Showing posts with label creepy kids. Show all posts
Showing posts with label creepy kids. Show all posts

Thursday, November 14, 2019

To the Devil's Ballet: The Cover Art of Robert Heindel

These pale, haunting, geometric sketches for very late Sixties and very early Seventies occult paperbacks from Signet Books are a refreshing palate-cleanser for when the lurid and tacky covers one usually sees becomes overwhelming. Whispers work wonders here, thanks to the delicate, intimate style of illustrator Robert Heindel (1938-2005), an artist I only learned of after spying his signature "R. Heindel" on a recently purchased copy of the 1970 edition of The Mephisto Waltz.

The doll's head in a circle, carefully drawn hands at the piano, and eyes closed in repose reminded me of a favorite cover for a book I have been unable to find cheaply, the intriguingly titled A Feast of Eggshells. Somewhere in my searches I discovered another similar cover and noted that signature, then began to track down more by Heindel. Which is how I discovered that he's a world-famous painter of ballet and other dance, whose artwork has been collected by Princess Diana, Andrew Lloyd Weber, and George Lucas! Claaaaasssy for a guy whose earliest works appeared on these "easy-to-see large-type" Gothic/occult paperback originals. I love it!

 
I could find only these four other horror covers, Suffer a Witch, Along Came a Spider, The Ouija Board and The Devil Boy. Personally, I think these are simply wonderful, as they feature all the signifiers of genre works of the era: creepy kids, eerie witches, haunted houses, Rosemary's Baby. If anyone knows of other covers he did like this, please let me know...

 
More interesting is that I've been seeing his work on more famous paperbacks for decades and didn't even realize it: his most well-known cover illustrations are for Signet's series of Ayn Rand reprints. Crazy, right? You can even buy the originals of these here.


Tuesday, March 19, 2019

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.

Thursday, March 7, 2019

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

Monday, October 22, 2018

The Little Girl Who Lives Down the Lane by Laird Koenig (1974): Did He Go Away and Leave You All Alone

A mainstream suspense thriller with plenty of '70s vibes, adapted into a fairly well-known movie (if you follow cult films I guess), the 1974 novel The Little Girl Who Lives Down the Lane (Bantam Books paperback edition, Feb 1975, cover artist unknown) was author Laird Koenig's second novel. He'd written TV teleplays and screenplays, and the structure, setting, and characters of Little Girl feels like an intimate stage play, taking place as it does in a rented home in a small New York village. Creepy cover art by artist unknown shows a spoooky girl whose tresses transform into bloody gore while a vampire phantom sort hovers in gonna-getcha pose. You won't be surprised to learn this imagery is misleading.

Our story begins on Halloween night, the kind of evening the little girl liked best...

The little girl is Rynn Jacobs, almost 14, and she's English so she doesn't celebrate Halloween. She and her poet father having been renting their small home in a small New York village. Won't surprise you to learn that Rynn is wise beyond her YA years, who loves the enigmatic lines of Dickinson, the glorious piano of Liszt, and her pet rat Gordon. She hates the shrieking girls her own age on the bus, their trashy teen hearthrobs, and especially the Hallets, the family from whom her father is renting their home.

Frank Hallet first shows up to visit Rynn's dad and to explain Halloween tradition as his two children are making their way to the house. Everything about the man seemed soiled, shiny or red, he reeks of sweet cologne and he giggles. Right away you just know he's a fucking creep. And you're right, especially after he learns it's Rynn's birthday as well.

"Pretty girl like you—on your birthday and all—no boyfriends?" The girl and her pet, in a world together, closed out the man.... 
Suddenly the man reached down and slapped the girl on the curve of her buttocks. Rynn wheeled around to face him, her eyes glaring hate. Hallet giggled nervously. "It's okay. I get to spank you. On your birthday you have to get spanked..." Rynn's green eyes held the man's until he slid his glance away. "It's a game," he protested. "A birthday game!" His voice was loud and shrill.

Sweet Jebus. Arriving the next day is Frank's mother, the imperious Mrs. Cora Hallet, an old woman with Barbie doll hair, who can't stand what she sees as Rynn's rudeness; the two of them get into an argument over jelly glasses and furniture that's been moved; everything goes downhill from there. Mrs. Hallet declares she is on the school board, and why isn't Rynn in school, where is her father...? All that jazz. She threatens Rynn with reporting her truancy, demands her father call as soon as he can—Rynn tells her he's in New York seeing his publisher—and is off. Rynn is terrified of exposure till she learns the truth of Mrs. Hallet's threats the next day.

Rynn, whose father is always working on either his poetry or translating others' and so we don't meet him face-to-face as he is not to be disturbed, is self-possessed and no-nonsense about taking care of herself and her home. We follow her into town where she runs grown-up errands to the bank, the hardware store, and her favorite: the bookshop. She stands outside it

...studying the shiny jackets of masses of books on display as eagerly as a starving urchin might stare into a bakery window, she was postponing the ultimate happiness, the moment when she would actually set foot inside the bookshop. Then she would be in a world she felt was far more wonderful than Alice found down the rabbit hole or the astronauts discovered out in the black vastness of space. 

Koenig, c. 1974

Two other characters feature in the tiny cast: police officer Ron Miglioriti, who might possibly or possibly not be trouble (he is the law after all), and young teenage magician Mario Podesta (who is actually Officer Ron's nephew), who uses a cane to walk and dons the garb seen on the cover. Both offer to Rynn sympathy and warmth, the former as a father-figure and the latter as a boyfriend (details of which are handled tastefully, gaze averted). Both treat Rynn with respect and a sense of equal standing; something neither Hallet is able to muster.

Rynn enlists Mario to help cover up a certain unfortunate incident, and their back-and-forth dialogue is a perfect snapshot of kids-against-authority, Mario the small-town kid trying to hold his own with cool, collected, sophisticated Rynn (she has traveler's checks! knows poetry! can cook better than his mother!). And it's this unfortunate incident that befalls Mrs. Hallet, and of course what happened to Rynn's father and mother, that power the engine of this little thriller. Koenig's style is subtle but sharp, with that mainstream narrative slickness that I feel good TV writers possess.

A hallmark of every creepy kid is the ability to outsmart adults; Rynn is no exception, even if she's not creepy. But as the novel tightens its grip, the giggling Frank Hallet proves to be more serious danger than bothersome neighbor, and he even comes to admire her: "I mean you're brilliant. No two ways about it. But you made one mistake." Isn't that always the case? But as Rynn's missing-in-action father had told her once, "Do anything you must, fight them any way you have to. Survive," we know that when we reach the final page, that instinct will be tested...

Coward, McCann & Geoghegan hardcover, 1974 

While it's certainly no must-read, Little Girl is crisp and bracing, like a brief autumn after a blistering summer and just before a blizzard; a minor work of its day that I read in a day and a half. I wouldn't call it a horror novel, maybe let's say it's horror-adjacent, as there are murders and secrets and other illicit behaviors. The backstory about her family is presented without ambiguity; I feel a stronger writer could have imbued her situation with perhaps more menace or atmosphere. Like other evil kids of the day, Rynn might be a budding sociopath, or she may just be taking her father's words about survival a tad too serious. Koenig keeps the action cozy in this little village rental home, venturing out rarely for, as Dickinson said and Rynn knows all too well, "I don't go from my home, unless emergency leads me by the hand." Indeed. Rynn protects what is hers; intrude upon it at your own peril.

Friday, May 11, 2018

Rockabye Baby by Stephen Gresham (1984): I Just Met a Nurse That I Could Go For

With its distressing yet utterly striking cover image, you'd probably think there was no way the novel Rockabye Baby (Zebra, Nov 1984) could live up to it. Aaaand... you'd be right. Prolific '80s author Stephen Gresham penned a solid handful of paperbacks for the infamous Zebra line of horror fiction and this is the first I've read. Gresham's writing is a touch better than his Zebra fellows, but that's about all: I found Rockabye to be interesting only in fits and starts, was not taken with its young protagonist, a towheaded boy named—wait for it—Prince, and while the psycho dude depicted on the cover features in the story, he doesn't quite feature enough. He was the most readable character, a nutjob with real psychosexual identity concerns.

Sorry, Judy Packett, but I must respectfully disagree

There's the out-of-town cop trying to solve the children murders, the country occult old lady and young girl, Aunt Evvie and Nandina, living in the woods who possess supernatural powers that Prince attempts to learn and master to find the killer's identity, various other kids from Prince's class—I really am done with kids in my horror fiction—and then there is Maris Macready, our cover model. What a piece of work he is. He calls his female identity, in a classy, literate horror reference, "the Bloofer Lady." No one will be surprised that Macready has a shelf crammed with

dolls, an array that would please any little girl. But these dolls had been given a different sort of attention from the apprentice mothering common to little girls. These dolls were naked. As a result, peering down into the box was like peering down into flesh-colored water—a pool of arms, legs, heads, and torsos. And each had been marked with a black felt-tip pen. Their anatomies were strewn with black circles, arrows, doodlings and a few indecipherable words...

This is on page 27. Without a doubt I had images of a deranged Joe Spinell in the role, so I was psyched at this early point. If only Gresham had drilled down on this perversity. If only. Instead, he doubles down on a gloomy coming-of-age story as Prince learns about "darkness" from Aunt Evvie and Nandina. Their phonetic Southern dialect is a constant distraction. Yeah, I definitely wanted more of dude on the cover (by Lisa Falkenstern, perhaps?), and more of the "Macready family of monsters" as it's put. Alas.

Frankly, I gave up more than halfway through, skimmed through the last part and found nothing of import to note. The first chapters were intriguing; I was relieved that Gresham could write. His sense of place and setting isn't too bad, and I appreciated his attempt at melding a vague Southern Gothic vibe with dark fantasy as well as the exploitative child-killer angle. Gresham adds some depth to the story when Prince's beloved father discovers he has cancer. But there remains an earnest, amateur vibe that I think one finds in a lot of Zebra books, a vibe I find hard to forgive and after awhile, harder to read. When I can hardly bother to pick up the book I'm ostensibly reading, going several days without any desire to find out what's happening to the characters, putting it in my jacket pocket to read on the bus and then not actually reading it, I know it's time to shelve the book. Bye-bye, Baby, bye-bye. 


Thursday, February 15, 2018

Your Pretty Face is Going to Hell: The Cover Art of Peter Caras

Peter Caras (b. 1941) is a long-time and well-respected illustrator and graphic designer whose paperback cover artwork dates back to the 1960s. Inspired by the great Rockwell and mentored by James Bama, it's cool to see their styles mingled in pulpy yet highly skilled art. Much, if not most, of Caras's output was in genres I have never followed: Westerns, spy thrillers, adventure yarns, historical novels, young adult fiction, modern romances, pulpy erotica, and superhero novelizations. Appreciate his attention to the realistic detail of tormented faces, menacing leers (almost Kubrickian!), to contrasting design, and the vivid use of light and shadow. Despite his prominence in other genres, there can be no doubt Caras is a master of the paperback horror cover.

Two fairly recognizable covers for paperbacks by one Duffy Stein, The Owlsfane Horror (Dell, Nov 1981) and Ghost Child (Dell, 1982). Word is these are disposable, mediocre novels, but I gotta have them on my shelf anyway.

(thanks to La Creeperie for this stepback image)

Effigies from 1980 was one of my favorite reads of 2016. How can you not love this cover and its stepback revealing the shocking evil that lurks behind an innocent visage. Virtually perfect.

Total '60s style for this 1967 Paperback Library Black Magic Library of Terror (some kind of series, unknown number of volumes, that I'm trying to track down).

I've heard goods things about Predators (1987), I mean Nelson DeMille, trusted name in horror. Below is a smattering of various '80s titles, including one TMHF classic, 1987's Finishing Touches from the terrific Tom Tessier.


Review of this paperback coming soon!

Now the following covers are ones I was unable to find precise credit as being by Caras; however I think you'll agree after having seen Caras's style that the odds are excellent these are by him. If anyone knows otherwise, let me know.


You can see more of Peter Caras's non-horror work here.
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