Too Much Horror Fiction Updates...

Hola amigos, long time since I rapped at ya! Got some horror (all good) news you can use...

I've written two introductions for two new horror anthologies: one was published at the end of 2024, The Rack: Stories Inspired by Vintage Horror Paperbacks, edited by Stoker Award-winning author Tom Deady, from Greymore Publishing; order here. Also, the brand-new Claw Machine, compiled by an old East Coast pal of mine who now also resides in Portland. You can order it from Little Key Press here. Both feature horror/science fiction/speculative lit stories that I think will appeal to TMHF and Paperbacks from Hell fans. It was definitely an honor to have been asked to write for these books!

And yet another intro I wrote is for a vintage paperback novel that will be reprinted by Fathom Press later this summer. Like Valancourt, they are putting back into print paperback horror under their Savage Harvest line. This one is Bad Ronald, the 1973 book by giant SF scribe Jack Vance, the basis for the infamous TV movie of yore (which I still have not seen!). The fresh new cover art, by Steve Andrade, is pretty spectacular (he's done all of the Savage Harvest reprints, I believe, and they are nothing short of wonderful). You can preorder it here. 

Last but certainly not least: Grady Hendrix and I, along with Valancourt Books, have decided to wrap up the Paperbacks from Hell reprint series with three more titles, thus ending the line with an even two dozen works. But the titles have not been finalized yet! We're discussing a few books, but as you know, tracking down publication rights, and then convincing people to have their books republished, is tricky business; the stars have to align just so. 

The moving parts are: books we all three like; the book is entirely out of print (no ebook/audiobook either); the original paperback is somewhat rare/expensive in the secondhand market; the author/estate is willing to have the book reprinted; and the promise of potential sales. As the years have gone on, checking off all those boxes is incredibly difficult. We've reached complete dead ends on several titles we've wanted. So we've all agreed, unfortunately, the end is here. I'll say we are looking at some "classicks" that a lot of people want to get their grubby mitts on, but that's all I will say for now. 

Alas, we cannot reprint several notorious works that people have been asking about over the years: Eat Them Alive, The Voice of the Clown, and The Little People. For various and sundry reasons, the rights to these three remain completely unavailable to us. Frustrating and disappointing, I know, but I think the other titles were hoping to reprint will be quite well received! I will announce as soon as we've decided and gotten the rights signed off on.

Okay, back to reading, and hopefully getting some reviews back up on here...

The Snake by John Godey (1978): My, My, My Serpentine

The gritty, grimy New York City of the 1970s looms large in our pop cultural imagination. Movies like Taxi Driver, Saturday Night Fever, The French Connection, to name a quick few, are today all virtually everyday notions, while progressive music from Blondie, Talking Heads, the Ramones, and early hip-hop continue to symbolize the absolute essence of "cool." The politics of the day were hardball and hard-won, like President Ford telling the town to (apocryphally as a headline in the local news) "Drop dead," and later, Mayor Ed Koch practically became a celebrity and known to folks who wouldn't dare step foot on those profane mean streets. 

Enter The Snake: a 1978 thriller from a writer named John Godey. This was the crime fiction pseudonym of Brooklyn-born author Morton Freedgood, who had worked in NYC's film industry for all the giant movie companies, like Paramount and 20th Century Fox. As noted on the cover of the 1979 Berkley paperback, Godey previously wrote The Taking of Pelham 1-2-3, which was made into a 1974 movie that also captured NYC at its most lawless. Letting loose a giant slithering atavistic reptile into the gleaming greenery of Central Park must have seemed like a no-brainer to the author, especially in the wake of Jaws. The cover of the original hardcover captures it nicely:

Godey seems to know every inch of the city, doling out places names and addresses like any reader will know exactly what he's talking about (ah, New Yorkers!), and I often plugged in such into Google Maps to get a clear view of the specific environs the action was happening in. His depiction of the titular creature is both scientifically sound and aesthetically unsettling. The reasoning for its arrival and escape is believable in its randomness, a backstory both intriguing but also blackly comical in a way, and very NYC-coded. "Two dead in less than twenty-four hours, that's one thing... People die all the time. But the other thing, the politics, that's serious."

Characters are familiar: the beleaguered cop, the cocky young herpetologist, the lovely journalist, the sweaty mayor, the religious nuts who make it their mission to find and kill the demonic reptile, plus various hapless victims introduced and dispatched with maximum suspense. Godey may be writing a slick bestseller, and he's a bit above the pulp pay-grade; still, lots of vulgar '70s slang and profanities and ethnic slurs you'll remember from the movies of the day, with less enlightened folks going about their daily grind in a city that can swallow you whole—and now even has the ability to inject fast-acting fatal venom right into your veins. New York City really has it all, don't it? "Any other city, if somebody got bitten by a snake, the public would blame the snake. Here they blame the mayor." 

I read The Snake quickly, enjoying a little imaginative time-travel to a place and time I do dearly love. As a horror novel of snaky scares it's not on a par with The Accursed, but Godey is quite adept at his descriptions of the 11-foot black mamba and its shenanigans, how it hides in the wilds of Central Park and is pretty much an innocent creature going about its own primal business. This is a thriller through and through. The set-up is solid, the sense of locale impeccable, the climax breathless, and the very ending you might guess—but ultimately The Snake is a satisfying bit of '70s suspense.

The snake in the park became a jewel in the crown of the city's obsession with its own eccentricity. The public reasserted its prideful conviction that it inhabited the most put-upon city in the whole world. When bigger and better and more unendurable disasters were contrived, they were visited justly upon the city that matched them in stature, which was to say, the city that was superlatively dirty, declining, expensive, crime-ridden, unmanageable, and glamorously unlivable beyond any other city in the world.

Under the Fang, edited by Robert McCammon (1991): The World is a Vampire

Vampires, vampires, vampires! Loathsome creatures of the night stalking and snacking on humans across the globe! There's no escape! Whatever can we do?!

Nothing, it seems, or very little, to save ourselves. Thus is the setup for the stories in Under the Fang (Pocket Books, Aug 1991, cover by Mitzura), under the auspices of the Horror Writers of America coalition, with editing duties by iconic bestselling paperback author Robert R. McCammon. Akin to the zombie apocalypse anthos based on George Romero's movies, Book of the Dead (1989) and Still Dead (1992), (which of course hearken back to 1957's I Am Legend) all the stories exist in this new world, with each author bringing their own special methods of madness to the proceedings.

McCammon in 1991

Virtually all the vampire anthologies published prior to the early Nineties were collections of classic stories, moldy golden oldies by the likes of Bram Stoker, Polidori, EF Benson, Crawford, Derleth, et al. Esteemed editor Ellen Datlow gave us Blood is Not Enough in 1989 and A Whisper of Blood in 1991, which featured all-new vampiric works by the cream of the genre's crop. I'll confess: I've read neither, even though I've owned them since Kurt Cobain was still alive. But those two volumes seem to be the first that showed that the old symbols and themes of vampire fictions could be given fresh new life at the end of the century. 

The vampires within Under the Fang exist on a spectrum of generic types: the typical night creeper; the almost-zombified monster driven mad by thirst; the brilliant military leader; the scientific sort looking for a way to walk in daylight; the Anne Rice decadent aesthete. Vampires have been dubbed cutesy nicknames, like "suckheads" and "fangers" and whatnot. That out of the way, let's get to the contents: McCammon gets a twofer, first with a metafictional introduction, in the guise of a doomed note from an unnamed narrator:

They've won. They come in the night, to the towns and cities. Like a slow, insidious virus they spread from house to house, building to building, from graveyard to bedroom and cellar to boardroom. They won, while the world struggled with governments and terrorists and the siren song of business. They won, while we weren't looking...

He handily sketches out the scope of the situation in a couple pages, setting us up for the tales to come. Second is his story "The Miracle Mile," of a family's drive to an abandoned season vacation spot and amusement park. Vampires have of course overrun it, and Dad is pissed. With his signature mix of corny sap and derivative horror, McCammon delivers perfectly cromulent reading material. It's just that I always find him square and dull and earnest, and not my jam whatsoever.

McCammon and Sarrantonio, 1990

The recently-late Al Sarrantonio's "Red Eve" is an effective slice of dark, poetic fantasy in full Bradbury mode, which was common for him. I have no idea who Clint Collins is, but his brief "Stoker's Mistress" is a high-toned yet effective bit of metafiction about vampires "allowing" Bram Stoker to write his "ludicrous" novel Dracula... Shades of soon-to-be-unleashed Anno Dracula. Nancy A. Collins had already had her way with the vampires; "Dancing Nitely" is a perfect encapsulation of the modern image of the unholy creature: they all want to live in an MTV video scripted by Bret Easton Ellis. Contains scenes of NYC yuppies dancing under blood spray at an ultra-hip underground vamp bar, called Club Vlad, with a neon Lugosi lighting up its exterior. We may cringe looking back at it today, but back then this style was au courant du jour.

Late crime novelist Ed Gorman delivers an emotional wallop in "Duty," powerfully effective even though I was half-expecting how the turnaround was going to happen. I gotta try one of his full horror novels! Richard Laymon does his his usual schtick of adolescent ogling and rape fantasy scenarios rife with toxic masculinity in "Special," this story ends on an unexpected note of enlightenment. Better than other things I've read by him, but not enough to make me a fan. 

One of those writers whose byline makes me groan inwardly, J.N. Williamson (above), contributes a lengthy, pulp-prose-level Interview with the Vampire-esque work called "Herrenrasse" ("master race" in German, yuck) in which a hoity-toity vampire traps a potential Van Helsing in his apartment. They then engage in a lengthy dialogue of philosophical conceits of bloodsucking. Kinda cool, but Williamson's style can be pompous, overwritten in that pulpy, self-taught style that screams "show-off." Thomas F. Monteleone, he of the wonderful cutting edge Borderlands anthologies, contributes "Prodigal Sun," a brilliant vampire who had been an immunologist who now tries to cure their curse of bloodthirst. Well-written but so-so.

Together, Chelsea Quinn Yarbro and Suzy McKee Charnas pit their own fictional vamps—Count St. Germain and Dr. Edward Weyland, respectively—against one another in "Advocates," the most philosophically ambitious work here; no surprise, as both women approached the vampire as a concept in their other writings. Could've been better I felt, less than the sum of its parts.

Brian Hodge, 1991

On to the finest stories within: my favorite was Brian Hodge's "Midnight Sun," which is so well-conceived in scope and execution I daresay he could've written an entire novel using his scenario. Muscular and convincing, its setting of a military outpost in frozen wastes makes it a standout; the conflict, not only between humans and vampires but also between vampires themselves give the story a real moral heft. A close second was "Calm Sea and Prosperous Voyage," by Chet Williamson, in which a loving husband and wife experience tragedy and woe after escaping into a cabin in the woods. Tough, moving, unsettling stuff. 

Surprisingly, Lisa Cantrell (above), she of The Manse "fame," pulls out a little winner in "Juice." It ain't moonshine this good ol' boy is making a living from. "Does the Blood Line Run on Time?" by Sidney Williams and Robert Pettit, is one of the real bangers here, an action-adventure-horror offering that is oh-so Eighties in just the right way. Williams wrote a few horror paperbacks around then, and now I'm considering adding them to my want-lists.

Other stories here, by authors both known and unknown, run up and down the scale from ok sure fine to oh well whatever nevermind. This might not be the best antho of the era I've ever read, but the quality of prose is very high—this was the HWA, after all—even if the story itself doesn't quite succeed. Me, I could've done with some more graphic bloodshed/drinking, or classic Lugosi/Lee-style vamp action in the good old Les Daniels' tradition. No matter; your mileage may vary as well (PorPor Books enjoyed it maybe a smidgen more than I did). Overall, I'd say Under the Fang is an easy recommendation for your horror anthology and/or vampire fiction shelves.

Punish the Sinners by John Saul (1978): I Got a Catholic Block

Busting out of nowhere in 1977 with his debut novel from Dell, John Saul had success immediately, watching as Suffer the Children hit the bestseller charts and sold millions of copies, thanks to an easy-to-remember name and a first-ever tv commercial ad campaign. Saul wrote his books fast, like in a month, so the publisher was always happy to have a new paperback original from him every year. With ominous, biblical-sounding titles and cover art featuring young women in grave danger (the remnants of the Gothic romance and evoking the twin icons of Rosemary's Baby and The Exorcist), his dense, 400-plus-page books were marketed to and scooped up by teen girls and young mothers, who could identify most with the anxieties inside.

But me, personally? I was never once interested enough in one of his paperbacks to pick one up, not with babies and dolls and cribs on the covers (very Mary Higgins Clark, no thanks). Working in bookstores used and new from the late Eighties to the late Nineties, I bemoaned the popularity of his work, even though I hadn't bother to read him. To me, all of his books looked, as is said today, mid. There were countless copies of his derivative-looking titles always around, jamming up the horror section, all read to tatters in the used paperback exchange I worked at in college, and later, upscale hardcovers for those eager and solvent enough to drop twenty-plus (!) bucks on his reheated hashwork.

Saul's books seemed to me fodder only; not truly horror fiction in its grand tradition, just disposable tchochkes for the less adventurous reader. And now that I’ve read one, let me tell you: my impression was absolutely correct. A duller, drier, more inconsequential book I have rarely read in the decade and a half that I've been keeping this blog. Punish the Sinners (Dell, June 1978) was Saul's second paperback original; maybe he got better, maybe he got worse. I'll never know, because I don't care. And although I have a few of his early paperbacks in my collection—these days, I do kinda appreciate the cover art—I'm in no hurry to read another.

I won't bother to rehash the plot, as the back cover gives it all to you, but really oversells it, making the novel sound like a real religious creepfest (cover art obviously a Carrie clone). In reality Sinners is plodding, melodramatic nonsense without any sense of atmosphere or urgency. One pseudo-event after another rather than a plot, one talking teenager indistinguishable from the next, one conversation between virtually non-existent characters after another, and cheating POV shifts to end a scene on some phony note of "suspense." 

You feel no jeopardy for the boring teenage girls who are killing themselves one by one (which only starts after some hundreds of pages) in a small, barely-described town in Washington state. You'll see the "surprise" twist coming; while the half-hearted ending is dark, it is not disturbing. Unlike the genre’s worst talents, Saul’s prose is serviceable and actually readable, but utterly devoid of wit, insight, observation, or conviction. The overall impression Saul gives is one of indifference.

I don't know how any experienced horror fiction reader would find any sustenance in this book at all; I do know that many people avidly read Saul while in their young teen years, and so recall him as a fond memory of an illicit behavior, reading-with-a-flashlight-under-the-covers kind of thing. Many of the one-star Goodreads reviews are basically, this scared me as a kid. But also many adults enjoy his stuff still. Which of course is fine, sure, but not for me, not for this blog, not for any recommendation I'd give.

This is the type of "horror" that my blog is a reaction to and against. While better writers sold fewer books, Saul's sold in the millions (and probably still do). I've always wanted to find the forgotten and the overlooked, the authors lost in the shadow of their lessers, shine a light on those who were worthy of rediscovery—not simply tread the same old worn-out ground of yesteryear's dusty bestsellers. Nobody needs to be told to read John Saul, and I rue horror fan pages on Reddit and Facebook and social media elsewhere in which his books are still recommended to innocent readers not around during his peak popularity and thus ignorant of the poverty of his imagination.

This kind of by-the-numbers banality is what the splatterpunks were rebelling against in the mid-Eighties. What any good, thoughtful horror writer of any stripe should be against (King rightly lambastes him a couple times in Danse Macabre). The folks spearheading the Dell/Abyss line also had to have Saul's books in mind as they stated in their manifesto. 

Sinners exists in some netherworld, some purgatory, of the undistinguished, a gray rock of a novel that requires no imagination or effort on the part of the reader. Two bloody characters walking towards each other on the street of the small town at the "climax" was about the only unique, vaguely interesting moment in the whole 400-page slog. Oh, right, almost forgot, there's a graphic priest orgy, too, which Saul attempts to use as shock but in his slow-witted manner only manages to lazily disgust. 

In interviews over the years Saul has said that while he doesn't mind being considered a "horror novelist," he is no fan of the genre, either in fiction or film. No shit. John Saul is, simply, a supreme hack. And far from being a horror novel, Punish the Sinners is manufactured product, unit shifter widget, maximally conceived, designed, and produced to get readers to part with their money at the airport, the drugstore, the mall bookstore: exactly what I'd always assumed Saul's books were lo the past four decades. While it's a slight satisfaction to have my suspicions vindicated, it was no fun finding out first-hand.

To sum up my feelings about this novel—in case you couldn’t tell!—I will quote from that other musty old tome, the biblical Book of Revelation: "So, because you are lukewarm, and neither hot nor cold, I will vomit you out of My mouth." 

John Saul retired in 2009 and was awarded the HWA Lifetime Achievement Award in 2023. 

Night Visions: In the Blood, ed. by Alan Ryan (1984): Growing into the Grave

Plucked this guy off my shelves at random, it's spooky season, right? The inaugural title in the long-running anthology series launched by specialty press Dark Harvest in November 1984, Night Visions 1 was intended as being a showcase for the best original short stories by the leading figures in both horror fiction and dark fantasy. Charles L. Grant was pretty well-established already as an author and editor, Steve Rasnic Tem had been a rising figure in genre fiction, publishing stories in various SF&F publications as well as Grant's Shadows series, and British fantasist Tanith Lee had already published two dozen novels by that year. Berkley Books reprinted the hardcover in paperback as Night Visions: In the Blood, in April 1988, named for one of Grant's stories. (Dig that cover art, totes appropriate, but I'll be damned if I can make out that tiny artist signature on bottom right; it looks so maddeningly familiar, so just out of reach. I'm determined to ID it however.)

In his erudite introduction, Alan Ryan (1943-2011) provides a background and the impetus for this anthology, making note of how the short story has always held a sort of precarious position in American letters, and how horror is often at its very best in the format. Writers who speak on panels at fantasy conventions very often find that their audiences are most knowledgeable and most vociferous when the subject is short fiction.

Grant (1942-2006) was famed for his understated, elusive, and whispered brand of horror fiction; for some readers, entirely too understated and elusive. His stories here, seven in all, read pretty much the same as all the other Grant I've read: sometimes good, sometimes meh, and a couple times excellent. My tastes have moved past Bradbury-esque small towns at night, cold winds blowing autumn leaves across empty streets and onto regular folks' porches and windows, with kids climbing trees, dads in the garage and moms in the kitchen, grampas in the easy chair. Sure, behind those windows lurk realistic "horrors" like the indignities of aging, disintegrating marriages, childhood nightmares, coming back home to family strife... but his touch is often too gentle, eschewing as he does most violence and bloodshed.

That said, I will note the highlights of his contributions. He's adept at putting in that final turnabout line that might give the reader an intellectual chill, and, especially in the title tale, ably describes the true aches and pains of loved ones' mortality: it was the dying he saw [in her] every day for a year, the wasting, the shrinking, the growing into the grave from the inside out.

Grant in 1981 (photo by Jeff Schalles, from Grant's FB page)

"That's What Deaths Are For" and "Family" well utilize his penchant for trapping his characters in a metaphysical hell, forced to relive/re-enact trauma for, well, eternity (at least, that's what I think is happening; Charlie Grant, master of elusion). "And We'll Be Jolly Friends" is a perfect example of Grant's melancholy M.O., and I'm not surprised it's the only story of his here that was reprinted, collected in his best-of Scream Quietly in 2016. Small town, parents, friendship, memory, wounding, death, and worse: present and accounted for, in Grant's slightly fractured, stream-of-consciousness prose:

go crazy
no, you ain't, you're just scared man, that's all
yeah, well, I don't wanna die
then stop bitching and hang on
jesus, i'm tryin', i'm tryin'

Tem in early 1980s, (photo by Karen Simmons, from Tem's FB page)

Next up are Tem's stories, also seven in number, and generally my favorites here. Tem's approach seems to me to be the most "modern," and one that other writers would employ as well. At times he can be, like Grant, a mite too obscure, but his mix of surreality and the quotidian hit me in the sweet spot. "The Men and Women of Rivendale" hides its menace till the end, hinting with imagery of mouths and red eyes again and again, subtle but insistent. "Spidertalk" won me over, with a frightened child, a caring teacher, and a menace both outside and inside the schoolhouse. The end of this one is shivery apocalypse, a common human fear becomes overwhelming both as symbol and substance; a perfect example of Eighties short horror fiction. But her fear was a living thing with a mind of its own,  that would not respond to her own sense of reason. 

In "Punishments," our father-narrator speaks disquietingly about his unfathomable daughter, ruminating on the alien nature of our offspring, how difficult it is to raise, nurture—and punish—these wayward creatures. When the baby moved away from us, crawling on the floor, she was back and head in her roomy flannel nightgown. I'd swear she was a crawling torso, born without arms and legs. And when I finally saw those little hands and feet I'd swear they were prosthetic appendages, so unnatural they seemed.

As gross as you might imagine, "Worms" finds a snobbish, racist, classist woman offended by her neighbors, and her comeuppance. Tem elevates this classic horror setup with his descriptive prose and quirky characterization. "The Overcoat" wowed me, a grimy glimpse into family strife and downtrodden lives, mixed with effective grue and imagery. In fact, to me, it is an almost proto-splatterpunk tale in that it highlights urban decay and uses it and its unfortunate denizens as a mirror for the human psyche, in stark contrast to the middle-class nuclear family units that generally populated the genre. It was always a case of when you should call the cops. Most of them time you didn't... You shut your door and turned up the TV. Pretty soon it was just white noise. I wasn't a saint.

With her darkly fantastical tales of myth, legend, and family legacy, prolific British author Tanith Lee (1947-2015) stands in contrast to the more grounded works of Grant and Tem. Her characters have names like Sephaina, Marcusine, Araige, Jenver, and one always wonders, are they gods? immortals? vampires? otherworldly creatures beyond our ken? Surely they cannot be merely human. Her style seduces, sucks you into a breathless world of high drama, high culture, secrets, lies, and illicit lusts between (sigh) family members. Only once had she ever discovered herself in the wish that Jenver were not her brother, that the notion of making love with him did not revolt her...

Loved "Simon's Wife," top-tier stuff, a realistic tale of modern love and adultery. A woman travels to a married man's home while his wife is away, and faces her fears head-on when Simon is called away on business for a few hours the morning after their consummation. Unnerving, at times unpleasant, but for me, a real winner. I wandered this house like a ghost, no familiar possession of mine in sight, a lost traveler without a landmark... landmarks of Simon's wife, whose name I did not yet know, whose picture I was forming by irresistible slow degrees.

Her other stories, "The Tree: A Winter's Tale," "The Vampire Lover" and something something about a unicorn, I mostly skimmed: Lee's writing is sure and strong, all blood-drenched—yet not particularly scary at all—fairy-tale vibes, but my taste for that kind of medieval lore and imagery is practically nil. Still, I'm sure others whose tastes do run in that direction will find them perfectly satisfying.

All in all, In the Blood is a perfect little starter for getting familiar with the more sophisticated styles of Eighties horror: literate yet chilling as it exposes the secret recesses we hide, highlighting those fears without resorting to excessive bloodshed or random limb-pulling (although there is a bit of that, here and there). You've got Grant's homespun domestic horrors of the everyday; Tem's sometimes surreal, sometimes esoteric, sometimes gritty entries; and Lee's lush, romantic, adult Gothic dark fantasies. Splatterpunk would come along in a year or two to rabble-rouse the grown-ups, sure, but much of what is written here is as about as good as horror fiction got back then. In the Blood will allow readers to look back and get a taste of these three authors' personal worlds of darkness, and what grave discoveries they have revealed.

Ghouls in My Grave by Jean Ray (1965): Dig Up Her Bones

This past spring I was visiting San Diego to meet up with family and on the drive down that way lucked into finding a delightful little bookstore, Artifact Books (not to be confused with Artifacts bookstore in Hood River, OR). I poked around a bit, found a small horror section, and then found the long boxes of bagged vintage paperbacks, various genres, but mostly fantasy and horror. Unfortunately for me, I already owned most of what I was looking through, but the titles were definitely highly collectible.

But a surprise was in store, for suddenly I was face to face with the gaping grinning skull adorning the purple cover of Ghouls in My Grave, a thin 1965 paperback from Berkley Medallion, by Belgian author Jean Ray. Huzzah! I'd only been looking for this guy for decades! Sure, I'd seen it online, at pretty high prices, and who knows in what condition it was actually in, but now I had it in my hands. It was priced at $40, which is about the very highest I will go on vintage paperbacks, but I felt fate and good luck were at work here, and who am I to blow against the wind?

Then I saw the owner at the checkout desk, tattooed fella in a metal shirt who seemed just about my age, and figured I was safe asking if he'd ever heard of Paperbacks from Hell... "Oh, yeah, I love it, love Grady Hendrix!" So I let him in on who I was, and we chatted for quite a little while. Can't recommend this spot highly enough; if you're ever in the area, stop in, browse awhile. Be sure to check out the glass case filled with Arkham House hardcovers too!

On to the book of tales at hand: two of the stories collected here are surefire weird fiction classics, longer works that whisper of cosmic madness and the unknowable, almost malevolent universe. One is a gloomy sea adventure, "The Mainz Psalter," while the other is a kind of proto metafiction tale entitled "The Shadowy Street." Both were originally written in French in the early Thirties, published in the 1932 collection La croisière des ombres ("the cruise of shadows," a reference to "Mainz Psalter"), and would've been a perfect in an issue of "Weird Tales" along Lovecraft, Seabury Quinn, Robert Bloch, and the like.

Both stories see Ray utilizing the tale-within-a-tale (and even another layer after that) technique to heighten the horror. In "The Mainz Psalter", a mortally wounded sailor regales the crew of the ship that rescued him with a story that evokes William Hope Hodgson, Lovecraft, and "Rime of the Ancient Mariner." Aboard the titular craft, a series of bizarre occurrences hint of the otherworldly. "The Shadowy Street" is in part about a man who discovers a street seemingly hidden in another dimension, but that is only part of the ambitious narrative...

Jean Ray, pseudonym of Raymundus Joannes de Kremer (1887-1964)

The other stories here lack the formal sophistication of the aforementioned; fine enough tales, yes, but more reminiscent of general horror pulp of the Thirties and Forties. There's an interesting vampire story I had not read before; strange goings-on in a hotel closed for the season; a man invents a dastardly cousin in order to get close to a woman; a graverobber who meets his unexpected match; a cursed artifact that once belong to famed British occultist John Dee... You get the idea. Translated from French by Lowell Bair, Ray's style is erudite, dry, and precise, with an elevated, cosmopolitan tone that tinges the macabre with a sense of irony.

I first became aware of Ghouls in My Grave after reading Danse Macabre, Stephen King's essential 1981 tome of boomer memoir and horror criticism, where he includes it in an appendix of important 20th century horror fiction. For many years I searched for the book, to no avail, and virtually never heard anyone discuss it or author. Closer to 20 years ago I watched the movie adaptation of his 1943 Gothic novel Malpertuis, I think solely because it was by the same director as 1971's Daughters of Darkness, one of my personal genre lodestars. Malpertuis wasn't even translated into English, as far as I could determine, until 1998.

For a writer considered "forgotten" or "obscure," I found plenty of online articles and reviews on him and his output; I feel caught a little flat-footed in this post, as I was expecting to have to do a deep dive and come back with some uncut gems but turns out plenty of folks have been there first. Oh well. At least the online prices for this paperback have gone down to around $20-$25, which I'd say is pretty fair for you collectors. So if mysterious, ambiguous, pulpy tales of gloom, doom, and hapless Europeans receiving supernatural comeuppance are your thing, digging up a copy of Ghouls in My Grave could be quite a reward.

Horror Fiction Help XXVII

I'm calling upon you again, dear readers, for assistance in identifying some forgotten horror tomes of yesteryear. Several are apparently from horror comix/magazines of the 1960s/70s, which are not really my area of expertise. Thanks in advance, everyone!

1. I read this story in the late 70s - early 80s, I think its from one of the DC horror anthologies as I definitely read I, Vampire in them at the time. It feels EC but I don't think I had access to any EC reprints.  Ive had no luck finding it since.  Here's what I remember.  A rich businessman decided to fake his death and live isolated from the world.  He has built an entire computerised home under his tomb where he plans to live with the help of his assistant who he contacts via his computer.   The assistant double crosses him and the air starts running out.  He flees to his escape tunnel but finds it filled in with dirt.

2.  All read in my teenage years, (1960's). All from paperbacks or comics from the time. If I had the authors names I would probably have had more success, but unfortunately, no. The first was entitled "Talent" about a precocious young boy who possessed the gift of being able to make things happen or change just by thinking about it. The spell lasted as long as he kept thinking or concentrating on whatever it was, then, when distracted or bored, it would revert back to whatever it was. During a visit from his parents friends/relatives, he demonstrates this power to a little girl who comes with them out in the farmyard by turning a pig scratching itself against a post in it's pigsty into a life size porcelain piggy bank just by thinking it. The girl asks if it will stay like it and he explains that if he stops thinking about it, it will regain it's original form, but when he tried it with a piglet sometime before, he smashed it with a hammer. Then, later, when he'd forgotten about it, the piglet retuned to normal but was " all broke up and bloody...". The nasty little shite gets his comeuppance at the end of the story in a pretty similar fashion. Found! It's "Talent" by Theodore Sturgeon; widely anthologized but first appeared in "Beyond Fantasy Fiction" in 1953.

3. It concerns a university student desperate to pass his graduation in maths, trigonometry and geometry. Being lazy, he decides to try an alternative route of passing his grades with black magic and proceeds to bone up on how to elicit the help of a demon held under his control whilst within a pentangle drawn on his study floor. After careful preparation, he goes through the ritual and succeeds in summoning a demon within the chalked area before him. After the initial shock he tells the demon he will keep him there forever if he doesn't help him pass his grades.  " You see...." he says to the demon,  "...I'm absolutely hopeless at geometry...."  Before he can continue, the demon, looking down at the floor replies "....you're telling me..." and steps over the useless pentagon he had drawn. Found! It's "Naturally" by Fredric Brown, which has been anthologized many times, and can be found in his 1958 collection Honeymoon in Hell.

4. The plot of the horror story involved a man who survived an awful killing? lived in a mental home. He drew pictures with white shoe polish and charcoal. There were teenagers and one of them had an older sister who was taking care of the crazy old man while she was having an affair with the local policeman. Two of the teenagers were caving and found luna moths, which had something to do with the plot. There was a woman named Birka who had become one of the creatures that killed the crazy man's family--she might have been his mother but she was with the creature. They were using strangler vine to stop the creatures and if anyone got one of the killer's thorns embedded in their skin they'd turn cold and deadish like the creature. It seems like it ended with one of the teenagers getting a thorn in his foot. Found! It's Fiends (1990) by John Farris.

5. I saw it in 1984, so it was likely published in that year or 1983. The cover showed a body on an operating table, covered with a sheet, and with those big electrode things overhead (like from the Frankenstein movie).  I only remember the blurb on the back cover. It went something like this: "_________ asylum. They warned him not to go there. But his son has disappeared, so he must dare. Now, from a window in a cell in the asylum, he watches as a group of lunatics lower a child-size coffin into the ground. The coffin moves. The boy is still alive. But no one can hear his screams over the howls of the patients, no one except the woman who is waiting in the asylum, and the doctor who is preparing the final experiment." Found! It's The Bad Room (1983) by Christopher Cook Gilmore.

The Accursed by Paul Boorstin (1977): Coils of the Serpent Unwind

Snake-handling, a bizarre cult behavior formed from several lines in the Bible, is ripe for horrific exploitation. While I was working in a Southern indie bookstore in the mid-Nineties we sold lots of copies of Salvation on Sand Mountain, a nonfiction account of the phenomenon. Eighties horror giant John Farris wrote a harrowing scene of it in his book Wildwood. Earlier, in 1976, noted grit-lit groundbreaker Harry Crews gave adventurous readers A Feast of Snakes, a grimy, raucous, raunchy bit of violent Southern Gothic grue with a literary air. I mean, dig this cover art:

And who can forget that great line from the Scorsese version of Cape Fear, with deranged De Niro snarling, "Granddaddy used to handle snakes in church, granny drank strychnine"? I haven't seen that flick since the grunge era and yet have never forgotten it. I was reminded of it recently when I picked up a book that's long taken up residence on my bookshelves, The Accursed, a slim novel published by Signet in November 1977. With a perfectly-rendered cover of innocence and evil, reduced to their most primeval, Paul Boorstin's first novel is one of the many titles Signet put out that feature animals run amok. This time, the animals are snakes of various deadly varieties, all part of the worshipful country cult ceremonies held by one Preacher Varek. [He] seized a hissing Indian cobra, the scaly coils writhing in his grasp, its forked tongue, sophisticated  sensor both taste and smell, flicking, bringing minute chemical particles back to be analyzed in the Jacobsen's organ above its jaws.

At the edge of Desperation Swamp in Clay-Ashland County, South Carolina, sits Thornwald Memorial Hospital, a time-worn edifice showing its age in the sweltering clime of mid-July. Run by a power-hungry administrator with no medical degree and rotating crew of indifferent, autocratic, and/or horny employees, the hospital is hardly a place one would want to spend any time in, much less perform as a doctor or recuperate as a patient. Unfortunately for Dr. Adam Corbett, a man of character and do-goodery vibes, perform here he must, and when he learns that the newborn baby of poor swamp denizen Mary Ann Cotter is suddenly and inexplicably dead, a baby he elivered, he is not convinced of the coroner's explanation of crib death: Adam would have to tread lightly or lose his job.

There's no doubt what's going on: dangerous serpents are about in the dark hidden places of Thornwald Memorial; just like in the movies of the era, we've encountered the creature from the outset, and now all we can do is watch/read in suspense as our cast of characters slowly come to the ultimate realization. The perplexing noises of Clay-Ashland County after dark were enough to convince anyone that man was not the source of all evil, that there were other more sinister forces at work in the universe, powers all the more terrifying because they were unknown, removed from the familiar, even endearing sins and vices of humanity.

 

Early on, we learn that this crumbling hospital was built on the site of a Confederate infirmary that, in 1863, was attacked and laid waste by Yankee soldiers, forever a place where bloodshed and black powder had poisoned that strip of land overlooking the swamp forever... the only thing the property was good for was a hospital or a graveyard, take your pick. More than once I was reminded of the late great Michael McDowell and his Avon paperbacks, and the Southern territory, both physical and psychological, that he would mine in a few short years. Author Boorstin certainly doesn't have the meanness, the mercilessness, the weird vivid characters, the deadly droll narrative of McDowell's works, but that's fine; Boorstin acquits himself well in these proceedings.

We're not here for finely-wrought characterization of human foible, we're here for monster mayhem, and Boorstin has the skills for just that, getting right at the skin-crawling repulsion that coiling serpents engender in us: Man's world seemed a simple matter of neat geometry, straights lines precisely drawn to meet at sensible right angles. But this cold-blooded hunter curved, twisted, a devious, sinewy, supple being eluding rational explanations.

The paperback's bio page states that he was inspired to write The Accursed while "filming in the Amazon interior" and spending time in the hot South Carolina sun. Boorstin's experience is wide-ranging, a professional documentary filmmaker/producer and TV screenwriter; his father was American historian and author Daniel J. Boorstin. His next novel, Savage (which I own but have not read), also happens to feature some fantastic cover art:

The Accursed especially snaps to life when Preacher Varek, a giant of a man shrouded in black, [his] head shaved bald by a straight razor, is onstage. Suspense ratchets up when he comes into contact with Jean, Dr. Corbett's pregnant wife, rescuing her when her car gets stuck in the mire, and shames her for wanting to have, you know, her baby in a hospital with modern medicine and all. The preacher contradicted everything the young doctor stood for and Adam worried where Jean's naive belief in this swamp healer might lead.

Other unsavory characters abound, mostly snake fodder, and Boorstin isn't above the cheap thrills of the Seventies, like the sexy nurse who caresses herself—not too tacky now!—and meets an inspired "sex and death" end in a bubbly bathtub. Unhooking her bra with one hand, she rubbed the icy champagne bottle along her bare, sweaty breasts, beds of moisture condensing around the enlarged crests of her nipples. Or the poor burn victim bastard who tries to get an old nurse to read him dirty magazines, utterly immobilized, a free meal for a ferocious reptile. Maynard's eyes peered over the coils of his murderer, the orbs nearly popping out of their sockets from the pressure...

Yeah, I gotta say, Boorstin has written some truly tasty scenes of serpentian gore and horror. There are two climactic scenes of confrontation; the first is good, yes, but the second is a fuckin' ripper, and I could easily see the fake blood flying and the mechanical snake writhing and roiling in a cheap TV-hospital set. Her blood mingled with the serpent's, to drench her nightdress in gory impasto. 

Boorstin, 1980

Like the previous novel I read, The Night Creature, this book got better as it went on, doling out its suspense level in a workmanlike manner, crisscrossing plotlines, very much in a cinematic narrative. You're definitely getting you your dollar-ninety-five's worth of B-movie entertainment. Did Boorstin miss a few opportunities to imbue a little more, I dunno, gravitas here and there? Sure, I guess; there are several times when the author's voice rings out over the standard cliche melodramatic proceedings that you wish he'd have given this baby one more writerly polish. But even its more lackluster moments didn't last too long. Boorstin's adeptness at describing ophidian destruction makes The Accursed a satisfying pulpy read, and its inclusion on the very cover of Paperbacks from Hell is thus the perfect place for it.               

The intruder seemed to congeal out of the moist and heavy air, gliding stealthily,
almost as if knowing this was a place of such fragility that it must trespass with infinite care.
Thick as a fire hose, it slithered slowly from the air-conditioning vent: five, ten, fifteen feet long, and still extending, an uninvited guest so out of place in the room it hardly seemed possible the interloper was there at all...              

The Night Creature by Brian N. Ball (1974): She Rides

All over the social media of bibliophiles you can see people who insist that they must finish any book they've started reading. Sometimes this dogged commitment comes off as bragging; more often, as a kind of desperation, a sad realization of a fault: the utter inability to not finish a book that is simply not grabbing you in the way you wanna be grabbed. Me, I've quit more books than I recall, and have my entire book-reading life, but ever since starting this blog I've tried harder to finish the horror novels I start. What if the best part of the book is the ending?! Let me tell you, book lover—and I'm probably not telling you anything you didn't already know—that is rarely the case.

Fortunately it is the case for this 1974 novel The Night Creature (published in the UK as The Venomous Serpent), by British scribe Brian (N.) Ball. For several weeks I meandered through the first two-thirds of it. Not because it was bad, or uninteresting; Ball, a prolific writer of SF, is a capable author, if kinda dry (it's told in first person, a style I've found myself losing interest in over the years). No, I just found it all rather tame and indistinct; for every little aspect that made me perk up, I'd have another several pages of, sure, okay, whatever. The book would sit on my nightstand for days untouched, till last week. Dammit, I can finish this guy! Spurred on by a few positive reviews on Goodreads, I sat down early one afternoon determined to get to the end. And I did! And boy was I glad!

Anyway. I found the hippie-ish young couple, Andy and Sally, enjoyable enough, picturing their artsy 18th century stone farmhouse Seventies-style charmed me, as did their making a living selling crafty antiques and landscape paintings in the touristy British countryside. Everything changes in their idyllic life when Sally comes home with a brass rubbing and... wait, what the fuck is a "brass rubbing"?! Turns out it's a chiefly British hobby, so it made sense, born and bred Yank that I am, that I had no idea what the dang thing was that starts all the trouble. Then I recalled I had seen the cover for the UK edition of the book, under its original title The Venomous Serpent; had, even posted it to this very blog a decade ago! Wonder of wonders.

One night Andy gets the fright of his life when the woman on the rubbing, as well as her dog, seem to come to life when the moonlight filtering in through the high barn windows illuminates it. Ball does a decent enough job describing the eerie escapade, which happens several times, each time more and more disturbing to the young man: I had never known the condition which we call "terror" before. It's something far beyond fear, for it's unreasoning.

(oddly, incorrect names of people on the rubbing on back of NEL edition)

And thus follows standard procedure: Andy convincing Sally what he's seen, a visit to the ruined church where Sally first made the rubbing, learning the local lore of the people in said rubbing, intimidating locals warning them off the church property, cranky coppers (I was fool enough to call on our local policeman), and one truly old eccentric priest Andy tries to enlist in his aid when Sally disappears one day. The lady Andy seeks is one of the blood-drinking living dead: Undead, blood-crazed, monstrous thing from the tomb she might be, there was no doubting her beauty. Can he rescue Sally in time from the Lady Sybil?

Not unlike a contemporaneous Hammer horror film, The Night Creature is a mere wisp of a book at barely 150 pages. It truly does ramp up suspense and interest in the last third, so by the end, the tale has found that sweet spot, the one I personally truly adore and crave, and nuzzles there, suckling and secure.