Livre des Poches de L'enfer: The Cover Art of Marc Demoulin

Lay your les yeux upon the covers of these French paperbacks, translations of well-known horror novels by some of our favorite writers. Part of a series called Presses Pocket—Terreur, which started these editions in the late 1980s. I could find out nothing about the artist, Marc Demoulin, but really, what would you need to know? In most cases it seems he read or at least was familiar with each book's content; I appreciate the little piece of setting featured at the top coupled with surreal horrific imagery. Bon travail!

First up are some Graham Mastertons, Picture of Evil, Wells of Hell, and the first two Manitou titles. Check out American editions here. I love our petit homme!

Next up, mon cheries, are the titles that comprise Anne Rice's monumental original trilogy known as The Vampire Chronicles. I haven't read these three novels in almost 30 years, but man did I dig them back then.

 

A couple James Herberts, The Survivor and The Fog, the latter of which is one of my favorite covers here; that sickly yellowish haze is c’est parfait.

Ooh, how about Thomas Tryon's two early '70s powerhouses? J'adore the skeleton poking out of that scarecrow's pants...

Nightwing was an early bestseller from Martin Cruz-Smith, an author more known for his espionage thrillers and such than horror fiction.

Two of Ray Garton's perhaps most (in)famous novels, one which was comme ci comme ça, while the other was magnifique!

And le finale: Peter Straub's first supernatural horror novel Julia, and his towering Ghost Story: the latter mingles sex and death perfectly and, mon ami, let me tell you, I am ici for it.

Just a Kiss Away

Very early '90s sex-ay vampire stuff, post Rice, never read any, dig the covers, kinda cool.

And the Dawn Don't Rescue Me

Vampire chronicler Anne Rice was born in New Orleans on this date in 1941. Above is a 1985 reprint of the original 1976 Interview with the Vampire (see earlier paperbacks, with stunning covers, here and here). Below are the later 1980s paperbacks, as she continued the tales of her undead brood and became a mega-bestselling author. I kinda like that they don't look like genre novels, featuring only big bold lettering.

These next three are the UK paperbacks, published by Futura throughout the '80s and early '90s.The cover for this reprint of Interview is the same art as the original 1977 edition.

 

I loved these books when I read them in the late 1980s. Rich, epic, decadent, thought-provoking and a whole lot of fun, I enjoyed them so much and recall them so fondly I'm rather reluctant to reread them today...

The author in 1979

Wings of Pain Reach Out for You

Interview with the Vampire by Anne Rice (1976): Ballantine First Edition Paperback

This is one of those horror paperbacks that began my obsession with, well, horror paperbacks. Another one of my recent finds from the used bookstore in South Jersey (a choice find too as I lost my copy of this edition many years ago), this May 1977 first mass market paperback of Anne Rice's influential Interview with the Vampire is luckily in excellent condition... and I think I paid $1.25 for it!

First time I saw it I must've been 9 or 10, wandering around in the library, when I saw the word "vampire" featured on its spine in the paperback racks. Upon picking it up I was nonplussed to find the elegant cover photo with everything in... white. That's not right, my monster-kid brain told me, Vampires always wear black! Little did I know that Rice was doing away with decades of Draculean lore. But it was obvious even then that the cover design was such so that it appealed to non-horror fans. I love it now: the three characters figured prominently, dressed to the nines (even if Lestat and Louis didn't exactly wear early 20th century dinner tuxes in the novel), beside their beloved Claudia, who's looking childlike and ancient at once. An immortal family portrait. Creep-ee.

Claudia and Lestat might hunt and seduce, stay long in the company of the doomed victim, enjoying the splendid humor in his unwitting friendship with death...

And... how about this pre-publication edition? Looking as she did then, how could Anne Rice have ever done anything but write something called Interview with the Vampire?

Interview with the Vampire by Anne Rice (1976): Whining for Centuries

Anne Rice gets blamed for the whole "emo"-ing of the vampire in the horror genre today but you'd never know it from the cover art of this amazing 1979 reprint of the Ballantine paperback edition of Interview with the Vampire. That is some classic Gothic Dracula-style action going on. I've got too many new books piling up these days to reread it, but damn if I don't love this cover! I didn't even know this edition existed until a couple months ago.

It's been 20 years since I read Interview but I can still recall the self-absorption, the self-dramatization, the self-victimization, of Louis, the titular vampire, as he recounts his "life" story. No wonder young adults love this stuff; I once heard it described as "Catcher in the Rye for the Goth crowd." Yet the art has virtually nothing - and I mean nothing - to do with the book itself; in fact, one of the points of Interview was that it shed the whole opera-cape-and-tuxedo look of Lugosi and Lee. Rice's vampires didn't go after swooning ladies in nightgowns; they fed on criminals and even family members, as I recall. However it's certainly a striking piece of Gothic horror art, by recently deceased artist H. Tom Hall (uncredited).

And on the back cover we see, what? Ejaculatory blurbs, and two vampires in Dracula capes (Louis and Lestat, one presumes), one semaphoring like he's signaling in an airplane. Claudia is there, so maybe somebody told the artist about the poor little girl who's damned to be a vampire. Truthfully I only liked the first few Vampire Chronicles, as they were unlike anything else in the horror fiction field; however in the intervening years I've glanced back at parts of them and found her prose overheated, overwrought, and in some places, just plain bad. When Tale of the Body Thief came out in '92 I bought it straightaway but only got about a chapter or two in when I simply said, "Done. This is just awful." Never looked back either, until now.

There are other '70s paperbacks of Rice's first novel with cool cover art that I need to track down. I've seen this edition going for some fair cash on eBay but I was able to buy it recently for $2. It has that comforting old-book smell that hints of age and imagination and escape, and it's not too beaten up. Another vintage paperback coup for Too Much Horror Fiction!

The Vampire Tapestry by Suzy McKee Charnas (1980): Vampire Walks into a Psychiatrist's Office...

Today it's almost tiresome to ponder the mythic fluidity of the vampire throughout history and how it reflects (heh) the fantasies and fears of the culture from which it's sprung. Vampires have been twisted this way and that, rendered fangless and impotent, but when Suzy McKee Charnas wrote The Vampire Tapestry in the late 1970s the field had not yet been taken over by the de- and re-mythologizing character of Anne Rice's work. Less a horror novel than a psychological deconstruction of an outsider, Tapestry has a smart and original tale to tell, thankfully unblighted by the shallow vagaries of popular culture. Indeed, this vampire haunts the halls of academe.

Dr. Edward Lewis Weyland is an anthropology professor of a gentlemanly, iron-haired age as well as a non-supernatural vampire. Drawn as a ruthless and precise predator, he has no kith or kin, walks about in daylight, and needs no earth from his homeland in which to sleep. Beneath his tongue is an unobtrusive stinger with anti-clotting saliva that can penetrate human flesh and draw out fresh blood. His haughty and surly brilliance allows him to pass through the mortal world with few noticing his true self.

Charnas tracks her creation through five different "adventures" in her novel so that we see how Weyland subtly alters his behavior to either escape danger, establish his identity, or to embrace a victim. Actually Tapestry is more like five interrelated long stories than one entire novel. Weyland sometimes missteps and ends up in danger, as in "The Island of Lost Content." He meets a near-worthy foe in "The Last of Dr. Weyland" and reappraises his thoughts of humanity (Not cattle, these; they deserved more from him than disdain). "A Musical Interlude" finds Weyland shaken after he is introduced to Puccini's opera Tosca, the high drama of which causes him to flash back to his own life centuries earlier.

The best is probably "Unicorn Tapestry" in which Weyland is forced to see a psychiatrist in order to keep his job as a professor and thus hide his vampirism. She tries to get him to empathize with his victims, which he refuses to do. Charnas spends a great deal of time detailing the work of this doctor, a middle-aged woman who, in spite of herself, develops serious feelings for Weyland even as she delves deeper into his pathology.

Endurance: huge rich cloak of time flows back from his shoulders like wings of a dark angel. All springs from, elaborates, the single dark primary condition: he is a predator who subsists on human blood. Harmony, strength, clarity, magnificence - all from that basic animal integrity. Of course I long for all that...

We can see the changes in vampire mythology just by tracing the imagery in the paperback covers. The original paperback edition at the top, from Pocket Books in 1981, hearkens back to Lugosi's dinner-party attire, along with a strong, very masculine jaw to suggest the eroticism that was so prevalent in the myth at the time. In 1986, with the Tor Books reprint (labeled oddly as SF/Fantasy), we see now a brooding, more European-looking fellow whose hand seems tensed and rigid; after Rice, the deluge of sensitive vampires mooning over their horrible undeath and blood thirst.

The 1992 trade paperback cover has a figure clad in a cape, apparently about to perform some bit of magic like Barbara Eden in "I Dream of Jeannie," and also is somehow deformed. The most recent edition, from Orb Books in 2008, with its bare tree limbs and shadowy figure, seems more like a Halloween decoration than a real book cover. I can say that not one (maaaybe the one from Tor Books) of these inaccurate covers captures the tone or style of Charnas's book, which is rooted in the psychological realism of a fantastical nonhuman.

Horror fiction has always suffered under a surfeit of bloodsuckers stalking across paperback book covers where they were depicted as aristocrats or lusty dandies, as well as Stoker-approved monsters from the Freudian id. Today, we see them as teenagers, as Fabio-style paranormal lovers, as lonely housewife-friendly boyfriends. It's a cliche to ponder this creature, as I noted, even trite, because isn't it obvious? We have met the vampire over and over and he is us. But Charnas suggests at the end of The Vampire Tapestry that this predator who tries so hard to gain psychological distance from his prey may come to see some of himself there after all.

Cut! Horror Writers on Horror Film, edited by Christopher Golden (1992): Looking for Horror in All the Wrong Places

Quite often horror fiction is just a hobbled rehash of monster movie/haunted house/slasher conventions and cliches. I can't imagine - but I envy - what it must have been like for authors such as Arthur Machen, H.P. Lovecraft, Algernon Blackwood, M.R. James, Sheridan LeFanu, et. al., to write horror fiction without having horror film as an influence. Cinema looms over virtually writer working in the field since the late 1930s, and even a sort-of classic like Stephen King's It is filled with riffs on the movie monsters of yesteryear. And from what I gather, current horror fiction seems like it's either zombie fetish mania or extremely graphic brutality (and terrible, terrible covers, but of course you all knew that). But reading Cut! Horror Writers on Horror Film is a pleasure because (most of) the writers contribute funny, knowledgeable, and insightful articles and interviews about horror film and how it's shaped them and their fiction... for the better.

Cut! editor Christopher Golden includes lots of the 1980s writers I've covered here at Too Much Horror Fiction. John Skipp and Craig Spector have a seriously impressive, if jokingly written, piece on how horror can be found in all kinds of movies, from The Deer Hunter to Sophie's Choice to Lethal Weapon to The Wild Bunch. They also rightly note that horror filmmakers don't utilize non-bestseller horror fiction enough. Joe Lansdale ruminates on the cheap, nasty pleasures of drive-in B-movies, blood and bare breasts while Ray Garton ponders the considerable merits of Annette O'Toole and Nastassja Kinski in the 1983 remake of Cat People. Charles L. Grant insists that black-and-white is the only way to film a horror movie, lauding Val Lewton above all others. T. Liam McDonald gives a nice little history of the Hammer horror studio output. Clive Barker talks about arthouse and foreign oddities - indeed, Barker's interview drove me to see films such as Les yeux sans visage, The Holy Mountain, and In a Glass Cage. He considers Taxi Driver a horror film and he is perfectly correct.

Showing eminent good taste, Anne Rice talks of her love for Bride of Frankenstein, Angel Heart, and Blade Runner and how Rutger Hauer is the only actor who could ever play the Vampire Lestat (!). Ramsey Campbell declares that at the time of his essay (1992), the scariest movie character he'd seen recently was not any horror serial killer but Joe Pesci as Tommy in Goodfellas. Philip Nutman and Paul Sammon, two horror journalists/editors, have in-depth critical pieces on the masterful and must-see films of David Cronenberg and David Lynch, respectively. Another editor, Douglas E. Winter, explores the filmography of Dario Argento. Horror comic book illustrator Stephen Bissette proves himself a fierce film critic when he looks at horror-fantasy throughout the entire history of cinema.

But there are some real boners in here, though. I mean, really, really bad. John Farris draws a blank when asked to name his favorite horror movies. Kathryn Ptacek writes a silly and amateurish piece on cannibal films while saying she doesn't like cannibal films. Ed Gorman tosses off a lame page or two about Wes Craven. There are more overly-chummy, embarrassingly earnest intros with corny in-jokes by Golden. I swear, I don't know what it is about collections like this that invite that attitude. Other authors present fair-to-good analyses of Fatal Attraction, The Haunting, and the giant bug movies of the 1950s.

Ultimately it's Skipp and Spector, Barker, and Campbell who really get at the heart of this essay collection, that horror as a genre is larger than most people think it is and its cliches can be avoided by looking elsewhere for terrifying entertainment and inspiration. Simply, it's as Ramsey Campbell puts it: Horror fans who look for their horror only in films and books labelled as such are cheating themselves.

Sunglasses After Dark by Nancy A. Collins (1989): They're So Sharp

I don't remember a thing about the vampire novel Sunglasses After Dark except that at one point, Jim Morrison comes back as a vampire for a chapter, or something like that, which I thought was pretty cool back in the day. Nancy Collins wrote some sequels to this featuring her character Sonja Blue, a vampire hunter, but I never read them. This was part of the post-Anne Rice generation when authors were reimagining vampires for the modern age. I guess that's better than reimagining them teenage and glittery. These days I'd just as soon put on an old Siouxsie Sioux album and be done with it. I've heard Collins was not too keen on the Underworld movies since they seemed too similar to her Sonja Blue series and sued the producers. But you can't deny the striking artistry (courtesy of Mel Odom) of this cover, which is the sole reason I kept my copy for 20 years in pretty nice condition. I love that the title and author are only on the back cover; later printings added them to the front which is far less effective.