The Landlady by Constance Rauch (1975): Can't You Hear Her Knocking

You've probably never heard of The Landlady (Popular Library, June 1976), nor had I when I stumbled on its cover art during one of my regular Google journeys trying to find more forgotten horror fiction. The juxtaposition of wrinkled old hands deftly undressing a creepy little doll jumped out at me, as did the tag-line "terror turn-on," the essential references to The Exorcist and Rosemary's Baby, and publisher Popular Library has long been a trustworthy one for me during those pre-Stephen King days. I looked into author Constance Rauch's biography, learned this was the first of her three novels. I was hoping to discover a lost classic, and while The Landlady isn't that, it's easy to say that this is an unassuming chiller with some terrific unique creepiness.

At first the setup seems a little too Burnt Offerings (1973), in which a family rents a summer home while the owner resides in an upstairs room, a virtual recluse. But unlike that earlier novel, the landlady of the title is Mrs. Falconer, and she makes no bones about being seen and heard in her apartment. She pops in at unexpected and inopportune moments to disturb the Porters: young wife Jessica, her older husband Sam, and toddler daughter Patience. Falconer is eccentric, that's no surprise, with odd habits and, the Porters come to learn, an unsavory reputation with other citizens of this well-to-do town.

There's a murder, eerie night-time sounds coming from a disused stairway that connects the two apartments, a cop doing research into Falconer and her dead husband's doings, and well-staged parties with the Porters interesting friends and colleagues that get weird. Rauch is particularly good at detailing a business arrangement Sam sets up with a friend; the delicate pairing of money and friendship can go wrong in so many ways, and Rauch elicits some knowing moments of discomfort, embarrassment, and upward mobility that's not so upward. As in Rosemary's Baby, Rauch puts wife and mother Jessica in a position of precarious paranoia, then tightens the screws. Tiny Patience has mysterious fits that seem impossible to control, there's the horrific scene when Jessica searches Mrs. Falconer's apartment, and my goodness, that doll you see on the cover—! Yep, it turns up too but inside it is so much more repulsive:

The doll was made of aging, half-sticky, half-dry and corroded latex stretched over a spongy composition frame, its "skin" luridly jaundiced. It was, admittedly, a slightly naughty toy. Perhaps a novelty item sold by mail through the pages of some bygone stag magazine some 30 or 40 years earlier... The body was as obscene as the head was grotesque...

Futura UK paperback, 1977

I mean, ick, right? Anyway, this is 250 pages of prime mid-'70s setting, not deep or disturbing, with a few familiar notes of horror and squickiness, a pretty good pay-off, written by someone who has an ear for dialogue and class conflict. No earth-shattering discovery, not even a minor classic, but simply a refreshing read to take the edge off the heat of a summer afternoon. If you enjoyed the aforementioned Burnt Offerings, Crawlspace, Stepford Wives, and other quiet, slow-burning '70s horror novels, you really can't go wrong with The Landlady.

Why didn't I tell him how the day really went? 

Why didn't I tell him that I'm scared out of my wits... 

that this place is a nightmare... 

that I want to get the hell out of here!

Meet the New Blood, Same As the Old Blood

Theirs was a hideous secret. To keep it they needed new blood. Without it they would be lost. All of them. And so they set the trap.

The place was called Credence. A pleasant country town, set well away from, anywhere. For Clay and Holly Ryan, in search of a new home away from the city, it was a dream come true. But then the stranger came with the haunting memories of black rivers of violent death. And for Clay and Holly, Credence suddenly becomes a whirlwind of blood and terror as the hunt is on 

- FOR NEW BLOOD.

With His Serpent Eye of Obsidian

It's a Jungle Down There

Stephen King: The Futura UK Paperbacks

In the mid-1980s and early 1990s about half of Stephen King's books were published in England under the Futura imprint (the others were published by New English Library (home of the redoubtable Guy N. Smith's Crabs series!). The covers, most differing wildly from the American counterparts, ain't too shabby—except that one for The Dead Zone; that's the lamest ever. Oh, and I don't remember any bats in the moonlight in Different Seasons.

And the Dawn Don't Rescue Me

Vampire chronicler Anne Rice was born in New Orleans on this date in 1941. Above is a 1985 reprint of the original 1976 Interview with the Vampire (see earlier paperbacks, with stunning covers, here and here). Below are the later 1980s paperbacks, as she continued the tales of her undead brood and became a mega-bestselling author. I kinda like that they don't look like genre novels, featuring only big bold lettering.

These next three are the UK paperbacks, published by Futura throughout the '80s and early '90s.The cover for this reprint of Interview is the same art as the original 1977 edition.

 

I loved these books when I read them in the late 1980s. Rich, epic, decadent, thought-provoking and a whole lot of fun, I enjoyed them so much and recall them so fondly I'm rather reluctant to reread them today...

The author in 1979

The Face That Must Die by Ramsey Campbell (1979): I'm Determined and I'd Rather See You Dead

When it comes to horror titles, Ramsey Campbell's first two novels, 1976's The Doll Who Ate His Mother and 1979's The Face That Must Die, must be considered as some of the most provocative of their day; in their tasteless glories they shout like cheap tabloid headlines. Yet within the books readers will find an imagination that is fine and not crude; sensitive and not exploitative; authentic and not postured. Indeed, the introductory essay included with the 1985 Tor edition, "At the Back of My Mind: A Guided Tour," is Campbell's well-known account of his worsening relationship with his mother as she sank into dementia over many years. These days mainstream memoirs and fiction of life with crazy parents are a dime a dozen, but Campbell's piece has no distancing irony or comic effect. Harrowing and sad and enlightening, it is Campbell's explanation for ''why I write what I write," and readers can come to their own conclusions about how this influenced The Face That Must Die.

Campbell in 1980

Face is the story of the aptly-named Horridge, a nobody kind of fellow in a precisely-drawn Liverpool, whose growing paranoia is exacerbated by his obsession/revulsion with an overweight, effeminate older man who lives in his Liverpool neighborhood. After reading in the papers about a "man whose body was found in a Liverpool flat was a male prostitute" and studying the accompanying suspect police sketch, Horridge comes to realize "he had seen the killer three times now, in as many days. That was no coincidence. But what was he meant to do?" His conviction that random events are a secret code to him alone is unshakeable.

Horridge finds out the man's name is Roy Craig by searching through library records (and mildly creeping out library clerk Cathy Gardner, who with her long-haired boyfriend Peter actually lives in the same building as Craig), Horridge begins systematically stalking and harassing the man. Craig's homosexuality—Horridge is correct in his presumption—offends him to his core: "If he was a homosexual he was perverted enough for anything." Which of course means he will continue to kill, and must be stopped by any means necessary--actually he can be stopped by any means necessary, because Horridge is doing away with degenerates and doing society a favor.

Campbell does a solid job of making the reader feel uneasy. Everywhere, things seem off: conversations are snippy, irritated, impatient; graffiti stains walkways and alleys (Horridge keeps seeing the word "killer"); the wheezing buses are crowded and smoke-filled; twilight is always seeping into Horridge's apartment; his limp is painful and insistent; library customers are resentful, grumbling at the clerks wielding petty powers (in a scene Campbell admits is autobiographical); fog prevents everyone from seeing clearly. Liverpool is as much a character as Horridge or Cathy or Peter, and at times even seems conspire against Horridge; he sees the tower blocks, rundown flats, loud pubs, grimy gutters, grey skies, and bare concrete as one big institution, a prison ready for its cowed inmates. Everywhere the banal, the mundane, threaten to swallow the sane and insane alike; the suffocation is palpable.

Sometimes he thought the planners had faked those paths, to teach people to obey without questioning... the tunnel was treacherous with mud and litter; the walls were untidy webs of graffiti. All the overhead lights had been ripped out. He stumbled through, holding breath; the place smelled like an open sewer... A dread which he'd tried to suppress was creeping into his thoughts—that sometime, perhaps in fog, he would come home and be unable to distinguish his own flat.

Immersed in Horridge's psyche, the reader is also both fascinated and revolted by his thought processes as they cycle through mania and grandiosity, memories of a painful childhood, and his ever-present desire to clean up the filth (moral and literal) he sees growing everywhere around him. Every tiny detail, every sliver of dialogue, every simile, drips with an uneasy threat of everything about to fall apart, as if reality itself were trembling on the precipice of chaos. Campbell allows us a few views outside of Horridge's, but overall we feel as he does: threatened, maligned, powerless. Then he lashes out in anonymous—and unwittingly ironic—calls to Craig: "Just remember I'm never far away. You'd be surprised how close I am to you."

 1st UK paperback, Star Books Dec 1979

The novel also offers some insights into contemporary British life. Craig's backstory of his marriage breaking up is sad and all too common, I'm sure. His wife discovers his gay porn, is horrified, and her last words to him are, "I think I could have borne it if it been another woman." In his opening essay, Campbell talks about his non-use of illicit drugs, but he sure gets the details right describing the dregs of late '70s drug culture, the desultory nature of trying to score, the hangover of 1960s radical politics ("I bet he thought I'd have to be middle-class and polite. No chance, brother"), and the nagging suspicions that the Establishment is just waiting to pounce. Peter and Cathy are growing apart due to his continued use of marijuana and LSD; they're a counterculture couple suffering relationship ills of the bourgeois. They and Craig, along with bohemian artist Fanny who also lives in the building, will have their confrontations with Horridge, moments in which a razorblade flashes its brilliance in dingy rooms...

There is one scene I must point out. Horridge goes to the cinema to see a film, but the only title that resonates is the one that contains the word "horror" ("Horror films took you out of yourself—they weren't too close to the truth"). Check it out:

Was it supposed to be a musical? He'd been lured in under false pretenses. It began with a wedding, everyone breaking into song and dance. Then an engaged couple's car broke down: thunder, lightning, lashing rain, glimpses of an old dark house. Perhaps, after all—They were ushered to meet the mad scientist. Horridge gasped, appalled. The scientist's limp waved like snakes, his face moved blatantly. He was a homosexual.

This was a horror film, all right--far too horrible, and in the wrong way.

Yes: Horridge inadvertently attends a screening of The Rocky Horror Picture Show! One of the funniest and most telling—and most deserved—moments I've ever read in a horror novel (AFAIC all homophobes should have Tim Curry's Dr. Furter shoved in their faces and, yes, down their throats).

Scream/Press hardcover, Oct 1983, art by J.K. Potter

Campbell keeps the story moving quickly as Horridge's fears grow and grow. He's a bit of a walking textbook of serial killer tics and tactics, but it's not just serial killers who display these attributes. His hatred of homosexuality (his hatred of any sexuality: at one point late in the novel, Cathy is running after him, trips and falls, and Horridge hopes the breasts she flaunts have burst); his belief that society is degrading more and more; his hatred of foreigners and anyone different, gay or not; the shades of his disappointed parents hovering about him—is this an indictment of Thatcher-era England? All I know about English culture I learned from '70s punk rock, but this sounds about right. Campbell is also wise to draw a parallel between Peter and Horridge, who are both aware of how out of step they are with modern society and the paranoid fantasies this engenders in them.

Futura UK reprint, 1990

Readers who enjoy the experience of being thrust into the killer's mind will enjoy Face; no, it's no American Psycho or Exquisite Corpse, it's not nearly so deranged or explicit, but for its time it's a brutal expose. A more accurate comparison could be made to Thomas Tessier's Rapture; both books are able to make their antagonist's irrationality seem rational, which is where the horror sets in. Despite a meandering chapter here and there, The Face That Must Die is an essential read for psychological horror fans. Many times Campbell hits notes that only now are we beginning to hear and understand about the minds of Horridge and his like. When Horridge finds one of Fanny's paintings is of himself, he slashes it apart with his beloved razorblade (see the Tor edition's cover, thanks to Jill Bauman); somewhere inside he knows, but can never admit, that the face that must die is only his own.

Snakes... Why'd It Have to Be Snakes?

 

 

 

 

 

 

Creatures of the Night: The Universal Horrors of Charles L. Grant

Moonlight over a lonely town. Swirling fog. Whispering shadows. Footsteps in the forest. A voice from the darkness. A movement seen from the corner of your eye. A slowly spreading stain of red.

New Jersey-born writer and editor Charles L. Grant (1942–2006) championed these hallmark details of old-fashioned horror tales, even in spite of their simplicity, their overuse, indeed, their corniness, because he knew in the right hands such subtle details would build up to an overall mood of dis-ease and weirdness. Evoking fear of the unknown, not the graphic revelation of a psychopath with a gore-flecked axe or an unimaginable, insane Lovecraftian nightmare, is what a truly successful horror writer (or, for that matter, filmmaker) should do. And especially during the 1980s, when he published dozens of titles through the Tor Books horror line, Grant did precisely that.

Grant was a prolific, well-respected, and award-winning horror novelist, short story writer, lecturer, and editor throughout the late 1970s until his death in 2006. He was perhaps the most vocal progenitor of what came to be known as “quiet horror.” In cinematic terms, Grant had more in common with the horror film classics of Val Lewton and Roman Polanski than he did with the writings of Stephen King or Clive Barker: suggestion, suggestion, suggestion, that was Grant's motto.

Algernon Blackwood, Arthur Machen, Richard Aickman, and Shirley Jackson were forebears; Ramsey Campbell, T.E.D. Klein, T.M. Wright, and Dennis Etchison fellow travelers. Many of the writers that appeared in Grant’s long-running horror anthology series Shadows (1978—1991) also belonged to this sub-subgenre. These were tales, like Grant’s own, of subtle chills, crafted prose, and (sometimes overly) hushed climaxes that might leave readers looking for stronger stuff a bit perplexed. But when quiet horror worked (which was quite often) you felt a satisfactory bit of frisson knowing you were in the hands of a master teller of terror tales.

Shhhh... Lewton's The Seventh Victim (1943), w/ Kim Hunter

Like many horror writers of the ’70s and ’80s, Grant had grown up in the 1940s and ’50s and therefore was a great lover of the classic monster movies from Universal Studios, whose stars have become legend. The (then) lesser-known works of producer Val Lewton also made a huge impression on Grant, and in an 1990 interview with Stanley Wiater in the book Dark Dreamers, he expressed his admiration for Lewton’s style of light and dark, sound and shadow, with only mere hints of madness and violence... and all the more frightening for that.

In 1981 Grant spoke with specialty publisher Donald M. Grant (no relation), ruefully noting that the classic monsters like Dracula, the Mummy, and the Wolfman had become objects of fun and affection (and breakfast cereal) rather than the figures of terror they had been intended. As a lark, the two Grants decided to produce new novels featuring the iconic creatures, although still in a 19th century setting.

Original Donald M. Grant hardcover editions

All three take place in Grant’s own fictional Connecticut town of Oxrun Station—the setting for about a dozen of his novels and many of his short stories—these books “would be blatantly old-fashioned. No so-called new ground would be broken. No new insights. No new creatures,” according to Grant. Setting out to recreate the moonlit mood, graveyard ambience, and cinematic stylings of those old monster movies, Grant delivered three short (all around 150 pages) novels for those hardcore fans of black-and-white horror.

The first title, issued in hardcover in 1982, was The Soft Whisper of the Dead. In the late '80s they were republished in mass-market paperback editions from Berkley Books. Here you see the October 1987 reprint featuring a kinda-sorta Dracula (one presumes Universal wouldn’t allow the use of Lugosi’s image) in classic pose. In the intro Grant also expresses a fondness for Hammer horror, so I threw on a mix of James Bernard’s Dracula scores as I began reading (I often read with background music playing; soundtracks for films like Silence of the Lambs, Cat People, Sorcerer, The Thing, and Crash make for uber-creepy ambience).

Like lots of Hammer horrors, you get upper-crust polite society and regular folks and then the help, and does Count Brastov like the help! Pity the poor. Anyway this night creature wants Oxrun Station all to himself, along with the help of Goth gal-pal Saundra Chambers, who can get him invited into all the best parties. Lots of description of weather and damp stone and a black wolf prowling about, some bloody fang-action, couple drained bodies turning up, lots of Brastov’s speaking imperiously and a chilly climax make Soft Whisper more a novel of “classic terror” than the other way ’round.

The next volume followed only a month or two later. Although we see Chaney’s Wolf Man about to pounce on the cover of The Dark Cry of the Moon, the werewolf that appears in the novel is actually a white-furred creature of much greater viciousness than we remember from the 1944 movie. I’m not a great fan of werewolf fiction (I prefer something like Whitley Strieber’s wonderful Wolfen) because the appeal of them lies in seeing the transformation. The emerging snout and sprouting hair and teeth becoming fangs simply don’t have the same gasp-inducing awe in cold print, but Grant does a nice brief bit of attempting it:

A baying while the figure began to writhe without moving, began to shimmer without reflecting, began to transform itself from shadow black to a deadly flat white. The baying, the howling, a frenzied call of demonic triumph.

Last is The Long Dark Night of the Grave, and here we get the Mummy. Mummy fiction, huh, I dunno. The Mummy was never really all that scary, was he? Perhaps it’s his implacable sense of vengeance and not his speed that’s supposed to terrify; he won’t stop, not ever, like an undead Anton Chigurh, I suppose. There’s no reasoning, there’s nothing behind those shadowed sunken eye sockets (remember the ancient Egyptians took out the brain through the nasal cavity). This mummy goes after unscrupulous Oxrun Station fellows dealing in Egyptian artifacts, creeping up on them and then when they turn around he’s got ’em by the throat. Never saw it coming. Well, maybe a shadow and a scent of sawdust and spice...

Overall, these three novels are very light, very minor entries in Grant’s Oxrun Station series; maybe imagine scary 1940s flicks never made. I think it’s obvious he wrote them more to satisfy his own nostalgia than anything else, a vanity project. His other fiction is more astute and focuses on modern fears than these simple, sincere, cobwebby tales. They certainly won’t appeal to readers who like their horror cheap and nasty; I felt they were quieter even than "quiet horror," and there's lots of meandering in plot, dialogue, and action. Grant should have concentrated more on the beloved Universal monsters rather than the relationships between people you can hardly keep track of. The scattered moments of goosebumps are rare, all too few and far between.

Those looking for Grant in top form would be best served by his Shadows anthologies and his own short fiction—collected in A Glow of Candles and Tales from the Nightside (both 1981). While nicely written and offering some mild, Halloween-y spookiness and old-timey charm, Charles L. Grant’s Universal novels are probably more collectible for their illustrated covers (artist unknown, alas) than for what’s between them.

(This post originally appeared in slightly altered form as part of "The Summer of Sleaze" on the Tor.com website)