Lovers Living, Lovers Dead by Richard Lortz (1977): Go Rimbaud!

How I love when my low expectations are shattered by a horror novel. Nothing like that feeling of giddiness when a nondescript book rises above the slag heap of cliche and convention to offer surprising, even—especially?—perverse, bizarre chills and thrills. Published in hardcover in 1977, Lovers Living, Lovers Dead (Dell paperback, June 1979), by playwright/TV writer/novelist Richard Lortz, is a dated humdinger of a horror novel, replete with cringe-worthy sexual politics that seem positively Neanderthal today. However it still manages to fascinate with an ethereal female protagonist, her murky psychological depths, and the analytic attempts to plumb them. And oh, her put-upon husband! Won't someone please think of him? It's a good thing it's the '70s because he can talk freely with his wife's psychiatrist to get to the bottom of her mysterious ways.

Richard Lortz (1917–1980)

Our protagonist, Michael Kouris, is a hale-and-hearty comparative lit professor of late middle-age, an egotistical, masculine manly-man, married for seven years to the much younger Christine, who earlier had been one of his English students (more on that later). With their two children, little weirods Jamie and Rose, they've just moved into a many-roomed ramshackle home in a New England forest. But something's not right: in the unsettling scene which opens the novel, Christine displays a violent streak by shooting up a nest of starlings in one of the huge trees on their new property. Also: the children are unruly and worst of all, the Kourises have been celibate for almost the entirety of their marriage! This simply won't do.

All this conflict stems, Michael is certain, from Christine's vagabond childhood, thanks to her father, Marcus Damenian, a brilliant eccentric anthropologist who took her on his many adventures deep into the exotic, dangerous jungles of far, far away, where they lived with primitive tribal peoples. Father's been dead for years now but his memory lives on, up in the couple's attic, in a trunk belonging to Christine which she keeps forever locked...

Poor unfathomable Christine is depicted as a woman-child who charms everyone she meets, especially Michael's dowdy old academic colleagues and their wives ("Where is that delightful creature? I simply must see her!") and who plays pretend, acts theatrically, as if she's playing a joke on everyone. But Michael must have her, Lortz tell us, and marries her after knowing her four days, the man must possess his bride, he will not be denied this elusive creature! The May-December romance seems so, so incredibly dated today, as does the domestic abuse portrayed as a lovers' game of passion and teasing ("Go on, hit me!") but with no clear line of consent (the old adage "better to ask for forgiveness than permission" seems to be employed). Even the cops are called, and one of them smiles "knowingly" as he leaves. It's a bit of a groaner.

Other dated groaners: that sexual relationships between older professors and their students as a given; the comparison of a wife to a child as a compliment; Michael and Christine's therapist talk together about Christine's sessions; drawing a link, perhaps tenuous, between the idea of feral children and autistic children. Christine also functions as a proto manic pixie dream girl, which in its day was not nearly as noted as it is now: the young woman's lack of convention and self-consciousness, her quirkiness and spontaneity, her almost-literally animalistic nature, are a balm to grown-up uptight Michael, helping him get in touch with a less rigid masculine persona.

But her intermittent fugue states and hallucinations (of a chauffeur no less!) lead to regression therapy with MDMA, administered by a psychiatrist, Dr. Ellen Ellenbogen (yes that's right), which becomes an entertaining mishmash of Freud and Jung as Christine mentally travels back to her unusual, to say the least, upbringing. Michael eventually allows the doctor access to his psyche as well, but it's all about getting Christine to explain the source her paternal obsession... and why can't this wife lay her husband once in awhile?!

1977 Putnam hardcover

Lortz's style might take some getting used to; the first few pages are shaky, while the opening chapter is a grotesque scene of obscure motivation in Christine's violence against starlings. The fussy, digressive manner can cause the reader to get lost in a tangle of brief asides, rife with sensual imagery which evokes classical Romantic poetry, high-minded yet earthy, somewhat pretentious yet not off-putting (for this reader anyway). Epigrams courtesy of iconic 19th-century teenage rebel-poet Rimbaud, perhaps a nod to Christine's wild, untamed manner: He entertained himself with the torture of rare aimals. He set palaces flame. He rushed into crowds and slaughtered all who were near him. Yet throngs, gilded roofs, beautiful animals remained. 

Overall however Lortz seems to be having a weird sort of fun with his outrageous (and truly shocking, even offensive to many probably) conceit, threading the narrative with unconventional sexual mores, anthropological, mythological, and psychological musings, all delivered in an allusive prose that maintains an intellectual distance from the perverse proceedings.

Conversion is an unconscious incubation (of knowledge forgotten or slowly acquired and synthesized) that enters consciousness with something like a burst.

So with Christine: not conversion exactly, but what she had previously understood to be être vu: a flooding up of subliminal knowledge whose sum is more than its parts... left her chilled from spinal column to surface skin...

 Ooh, kinky!

1991 reprint

My review is only scratching the surface of the book's transgressive qualities. Despite being only nominally a horror novel—it's creepy and weird, there are some suspenseful chills, a few violent acts, and the shock of that ultimate discovery—I pretty much loved every minute of Lovers Living, Lovers Dead (now that I think about it, it was the hauntingly romantic title that originally piqued my interest). I dug how Lortz totally pulls off his nutso surprise, it's pure delight for thrill seekers like me. Like two other TMHF '70s favorites, Incubus and Gwen, In Green, Lortz's work is a pure product of its era. An uncomfortable echo of our sexual past, warts and all, highlighting scenarios we'd never countenance today, I can recommend this novel to those readers who enjoy such inappropriate dalliances. Cock an eyebrow at the shenanigans delivered with a straight face, laugh ironically from the comfortable vantage point of 40 years' distance, and wait to be amazed at what Michael eventually finds in Christine's locked box.

With a croak of loathing, he dropped it back into the trunk and slammed the lid, collapsing over it, his head and stomach pounding in waves of vertigo and nausea.

The Tribe by Bari Wood (1981): Ghetto Defendant

I'll be honest: Bari Woods's books are ones I've seen in used bookstores for decades—decades I tell you—and I have never been interested in them. I mean not ever. Titles like The Killing Gift, Amy Girl, Doll's Eyes, and even Twins, the basis for Cronenberg's masterpiece Dead Ringers, did nothing to whet my horror appetite. Actually I'm certain I wouldn't have really appreciated The Tribe (Signet Books, Nov 1981) when I was in my early 20s, World War II and Nazis, ugh I mean old news. It wasn't until I read Grady Hendrix's review a year or so ago that my interest was piqued. And what a delight it was to be so well-rewarded: The Tribe is a superb, thoughtful thriller about a series of gruesome murders over several years and a group of aging Holocaust survivors living in New York City.

Hardcover, Dutton 1981

A novel that uses one of history's ultimate horrors not as an exploitative stage already set, but as a window to peer into the evil that can live and thrive in even the kindest, most unassuming soul, The Tribe offers no groundbreaking advancement in the genre, nor is it a summation of it or anything so profound. Dare I even say it's horror? Stylistically it is more akin to The Exorcist or Silence of the Lambs (yet had no movie adaptation to launch it into the pop culture stratosphere): aimed squarely at that mainstream of general readers who've never heard of Lovecraft or Matheson or Bloch or Blackwood.

Wood (b. 1936)

Beginning with one of the strongest, most mysterious prologues I think I've ever read, it is a humane work, concerned with more than solely horrifying readers (although it absolutely does). And Wood, unlike many a genre author, writes like a true pro: she knows her characters, even minor ones, and imbues them with life, desire, and love, with a sense of duty and sacrifice, of overwhelming fear and hate and vengeance. The story's tempo reminded me now and again of a solid '70s film in its plot beats and character arcs, and in that sense The Tribe truly is of its time. And that's okay with me!

Oh that enigmatic prologue, it's a model of the form. American forces have liberated Polish death camp Belzec, and found the German officers near death while the Jewish inmates are healthy and well-fed. Major Bianco must know what happened, and he interviews Speiser, the Nazi commandant at Belzec. What Speiser tells him is obscured to the reader, but its suggests madness and the unbelievable, a vast and dark horror that drives that Nazi commandant to insane laughter even as he contemplates his execution after Nuremberg. Dang it's so good.

Author's first novel, Signet 1977

New York, 1970s-ish. A young Jewish professor named Adam Levy is mugged and murdered on the Brooklyn streets while on his way to visit his father, the rabbi Jacob Levy. This sad yet prosaic event—the one thing everyone knows about New York is how easy it is to get murdered there—sets all in motion. Roger Hawkins is a black cop and Nam vet who has long known Adam, and been a dear friend and something of an adopted son to Jacob, and it is he who breaks the terrible news to Jacob and Adam's young and pregnant wife, Rachel. 

Here Wood deftly interweaves the origins of this friendship between a middle-aged Jewish man whose son is away at the University of Jerusalem and a young black cop with ambition: their days discussing life and literature in Levy's small bookshop along with Levy's fellow survivor, big, handsome Isaac Luria, who generally has no time for Hawkins. Jacob Levy is the kind of unassuming man in whom others instinctively place their trust, love, respect, and honor; Luria may be jealous of Hawkins, or maybe he just hates black people. Later Hawkins and Adam will become friends, but Hawkins realizes he was some sort of substitute... yet that doesn't diminish his deep affection for Levy.

Onyx, 1988

Almost immediately five teenagers are picked up for Adam's murder, gang members who hung out in a filthy clubhouse, but the police find no evidence connecting them to Adam's murder. Hawkins is angry and frustrated, doubts they'll do any kind of hard time if they even are convicted... but then all five boys are found again in that clubhouse, only this time... they are dead, smashed, broken, torn apart, in a graffitied room splashed with blood and, oddly, gray slime and mud smelling of a swamp. His gorge rose but he made himself look. Femoral blood leaked slowly, marrow oozed out of smashed bone on the muddy cement floor. Hawkins retched and dropped the flashlight...

Some of Hawkins's fellow officers mention the obvious but the impossible: that Levy, or Luria, or others of their "clan," are responsible for the murders ("If you say that again," Hawkins says to one cop, "I'll tear your fucking head off."), but surely that is ludicrous. When a neighbor witness comes forward, Hawkins is afraid he'll describe Levy... but he doesn't. Instead, he describes three maybe white men he saw outside that clubhouse, and a fourth: "Oh God," he moaned, "the fourth one was bigger..." and improbably denotes a man nine feet tall and three feet wide...

Art by Don Brautigam, perhaps?

But this is all only Part 1 of The Tribe. Part 2 is about Rachel Levy, Adam's widow. She has Adam's baby, names her Leah, and she and her father-in-law move away from the city and learn how to care for the baby together. Time passes, and Rachel wonders about Hawkins, who'd been so close to the Levys prior to Adam's death. She remains horror-struck by what happened to the boys who killed her husband, but slowly tries to regain her life. She meets and begins to date well-to-do Allan, and spends time with new neighbor Willa Garner, a black woman who moves nearby with her doctor husband and their children, who take to Leah. All of this is written in a warm, knowing, familiar style—who doesn't find descriptions of Jewish home life and especially food, and all those Yiddish words peppering conversation, cozy and comforting?—but there is more darkness to come.

It's at this point that the reader learns of the silent specter haunting the novel. One day Rachel looking for canning jars in her attic, she comes across an old schoolbook of Jewish folklore, flips through it, then alights on something that piques her memory: Rachel read the first few paragraphs. It wasn't a man, but a monster shaped like a man. It was called a golem and it was made of clay. Clay. That was the connection. A child's horror story that must've given her nightmares, and that came back to her when Ableson [one of the investigating officers] said clay. That simple. She went back to the beginning and read the whole story...

Signet 1978

The golem, we learn along with Rachel, is a giant, silent, mindless creature made from mud through a series of occult rituals, and controlled by its maker. It is built by a rabbi at the bequest of an angel, the legend goes, in 16th century Prague to defend the Jewish ghetto from marauding Gentiles. It is a hellish story about playing God, an amoral fable of the long conflict between Jews and the rest of the world, about protecting one's people at any cost, and it chills Rachel to the bone with its mind-bending implication: And forever after that, the Jews in Prague lived in peace...

But this is put to the back of Rachel's mind when one of the Garner teens is involved in a fatal fight between black and white kids at the local high school. One of the dead is Isaac Luria's oldest grandson. The funeral is a travesty, and Rachel squares off almost literally down in the dirt against Luria, who let it be known is a real cocksucking sonofabitch, even if his grandson was just killed. From here we get into the tensions between the black community and the Jewish one, an uncomfortable contemporary issue in New York.

In grieving anger, Luria goes to Jacob Levy and demands Levy "Prove to me you loved my grandson!" Wood takes us back to Levy's boyhood in Krakow, when his father takes him to a Cabalist mystic living in the forest ("Cabala isn't dumbheads looking at palms and calling up demons"). What can this boy do to protect his family from the encroaching Germans? And here it all begins. Wood draws the past and present together, showing how the friendship between Levy and Luria hides many horrors, not all of them human.

More death is coming, the worst of the worst, and Rachel and Hawkins meet up again and maybe are falling in love and there's a Jewish gangster and more about what happened in Belzec and of course the past is not a precursor but woven into every part of life. Rachel and Hawkins slowly try to investigate the murders, trying to convince people of the impossible, that it is not only possible but actual. Please God, Rachel thinks as the enormity of the task ahead and all they must do to face it, rises in her mind, don't let me die tomorrow. I won't give away any more of the plot, so let me move on to general insights.

Signet 1985

There's a lot of cop politics for a horror novel, and a lot of "romance" for one too, and the ancient Jewish mysticism of Cabala, some of which I vaguely remember from my college days when I studied religious history. There's a warm humanism, a pragmatism, threaded throughout the novel that is not often found in horror fiction, so much so that, as I stated above, it makes me doubt this is actually a "horror novel." Using the smooth narrative rhythm of popular bestselling fiction, Wood eschews generic bloody excesses, clumsy graphic sex, and pulpy sensibility. Woods depicts the monstrous in the midst of a carefully-denoted reality, perhaps the key to any successful work of make-believe. Mundane details, like a drawn curtain or a child's pig lamp, are noted again and again. Also particularly good is the payoff for that prologue, stick around for that set-piece of horror mayhem.

I will say The Tribe is a helluva book for folks who like good reads. The characterization shines: rich, warm, and enveloping, the crossing currents of life, the threads that break and the ties that bind, the budding of romance and the rising of hate, the caustic stain of fear and the slow poison of bigotry, the primitive desire for vengeance, for retaliation, for identity: Wood is adept at depicting all in a mature, satisfying manner, how traumatic history affects the present, and I think she handled with good faith the racism and prejudice that plague even minorities. And this is a book about minorities, religious, racial, sexual, intellectual, and mystical, all those who must defend themselves against the larger world. I mean, the book is called The Tribe, after all. 

By Bizarre Hands by Joe R. Lansdale (1989): Apocalypse Wow

If you were a horror fiction reader in the late 1980s and paid attention to such things, you knew that Joe R. Lansdale was being marketed, if that's not too strong a word, in a manner not seen since probably Clive Barker. Their respective publishers knew, even if they couldn't put their finger on it exactly, that these writers were incredibly special (this has nothing to do with the individual styles of Barker and Lansdale, which are markedly different, only that they both went further, deeper, harder, than other even very good writers of that age did) and deserved to be widely read. Check out the cover copy, front and back, of By Bizarre Hands (Avon Books, Sept 1991): "Renegade Nightmare King"?! "May Be Hazardous to Your Health"?! These types of superlatives reach higher than the usual boilerplate encomium, and worked to entice readers who wanted more than just the latest humdrum hack horror.

I was ecstatic to be reading Lansdale for the first time in various anthologies; like many readers I'd never read anything like him. Sure there was the Vonnegut and the Twain, the Mencken and the Joe Bob Briggs, the King and the Matheson and the Bradbury, here and there a whiff of Elmore Leonard and Harry Crews (I noted these last two much later as I had not read them on my first encounter with Lansdale). But still there was something original, tough and sure and daring that sang beneath those familiar notes... and I wanted more.

Around '90 or so I paid big bucks for a signed copy of Joe's short story collection, the 1989 hardcover edition from specialty publisher Mark V. Ziesing. Consisting of his earliest as well as his major stories, I devoured it, loved it, but sometime later, during a bleak broke span during my college years, I had to sell off a major chunk of my limited-edition horror collection, so it was bye-bye By Bizarre. Ah well. Then a month or so ago a TMHF pal emailed a link to this Avon paperback edition from 1991, adorned with the same illustration as the hardcover, thanks to usual suspect JK Potter; it was in good shape and at a fair price, who doesn't love that. Sold! So it's great to have By Bizarre Hands back on my shelves. Couldn't wait to revisit Lansdale's singular landscape of horror, black humor, science fiction, crime, and whatever the hell else he puts in.

Lansdale often succeeds at impossible tasks, with setups that would make lesser writers blanch (or not even realize what deep waters they were in), and pulls them off with a tough, vulgar, self-conscious but not arch energy. He may wink at you but it's not a cute wink of "Hey we both know this is ridiculous" but a wink of devilish glee, acrobatic mischief, "You can't believe I'm getting away with this, can you?!" Like a sort of Tarzan swinging through the jungle hoping a vine will appear in the nick of time, you can't fault him because it all kinda takes your breath away even when his moves are occasionally clumsy or crude. His confidence and his trust in his own instincts, talent, character sketches, and unique vision thrills the reader, makes the reader forgive those tacky lapses scattered about (as if Lansdale were afraid of upsetting social niceties in the first place). YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED!

Let's get to the goods, right from the opener. "Fish Night," hearkens back to Bradbury's love of dinosaurs and other creatures of our earth's past, but lacks any wide-eyed nostalgic innocence. Nostalgic for the ravenous extinct monstrous creatures which swam that prehistoric sea, perhaps... "Duck Hunt" satirizes male camaraderie and companionship, machismo and violence masquerading as such. The terrific title story was also published in the first Borderlands (1990); I wrote a little about it here. It's tasteless, sure, sometimes you think, "Jeez, Joe, I didn't need to know all that," but that's just Joe: he's gonna give it to you straight, maybe chase it with pickle juice and gasoline. Then light the match.

Ever read any of the Black Lizard pulp reprints from the 1980s? Not just Jim Thompson, but Dan J. Marlowe, David Goodis, Charles Willeford? Written with pulp muscle and refusal to sugar coat with any moralizing, Lansdale presents the criminal lifestyle as-is, no returns, no refunds. More than one tale here reminds me of those stark, sere, brutal crime novels, particularly "The Steel Valentine" and "The Pit." "I Tell You It's Love" revels in the romantic sadomasochism of James M. Cain. "Down By the Sea Near the Great Big Rock" is almost whimsical, a Gahan Wilson cartoon come to life. And three stories became three novels: "Boys Will Be Boys" part of The Nightrunners; "Hell Through a Windshield" is the beginnning of The Drive-In; "The Windstorm Passes" became The Magic Wagon. All are must-reads, both the stories here and the actual novels themselves.

One of the very best stories included is "Tight Little Stitches in a Dead Man's Back," the title alone which has bounced around in my head for 25 years even as the details faded, is a mean little masterpiece. It's funny, sad, disgusting, outrageous, insightful, empathetic, painful, humiliating, gory, unsettling, a near-effortless melange of SF and horror tropes. His weirdo SF is kinda mind-blowing. I'm not sure what apocalyptic authors Lansdale read—John Brunner? JG Ballard? John Wyndham?—but it's just powerhouse stuff nobody else could've written. Guilt, hatred, regret, only these human emotions survive the apocalypse, along with monstrous thorny vines and mutated animals. Behold the surreality:

The collection concludes with two of Joe's most infamous stories, late 1980s classics that made a splash then and still retain their power decades later: "Night They Missed the Horror Show" and "On the Far Side of the Cadillac Desert with Dead Folk." The former contains some of the ugliest, most blistering imagery and dialogue for its time, and isn't even really a "horror" story in the generic sense; it's the blackest of noir, maybe. Scorched earth policy here, a glimpse of unfettered human depravity and ignorance, outcast kin to the blistering art and exploitation of, say, Taxi Driver or Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer or James Ellroy's LA Quartet. If you haven't read "Night They Missed the Horror Show," I can't say you've missed a treat but you have missed a milestone in extreme fiction. The latter tale, from the zombie universe of George A. Romero (RIP!), is a long rambling road story of bounty hunters and the undead, plus lots of Bible talk (a staple of many a Lansdale), gunplay, and gore. You won't be scared but you will be impressed by its colorful energy.

New English Library, 1992

We all are aware of how unique voices can be forgotten, or become cult/fringe favorites, and never find a broader audience. Not so with Joe.  It's satisfying to know that today he has a bigger following than ever, with a movie and TV series adapted from his work (Cold in July and Hap & Leonard, respectively), and more and more award-winning novels. He is a friendly and supportive online presence as well. Reading Joe Lansdale is a free-for-all. For the adventurous, unsatisfied reader who demands more, more, more, I can say get your hands on By Bizarre Hands; it is an essential and uncompromising read.

RIP William Hjortsberg (1941-2017)

Sad news for lovers of good writers: author William Hjortsberg has died. His 1978 crime-horror novel Falling Angel is a favorite of mine, and should be one of yours as well.

 

 

 

 

Effigies by William K. Wells (1980): Don't Shake Me Lucifer

First things first: this might be the most soused horror novel I've ever read. Everybody's always topping off their drink, or sneaking one, or suggesting they grab one together and talk, or exclaiming they need one. They're drinking while they're frantic with worry and dread over the horrible things happening to their town of Holland County and to their family members. One guy's drinking during a seance! It's like Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf up in here. This is all okay with me. Effigies (Dell Books, Nov 1980) with its astounding Peter Caras cover of a leering visage and its lurid stepback, looks like just another creepy satanic kid paperback original of its day, with a no-name author (sorry, William K. Wells!) and lacking even the most rudimentary of relevant blurbs (what, no "Scarier than The Exorcist!", no "More shocking than The Other!", no "Makes Rosemary's Baby look like Love Story!"?). Seems like a real, well, loser. Yet I totes dug it and I did not expect to totes dig it.

The story proper: a young suburban mother, Nicole Bannister, a children's book author and illustrator, receives a terrible shock when she finds a package delivered to her contains a child's amputated finger. While police chief Frank Liscomb and medical examiner Thomas Blauvelt begin their investigation looking for a dead body, rumors start to fly in this upscale artist community that there's witchy satanic coven up in the woods, a spot called Job's Camp, occupied by young itinerants who a few years before would've been called hippies. Now they're seen—well, one of them, a crude, abusive yet charismatic 20-something named Freddie Loftus, is seen as a Charles Manson follower, perhaps eager to start his own murderous cult...

Lots of characters, get ready: Nicole's husband Jonathan, a commercial artist working in the (dangerous) city; his colleague Henry Dixon, a bitter drunk whose tipple is Boodles gin (crime readers may note this was Travis McGee's drink as well); Dixon's wife Estelle, who feels intellectually inferior in this environments of creatives, has been digging pseudoscience as of late and has discovered the Ouija board; Father Daniel Conant, a darkly handsome yet friendly, thoughtful young priest who wishes to help Nicole deal with her shock; Maria Braithwaite, a worldly European sophisticate who eyes Americans as shallow and impulsive; Judge Oliver Marquith, expansive and greedy, eager to purchase the plot of land called Job's Camp; and more. Also: little Leslie Bannister, the girl on the cover, whose invisible playmates bode unwell for her and well everyone; babysitter Susan Dixon, who straddles the line between dutiful daughter and drug and sex experimenter up in the woods; Ken Brady, maybe her boyfriend, maybe not, he hangs around too much with that creep Freddie Loftus.

Also, weird natural stuff is happening in town: the oppressive heat, the appearance of giant beetles and rattlesnakes, darkening skies, your general gloom and doom ("There seemed to be a giant pall over Holland County, like a tarpaulin covering an open grave"). To get Nicole's mind off all the unpleasantness, Jonathan throws her a birthday party and everybody's there having a high old time. One guy talks about the book he's gonna write, another declares Wertmuller can't compare to Herzog, another simply must get this recipe, and what about the "sex orgies" and LSD up in Job's Camp? Estelle and Maria and Father Conant talk about seances. Dixon gets drunk. Presents for Nicole are opened: lots of booze to ensure the party continues. And then one present in particular that no one recognizes and you can probably guess what's coming. 

Still reeling from that one present that turned a great party into a bummer one, the people who attended are encouraged by Estelle to attend a seance in which she will be the medium. Oh man you know that's not gonna turn out well. And it doesn't. Roaring tornado winds invade the house, lots of screaming in Latin, a spirit named Elvida makes contact ("I am young but old, I am alive but dead, I am flesh but not flesh") and not everyone makes it out alive. A grand set-piece of terrific mayhem, it was great sequence for this horror fan.

Meanwhile Freddie is holding his stoned gang up in the woods spellbound with his "sermons" on the illusory constructs of good and evil. Soon they're gonna have a special night where all boundaries are crossed (wait till you get a load of "the pentagon"!). This night of Rites ends in a climax of sacrifice, violent sex, and whatnot. But of course! It sends Blauvelt and Liscomb into more frantic efforts to find out who Freddie Loftus really is, and if he's behind the gruesome packages sent to Nicole Bannister. Wells takes his time drawing it all together—Effigies is not quite 500 pages—and there are ugly, guilty revelations a-plenty about Freddie, about Nicole, about Father Conant to come. The title too will become clear. Disgustingly, bizarrely, satanically so.

While it's not a great horror novel by any means, Effigies provided me with some solid hours of reading enjoyment, probably because I was expecting so little. I never once went "Oh come on!" or "Are you kidding me?" or rolled my eyes at a clunky descriptive phrase, an amateur analogy, or a wooden exclamation like one too often finds in horror paperbacks—Wells, whoever he is, is a serviceable writer. The death and degradation of the '60s revolutionary spirit is part of the novel's setup, and Wells does a nice background sketch of the era, how the '70s came on and slowly laid waste to those ideals. I did not get a sense of "You kids get off my lawn!" from the author's stance; seemed fairly judgment-free to me. Everybody felt this way after Manson, no? Maybe the author was saying something about how those lofty ideals, once corrupted by time and age and carnal pleasures and the lure of society at large, opened up a place for evil to slip in. But the Church also has its faultlines ripe for exploitation. What difference is there between Freddie Loftus and Father Conant? 

And while satanic/occult horror is one of my least favorite styles of horror, here, for me, it just seemed to work. Many sequences would have lent themselves well to a sleazy '70s or '80s horror flick, especially the seance(s) and the climax(es); shame nobody got on that. One problem is that the cast of characters remain somewhat vague; Wells could've filled in some more detailed specifics about each one, some apt note of behavior or thought or motivation that differentiated them. Sometimes I had trouble identifying some of the minor players. The ending satisfies but just maybe could've hit a note of horror I was imagining. But there's also lots of vintage goodies to enjoy, a mood of fatalism, plenty of post-Exorcist foulness (the passages from "The Journal of a Satanist" are metal as fuck) and even a couple scenes of straight-up hippie/demonic porno! Yee-ikes. Yep, Effigies kinda brings it. If you'll pardon the pun, I enjoyed the hell out of it.

As jaded Maria Braithwaite muses perceptively:

How little Americans know about spiritualism, mystery, the inexplicable, the unforeseen... Astrology, yoga, Buddhism, meditation, all become fads, something to "do"... to show off like a new possession. Psychiatry had been twisted, warped, torn asunder and completely reshaped into a meaningless mass of pseudoscience... And now the American masses had lately discovered the occult. As though it had never been there in the first place! 

Satan, Lucifer, Beelzebub were new characters in the American drama... 

What will these Americans do with their new fad?

Clive Barker's Shadows in Eden, ed. by Stephen Jones (1991): Of Minds to Madness, Flesh to Wounding

"I don't scare easily," said Clive Barker to a journalist in 1990, while promoting his then brand-new novel The Great and Secret Show. Barker continued: "But I'm terrified of two things. One is the general condition of being flesh and blood. Of minds to madness and flesh to wounding. The other is banality. My characters are constantly escaping from banality." That quote struck me back then and it still strikes me today. The great thing about Barker is that he's so in tune to his own wavelength; he knows just what and why he's writing and what he wants his readers to experience, and he's eager to talk about it too.


And that's just what Clive Barker's Shadows in Eden (Underwood-Miller, Oct 1991) gives us. An anthology of interviews, discussions, reviews, quotes, and endless illustrations, it's a beautifully produced hardcover. At 450+ pages, this is Barker unadulterated, talking at length about his art, his influences, and anything else he might want to expound upon. Shadows covers the gamut of his early career: his plays (and minor forays into stage acting), stories, novels, movies, and comics. I can hardly overstate its importance for the Barker fan. I bought this lovely title from the specialty-press Underwood-Miller as soon as it was published, and have happily revisited it for 25 years.

"I was very aware that if I was going to rise I was going to have to be a proselytizer for my work. I'm aware that many writers are actively reluctant to do that. They don't like to do public readings, they don't like to do television and so on... I have, no pun intended, something of the carnival barker in me."

Disturbingly erotic yet humorous front/endpiece art by Stephen Player.

Shadows in Eden is littered with Barker's sketches in the margins and rough drafts of paintings, some representative of characters and scenes from his fiction, others simply unlimbered escapees from his fevered brain. Some years ago I was waited on by a bartender who had a tattoo of one of these sketches and I said as she served me my beer, "Hey, that's a Clive Barker!" She told me I was literally the only person who'd ever recognized it.

Who doesn't love seeing their favorite writer's handwritten manuscripts?! Critical essays are also included, exposing the metaphors and subtleties—and yes, when necessary, the weaknesses—of Barker's literary output. Alas, Shadows doesn't include anything about Barker's magnum opus Imajica, since that novel was published pretty much concurrently.

Creepy art—Brother Frank?—and Ramsey Campbell's original introduction to the first editions of the Books of Blood. I'm still not sure what a Balaclava is and now I don't even want to find out, I enjoy the tantalizing mystery of it.

Of course: the first time I ever heard the word "meme" and learned what it was was reading this conversation between Barker and Neil Gaiman. They talk comics and how, in the late '80s and early '90s, they were rather like twins, figuratively and literally. And literarily. (Gaiman doesn't get the definition of meme exactly right, but ah well, the point is made.)

Movies: Hellraiser and more are featured. Nightbreed was going into production as Shadows of Eden was being put together, so it was cool to see some behind-the-scenes goodies. Here Barker's with illustrator icon Ralph McQuarrie. And then there's some stuff on, uh, Rawhead Rex.

The great Lisa Tuttle, who'd been featured with Barker in Night Visions III, contributes this wonderful piece in which she and Clive discuss Cabal and all manner of horror and art. "Whenever Clive and I have met to discuss horror, writing, fantasy and similar topics—whether on a public platform, or in private—I've always enjoyed it. More than enjoyed it: found it exhilarating. There's an intellectual rapport, so that even though we don't agree about everything, we're on the same wavelengths, shortcuts can be taken, intuitive leaps made; we spark responses in each other. I find what he has to say invariably interesting, and often illuminating, not only about his work, but about my own, as well as about art and life in general."

A treat from the Barker scrapbook! My God I can't imagine a bigger treat than sharing a bottle with Barker and discussing Books of Blood. Except maybe sharing a bottle with Barker and King and discussing Books of Blood (see below).

You'll recognize lots of the journalists and writers included: J.G. Ballard, Douglas E. Winter, Dennis Etchison, Kim Newman, Philip Nutman, Stanley Wiater, and oh yeah good ol' Steve King, whose piece "You Are Here Because You Want the Real Thing" opens Shadows. He recalls the first time he heard the name "Clive Barker" (New Haven World Fantasy Convention 1983, "drunk, drunk" as he puts it) and mused, since there was so much talk about him being a real game-changer, on the famous quote about Bruce Springsteen back in the mid-1970s, "I have seen the future of rock'n'roll, and his name is Bruce Springsteen." (King—drunk, drunk—misremembers and misattributes the quote, according it to Rolling Stone mag founder Jan Wenner. Not so but ah well, the point is made.) Of Barker King says: "And, oh my God, can the man write. No matter how gruesome the material, you are witched into the story, hooked, and then propelled onward."

My goodness what a perfect image for Barker's work. Jesus wept.

H.P. Lovecraft Born This Day in 1890