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Can’t Hardly Bear It: Malachy McCoy’s Kodiak!

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Can’t Hardly Bear It: Malachy McCoy’s Kodiak!

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Can’t Hardly Bear It: Malachy McCoy’s Kodiak!

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Published on January 20, 2017

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Welcome to Freaky Fridays, your fifteen-foot tall, 1,500 pound, fur-covered guide to the dusty old out-of-print paperbacks of yesteryear. We eat our weight in fresh salmon every day.

Bears are the most employable members of the animal kingdom. Kuma is the bodyguard for Heihachi Mishima. Billy Bob Brockali leads the Rock-afire Explosion Band at Showbiz Pizza (his evil cousin, Freddy Fazbear does the same over at the pizza parlor bearing his name). Fozzie Bear is a professional stand-up comedian for the Muppets. And Smokey is the most famous park ranger of all time. Then there are the questionable bears. The illegal immigrant bears (Paddington), the freeloaders (Yogi), the addicts (Winnie the Pooh), and those stupid lazy polar bears who just sit on their butts and drink Coca-Cola all day long.

Far worse, however, are the thug bears.

These bears grew up in neighborhoods so failed there aren’t even buildings to live in, just trees. There are no supermarkets, the public schools are so bad they’re non-existent, there are no fire or emergency services, very little tax base, and life is cheap. It’s a “survival of the fittest” situation where might makes right and baby bears don’t even learn how to read! The list of stone-cold super-predators that come out of these wildernesses reads like a roll call of the damned. There’s Kesagake, the serial killer bear. The Sloth Bear of Mysore. That bear in the Werner Herzog documentary. Even worse, is an ethics free entertainment industry that glorifies bear crimes in motion pictures like Grizzly (1976) and books like Marian Engel’s perverted Bear. Some of these so-called artists say they’re just telling the truth about the gang-banging lifestyles these bears lead on the streets, and that their movies and books have redeeming social value. Tell that to the bears. They see these depictions as glorifications of their lifestyles and after watching them they’re inspired to go out and commit even more bear crimes! Case in point, Kodiak, a disturbing, ultra-violent book that will leave the reader convinced that the time has come to get tough on bears.

Written in 1978 by Malachy McCoy, freely adopted from the original screenplay by Derek Robbins we’re told on the copyright page (but never made into a movie, thank god), Kodiak starts in Glennallen, Alaska as a bunch of fellows go looking for their buddy, Sam. They all work for an oil company, known only as The Company, that has a big refinery up here and the grizzled old timer, Charlie Ostermeyer, is leading the hunt. Well, they find Sam…torn to pieces. Then word comes in that a prostitute’s head and torso have been found 40 miles away. Making it worse, she’s been mutilated in a “sexual frenzy.” Normally, when I’m reading a book and encounter a foreign (Alaska is basically Canada’s appendix) serial-killing pervert bear on the rampage by page 10 I buy all the copies I can find and set them on fire, but for your sake, I’m going to keep reading. If you have any little ones reading along with you, now’s the time to go let them go watch something more wholesome on the internet, like snuff videos or C-SPAN.

According to Johnny Sianook, the suspect is a Kodiak bear, which he’s seen and describes as being 15 feet tall and weighing 1500 pounds. There are a lot of reasons to discount his so-called eyewitness testimony. First of all, he’s an Athabascan, which is a kind of indigenous Alaskan most notable for being hard to pronounce. Second of all, he’s very old and old people are liars. Third of all, he has six wives and fourteen children, which is completely irresponsible unless you’re Strom Thurmond. But then two young hippies, Robert and Betty Reardon, are snowmobiling into town from their commune when they run into the Kodiak with their snowmobile and it promptly bites off Betty’s breast. So, maybe we all should have listened to Johnny Sianook after all.

Charlie Ostermeyer and his boss, Mr. Sneed, want to kill the bear, which makes sense. But also employed by The Company is a pinko liberal college professor, Oscar Langsdorf, and he wants to capture the bear and that’s just crazy. Even crazier, he’s dating a librarian. Not so crazy, he hires Johnny Sianook to help him hunt the bear alongside Johnny’s half-white son, Dan-Jack.

“There are many mysteries with bears,” Johnny says, which is such a typical Athabascan thing to say. Translated into into normal people talk that means: bear hunting is messed up. Right from the get-go, this bear hunt is a line of dominoes made of stupid getting knocked over by a drunk monkey. Betty Reardon is in a coma and probably going to die, which makes her husband go crazy. He shows up with a gun to demand that Johnny Sianook take him bear-hunting so he can beat the Kodiak to death with his outrage, but wife #6 bashes the screaming hippie over the head with a log and knocks him out. Then Johnny goes off bear-hunting alone without even waiting for his professor friend or a plane.

The Kodiak finds Charlie Ostermeyer’s bear-hunting blind and casually tosses it off a 100 foot cliff, then raids a pumping station along the pipeline just for fun and is helping himself to the human buffet when Mr. Sneed tries to ram him to death with a bus, misses, hits the pipeline, and unleashes a 50,000 gallon of crude oil flood that drowns any survivors. The Kodiak heads into town and starts sidling up to bars, setting fires, getting drunk, and not once does someone ask for his ID. The mayhem escalates until a bleak final shitshow of a showdown that involves near-decapitation by plane propeller, a pilot accidentally knocked unconscious at the worst possible moment, combat on a frozen lake that’s cracking apart, an ill-timed sexual fantasy about librarians, and a delusional hippie with a gun.

Cynical, blood-thirsty, and the kind of book that refers to all its characters by their last names, this is basically a Walter Hill movie in novel form, all stripped-down, minimalist action and mean-spirited machismo without an ounce of fat on its sinews (it runs a brisk 141 pages). And that’s a bad thing. Because as long as pop culture insists on glorifying thug bear behavior, we’re going to have thug bears breaking into our picnic baskets, eating our scientists, and taking our jobs.

best-friends-exorcism-thumbnailGrady Hendrix has written for publications ranging from Playboy to World Literature Today; his previous novel was Horrorstör, about a haunted IKEA, and his latest novel, My Best Friend’s Exorcism, is basically Beaches meets The Exorcist.

About the Author

Grady Hendrix

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Grady Hendrix is a novelist and screenwriter living in New York City. His latest book is How to Sell a Haunted House, and you can learn more dumb facts about him at gradyhendrix.com.
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8 years ago

No mention of Dilbia?

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8 years ago

Baloo, that lovable doo-bi-dooing jazz bear from The Jungle Book is supposedly a sloth bear.

That is all I know about bears. Just that. Well that and Washington gave every American the right to hang a pair of bear arms on their wall.

https://youtu.be/MXrNj3t6Vxo?t=11s

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8 years ago

Then word comes in that a prostitute’s head and torso have been found 40 miles away. Making it worse, she’s been mutilated in a “sexual frenzy.” Normally, when I’m reading a book and encounter a foreign (Alaska is basically Canada’s appendix) serial-killing pervert bear on the rampage by page 10 I buy all the copies I can find and set them on fire, but for your sake, I’m going to keep reading.

 

I don’t know if it’s better that the rape-bears of Iraq will at least try to woo their victims with gifts of food, or if that’s somehow worse:

 

Even an animal respects a man’s desire, if it wants to copulate with him. Doesn’t a female bear try to please a herdsman when she drags him into the mountains as it happens in the North of Iraq? She drags him into her den, so that he, obeying her desire, would copulate with her? Doesn’t she bring him nuts, gathering them from the trees or picking them from the bushes? Doesn’t she climb into the houses of farmers in order to steal some cheese, nuts and even raisins, so that she can feed the man and awake in him the desire to have her?

 

The above quote is from a novel by the late, unmissed despot (and secret bear expert?) Saddam Hussein, as quoted by a 2011 piece in The Guardian.  Until today, I assumed the danger was confined to that part of the world, but now that I have learned that there are sexually-voracious bears in Alaska for whom consent is a non-or-secondary issue, I guess I shouldn’t go there, either.

I was also wondering, since you’ve read one more book about rape-bears than I have (of the two I know of), whether you had any kind of comparative opinion about the two, or whether you’d prefer to hold off until after you’ve read Zabiba and the King before offering one, assuming you’re up for the research on what I think we can agree is a pressing issue (especially in light of the past week’s revelation–new to so many of us–that bears are also a danger to American schoolchildren).

Thanks!

 

 

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Jenny Islander
8 years ago

I didn’t think I’d find any mention of my home region more nauseating than that public domain boys’ own adventure thing from the turn of the 20th century that depicted the rampage of two teenage thugs through the villages and isolated homes of roadless Kodiak, robbing and bullying little old men and turning viciously on a subsistence hunter who had dropped what he was doing to rescue the two scumbags–but described it as the heroic adventures of clean-cut American youths in a savage land.  Congratulations, you topped that!  

As a bonus, Kodiak bears don’t live on the mainland at all and the author’s weight estimate for a mainland bear of that standing height is too low.  Maybe the poor thing was starving.

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8 years ago

I had no idea rape bears were a thing, but now I know.

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wizard clip
8 years ago

“…thug bears breaking into our picnic baskets…”  Excuse me, but I believe the accepted terminology is “pic-a-nic.”