Jeff Jones: The Paperback Covers

These stunning covers illustrations by the late Jeff Jones help confirm that 1960s and 1970s horror-fantasy paperbacks were a world unto themselves. Like his comrade-in-ink Frank Frazetta, Jones reveled in the mythical past, but it was one perhaps darker, more Gothic, less heroic. Rather than hulking loincloth primitives and armor-clad villains, though, Jones's covers here showcase a misty nighttime world of sorcerers and shadowy cults, of masters of occult powers and animal familiars, the hungry undead and their victims. My faves? Definitely The Vampire Women (Popular Library, 1970) and The Curse of the Undead (Fawcett Gold Medal, 1970). But could the books themselves deliver as well as their covers...?