Koko by Peter Straub (1988): Born Down in a Dead Man's Town

In a way the Vietnam War was an Eighties war, much as we revisited it in that decade and as its after-effects began to be confronted in our most popular culture. After 1975, people weren't eager to talk about it; the wound still fresh, the stitches still in place. Of course there had been books and movies in the previous decade, like The Deer Hunter and Dispatches, Going After Cacciato and Coming Home, but an Eighties character such as Rambo (and even a performer like Bruce Springsteen from that era) more embodied a perfect wish fulfillment fantasy for the decade of excess, as the damaged national psyche transformed itself into oiled, striated, male musculature pushed to the limit of human endurance. We're back, baby! Nothing's gonna stop us now.

Peter Straub's entry into this cultural reckoning of the conflict was his ambitious 1988 novel Koko (Signet Books paperback, July 1989, cover by Robert Korn). One of the most ubiquitous of all 1980s paperback novels found in many a used bookstore's horror section, Koko's cover art of primary colors and thick, high-contrast spine has captured my eye for years. It wasn't ever very high on my to-read list, however, as I knew it was more mainstream thriller and that it dealt with Vietnam, which was not my thing at all when I was in my early twenties (despite the fact that I was devouring films like the aforementioned Deer Hunter and Apocalypse Now, but that was because they happened to be great '70s movies, not because they were about Vietnam). How glad I am that I finally took the leap and read it!

 

 Straub in 1988

Straub's book is about four men, Vietnam vets who served together, on a journey, circling around a secret, a secret unknowable and unimaginable, a secret that may not even have happened: a Schrodinger's cat event of battletime horror. Michael Poole, Harry Beevers, Tina Pumo, Conor Linklater: a children's doctor whose marriage is breaking up, an asshole lawyer, a NYC restaurateur in over his head, an unambitious carpenter. In shades of Straub's horror breakthrough Ghost Story (1979), these men live their lives around a horrible event; in this case, something that happened in a cave in the Vietnamese village of Ia Thuc during the war, akin to the real-life My Lai massacre. Koko opens with a powerful, resonant, emotional scene of the men reuniting after more than a decade in Washington DC to visit the Vietnam Memorial:

For Poole, the actual country of Vietnam was now just another place... its history and culture had briefly, disastrously intersected ours. But the actual country of Vietnam was not Vietnam; that was here, in these American names and faces.

 

Having learned of a serial killer named Koko in southeast Asia who may be one of their fellow vets from their old combat unit, the four men begin an international search: Beevers, Poole, and Linklater travel to Asia to track him down; Pumo remains in New York and deals with the demons of restaurant management and a one-night stand that goes horribly wrong. Visiting Singapore and Bangkok, the three men begin searching for answers no one can give them, carousing East Asian bars and whorehouses, being taken to secret shows in dingy basements where humans are killed for expensive thrills, plumbing their own natures in that Heart of Darkness manner. These colorful travelogue sequences are interspersed with scenes from the war, and we meet the other soldiers in their unit: Manuel Dengler, Tim Underhill, Victor Spitalny... who is Koko? What is Koko? Fortunate reader, you will learn.

In the eerie and violent chapters featuring the title character, Koko's psychic state reminds me very much of Francis Dollarhyde in Red Dragon: the cunning, the mania, the grandiosity, the sick poetry of it, and this bit about "the nearness of ultimate things." It's a dead-eyed glare, an interiorized fantasy world so powerful that he must remake the real world in trauma. While Straub does not trade in the same forensic ingenuity as that Thomas Harris title, the madnesses of men and its origins are kindred: "God's hand hung in the air, pointing at him."

By far my favorite sequence—in a novel filled with great sequences—is a trip to Milwaukee to track down Spitalny's and Dengler's families. This visit to a sad, broken, gloomy town to speak with sad, broken, gloomy people is a glimpse into a part of America that isn't a beacon of shining hope: these are people with petty approaches to life, who exile themselves from the main street of life and gloat over past pain, who never seem to grow out of the small-minded provincialites, who cripple themselves and indulge in the small sick sadistic voice that whispers of their inadequacy and vanity. Small-town America, as horror reminds us over and over and over, is rife with the evil of banality.

One of the criticisms/complaints I hear against Straub is that he is long-winded, pretentious, ponderous, boring. I mean, I guess I can see that. He writes big books and he's not just writing scary ones; he's after bigger prey. So yes, Straub, for all his expansive depiction of human nature in its deeps and valleys, also often obscures certain details from the reader, leaving them to ponder if they missed a sentence or phrase or snatch of dialogue somewhere along the line. No, that's not it: Straub uses implication, a shaded eye, to keep some aspects of the narrative in doubt. And indeed, the central trauma at the center—that village massacre involving these men when they were young soldiers—is open to interpretation.

What I'm saying is: Straub doesn't always tell you everything you need to know. Is this a literary pretense? Is it lazy writing? Or is it because the truth, for all we venerate it, is unknowable, unfixed, changeable through the stories we tell? Not for nothing has Straub created a character who has written the short stories Straub has already written ("Blue Rose" and "The Juniper Tree") and published. Meta-fiction has been hot for a long time now, authors winking at us from inside the pages of their own work, but Straub's version is not whimsical, ironic, jokey, or cute; it simply is. We write our stories every day; this is as commonplace an idea as the fact that sometimes an author doesn't even know what his story is about. So let's keep things interesting by keeping some things in the dark. But illumination can come from an unexpected source: as one character thinks to himself while reading a paperback novel called The Dead Zone during his travels: "Improbability and violence overflowed flowed from everyday life, and Stephen King seemed to know that." That's good stuff.

To readers who like their horror graphic and nasty, I'd say there's nothing here for you; this is not that kind of novel. To readers who like to step off into a larger landscape of human tragedy, Koko is recommended. Straub is not trying to scare the reader; there are no attempts at jump scares or spine chills. These fears dissipate in the morning light. "The nearness of ultimate things" he notes again and again, an existential mantra that implies a whole host of misery and revelation: those are frightening things in and of themselves.

 

 

This is the kind of full-on novel that takes up a lot of space in your head; this review has touched on only a portion of what it offers. Straub's fine and thoughtful prose, rich vein of humanity, eye and ear for marital discord, and ability to launch widescreen emotional horrors of deep, profound impact, will satisfy the discerning reader. For such a thick tome (600 pages), the story moves along weightlessly, fleet-footed yet penetrating, disturbing but empathetic, never bogged down in useless detail or dialogue, everything in its right place. The climax is in another unlit cavern in a modern American city, where everything meets one final time, where "eternity happened all at once, backwards and forward."

Reviews found online range from "masterpiece" to "meh," but I can tell from some of those "meh"s that the readers were expecting a giant feast of guttural horror—which Koko surely is not. Two volumes follow in a very loose trilogy: Mystery (1990) and The Throat (1993), and I know little about either, but I've added them to my must-read list. Koko might not be a perfect novel—perhaps its sights are sometimes beyond its reach—which is not even something that needs to be said, but for the adventurous horror fan who doesn't mind the occasional foray into non-supernatural madness, a huge armored tank of a book that looks into one of America's darker eras... Koko is singing a song you'll want to hear.

Couldn't believe Straub himself retweeted me...!

Carnosaur by Harry Adam Knight (1984): Bang a Gong Get It On

I can't imagine it'd surprise you to learn that I was a pretty mean dinosaur fanatic when I was a kid in the 1970s. Visits to the local library were never complete without a stack of books on these fantastic creatures. Most of these titles were from the '50s and '60s and out of date by the time I was reading them, illustrated by timid little black-and-white pencil sketches of tail-dragging creatures, but I still recall with great fondness two from that actual decade:

A family trip to New York's American Museum of Natural History when I was in second or third grade allowed me to see the immense fossils in person. Relatives would ask me to name the various dinos, which I could rattle off pretty easily (I could also do the same with classic monster movies thanks to the infamous Crestwood series). There was this early '70s model kit. Lots of plastic toys. Factor in the original King Kong, movies like The Land that Time Forgot, oh and especially the bottom-of-the-barrel TV movie The Last Dinosaur, with a drunk Richard Boone battling a Tyrannosaurus and other baddies in a land at the center of the earth. Or how about the actual Journey to the Center of the Earth? Or The Lost World? And who can forget Bradbury's "A Sound of Thunder"? So. Yeah. Dinosaurs.

 

In 1993 I went to see Spielberg's adaptation of Jurassic Park twice the weekend it opened and was well rewarded: yep, that's the stuff I've been wanting to see since I was a kid. I even went to the mall afterwards and bought the T. Rex, the toy I had dreamed of all my childhood (just the right size have battled an alien or eaten a rebel!) and proudly displayed it in all my homes for over 20 years. All of this brings me to...

Harry Adam Knight was a pseudonym used for a small handful of pulp novels by John Brosnan (sometimes with the assist of Leroy Kettle), a prolific Australian author who also wrote nonfiction genre studies. A fleet-footed, old-fashioned thriller with plenty of gore, in the tradition of James Herbert, Carnosaur (Star Books, June 1984 UK/Bart Books, Feb 1989 US) is as solid a trashy paperback horror novel as one could want. Knight ticks all the boxes and doesn't muck about with the unnecessaries. This is pulp horror done right: mean, nasty, brutish, and short. Sometimes every character is so glum and rude you kinda think, Jeez, doesn't anyone have a nice polite word to say? Everyone's all Johnny Rotten all the time. Kill the lot of 'em. Unpleasant, ungrateful, folk fodder for the dinosaur. Right... now.

Our tale begins at 2:17 a.m. sharp when a poultry farmer is woken by his wife ("fat lazy cow" he thinks. See what I mean? What a turd) because their chickens are squawking up a ruckus. Of course, you're reading a book called Carnosaur so you know what's about to happen when Rudie McRuderson goes out to investigate. And it does. Then the action switches to two teens doing it in the backseat and it's more of the same, with some class-consciousness woven in as British pulp fiction seems to always do: "She'd been flattered to have been picked up by someone who was so upper-class. Well, sort of upper class."

Daytime: David Pascal is a late 20s guy working as a "journalist" at a newspaper that's barely a newspaper in the small English town of Warchester, "where nothing exciting ever happened." He's just dumped his wonderful girlfriend, a coworker named Jenny, because of his dreams of leaving for a job on a Fleet Street scandal rag. Who knows when that'll happen since those papers keep ignoring his applications. So here Pascal is, still working on a paper that's practically a local business flyer and having awkward moments with Jenny in the office. But you're reading a book called Carnosaur, so you know that Warchester is gonna offer up something soon that Fleet Street dared never dream.

Sir Darren Penward (erroneously referred to as "Sir Penward" throughout the novel) is Warchester's wealthy eccentric, the big-game hunter with his own personal zoo on his vast estate, filled with exotic and dangerous animals—including his ravenous nympho wife, Lady Jane. But again, you're reading a book called Carnosaur, and you know that Warchester will soon be under siege by animals much more exotic and dangerous than *yawn* tigers and panthers. The police begin their investigation, and "Sir Penward" blames the attacks on an escaped Siberian tiger. Pascal suspects a cover-up, and along with a reluctant Jenny, begins some investigation of his own. This leads him into the clutches of Lady Jane (aka Lady Fang, and looking "like something out of The Story of O"), well-known amongst the locals for her penchant of seducing younger men while her husband tends to his menagerie. Pascal realizes he can use her to get inside the zoo to peek around. That can't be a bad idea, can it?

Pascal has a confrontation with Penward in which all is revealed about how these extinct monsters are suddenly alive again: the painstaking genetic process that the obsessed Penward explains almost like a Bond villain, which leaves Pascal muttering, "Incredible. Chickens into dinosaurs." Brosnan's science when it comes to dinos sounds pretty spot-on to me from what I recall of more modern paleontology books, and the distinction between dinosaurs—terrestrial prehistoric creatures—and other ancient reptiles will prove more important than anyone but an actual scientist could imagine. But you're reading a book called Carnosaur so that shouldn't surprise you. I don't need to rehash the rest: Brosnan does nothing new with the plot—but that's entirely beside the point. This baby zips along with a confident rhythm and pacing precisely because the author doesn't try to add new twists or turns to his narrative (indeed I could have done with less "You've got to believe me, dinosaurs are in the streets, there's no time to explain!" but that is to quibble). Pulp is, in essence, comfort reading.

Brosnan, 1947-2005

Okay, okay, I'm getting to it: the "carno" part of the title. Well, gentle reader, you won't be disappointed. The residents of Warchester—the ones still alive—woke up to a world that was vastly different to the one they'd gone to sleep in. Brosnan serves up the grue that satisfies. Behold: Tarbosaurus, a T. Rex in everything but name, wreaks delightful havoc wherever it goes; Deinonychus, with its scythe-clawed foot that it uses like a prehistoric exponent of Kung-Fu, guts hapless farmers and other locals from neck to groin; and a plesiosaur joins a boating party that none of the invitees will soon forget: After a long, stunned silence a man's voice said, with an edge of hysteria to it, "Well, you've got to say one thing for good old Dickie; he sure throws a hell of a party..." Brosnan doesn't quite take it to ridiculous Dinosaur Attacks! levels, but pulp fans should still have plenty to chew on. Sex, violence, nerdy dino facts: Carnosaur has it all.

Above I mentioned Jurassic Park, and I can't leave this review without mentioning that Carnosaur features many facets that would become famous, indeed iconic, when Spielberg adapted Crichton's 1990 bestseller: chase scenes, close calls, and especially the scientific basis of resurrecting dinos are all first seen in this novel (itself adapted into a post-JP cheapie by Roger Corman). While I've never had much interest in Crichton's fiction, after reading this I feel I need to see if Crichton really did read a book called Carnosaur... or if it's simply a case of a great idea whose time had, like the dinosaurs, come again.

Eternities Lost to Darkness

I had never heard of Emergence (Avon Books, July 1981) when I found it in a bookstore a few months back, but I recognized the cover art as by the hand of Don Brautigam and bought it solely for that. Author Robert D. San Souci was an award-winning children's writer; he died in a sad accident just a few years ago. I held out some hope for the book because of his reputation, and while this work of Native American vengeance is told with lots of local New Mexico color and characterization, the mythological/horror elements don't have quite the power implied. I was more than halfway through when I realized nothing was happening.

Skipping ahead to the final chapters reveal an epic apocalyptic climax that is somehow muted, albeit a touch creepy. Just not enough of a touch. Emergence really could have been a work of overwhelming ancient horror, I really am fascinated by goddesses of death and destruction and the scholarly pursuit thereof, but San Souci couldn't quite twist the knife where it counts.

Despite a knowing depiction of teenage homosexuality and punk rock house parties, The Lake (Avon Books, Aug 1989, cover art by Jim Warren) is a YA novel—something about the back-cover typeface style screams it—and folks that is just not my jam. It was John Peyton Cooke's first novel, and he eventually moved on to crime writing. Again, it's not terrible: he writes clear, more than competent prose, but the witch story was one-dimensional and simplistic and could not keep my engagement very long. First few chapters were fine, teenage relationships are believable, but I absolutely have no interest in middle-school dialogue or shenanigans.

That said, other horror readers more sympathetic to this style might dig The Lake. Points for its nicely self-aware moments ("You tell me, you're the one that reads all those Stephen King novels") and especially the punk party held in a suburban home while the parents are away, man that really took me back. Too bad about the puke on that Clash t-shirt, now that's a collector's item.

Joyride by Stephen Crye (1983): Long After the Thrill of Living is Gone

Pity poor Robert James Atchison. Living in a California town known as America's preeminent burial ground, where the dead outnumber the living five thousand to one, he's a sensitive 17-year-old boy with a fondness for poetry, instilled in him by his dear departed mother, and he actually enjoys reading books like The Iliad for school. He may have good hair, vibrant eyes, and fine features, but all that's lost on his high school classmates: to them he's a gangly, awkward-limbed, tongue-tied goof who they've nicknamed "Coma Man" with an embarrassing crush on Carla, the prettiest girl in school. He's written Carla a poem and has two scarlet ribbons to give to her. What could go wrong?

And then there's Robert's widowed father, a cemetery caretaker paralyzed in a graveyard accident—sure, those things happen—is a raging bastard in a wheelchair who demands the same breakfast every morning at the same hour and wants Robert to continue the family tradition of being a raging bastard cemetery caretaker. But one morning Robert has had enough. He's had more than enough: I won't let him make me dead inside... I just want to live a normal life.

This 1983 paperback original from Pinnacle, one of the mainstay publishers of the era, is nothing more nor less than a slasher flick in book form. Joyride, by Stephen Crye (according to a post on Goodreads, the pseudonym of a Ronald Patrick, who also wrote a previous Pinnacle novel from 1978 called Beyond the Threshold). And while I'm no slasher fan—it's one of my least favorite types of horror—I have to say Joyride is a competent, no-frills novel that does what it does perfectly well. If it ain't Halloween, it's maybe at least The Burning.

You can see the setup cinematically: a group of dumb, horny, wise-cracking, junk-food-snarfing teenagers cruising around looking for a place to party one night ignores a No Trespassing sign outside the gates of All Saints Hill Cemetery and drives on in. Yep, that's the cemetery that our pal poor Robert is caretaker of; he's been living there in the years since high school, after lying to officials that he had an adult guardian staying with him. Nope. And ever since a tragic last-day-of-school fireworks accident—sure, those things happen—Robert has festered with his scars, both mental and physical, in this cemetery, dreaming his dreams of his high school princess and of vengeance:

He wondered if any of them really understood how deeply he had suffered because of their cruelty... how he had been forced to retreat into the loneliness and despair of total isolation just to avoid the endless succession of humiliating stares from people who could never understand... how he had thought of killing himself at least a thousand times since the accident...

Pinnacle, 1978

In his fevered mind, the killer thinks one of the girls, Priscilla, is his old teenage sweetheart Car-r-r-r-la, so after he burns her boyfriend alive he stuffs her in a sepulcher, hoping to teach her to love him. Don't make me hurt you, you made me do it, I didn't mean to hurt you, Cleats is thinking, a thought process which should surprise absolutely no one. He's also stalking her friends, wandering about in the cemetery and who by now have discovered the gates have been locked again and are too high to climb over. The kids get dead in various ways, as Robert—now dubbed "Cleats" because of, you know, his shoes—goes after them with various cemetery caretaking implements. The kills are graphic but not too graphic, just like in an R-rated flick: The blade cut deep into his skull, splitting it down the center like a ripe melon.

The fat kid (I didn't say there was a fat kid? there's a fat kid) who is of course called Twinkie, ends up searching for help in the caretaker house (why doesn't he look for a phone) and there finds an old gentleman sitting alone at a dining room table. Stepping forward, he craned his head around the edge of the chair to meet the eyes of the man who would liberate him from the clutches of All Saints Hill. Ah, can't you guess what's coming? Some final kids are left for the face-off in the time-honored slasher tradition, when the killer seems to be everywhere at once.

Sphere 1982. Sweeet Christ
(also: I feel like this is a still from maybe a British '70s horror...?)

At times Crye is tedious in his descriptions of dumb teens in a panic—Pleeeese don't kill me, oh my god oh my god, he's coming back! I hope he kills me fast I mean you can see EC Comics speech balloons—but occasionally he writes a passage like A shimmering mosaic of buttery morning sunlight filtered through the checkerboard of dusty windowpanes or Priscilla had eased her mind into a state of suspended rationality that others, for wont of a clearer understanding of her despair, would call madness and you'll be glad for it. I found the high school flashbacks more interesting than the teens flailing away in the cemetery more engaging, so I'll be honest and say I did skim some pages but I don't think I missed much.

Joyride is not original and doesn't intend to be anyway, but nor is it terrible at all: I've read more original novels that were worse-written, unreadable and charmless. At 250 pages, Joyride is brief and mostly brisk, won't insult your intelligence, and you can read it in a weekend. It's a tasty, mindless little morsel of slasher mayhem. Oh, and that glorious cover art at the top by Sonja Lamut and Nenad Jakesovic? Yeah that's in the book! O joy indeed.

Spook by Steve Vance (1989): The Day the World Turned Day-Glo

Neon was a popular genre paperback coloring for titles and cover art in the very early '90s, I can remember authors as varied as Joseph Citro and Iain Banks having their books adorned with it. Vaguely psychedelic, but also kinda cheap, these Day-Glo colors glaring out at your from the shelves. I guess you almost had to pick 'em  up, though, didn't you? And if you picked up Spook (Berkley Books, Nov 1991) back in the day and flipped it open expecting to see some more eye-penetrating imagery, you'd get instead:

Yep, critical blurbs in place of stepback art. So weird. And yet, Spook offers nothing but that toothy skull and neon typeface. Author Steve Vance has written other horror novels but I can't imagine reading any of them. This is really one of the most nothing books I've read in some time, and while I was intrigued by one aspect of the narrative—failed artist seeks vengeance on the man who impregnated her with the titular "spook"—this aspect should have been most of the story. Instead we get hohum romance, indistinguishable cops, a slackly-characterized protagonist, and a cast of the most obnoxious, tedious teenage morons you ever saw. The whole shebang is here on the back:

"Spellbinding"? Hardly. Vance can write, I guess, and you can tell he wants to produce a serious horror/thriller novel, but he has absolutely no sense of pacing, POV, dialogue, suspense, chills or thrills—you know, all the reasons you read. Maybe if he'd used this as a first draft and then broke the novel down into individual parts and reassembled it, making his backstory the story or something. The twist is good, but I feel the book was reverse-engineered from it. 

 

But I kept waiting for something, anything, to alleviate my lack of interest; it never came. I didn't find the book stupid or insulting, crass or tacky or inept like other bad horror novels; I found it utterly unengaging, devoid of almost anything unique, fresh, inventive. There's no there there. Even though I finished Spook, I have to recommend you keep far, far away from it—If you're smart, you'll keep your distance. As for reading Vance's other novels, I don't think that day will ever come.

Child of Hell by William Dobson (1982): Flaming Youth

...the elemental passion that forever rumbled in his belly: 

the delight in the mystical properties of flame, its godlike destructiveness, 

its leaping, growing, consuming might.

With cover art that is a near-perfect example of vintage paperback horror fiction, this slim volume from Signet Books is adorned by one of artist Tom Hallman's most dramatically lurid images, bowl-cut notwithstanding. Love how the firelight is reflected in his eyes, a nice derangement of the senses. Dig the menace of the title, Child of Hell, and its glorious ITC Benguiat typeface, stark and unmissable against an inky black background. William Dobson is a perfectly non-descript name (a pseudonym too). Yep, creepy kid, similarity to a previous bestseller (King's Firestarter of course), typeface and tagline—all that's missing is a comparison to The Other or Rosemary's Baby!

Dobson is the pen name of British writer Michael Butterworth (copyright is under this name). Under this name he published Fangs, The Child Player, and The Ripper, all early '80s and also from Signet.  Unfortunately there are two British writers named Michael Butterworth so parsing between the two was tricky, but I'm pretty sure this Butterworth was also a writer of crime thrillers and comic books, while the other Butterworth was a New Wave science fiction publisher and author. Our Butterworth died in 1986 at age 62.

With those bibliographic deets out of the way, let's discuss. Less a horror novel than a psychological potboiler with some very graphic scenes of pyromaniacal mayhem, Child of Hell isn't really about a child at all (thank ye gods), although the novel begins with a little boy of just seven burning down his house with his family inside on Christmas in the non-descript American town of Midchester. Good heavens, why? Well, because instead of the super-cool radio-controlled model fighter plane he asked for, his folks ripped him off with a goddamn cheapo jigsaw puzzle! The discarded wrapping paper smolders in the ash of the dying living room fire and then catches on the Christmas tree branches and*poof*—fire!... and little Davie Fosset runs outside and along with horrified neighbors, watches his family burn to death unable to escape.

When he heard their screams—and they screamed till they died, 

and they died neither soon nor easily—he only grinned.

Jeff Angel is a young family man and a firefighter on the rise; while Little Davie is setting his family home alight, the firefighters are have a literal ball. Jeff is chatted up by a delightful woman named Marie, and they argue wittily about the Mad Arsonist, who's been lighting up Midchester for two years now. What motivates him? What's his background? How can he be caught, and how should he be punished? This conversation, as well as the ball itself, is interrupted by the blaze at the Fossets', and Angel is off to fight this war he can never win.

Arriving on the scene and finds ambulance nurse Janice Hooper comforting the young survivor. Now Janice nursed neither a motherly nor a platonic regard for the young rookie fireman, and Dobson neatly sets up some romantic interests for our ostensible hero within the first 10 pages. Then Janice hears the boy mutter that weirdo phrase again: goddamned cheapo jigsaw puzzle...

As I said, Child of Hell isn't exactly about a child: Dobson allows Davie to grow up as the novel progresses, and it's a solid narrative arc I think. He's adopted by an older preacher and his wife, Marvin and Teresa Allaun; they're strict adherents of the severe religion that founded the town, the Church of the Lonely Wanderers. One night at dinner our incipient maniac admits—"Speak out straight, lad"—that he wants to be a fireman when he grows up! O irony, like fire, you are an elemental force of the universe.

Then we follow Dave through grade school and college, with terrible glimpses of his fire mania and growing hatred toward the women who reject him. When making a date, he mutters to himself, You'd better be there, you little prick-teasing bitch, or you'll be goddamn sorry. He traps vagrants in abandoned buildings and then sets them alight.

He watched it all from the shadows beyond the inferno, and gloried in what he was doing, had done, and not with any unholy mirth, but with an awe and wonder at the power that lay in his hands.

Other than those personality tics, Dave grows into a fine upstanding fellow.

Meanwhile, Jeff Angel has married Marie, and they plan to start a family. Jeff's work is paramount, though, and Dobson gets into some police and firefighter politics, with chiefs and officers and all that, filler to make a fuller novel; not boring exactly but not always my favorite type of reading unless handled by a master. With pressure from various city muckety-mucks, the firefighters are determined to catch this arsonist, but Angel often thought that at his retirement party and presentation, he would be handing over the arsonist's dossier to his successor...

About halfway through the novel Dobson sets up a major setpiece of conflagratory terror, hearkening to the climax of Carrie. It's epic, cruel, horrifying. Debby Shearer, the belle of the Armadillo Country Club, is having her nineteenth birthday party there. Our Dave has become a busboy/waiter/bartender there, and even though he is of the lower classes, Debby has her eye on him—and seduces our pyro easily. Thinking of herself as a highborn lady of the eighteenth century, she knows she can take a lover beneath her station and is hidebound neither by convention nor by the acclaim of disapproval of the mob. But she certainly won't marry him... Yes, she's a terrible snob, and you know what happens to snobs in books like these.

And so Child of Hell progresses, twining the stories of Fosset and Angel as they move through normal life, its ups and downs, and the madness of one and the determination of the other. Characterization is economic but believable; there is even some early serial-killer profiling, as Janice reappears in Jeff's world and tries to assist in the identification and capture of the Mad Arson. Was it feasible that a child of six or seven would deliberately destroy his own family by fire, then go on to commit fourteen years of dedicated arson and murder? The mind recoiled away from it. And yet... and yet...

Dobson writes well enough, his dialogue doesn't distract (at times it sounds a little plummy),  and his ability to generate suspense is laudable. I did though notice a few particulars that either made me wince or laugh. His sex scenes, well, he's the kind of writer who uses the phrases "amatory vocabulary" and "couplings" and even, god save us, "darling." More distressing is the appearance, albeit brief, of  sibling incest, almost as if paperback horror contracts of the '80s were written with an ironclad clause that could not be unheeded. I had a chuckle at Dobson's failure to convince me he knew anything about America.

You'll be happy to hear I've not even mentioned all of the twists and turns and shocks that make up the entirety of this barely 200-page novel. Dobson is great at scenes of fiery destruction, at depicting Dave's psychopathic desires that he can suppress for a time—he even meets a nice girl! the killer fell in love at first sight—but oh how it can't be denied.When Dave lights up a theater full of retirees at a matinee, he sits eating a burger and watches it burn, in the curious amalgam of tension and relaxation, of cold-bloodedness and erotic excitement that informed his excursions into death, disfigurement, and destruction. As a fireman, how can he ever be suspected? How can he ever be found out? Dave Fosset has the perfect cover. Yes, Child of Hell brings the goods, hot and ready for you.

And speaking of perfect covers...

Paperbacks from Hell table of contents

Shadows 4, edited by Charles L. Grant (1981): I Was Born Here and I'll Die Here

"This volume breaks almost every one of my rules," states esteemed author and editor Charles L. Grant (1942-2006)  in his introduction to the fourth volume of his long-running anthology series of quiet horror stories, Shadows. Published in hardcover by Doubleday in 1981, this Berkley paperback from 1985 promises ghoulish, skeletal frights by the cover art (artist unknown), but in truth the tales within aren't quite obvious as a mouldering corpse looking for revenge. But you can't deny the eye-catching quality, which is what it's really about, no? The lantern is a nice touch, I mean you can't expect that skeleton to see, he's got no eyeballs.

Grant's "rules" are that stories for Shadows had to be contemporary and nontraditional. He's right: rules are broken by several stories here that aren't contemporary or nontraditional, but still achieve the chilling vibes that Grant's name was associated with. Though at times I find this quiet horror style too mild or old-fashioned for my personal taste, I'm also open to subtle terrors that don't reveal themselves in a blast of super-heated prose or vistas of inhuman cruelty. Suppose my main issue with quiet horror from this era is that it's too cozy, too slacks-and-slippers, to truly disturb or unsettle. Oh well, these stories date from 1981, the big bulldozer of more graphic horror is still beyond the horizon. But our tastes are not so jaded and degraded that we can't enjoy a few more refined horror treasures?

Anyway. Check out the names in the contents list, I'm surprised not a one of them made it onto the paperback cover! You got Steve King, you got Tabitha King, and Ramsey Campbell and Chelsea Quinn Yarbro and Tanith Lee, Alan Ryan and Lisa Tuttle... I was even impressed that there was a story from science fiction giant William Gibson, albeit from before he was a science fiction giant as publication of his epoch-defining Neuromancer was still a few years off (although the Berkley paperback came out after that novel). Written with jack-of-all-trades John Shirley, "The Belonging Kind" is a story I've read before, in Gibson's own short-story collection of his early cyberpunk works, Burning Chrome (1985). Glad to have read it again!

Gibson, Shirley, 1980s

Set in countless bars, discos, nightclubs and cocktail lounges, "Kind" is mildly SF, with some bio-weirdness and identity crises as a slacker-slob kinda guy meets an attractive woman while out drinking one night and ends up following her from bar to bar (I can't help but picture a neon-lit cyberland of synths and urban squalor). But she's changing, always in flux, to "belong" in whatever environs she finds herself in.  

She stepped off the curb and it began. It began with tints in her hair—at first he thought they were reflections. But there was no neon there to cast the blobs of color that appeared, color sliding and merging like oil slicks. Then the colors bled away and in three seconds she was white-blonde. He was sure it was a trick of the light until her dress began to writhe, twisting across her body like shrink0wrap plastic. Part of it fell away entirely and lay in curling shreds on the pavement, shed like the skin of some fabulous animal... 

This is quality short fiction, not easily fitting into any genre, but capable enough to belong anywhere it chooses.

Tanith Lee's "Meow" presents the ultimate cat-lady scenario. Writerly fella meets a shy, independent woman... and her cats. Lee's story is so charmingly, brightly written, so fresh and winning, so unexpected in some of its imagery, that I will forgive its maybe short-sighted generic climax; Lee could have gone for bigger, deeper rewards with the end. Passages like I'd spot their eyes in the early morning darkness when I brought her home, ten disembodied dots of creme de menthe neon spilled over the air. Demons would manifest like that make "Meow" a high point of the antho.

Another favorite turns up as he does in many of the era's anthologies: fellow author/editor Alan Ryan. "A Trip to Brighton" breaks no new ground, yet it does its deed with all the clarity, precision, and sensitivity that Ryan is known for. A doll left behind on a train ride promises to be the perfect gift for a loathsome little girl, an ill-mannered, ungrateful little thing. A perfect beast.

Children are the main characters in both Steve Rasnic Tem's "The Giveaway" and Al Sarrantonio's "Under the Bed." They're competently written and creepy-clever enough, but the climactic twists can be seen coming and going, not uncommon when reading horror tales of this vintage; both authors have better-realized works elsewhere. "Need" I'd read in Lisa Tuttle's splendid collection A Nest of Nightmares (1986). A college student has her pleasant walk through a quiet cemetery spoiled by a clueless dude who sneaks up on her. She felt uneasy now, her pleasant mood shattered. She had no desire to be standing in a cemetery, talking to an odd boy who had watched her without her being aware. But force of habit kept her polite. Ugh, guys, really, leave women alone. And then he goes and kills himself and still won't stop bugging her? Seriously, this guy's the worst.

"Hearing is Believing" is Ramsey Campbell's contribution, and fine, vintage Campbell it is. A lonely man with a drab job begins hearing voices and pouring rain from his stereo speakers; the clerk at the repair shop is no help. Things get worse. My appreciation for Campbell's style has grown immeasurably since beginning this blog (nearly 10 years ago now!) and his twilight world of disorientation, decay, and dribbling rain that smears vision is the stuff of my literal nightmares. At one end of the unknown street, amid a chorus of unhurried breathing, something was feeling for him along the broken facades.

Although she's published several novels, I've never read anything by Tabitha King till "The Blue Chair." It's perfectly cromulent, a well-described tale of a businesswoman alone in her hotel room with the titular object who meets up with a male cousin she once had a crush on. Things get hot and heavy—you know that's totally legal and fine, right?—but that chair isn't gonna let things end so easily.

Would you shake hands with this man?

Does anyone actually talk like the characters in some of Stephen King's stories? Oh, who cares: in "The Man Who Would Not Shake Hands," King employs one of the most effective tools in his arsenal, the tale-within-a-tale (whyyy is that so terrifying?!). Group of old men at the old-men's club play a game with a stranger, a young man who won't—you guessed it. Much of the tale includes blow-by-blow card hands, which I never understand. Grant calls this one "Kiplingesque" and maybe that's so, I wouldn't know myself, but the story is minor King yet readable and satisfying, you can tell Steve's having some fun writing in a mannered period style.

Brower staggered away from the table, holding hand out in front of him like a masculine Lady MacBeth. He was as white as a corpse, and the stark terror on his face is beyond my powers of description. I felt a bolt of horror go through me... Then he began to moan. It was a hollow, awful sound, cryptlike. I remember thinking, Why, the man's quite insane...

1988 Doubleday hardcover, art by Christopher Zacharow

There are other stories, too: short-shorts and whatnot, meager morsels I found neither here nor there, so I won't bother noting them except that they made passably engaging reads while on the bus or at the bar for happy hour. Grant notes in one of his intros to each contribution that finding and publishing new writers is one of the joys of his job, and while he says nice things like "This is their first story but it won't be their last," it is often the case that some of these new writers never published again. Cherie Wilkerson's "Echoes from a Darkened Shore" is an accomplished work for a first-timer, a moody bit of parental love and guilt, a child who refuses to grow up, and an old man wandering the sea shore.

"How long has it been since you've been to sea?" 

"A long time," he said without glancing up. I stared at him and felt my scalp trying to lift from my skull. 

"Did you ever have children?" 

The Captain nodded slowly. "My grandson was about her age when he died." 

"I don't want you to touch her," I said, trying unsuccessfully to control the quiver in my voice.

There are also writers, such as Juleen Brantigham, who rarely wrote anything but stories for Grant's anthologies, so much so that I wonder if that's one of Grant's pen names! "The Hour of Silhouette" is all slithering shadows and misdirection, hallmarks of the Grant style.

The longest story is the last, "The Spider Glass" by Chelsea Quinn Yarbro, one of her exquisitely detailed historicals featuring the Count St.-Germain, the "decadent foreigner" who is also a vampire. Another tale-within-a-tale, another men's club, a bookend to King's opener, it's lush, witty, somewhat romantic. Glistening in the mirror, the spider hung in its jeweled web. The body was red as rubies or fresh blood. The eight, finely-made legs were garnet at the joints and tourmaline elsewhere, delicate as a dancer...

I've enjoyed other volumes of Shadows more, but for the completist there might be an hour or two of whiling-away reading. Overall the stories are professional, mature, varied, and eerie (which is not always the case with horror anthologies as the Eighties continued). The whole series is, of course, essential for any paperback horror library, perfect for dipping into when one wants a bit of tasteful terror to darken the light.