Susan Scott-Parker
The Real Whores of War
War novel nasties can usually be spotted by their titles: The Whores of War, Wheels of Terror, Slaughterground, Cauldron of Blood, Mountain of Skulls, Reign of Hell, Blood on the Baltic. The dust jackets promise demon heroes, corpse-strewn landscapes, sadism and blood. Inside, brutal men, ‘living outside the normal boundaries of reason and fear’, burn, loot, rape and murder their way across the battlefields of an hallucinatory World War Two. These caricatures, owing allegiance to nothing, have been dying in their lurid wasteland since the early 1950s when Sven Hassell’s The Legion of the Damned was first published. Unlike video-nasties, these novels have been around long enough to become quite respectable. Just ask at any W H Smiths or Menzies or local library.
Yet despite their continued popularity, the origins, the readership, even the writers of these war nasties remain obscure. The publishers will say little; only that the great majority of their readers are men and that the books sell very well indeed. Sven Hassell has sold more than sixty million novels
Sign Up to our newsletter
Receive free articles, highlights from the archive, news, details of prizes, and much more.@Lit_Review
Follow Literary Review on Twitter
Where now for active asset-management in the wake of the Woodford Equity Income collapse? My review of @davidricketts's When the Fund Stops and @OwenWalker0's Built On A Lie in @Lit_Review https://literaryreview.co.uk/stock-horror-2
'What if the 1492 "discovery" of America had been a fiasco, the major effect of which was to alert the Incas to the existence of a land to the east that might be ripe for conquest?'
@lieutenantkije on Laurent Binet's new novel, 'Civilisations'.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/1492-and-all-that
'Humans may be the supremely musical animal, but, with or without us, this is a musical planet.'
@MathewJLyons on how music on earth began.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/symphony-of-a-thousand-millennia