, as well as suffering the blackest fates imaginable.--one of the bourgeois women in Mil's group wants to try diplomacy with the gypsies even though Don and Mil have intelligence indicating the gypsies are planning an attack; this peacenik runs off by herself to try to treat with the gypsies but is attacked and eaten alive--reduced to a skeleton!--by a horde of rodents before she reaches the gypsy position.  And during the battle Don grapples with a "slim, lithe, young" gypsy girl before slaying her with his clasp knife.

Once the gypsies are wiped out, the community started by Mil grows and we learn that other such communities around England are similarly growing as men and women become expert at defeating the pagbeasts.  Human civilization will endure!  The last line of the novel even suggests the pagbeast catastrophe was good because it cut in half the human population, which was too large (we saw this attitude in McIntosh's The Million Cities many years ago.)

The plot and structure of The Fittest AKA The Rule of the Pagbeasts have the appeal of the zombie apocalypse fiction that is so popular nowadays, the inhuman menace that has people banding together to rebuild society while squabbling amongst themselves and the disgusting violence and gore.  McIntosh throws in a pile of other stuff: all the sex and gender business, of which there is plenty, plus some class and race/ethnicity material; we might also consider national culture material--is McIntosh, by setting the story in France and England but having the mad scientist and monsters originate in the USA, trying to say something about those three nations and their people?  A final thing we might consider is the novel's attitude about government--the American and British taxpayers in the 1950s were shelling out plenty of moolah for military and intelligence establishments to deal with the threat posed by international communism, and just ten years before had successfully engaged in a titanic struggle with Germany, Italy and Japan, so the US and UK governments had vast amounts of trained and experienced manpower and equipment at their disposal tailor-made for providing people protection and emergency medical care, but McIntosh never portrays those governments doing anything to kill pagbeasts or maintain order or provide succor to the people.         

The most remarkable thing about The Fittest AKA The Rule of the Pagbeasts is that the writing style and all the other elements--structure, pacing, characters, themes, images--are acceptably done or well done; so much of McIntosh's work which I have read is so bad that I was surprised that this thing was competently executed and before I opened it I had no expectation of telling you I can mildly recommend it.  But I am telling you just that.

Another SF novel I bought for its cover the next time I can tear myself away from the quest for money and from family obligations and produce a post of the quixotic enterprise we call MPorcius Fiction Log.