Fangoria Nightmare Library, March 1988

Here we go again! Peer into the vault of Fangoria's Nightmare Library reviews. (Don't worry, I've got more of my own coming...)

Fangoria Nightmare Library Reviews, October 1986

More Fango reviews! Lots of favorite names here: Klein, Skipp & Spector, Bloch. Thanks to Crypticus for sending these along, I'm still going through them! Stay tuned.

Fangoria Nightmare Library Reviews, March 1987

The Fangoria vaults have been opened once again, this time thanks to reader Patrick B., who sent me a treasure trove of Nightmare Library review scans from the golden era of '80s horror fiction. Behold this particular cache, as it features reviews of some of our favorites... 

The Cover Art of Joe DeVito

Artist Joe DeVito painted many a paperback cover throughout the 1980s and '90s, including some wonderful pieces for iconic horror novels seen here. His work for the 1989 Tor reprint of Psycho II is easily one of my favorites of that era. Above, a timeless, subtle representation of a woman of Stepford. Bold and dramatic, his covers can be moody, sensual, or outrageous - and all three at once, check out Bloodletter below! DeVito has also worked in comics, gaming, and toys, and the covers I've posted here are but a sample of his paperback covers...

 

French Paperback Horror, Part Deux

Quelle horreur! And it continues, these covers for French translations of some terrific vintage horror (for more, much more of these as well as artist info, go here). For their splatterpunk magnum opus The Scream (1988), Skipp & Spector get a Heavy Metal-esque cover, pretty fitting considering the metal mayhem contained within.

Ah, The Cipher! Here, Kathe Koja's stunning debut novel becomes "Breach of Hell," fitting, although the cover image doesn't quite capture the amorphous quality of the cipher itself, which was basically a nothing... Still, creepy cool.

A simplistic, not too impressive rendition of Fletcher and Jaffe, the warring spiritual duo in Barker's 1989 novel of the fantastique, The Great and Secret Show.

Holy shit is that terrifying. And erotic. And terrifying. Nice work! Don't know this book by the recently late Gary Brandner, who is most famous for writing The Howling (1977).

A glorious rendition of the images contained in Poppy Z. Brite's essential 1993 short story collection, variously known as Swamp Foetus and Wormwood. I believe the title translates as "Stories of the Green Fairy," that being an old literary term for absinthe - clearly visible and ready for the imbibing. Watch out for Kali though!

This noxious cover reminds me that I really need to reread The Fog since I really member nothing about it; the James Herbert classic from 1975 is highly praised for being a pure pulp delight in Steve King's Danse Macabre. But you knew that.

A gorgeously Gothic and evocative work of art for Straub's 1980 novel. "La terre l'ombre," if my high school French serves, could've been the translated title.

Last but not least, Lansdale! Lurid and lusty. Lovely!

Meat the Authors! John Skipp and Craig Spector 1988

Ha ha ha - get it?! I had to share this awesomely ridiculous, or ridiculously awesome, illustration of splatterpunk maestros John Skipp and Craig Spector, which can be found in their rollicking 1988 rock'n'roll horror epic The Scream. Enjoy!

John Skipp Speaks

Crossroads Press has released an ebook edition for the 25th anniversary of Skipp and Spector's 1986 debut novel, The Light at the End. Here are three brand-new interviews with John Skipp to mark the occasion. He's talking about the novel itself, then the rise of splatterpunk fiction in the '80s, and last the zombie anthologies he and Spector edited with George Romero's blessings. Skipp is articulate and engaging, and all are must-sees for fans of horror fiction of the era. Can't believe I've never seen or heard an interview with him before! Thanks to both Brian Keene and Little Miss Zombie, who featured these videos and encouraged other fans to do so.

1992 Bantam reprint

Animals by John Skipp and Craig Spector (1993): A Bloody Disgrace

John Skipp and Craig Spector's sixth and final horror novel together, Animals (Bantam Nov 1993, cover art by Joe DeVito), is rife with the type of emotional as well as physical pain and humiliation that they explored in all their works. Despite their reputation as splatterpunks - or maybe because of - they always tried to depict realistic human relationships. Here, they delve into the psychic turmoil of 35-year-old blue-collar Syd Jarrett's divorce and its aftermath. In an out-of-the-way rundown blues bar in rural Pennsylvania, Syd meets the improbably hot and sexually ravenous Nora and his life is torn asunder. Nora is, of course, a werewolf. She wants to make him one too. But she is on the run from her ex, a sort of alpha-werewolf named Vic. What will happen when these night-time worlds collide? Surely you can guess.

But the thin, over-worn metaphor of werewolves who represent the dark, repressed nature of ourselves is expressed in tone-deaf, hey-buddy-check-this-out "prose" that seems less like writing than like two guys yelling a story at you in tandem. I don't know if Skipp and Spector had simply run their creative streak dry, were under a tight deadline, or had personal issues, or were simply bored, but virtually everything about Animals is lousy. Nora wants Syd to confront his psychological wounds caused by his ex-wife's adultery and the rage he felt to the man who cuckolded him, because that's what werewolves do: make you confront the beast within. I know horror likes to literalize its metaphors but this one is so obvious and trite and anemic it hardly registers.

The relentlessly graphic sex and violence is approached like sniggering 13-year-old boys who've just discovered Hustler magazine and Faces of Death videotapes. Every character comes across as an utter dated dork, straight from central casting circa 1987: women wear leather bustiers and fishnet stockings; men have one earring and stubble and drink from cans of Budweiser and bottles of Wild Turkey (Nora drinks copious amounts of Southern Comfort - barf) while driving muscle cars; a bartender is a world-weary sort who's seen it all; Syd's boss is a corrupt, crooked weakling. I know these characters are working-class Pennsylvania types, maybe Skipp and Spector did some research, but it makes for underwhelming fictional companions, more The Onion's Jim Anchower than flesh-and-blood human beings.

The cliches pop up thick and fast and the puns would make Robert Bloch groan. He was hell with names, but he never forgot a face. And even if he did, hers was in the trunk. A car moves through the night like a shark through dark waters. Kisses are deep and soul-searching. Sex is the raging bone dance. Well, that last one isn't a cliche; it's a ridiculous and juvenile original. The bad guy laughs wickedly, the moment of truth arrives, and werewolf survivors lick their wounds. See what they did there?

Animals was published in 1993, which was a distinct end of an era for me. I was still reading horror, but I was moving backwards toward classic writers like Machen, Jackson, le Fanu, Blackwood; modern horror was pretty much over as far as I was concerned. Bookstore shelves were more and more taken up with Koontz and King and Dell/Abyss had folded. Sure, there were a few titles I picked up here and there over the next couple years: Kathe Koja's Strange Angels and Poppy Z. Brite's Exquisite Corpse (both of which I liked) and The 37th Mandala by Marc Laidlaw (which I didn't ) but overall this was the end of keeping up with new publications.

And so I distinctly recall the publication of Animals and how I thought, "Yeah, no, I'm kinda over this stuff; besides, a werewolf novel about 'the animal in all of us'? No thanks." Even Clive Barker's encomium on the cover did little to assuage my suspicions. After I began this blog and saw that copies of the novel were going for up to $15 or $20 online, I wanted to see just what I'd missed (no, I didn't pay that much; found an oddly pristine copy in a local used bookstore). And I see that I was exactly and precisely right in my impression that the book was one long, grim, cringe-inducing horror-fiction cliche.

Guess you won't see that as a cover blurb. Sorry, guys!

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.

The Scream by John Skipp & Craig Spector (1988): Satanic Panic

Novels about rock'n'roll are difficult to pull off. When authors invent artists and their songs and try to write about the music industry from an insider's point of view they're leaving themselves wide open for criticism from a whole different type of critic: the rock'n'roll nerd. Ironically, much of rock'n'roll is about being cool, not nerdy, and if an author can't get that attitude just right, it all comes off as smug and dorky rather than as admirable, aloof, and sexy - suddenly nerds are experts on cool. Splat-pack duo John Skipp and Craig Spector's magnum opus The Scream (Bantam, Feb 1988 - remember buying it on Easter Sunday that year!), about a truly and literally evil rock group, treads this oh-so-dangerous line. But in their intensity, their passion and their commitment to outright horror, S&S overplay their hand. They try a little too hard. The Scream isn't cool; it's loud, outrageous, enthusiastic, earnest, and often quite ugly. And yet, ironically again, that is about the actual definition of rock'n'roll.

Spector, Skipp, cautious passerby

Set against a nicely-drawn '80s backdrop of "moral majority" religious groups' outrage over "satanic" rock music and their attempts to censor it, The Scream offers up a huge cast of characters and relationships. Jake Hamer, a Vietnam vet, is now leader of a popular rock group; Jesse Malloy, girlfriend of Jake's guitarist, desperately trying to get an abortion; Pastor Furniss, the Falwell-esque religious leader out to bring down rock'n'roll; as well as band members and wives and exes and kids and groupies and bodyguards. And then there is the Scream, the mysterious titular band whose album The Critical Mass has kids coast-to-coast mad with rock-star obsession. But there's something more to them than just cocaine and limos and blown-out amps and a stage show that would put Live After Death-era Iron Maiden to shame, something dark and eternal, and a lead guitarist who quite admires the Marquis de Sade.

2001 hardcover reprint from Stealth Press

The Scream might be a bit overlong in its inter-connecting character arcs, the prose might be informal and sometimes painfully amateurish, but it has energy and drive and bloodshed to spare, and a positively Dantean climax. Not for nothing was this sub-sub-genre of '80s horror dubbed "splatterpunk." Its main characters are treated with some sympathy; its behind-the-scenes nuts-and-bolts have credibility; its Vietnam War flashbacks are effectively intense. In fact, parts of the novel made me think of a mashup between Oliver Stone's The Doors and Platoon, but with George Romero happily stepping in to direct scenes with the Screamers, the zombified, maniacal, and supernatural followers of the Scream:

The Screamer lay in a long skid mark of gore, twitching and flailing. His spinal column had been sheared away between the fourth and sixth vertebrae; his lower half dragged uselessly behind him, connected only by ruined tendrils of muscle and skin. The white fluted ends of his shattered spine jutted out into the cool night air... But the lunatic howl that spewed forth from his lips was somewhere between a laugh and a howl...

Over 20 years later, of course, all this is ripe for hipster humor; something like The Scream can be seen on Adult Swim now in the guise of Dethklok from "Metalocalypse" and their murderous and blood-drenched - yet hilarious - gorefest performances. But in the '80s, man, people were totally terrified by this heavy metal stuff, and I kind of miss that.

And I recommend looking for the first edition paperback because it comes with this totally bitchin' pull-out mini-poster (by Stan Watts) just like rock albums from days of yore. Done by an artist who actually read the book, too.

Dark Dreamers, edited by Stanley Wiater (1990): First You Dream, Then You Die

Although this is the first nonfiction book I've written about here, it's absolutely appropriate: Dark Dreamers: Conversations with the Masters of Horror collects journalist Stanley Wiater's interviews with the very best horror writers of its day - and many of all time: Bloch, Matheson, King, Barker, Straub, Campbell, as well as (at the time) up-and-comers like Lansdale, Skipp & Spector, and Robert McCammon. While some of the writers covered do nothing for me (yes, there are a few), any behind-the-scenes info on the writing of horror and its attendant difficulties and rewards is fascinating.

Clive Barker lays out his ambition to write horror fiction that confronts and confounds; Richard Matheson realizes you can never escape the horror label; Richard Laymon admits he tempers his fondness for gore to get mainstream publications; Charles L. Grant reveals his wish to make a Val Lewton-type movie; Gary Brandner intimates the real horror hell is Hollywood; James Herbert lets it be known he was a horror writer from birth; Les Daniels speaks of the dream which gave him his idea for his historical vampire novels; Steve King and Peter Straub team up to talk of the perception of horror fiction in the mainstream literary world; and of course Whitley Strieber gotta talk about those damn aliens.

All that and more, Dark Dreamers is a wonderful exploration of the men (alas all, save for one Ms. Rice) who imagine the darkest, the bleakest, the blackest of worlds, so that we might see better in this one.

Living for the Screen: The Bastard "Art" of Horror Movie Novelizations

You won't find me collecting too many horror movie novelizations. While horror movie fans might find them exciting, I think novelizations are a strange and thankless art for the reader. I suppose they're not even art, they're simply commercial artifacts designed to sneak more money out of a film fan's pocket. Initially as disposable as a movie-theater popcorn bag, they have, like so much other pop culture detritus, turned into kinda cool collectibles. I read many as a kid before moving on to, well, actual books. I certainly don't think I'm alone in that, and I remember devouring the Star Wars, Indiana Jones, Alien and Superman novelizations of the late '70s/early '80s.

Most novelizations probably aren't worth much, but some have turned into decent collectibles thanks to, of course, covers that either reproduce the awesome poster art - as in Nosferatu (1979) - or features more characterization - as in The Wicker Man (1978). And I must say, I was pretty jazzed to snag that copy of Night of the Living Dead (1981), even though the guy peeking out from - well, whatever it is he's peeking out from - looks nothing like a zombie.

Novelizations are different from movie tie-in editions, which are when novels written first are then repackaged later with the movie adaptation poster on the cover. A good example is Stephen King's 1982 collection of four short novels, Different Seasons. This baby got re-released half a dozen times as a total of three of the novellas were adapted into popular movies. It's not just double-tripping; it's quadruple dipping, and more, in some cases. Check them all out here.

The literary merits of the novelization are next to nil, probably even closer, but often they are based on early or discarded drafts of screenplays and can therefore offer different or more in-depth details not in the finished film (see Jaws 2 for a great example). Often the books have pseudonyms or ghost-writers, and in the case of Nosferatu, have authors who became rather well-known in the literary world. Paychecks were pretty much guaranteed for this type of work, so many burgeoning young authors put aside notions of artistic purity and cranked 'em out on the side.

Even the estimable Ramsey Campbell, under the incredible and incomparable pen name of Carl Dreadstone, had a payday with 1970s novelizations of 1930s Universal monster classics, which actually go for a fair penny on eBay and such. I have so far been unable to track these down for a price I'm willing to pay. Which is like a buck.

Others who turned to novelizations include Dennis Etchison - actually, a major editor/short-story writer of the 1980s who I've not yet written about on this blog - who, as Jack Martin, penned Videodrome, David Cronenberg's bizarre cult masterpiece from 1983. Etchison worked from an early screenplay of the director's and therefore some of the alien quality of the movie is alleviated. John Skipp and Craig Spector, just before the height of their popularity, wrote one for Fright Night, the charming 1985 homage to horror movie hosts of the 1970s.

While I have here and there picked up some of the above novelizations, they're not really my collecting focus; I won't be filling my shelves with all the Friday the 13th novelizations, for example (an exception would be made for the novelizations of George Romero's Dawn of the Dead and Martin). But for anyone really interested in this aspect of horror fiction, I mean really and sincerely, you have to go here; this guy has an astonishing thread going, albeit from four or five years ago. The covers are mostly amazing. Imagine that!