The Spirit by Thomas Page (1977): You Drive Me Ape You Big Gorilla

Bigfoot was big news throughout the 1970s, thanks to that infamous Patterson footage of the late 1960s. Stomping across the pop cultural landscape and metal-and-asphalt playgrounds of the decade, he showed up on TV ("Bigfoot and Wildboy"! "In Search of..."! "The Six Million Dollar Man"!) and in some cheapie movies I recall older relatives and brothers of friends going to see. Even the commercials and specials on TV terrified me. Amongst the drugstore spinner racks that held our precious horror paperbacks readers could also find "non-fiction" on Sasquatch, and the covers offer that same fine vintage frisson.

But Bigfoot was dead and gone by the '80s—I was just too old for 1987's Harry and the Hendersons—and although he's back in a big way today, I can't say I have any interest in him. So it was with some measure of "meh" that I approached The Spirit, a 1977 novel actually published in hardcover (scroll down for cover). Ballantine released the paperback edition in 1978 with a moody George Ziel cover, as he does so well, and I was sort of expecting an adventure-romance tinged with creature horror. Author Thomas Page (b. 1942, Washington DC) wrote a few other genre paperbacks in the day that I've seen here and there over the years but I know nothing about him. I do know he can spin a yarn and mix in some solid suspense and a few snatches of 'Squatch destruction.

There is something I think distasteful about implying Bigfoot is dangerous to humans, I've always felt, but now I see he is generally part of the "eco-horror" moment of that era, when the natural world has simply had enough of humans trashing it for big bucks and fights back by any means necessary. Bigfoot simply does not respond well to ski resorts in his 'hood! Page's novel, despite the slavering back-cover copy and its swooning-romance cover, is more tasteful than those pulp implications, as its specific horror elements are minimal and there is no romantic element whatsoever, which is a shame because two characters meet cute and I could've done with some sexy Seventies sex action.

1977 US hardcover, Rawson Associates

Easily the most accurate cover art

Still, I do think Spirit is a rewarding little read for those who dig the 'foot, as it has some terrific action setpieces and opens with a harrowing helicopter crash, characters and dialogue aren't a lot more than stock but serve adequate purpose for the story. Page isn't too shabby at mixing in Native American lore either, adding a dash of the hallucinating Vietnam vet and the vision quest, and has some fun theorizing on the anthropological origins of the creature (genetic deformity? cross-species banging?), thanks to our manly-man protagonist's visits to a primate specialist. Bigfoot sightings aren't overdone and have a bit of subtlety about them—She had materialized from the forest, as massive as a mountain and light as a wraith—but definitely convey the creatures' power and might. There's even sad note of irony at the end.

1979 Hamlyn UK paperback

But only dum-dum Lester, who works in the ski lodge kitchen and knows what he saw that one eerie night even though everyone thinks he made it up and he tries to recant even though he really wants to make some money off it on the Johnny Carson show, truly knows what's up with the 'Squatch:

Somebody once said on a late-night TV show that people were afraid of the full moon because thousands of years ago the earth was covered with different types of humans who came out then. These humans lived in the woods with saber-toothed tigers and snakes and dinosaurs and mastodons, and got along great with them because they all ate the same thing: other humans.

Berkley Books, 1977, rare collectible 
Er, no thanks, I'm good

Won't Forget to Put Roses on Your Grave: The Gloomy Gothics of Victor Banis

The esteemed Jeffrey Catherine Jones painted this, one of my favorite-ever covers, of a delightfully ghoulish lass writhing upon a coffin attended to by fluttering batwings. I mean, I think it is just spectacular. My expectations weren't high for the actual novel, but even so they were dashed as I began to read, for The Vampire Women (Popular Library, 1973) is a dreary rip-off of the original opening chapters of Dracula, right down to its epistolary narrative. Victor Samuels—or should I say "Victor Samuels" for reasons that will become clear in a moment—has produced a work of pure pulp hackery. Updated to 1969, it's the tale of a man, a woman, and her younger sister traveling to Castle Drakula. Yes, Drakula, so see, as their guide through the Carpathians informs them, it's not the same Dracula as from the books and movies! Whew, glad we cleared that up.

I tried to approach the story as a cheap Dracula flick, a lesser Hammer or a Naschy or something, but even that didn't work thanks to "Samuels"'s simplistic prose and bone-headed journal entries:

What was the name of the castle again?
Drakula. Do you know of it?
I recognize that name. It's been used in books and movies. Not very pleasant ones.... He was a werewolf or something like that.

It is those silly legends about that Wallachian—Drakula, I think the name was. I gather he was the subject of some books and movies. I never had time for things like that.

We can't afford to get mixed up with Count Drakula and his government or his politics.

Carolyn giggled. "I'm going to marry Count Drakula," she chirped. She looked cocky and defiant.

1976 German edition

Of course I trudged and skimmed most of the way through to the obvious climax—"Get back, Drakula!" I warned as I snatched up the stake at my feet—groaning the whole way. Then I looked up the author and quickly found it is the pseudonym of a writer named Victor J. Banis, and o my friends, lots of fun stuff came my way. Born in 1937 in Pennsylvania, Banis is considered the father of gay pulp fiction. That's a pretty big deal, and as I read about Banis and his illustrious history in the pulp trade, I learned he also wrote many Gothic romances of the late '60s and early '70s under other various pen names (he even wrote some of the perennial Executioner men's adventure series!). In interviews Banis has no illusions about the quality of some of his output—he was simply a working writer, but his subject matter had never been explored in mass market before. Fascinating! I live for these jaunts down forgotten paperback history...

Banis, 1973

I've found a handful of glorious paperback covers for his books from that long-ago era; I think you'll recognize a Hector Garrido cover down there too...

Artist Murray Tinkelman Born on This Date, 1933

Murray Tinkelman, who died last year, produced covers for the mid-'70s Ballantine reprints of Lovecraft which are almost as iconic as the Michael Whelan ones in the early '80s. This is my small collection, as I don't often see his editions in used bookstores. See a more comprehensive collection of his Lovecraft paperback covers here (which also includes a great interview with the artist) and more Matheson here.

The Homing by Jeffrey Campbell (1980): I'm Not a Prisoner I'm a Free Man

Middling mainstream thriller with touches of Stepford Wives and Thomas Tessier's psychological ambiguities, The Homing (Ballantine Books, 1981) was written under the pseudonym Jeffrey Campbell, in actuality authors Campbell Black and Jeffrey Caine. First I found it rather entertaining, at times an ingenious puzzle, an enigma as one man tries to sort out dreams, memories, and reality through various coincidences and correspondences in the quietest little country town ever. But as the first notes of "medical thriller" began to tinkle, however, my interest began to fade, although the writing alone was engaging enough to keep me going.

Our protagonist, Manhattanite George Kenner, is trying to reconnect with his beloved daughter, once a promising psychology student but now content to live in this one-horse town of Chilton as a one-dimensional housewife married to a dopey well-meaning dork. In fact everyone in town is a boring homebody, and it chafes Kenner terribly that his daughter Katherine, with whom he'd shared private jokes and intelligent conversation as she grew up, should find herself at home amongst them. These folks are, to Kenner, committing the worst sin ever: they're fucking boring beyond belief. His acerbic wit is lost on these dullards!

1980 Putnam hardcover

50 cents at Woolworth's. Seems about right.

Not everyone is so harmless, though: there's the cop with that crooked grin and an ironic tone (irony being in short supply in Chilton), there's the old drunk who begs for a ride out of town, or the teenage hitchhiker harassed by that same cop. And yet nothing too terribly scary or even eerie happens, and it should have. Kenner's bouts of dreamy déjà vu are mysterious, clues placed here and there but just out of reach, and his enlistment of Katherine's former professor Elaine Stromberg allows for decent romantic interplay. Cue the suspicion, the research trip, the car chase, the revelation. But nothing scary or even really eerie happens. That '70s paranoia/conspiracy theory vibe is in full effect (it's been years since I've seen it but 1966's Seconds had to be an influence) but never seems to hit hard enough, alas. The authors seem to have been phoning it in (as was the cover designer). I bet this is the kind of case Mulder and Scully would've solved before the hour was up. You've seen and read this story before. Don't bother again.

1992 UK paperback

The Sentinel by Jeffrey Konvitz (1974): Call for the Priest

A mainstream horror bestseller in the wake of the far better novels The Exorcist, Rosemary's Baby, and The Other, 1974's The Sentinel (Ballantine paperback, January 1976) offers similar ominous occult/religious horror trappings but brings nothing new to the proceedings. I don't know what Jeffrey Konvitz did before he wrote this, his first novel, but afterwards he produced B-movies and wrote a couple more shlocky novels (one, a sequel to The Sentinel called The Guardian, was similarly unimpressive). Today it's less remembered than the also-shlocky yet star-studded 1977 movie adaptation.

Allison Parker is a fashion model returning to New York City after her father's funeral in Indiana, a place she'd fled years before due to some icky stuff going on at home. Now she's struggling with some guilt issues due to the fact that her boyfriend, big-shot lawyer Michael Farmer, was the husband of her friend Karen, who killed herself because he was having an affair... with Allison, unbeknownst to her. This soap-opera set-up is slowly parceled out to the reader, and later the "icky stuff" with her father is revealed. The Sentinel begins with Allison moving into an apartment building on the Upper West Side to get her life back in order, but the other residents she meets prevent that.

Back cover copy gives you the inside skinny.

Also featuring is a grizzled city cop chomping on a cigar who's convinced that Michael actually killed Karen for her family's money and is setting Allison up the same way. Boring and predictable, neither scary nor suspenseful (unless under-pacing and ending sections with characters' faces bearing looks of terror count as suspense), The Sentinel stands not with the aforementioned classics of early '70s horror fiction but with dullards like The Searing. This is pretty much hackwork that utilizes TV cop-show tropes and the Latinate mysteries of the Catholic church liberally dosed with Dante's Inferno. Konvitz's prose is literate but not illuminating, and I can see why it was a bestseller. The climax mixes violence with otherworldly demonic forces in the guise of people from Allison's past. Not terrible, mind, but nothing really special either.

Kinda cool stepback art, nothing so dramatic inside
Requisite note of better novels 

I read The Sentinel with indifference mixed with impatience over several weeks, meandering through it without really caring. This is not horror fiction as we fans know it and love it. It is solely marketing fodder branded by its betters, a hash cobbled together from commercials, soap operas, and several other pieces of extremely popular culture; it's a work of mainstream dullness that will bore and frustrate long-time readers of the horror genre thanks to its crass origins. The Sentinel's unique image is for me not even the blind priest that so unimaginatively adorns the cover. For me it's that tasteless yet effectively creepy moment of two women fondling themselves and then one another in front of Allison, a bit of unexpected shock-value that works as it transgresses social norms. It's the only moment of unsettling frisson (no pun intended) in the entire work (and yes, it's in the movie). Utterly missable and inessential despite the implied menace of the title (which really isn't that menacing when you think about it), The Sentinel will make a nonbeliever out of you.

1976 Star Books UK paperback

How Dear the Dawn by Marc Eliot (1987): Have You Ever Heard of a Vampire?

You tell me: this cover art for a paperback unknown to me till just a couple weeks ago is by the same (sadly unknown) artist who produced one of the greatest horror movie posters of all time: for Herzog's 1979 remake of Nosferatu... right? It's just that I can not, for the life of me (heh) find out just who produced either image. Alas. I found How Dear the Dawn (Ballantine/Aug 1987) for sale during a random eBay search and was captivated instantly by that cover art and that not unpoetic title. Didn't know who Marc Eliot was (my Google-fu served me well on that endeavor though: it is a pseudonym of Dave Pedneau [1947 - 1990]) but that didn't matter; I bought a copy immediately and dove in. For as one character improbably, impossibly, unbelievably, asks another, "Have you ever heard of a vampire?" Why yes, yes I have heard of a vampire! I suppose this is the book for me.

Once you get past the creepy cool heraldic and relevant imagery of the arty cover, though, you read the copy front and back then realize it's about as horror clichéd as horror cliché can get; virtually every phrase could be applied to one million horror novels, approximate. This one isn't that bad though: Eliot/Pedneau is a competent enough writer, slick even, occasionally producing an apt or unexpected image or bit of dialogue, and evokes enough of the Southern American coastline, its landscape and its weather, to lend some welcome atmosphere, but the logistics and the pacing of his tale are standard B-movie style. You'll gape in disbelief as a woman, concerned about her missing friend, is asked out by the cop who arrives to investigate (and she says yes! And they become the two main characters so you have to root for them!).

How Dear the Dawn is an unpretentious little novel, not 300 pages, of old-school vampire horror: no long-winded backstory to jam up the narrative flow nor any upending of accepted supernatural mythologies (interestingly the myth of the vampire is  presented by one character as a subset of the zombie). I dug how the head vamp, Sterg LeVeau, demands obeisance from his cohorts and gets really mad at the first woman he first bites after his reawakening because she keeps killing her prey—causing them to come back as vampires themselves of course—rather than just feeding on their blood. Ugh, noobs.

Scenes of throat-ripping gore and decay mingle with steamy if straightforward vampire eroticism; characters are perfunctory but individualized; dialogue is not embarrassing for the most part. All in all, not a bad vamp book at all. If only Pedneau had lived to write some sequels: How Nice the Night, How Mournful the Moon, How Horrible the Hunger...

On this wet, stormy night, they were to hunt as one, and she was to learn to sate her gnawing obsession without killing. Jo Ann, so new to her state, could not fathom LeVeau's reluctance to claim their puny lives. To her, they were pathetic creatures, livestock to be bled for sustenance. And the sensation she experienced in the process was ultra-orgasmic It reached its pinnacle at that moment when life ebbed from their bodies.... That her victims rose to become as she was, to her, a Mephistophelian magnificence. She yearned to spread her hellish splendor over the face of the Earth... Clad now in a black, mildewed dress she had found in a closet, she stood before a window, the flashes of lightning illuminating her fierce face. With each passing moment she became more rapacious...

Pick a Name, Any Name

Born on this date in 1944, Campbell Armstrong was a Scottish author who died in 2013 and wrote many thriller/horror novels under a handful of pseudonyms. These paperback covers from publishers in the US and the UK are nicely indicative of that '80s era...

 

 

 

 

 

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