At best, Nikie Gordon was a C-level actress in a string of B-level films. With her career in the crapper, no one in the industry was surprised when she disappeared in 1974 and became a Hollywood dropout.
Twenty-three months later, she was back like a Bi-Centennial rockets’ red glare. Full-page ads in Variety and The Hollywood Reporter announced her triumphant return to the spotlight. She was a star reborn.
The mystery of Nikie’s disappearance and her surprising return ran parallel with a monster that emerged mysteriously from La Brea Tar Pits. In a way, the titular Bog Beast became her benefactor and co-star.
The creature was seven-feet tall, bipedal, skeletal and thickly covered with black viscous tar. Its silhouette was vaguely human if you ignored its crust of twigs, roots, clumps of fertilizer and vegetation. The Bog Beast didn’t come from the swamp, but it certainly was a sludgy cousin of the Heap, Man-Thing, Swamp Thing (and probably Theodore Sturgeon’s It).
Unlike its predecessors, however, the Bog Beast lacked any sort of compelling origin story. Nothing was known about the creature except that it had crawled out of a Los Angeles tar pit. Later, the author would give readers a small crumb to chew on: “It knew nature,” he wrote cryptically. “It was part of nature and had elemental understanding of earth and water.”
The lives of Nikie Gordon and the Bog Beast intersect during the filming of a movie called Tomb of Frankenstein. The sound stage was destroyed by a disgruntled former crew member, and the actor portraying Frankenstein’s Monster was killed. Luckily, the Bog Beast rescued Nikie when she accidentally fell down a rickety FX contraption. The film production was consequently shut down and the actress spent two years convalescing from her injuries.
During that time, a Hollywood fixer approached Nikie with a proposal. Faced with major insurance lawsuits, union reprisals and insurmountable bad publicity, Worldly Pictures gave her an offer she couldn’t refuse. All she had to do was blame the whole thing on the Bog Beast and she’d get a second chance at Hollywood stardom. And that’s what happened.
I can’t blame the author for his contrived plotting and tidy resolution. Richard H. Levey’s prose is actually quite entertaining throughout the novel. I would even call it perky.
Unfortunately, Levey is constrained by the poor quality of his source material. If you didn’t know, the adventures of the Bog Beast first appeared in a long-forgotten 50-year-old comic book. Believe me, the comic wasn’t very good, and neither is this novelization. Digging Dirt: Seeking the Bog Beast is a fine example of “garbage in, garbage out.”
[Digging Dirt: Seeking the Bog Beast / By Richard H. Levey / First Printing: July 2020 / ISBN: 9798666859476]