Showing posts with label david mann. Show all posts
Showing posts with label david mann. Show all posts

Monday, February 7, 2011

A Perpetual Halloween: Charles L. Grant's Oxrun Station Paperback Covers

While not as well-known as Lovecraft's Arkham and Innsmouth or King's 'Salem's Lot and Castle Rock, the fictional town of Oxrun Station created by Charles L. Grant was the setting for his many tales of quiet horror and dark fantasy. Beginning in 1979, when The Hour of the Oxrun Dead (1977) was published in paperback, the various editions of the series show an interesting evolution in the marketing of horror fiction. The first three were put out in hardcover by Doubleday, but as ever, it's only the paperbacks I'm interested in.

At the top you can see the Popular Library edition with the requisite comparison to 'Salem's Lot, and with artwork that combines then-popular Gothic and occult imagery as well as the gender-free author attribution "C.L. Grant," thus (I'm assuming) appealing to male and female readers alike.

1987 Tor Books

Throughout the late 1980s, the early Oxrun books were republished in paperback by Tor Books, with cover art by David Mann. These covers are a perpetual Halloween of old-timey scares: pumpkin-orange title fonts, full moons, inky night skies, swirling mists, dead trees, imposing old houses, and graveyards...

The second novel in the series, The Sound of Midnight (1978), we get a young woman on fire - flames were popular post-Audrey Rose - and another reference to a bestselling King novel. Now Charles gets his first name on the cover!

1979 Popular Library

1987 Tor Books

The ever-present King blurb now on a Nancy Drew-ish cover for The Last Call of Mourning (1979). I like the Tor edition, with a woman looking - expectantly? - out into the night and the growing fog...

1980 Fawcett Popular Library

1988 Tor Books

The Grave (1981) is a reductionist horror title if I ever heard one! Note the name on the tombstone of the Tor edition.

1981 Popular Library
1988 Tor Books

Now I dig this '82 cover for The Bloodwind: demonic face hovering over a quaint little town, quite a common image for horror paperbacks. The Tor edition is kinda cool as well, hinting at children gone missing into a creepy... well, bloodwind, I guess. Way to keep it literal!

1982 Fawcett Popular Library

1989 Tor Books

From my research it seems that Nightmare Seasons (1982) was the first Oxrun title that Tor published, though it was the sixth in series; we can assume this was the beginning of that stylized cover art. This one is actually a collection of several novellas set in Oxrun Station. The next book was The Orchard (1986), also a collection of novellas, which I read last year and reviewed here.

1983 Tor Books

And we start to move out of the vintage horror era with the two last books in the series, Tor's Dialing the Wind (1989) and The Black Carousel (1994), the latter boasting of Grant's "X-Files" novelizations. Can anyone explain why his middle initial would be excised?


These final three titles seem like a treat: Grant haunted his fictional town with the Universal Monsters! These first came out in hardcover from long-time specialty genre publisher Donald M. Grant, and then in paperback by Berkley Books. None are without a King blurb, of course. The artwork is a little on the nose for my tastes, perhaps, and Dracula doesn't look scary at all (is there perhaps a copyright on Lugosi's image?). They are: The Soft Whisper of the Dead (1982/1987), The Dark Cry of the Moon (1986/1987) and The Long Night of the Grave (1986/1988). A perpetual Halloween indeed!