The Little People By John Christopher
The idea here is fascinating...unfortunately the execution of the idea falls flat. Most of the book consists of half a dozen different internal monologues...long, long monologues. About things that COULD be tied together, but ultimately never really are. I went into this with very low expectations, so I stuck through until the end and it wasn't TERRIBLE, but it's just so anticlimactic. There are so many directions this book could have gone and it didn't really go anywhere. There's not much terror or horror or anything too terribly exciting. I read a chapter a night, like it was more an assignment, less a compulsion. I'd skip this one unless you're a huge fan. The Little People I remember picking this up from Chapters bookshop in Dublin when I was a Young Teenager in the 80's. I was fascinated and it was quickly passed around my friends that summer. Its highest recommendation came from my best Friend's older brother who was in a band and read it in one sitting - stating it was excellent!
Totally weird, and mostly unrealistic trash, parts of this outrageous story stuck with me right up to watching Buffy the Vampire on TV where a particular scene about two lovers could have been ripped right out of this tale.
The Little People I was upstairs in the passage when they came after me. They harried me, and they took my voice from me so that I could not cry out. The stairs door was open, and I made for that. And they threw me down. I heard them laughing up above, and I lay as though I was dead and prayed.
I've recently read Paperbacks from Hell by Grady Hendrix. It was one of those books that I bought when it first came out and it sat on my shelf until I thought it was time to take a magical trip back in time. Go back to a time when you could buy the craziest paperback books at the grocery store. Where no one would bat an eye at seeing a skeleton holding a baby on the cover of a book. As I said, it was a magical time. This was the first book mentioned and I knew that I had to track this one down. It was a tough road but here we are.
This book wasn't like I expected it to be. Our little people friends really didn't make their grand appearance until the last sixty or so pages. They do create a little bit of mischief before the big reveal. Even though it wasn't all push and shove (down the stairs), I really did like this. The story flowed smoothly and was interesting. It kept me around until I finished it.
The Little People was a decent read. It will be slow moving for some because you had to wait for the horrorshow to happen. I would have loved for the little people to be more terrifying but we get what we get. It was still interesting and one I can see myself rereading.
Leave your candles, rope, and knives at a location where these people can get to them... Don't say that I didn't warn you! The Little People A well written book with a plot you would not think would make for a good story. I liked the diversity of the characters as well as their depth. It was hard sometimes to know whether to laugh or cringe, but I think it is well worth the read for 60's-80's horror novel enthusiasts. The Little People This review previously appeared on the DMR Books Blog.
This book has a whip-wielding Nazi leprechaun on the cover. I thought this would be one of the trashiest novels I’ve ever read, but hopefully it would be some good dumb fun, too. Neither expectation was met. Instead of the wild, pulpy “novel of pure terror” the cover promises, we get a psychological drama. The tale takes place at an old house in the remote wilds of Ireland. Bridget Chauncey, an Englishwoman, has inherited the place from her uncle. She decides to turn the place into a hotel, to the disappointment of her lusty fiancé, Daniel. Daniel arrives for a visit and meets the other guests: a couple from Germany (Stefan and his Jewish wife Hanni, who he married due to holocaust-guilt) and an American family (Waring, his horrid wife Helen, and their teenage daughter Cherry). Christopher frequently digresses into each character’s backstory and their neuroses, bogging down the pace of the novel.
The day after discussing faerie folk, the group finds a tiny footprint and other evidence of such creatures. That night they lie in wait in the catacombs beneath the tower, and successfully capture one: an emotionless 12-inch tall girl who only speaks German. She goes along willingly and introduces them to the six others of her kind. While the others debate what to do, Stefan investigates the tower and finds documents detailing the creatures’ origin. It turns out (spoiler alert) they are not supernatural beings at all, but Jewish children subjected to Nazi anti-aging experiments during World War II. (Why was Bridget’s uncle in league with National Socialists? Why would he let the children live in his tower? No explanations are given.) What is not detailed in the documents is the fact that as result of these experiments, the “little people” have developed ESP, which they use to psychologically torment the humans. By the end most of the characters are emotionally scarred, but many of them were to begin with, so they weren’t much worse off.
This novel wasn’t as bad as I’m making it seem, but it could have been a lot better if the “pure terror” section was longer than just the penultimate chapter. If you’re looking for the great Nazi leprechaun novel (and who isn’t?), I fear it is yet to be written. The Little People
They speak German. They carry whips. And they are connected in some mysterious way with Nazi experiments carried out in the charming old Irish castle during World War II.
When members of the vacation party are found missing from their beds, and when pleading cries ring through the halls of great house, terror grips hearts and minds, and the vacationers are brought face to face with the unknown...
Cover illustration by Hector Garrido The Little People
This is book made infamous by the paperback cover featured in the introduction to Grady Hendrix’s Paperbacks from Hell: The Twisted History of '70s and '80s Horror Fiction. You may have heard of it as “that book with the Nazi S&M leprechaun sex slaves.”
I’m here to set to the record straight. This isn’t about Nazi S&M leprechauns at all. It’s about Nazi S&M Irish fairies. It’s a totally different thing.
Okay, you got me. It’s actually about I hope that clears it right up.
The book offers suprisingly deep character studies of each of the big people; the mutually loathing American couple and their quiet teen daughter, the young Irish lawyer with a crush on the young English engaged hotellier, her fiance, the German son of a Nazi and his Jewish wife. They all receive potentially sympathetic treatment over the course of this slow-burn, mild horror novel from the 1960s. I enjoyed it quite a bit in that respect, but the ending is terribly unsatisfying.
So what does an author do after writing about leprechaun sex slaves? Write children’s books, of course (The Tripods Trilogy). Oddly enough, I have those on my bookshelf also. The Little People The Hector Garrido cover is, unfortunately, the best thing in this book. Despite the Nazi Leprechauns on the cover (Gestapochauns? LepreNazis?) this is a book of quiet horror in which author John Christopher slowly draws his tapestry of flawed characters into a situation that starts out uncanny and then gradually darkens into pure terror. With Leprechauns.
Considering that the main characters in this book are a gorgeous secretary who inherits an Irish castle from a distant relative, her patronizing lawyer/fiance who only wants her body, an Irish dreamboat who slowly sinks into alcoholism (the “curse of his race”), a married German couple (he was an officer in the SS and she was a Jewish woman he met in a concentration camp – the flashback to their romance reads like When Harry Met Sally meets Schindler’s List) and an American family consisting of two bickering parents and their hot-to-trot seventeen-year-old daughter, you’d kind of think that Christopher might be predisposed for the gonzo stuff teased on the cover rather than quiet horror, but the man wants to write quiet horror no matter how much we want him to write Gestapochauns II: The Whipping.
Read the rest of this review here The Little People “Quiet horror” is not the route I would’ve personally taken when it comes to BDSM nazi leprechauns, but what do I know? The Little People Sometimes you judge the book by its cover but sometimes the books cover judges you. No, that's not quite it.... I stumbled across this odd little volume in a used bookstore and grabbed it up because it had one of the most over-the-top gonzo covers I'd ever seen. Even the guy at the cash register commented that it was of the most striking he'd ever noticed. The crazy whip-wielding Nazi leprechauns aren't precisely as they are described in the text, but they're close enough. It's the story of a young lady who inherits an Irish castle and opens it as a hotel. The ten folks who are there for the grand opening are an unpleasant and unappealing lot (think Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? with a Vincent Price filter), preoccupied with sex and alcohol and other such unwholesome pastimes, and the whippy Nazi gnomes only make things worse. Unfortunately it's a hundred pages or so into the text before the nasty little people are revealed, but we already know they're there because of the cover... oops. Actually, it's not a bad story, representative of mid-'60s British horror, but rather unremarkable other than for the cover on this edition. The Little People One expects a book like The Little People, with its insane cover art of a whip-wielding Nazi Leprechaun, would be some kind of pulp anti-masterpiece. Sadly, John Christopher's effort at atmospheric horror takes its premise dead seriously - and it's the reader who suffers. A lawyer and his secretary-fiancée relocate to a remote Irish estate, where they fall in with a German couple, a superstitious-but-hot local and some crude American stereotypes while they struggle to save their marriage. After about 100 pages of scene-setting, with tedious relationship drama and stillborn attempts at generating suspense (Everyone knows leprechauns are extinct!), Christopher finally brings on the titular Little People: a gang of foot-tall, German-speaking genetic freaks, evidently Jewish victims of Nazi experimentation (one of them, of course, named Adolf) who, somewhere along the way, developed psychic powers which they use to manipulate human dreams. There's some prurient interest when the Little People display their kinky side, with one tiny beauty stripping naked and trying to ride the protagonist's member in a scene drawn from someone's Very Specific Fetish. Or a scene where two of the humans make love, while a gaggle of giggling Leprechauns enjoy the show. The reader feels glad that Christopher, better-known for writing young adult science fiction, didn't send this manuscript to his usual editor. But that doesn't make the novel readable, whatever the cover may promise; a few scenes of camp madness don't make up for a tedious book where Lepreichauns are a subplot to a boring couple's personal woes. The Little People
