This month's Arizona author for me is author and podcaster James Sabata, for a few reasons. One is that I've planned to review more horror here at the Nameless Zine—hey, it's a perfectly valid genre within the wider one of fantastic fiction. Another is that I swapped a copy of one of my books for 'The Cassowary' at TusCon 48 while James and I shared a signing table. And a notable third is that the two words that kick off the novel constitute the name of my eldest son, who quickly thereafter becomes an ex-son, the first victim of the titular monster bird. This particular cassowary mangles, maims and murders many real people within the pages of this book, a whole slew of whom I know personally or, at least, recognise. That's fun.

It's worth mentioning that I've been a sucker for creature horror since I discovered it in the eighties, as those of you reading my Guy N. Smith runthrough reviews will have noticed already. Over the few decades since, horror authors have continued to work their way through the animal kingdom to track down new creatures yet to be given their own rampages and I have to admit to shock that not one of the many horror novelists out there had enlisted the cassowary until now. After all, we all know that big birds are often vicious, even if we've never been chased by a goose or a swan, and the southern cassowary, the most common variety of the species, is both the third tallest and the second heaviest living bird on the planet. It deserves its own moment in the creature horror spotlight.

My son is an old man here, which makes me wonder all the more about the grey in my beard, and he's worked at the Toscano Wildlife Preserve here in Phoenix for a quarter of a century. In that time, he's trained legions of keepers and doted on generations of animals. Cassie, the zoo's cassowary, used to sit in his lap when she was young. Of course, she's not young any more and, what's more, she's not at all herself. As the tagline has it: "The world's most dangerous bird just got an upgrade". Something has happened to Cassie, something that's generating bright pink light in her eyes and prompting her to go batshit crazy on a doting keeper like Michael Flanders. Oh well, she's got to start somewhere, right? We'll miss you, dude.

If there's a plot here, it's this. Cassie, previously a popular exhibit at the zoo, is now a deadly fugitive who's wreaking havoc across town, leaving an increasingly bloody trail in her wake and a burgeoning news story to panic the local populace. The zoo has to get her back or, at least, to stop her before the death count grows any larger, so it sends out security guard Jerome McClintock and animal handler Kaitlyn Lenhart to get the job done. Of course, that's much easier said than done, because Cassie is not merely gone, she's changed, growing in size and threat with every kill for reasons we don't know but surely have to be supernatural. I may not know much about cassowaries but I'm pretty sure they don't emanate pink light from their eyes like laser beams. Unless it's leading a pride parade.

The chapters generally alternate between Jerome and Kaitlyn doing what they can, along with some other people searching for Cassie for their own purposes, and the cassowary carving her way through a substantial cast of freshly introduced and quite clearly disposable characters. There's really not too much else here, which is both a positive and negative. Those looking for depth will find this a shallow read, without much at all in the way of character development or plot. However, anyone looking for a novel where a cassowary kicks ass and takes names, with surprising speed and the deadly 5" middle claws on its feet, is going to get exactly that. 'The Cassowary' delivers exactly what it promises. It just doesn't do a heck of a lot else. OK, we learn why the supernatural, but that's not much of a surprise.

What's perhaps most surprising about this book is that it was written as part of a charity series with profits going to protect the bloodthirsty creatures in their titles. Inspired by a headline shared by a group of horror authors on Twitter, Alan Baxter promptly wrote a horror novel starring a kangaroo, The Roo. Stephanie Rabig followed up with Playing Possum, which I simply have to seek out, and Sean Seebach contributed The Buck Stops Here. Forgetting that each author wrote about an animal native to his or her home locality, Sabata successfully pitched The Cassowary, even though the bird is utterly not native to Arizona.

Of course, nobody cares about that, especially as Sabata never pretends that it is. Cassie's in the zoo here and she's deadly and she escapes after her mysterious upgrade and that's all we care about. We can sit back and bathe in the blood she sprays over every other chapter, secure in the knowledge that there will be another one and another and... And, having revelled in Cassie's carnival of carnage, we can be immensely happy that the profits will go to the Cassowary Recovery Team, a group of groups working together to protect cassowaries and their habitats. Given that name, clearly those running the Toscano Wildlife Preserve should have hired them to track down Cassie, but that would have left this novel a short story, so we should be thankful they went with Jerome and Kaitlyn.

Now, having got the author's signature on my copy of 'The Cassowary', I clearly need to add my son's and that of everyone else here in Phoenix I know who's tuckerised here for posterity. Hey Brian! And John! And AJ! And... ~~ Hal C F Astell