The Frankenstein Horror Series, 1972 - 1973

Beginning sometime in that impossibly long-ago year of 1972, Popular Library published the first volume in its paperback Frankenstein Horror Series, with the somewhat non-Frankensteinian title The Curse of Quintana Roo. Eight more slim volumes followed, featuring more primary-color artwork and scenes of vintage comic-book horror than you can shake a pitchfork at. This series predates the Dracula Horror Series, but where that series had one author - Mr. Robert Lory - the Frankenstein series has multiple, mostly nobodies, except one large somebody, HPL's ol' buddy Frank Belknap Long. All cover art is by comix artist Gray Morrow, except for one by the esteemed Jeffrey Catherine Jones - betcha can't guess which.

What's that late '80s Iggy song? "I ain't gonna be no squarehead!" Uh, too late lady, sorry.

Look out Jackie O! Some things might be worse than Texas.

Dare we think this night belongs to the Hounds of Tindalos?

Zombie ladies in diaphanous gowns? More please.

Ha ha ha, I love how the late '60s spy couple has been added in as an afterthought.

Get away from her Marty Feldman!

Haunting horror imagery, just spectacular. No snark here!

Is he pulling her head off or putting it back on?

You can buy these paperbacks separately at around $5 to $15 on eBay, Amazon, and everywhere in between. I haven't read the series actually, it's more of a Groovy Age of Horror kinda thing than what I'm personally into, but that's just, if this blog is any indication, me.

Like a Pigeon from Hell: The Horror Stories of Robert E. Howard

This week saw the 108th anniversary of the birth of the pulp king of sword and sorcery  and the creator of Conan the Barbarian, Robert E. Howard. You probably already know this, but along with Lovecraft and Clark Ashton Smith, he was a titan of the pulp era and his books have long been available in countless and now collectible paperback editions. Time was kind to the art of a man who committed suicide when he was 30 years old, unable to face a future without his beloved mother, who lie comatose and near death when he put a pistol to his temple and pulled the trigger. 

When it comes to Howard's fiction, I have been mostly unfamiliar with it, preferring the horror/dark fantasy tales from HPL and CAS. These two paperbacks - Cthulhu: The Mythos and Kindred Horrors (Baen Books, May 1987, cover by Steve Hickman) and Pigeons from Hell and Other Weird and Fantastic Adventures (Zebra Books, June 1976, cover by Jeffrey Catherine Jones) - feature mostly Howard's own brand of HPL-tinged horror/sword-and-sorcery/dark fantasy tales, all published in Weird Tales throughout the 1930s. You probably already knew this too, but there is some fantastic stuff here.

Sadly, both covers feature misleading - albeit spectacular - imagery: neither Cthulhu nor dinosaurs truly appear in the stories. They are however threaded with the fictional forbidden tomes, esoteric knowledge, and dark gods that are familiar to readers of horror; they're also purely Howard's own. His heroes aren't pasty scholars and recluses, no, they are men of muscle, bone, and sinew - which he won't often let you forget - while locales are often misty craggy lands from a deep and forgotten ancient age rather than the wilds of Arkham or the historic university environs of Providence. Howard even goes for the one-up on HPL when a character from "Pigeons from Hell" states, "Witchcraft always meant the old towns of New England, to me - but all this is more terrible." Zing!

I kinda skimmed through stories that contained vast passages about pure races, tribal honor, bravery, vengeance, that sort of thing (sword and sorcery - not my sort of thing), even when mixed with vague Lovecraftian darkness. Still, Howard's tales of grue work well and work often, and a few - "Pigeons from Hell," of course, "The Black Stone," "The Fires of Asshurbanipal" - I consider classics of their era. The famous and intriguingly titled "Pigeons from Hell" is a virtually perfect example of pulp horror. From its haunted house opening to its voodoo revenge turn all the way to its lurid, heart-palpitating climax, Howard never falters in his ability to propel a story forward (modern readers could probably do without the consistent use of the N-word, period-appropriate as it may be). I've read this tale a few times over the decades, read one comic book version, and recently saw its very well-done adaptation on the old "Thriller" show. Listen:

"A zuvembie is no longer human. It knows neither relatives nor friends. It is one with the people of the Black World. It commands the natural demons - owls, bats, snakes and werewolves, and can fetch darkness to blot out light... It dwells like a bat in a cave or a house... It can hypnotize the living by the sound of its voice, and when it slays a man, it can command his lifeless body until the flesh is cold. As long the blood flows, the corpse is its slave. Its pleasure lies in the slaughter of human beings."

Eclipse Books, 1988

It works like gangbusters, and if you haven't read "Pigeons," step away from your computer or smartphone or whatever and get to it! "The Black Stone" showcases Howard's main contribution to the Cthulhu mythos, the Unaussprechlichen Kulten, or Nameless Cults, by Friedrich Wilhelm von Junzt, an adventurer-scholar who of course discovers something he shouldn't have and is murdered - only after he finishes his book. This is the most overtly Lovecraftian story, with its academic narrator finally learning the horrors hinted at in a forbidden book are - gasp! - all too real. Howard whips himself into a frenzy of outlandish pulp prose  when he sets out to describe those "nameless rites" our old pal HPL was too squeamish to depict forthrightly. In a brooding forest beneath the moonlight, the narrator has found the titular object, but watches from afar:

...the worshipers, howling and foaming at the mouths, turned on each other with tooth and nail, rendering one another's garments and flesh in a blind passion of bestiality. The priest swept up an infant with a long arm, and shouting again that Name, whirled the wailing babe high in the air and dashed its brains out against the monolith, leaving a ghastly stain on the black surface. Cold with horror I saw him rip the tiny body open...

Ballantine 1979, Paul Lehr cover art 

I mean what! So, so good, really. The Ballantine paperback cover above captures the mood perfectly. "The Fire of Asshurbanipal" was also excellent, successfully mixing men's adventure in the exotic land of Arabia with mind-blasting cosmic horror. The back-story from Howard, about a green jewel, an ancient desert land of black stone, and a vengeful sorcerer, reads a bit like "The Shadow out of Time," and the two protagonists' entrance to this lost, deserted city evokes At the Mountains of Madness.They're looking for that fabled jewel, but they've been followed across the burning desert sands:

The shrieks had faded into a more horrific silence. Holding their breath, they heard suddenly a sound that froze the blood in their veins - the soft sliding of metal or stone in a groove. At the same time the hidden door began to open, and Steve caught a glimmer in the blackness that might have been the glitter of monstrous eyes. He closed his own; he dared not look upon whatever horror slunk from the hideous black well. He knew that there are strains the human brain cannot stand, and every primitive instinct in his soul cried out to him this thing was nightmare and lunacy.

Well, duh. Howard had a long obsession with obscure history, languages, and peoples, and enriched his pulp writing with it; "The People of the Dark," "The Children of the Night," "The Garden Fear," and "The Valley of the Worm" are the best examples of this proclivity. While not necessarily to my taste, I can see how young Weird Tales readers found their minds stimulated and expanded on such fare - which made Howard the success he was, and why he's still read today. Other tales like "Old Garfield's Heart," "The Thing on the Roof," and "Dig Me No Grave," are pure enjoyable gruesomeness with twist endings but retain a charm and readability for all that. Robert E. Howard's muscular prose, vivid action scenes, moody horrors, and ability to conjure in writing precisely what he imagined, can hijack your mind to a place in a past in which men are made of iron, honor is king, pigeons are from hell and dark and hungry gods demand nothing less than our very blood.

Devil's Playthings

Who can resist 'em?

Jeffrey Catherine Jones: The Paperback Covers

These stunning covers illustrations by the late Jeffrey Catherine Jones help confirm that 1960s and 1970s horror-fantasy paperbacks were a world unto themselves. Like comrade-in-ink Frank Frazetta, Jones reveled in the mythical past, but it was one perhaps darker, more Gothic, less heroic. Rather than hulking loincloth primitives and armor-clad villains, though, her covers here showcase a misty nighttime world of sorcerers and shadowy cults, of masters of occult powers and animal familiars, the hungry undead and their victims. My faves? Definitely The Vampire Women (Popular Library, 1970) and The Curse of the Undead (Fawcett Gold Medal, 1970). She died in 2011 after years of poor health. 

The Horror Paperback Covers of Zebra Books: What Happened?

Zebra Books used some ludicrous and cheesy art for most of their paperback originals they published in the 1980s and beyond, but the horror titles they put out in the 1970s had much more vintage-styled covers. Definitely some quality work for their reprints of pulp kings like Robert E. Howard, Frank Belknap Long, and Robert Bloch. Gaze upon the mighty art of Jeff Jones above, in the 1976 edition of Pigeons from Hell. Okay, sure, that's not even close to what goes on in Howard's seminal 1938 horror story, but how can you not be charmed at the evocative mystery of old-style dinosaurs cavorting in the surf?

Night Fear (1979) from Long boasts some kind of Elephant Man that I think is supposed to evoke the Cthulhu sculpture from Lovecraft. Art by Clyde Caldwell.

Also in '79, Zebra reprinted some of Bram Stoker's other works, The Lair of the White Worm (1911), Jewel of the Seven Stars (1903), and Dracula's Guest (1914). I'm digging 'em all!

But then as the decade turned, Zebra suddenly switched to the endless procession of dancing skeletons and wide-eyed innocents to sell their books, and a brand-new horror cliche was born. Most just look like Halloween decorations today, and have about as much atmosphere. Consider Wild Violets by Ruth Baker Field: the first cover is from 1980; the second, from '86.

See what they did there? Another example is Leslie Whitten's The Alchemist, published by Avon in 1974 with a pretty cool, well-painted cover that's part of a set with his Progeny of the Adder; 12 years later... ooh, a skeleton and a pumpkin! And Leslie is changed to "Les," because, of course, men won't read books by women... even though Leslie Whitten is a man.

I wonder though what the impetus was for this change: were readers actually getting less demanding? More likely, the horror paperback boom was happening so fast the publishers had to use gaudier, less atmospheric art, as well as those foil-stamped titles, to stand out from other books on the drugstore racks. The genre's covers moved from the otherworldly eeriness of Jeffrey Catherine Jones's art to the skeletal hijinks of Lisa Falkenstern...

Conjure Wife (1943) and Our Lady of Darkness (1977) by Fritz Leiber: Under Her Black Wings

Two good novels from classic fantasy writer Fritz Leiber: Conjure Wife and Our Lady of Darkness. The former is a tale of witchcraft set at a New England college university, while the latter explores the occult theory of Thibaud de Castries known as "megapolisomancy" (invented solely by Leiber himself in a Lovecraft-inspired bit of mythmaking) and posits the city of San Francisco itself as a haunted - and haunting - entity. It also weaves authors like Jack London and Clark Ashton Smith into its storyline, as well as the pulp fiction background of Leiber himself, and won the 1978 World Fantasy Award. Both novels feature modern men, thoughtful and literate, modern men of skepticism and rationality, who find that the dark superstitions of the past have a horrifying way of wending their way into the light of the contemporary world. Count me in!

I don't think either of these covers captures the feel of the books themselves: Conjure Wife is another example of an older book republished during the height of the Gothic romance fad (this edition is from '68, art by the great Jeffrey Catherine Jones). Its current edition has a pretty foxy Goth chick on its cover, reminiscent of the loverly Eva Green. Berkley's Our Lady of Darkness has an odd psychedelic tinge to it, dated even by 1977 standards; fortunately Amazon has it listed as being back in print this fall.

...sometimes it wasn't clear whether it was a real woman, or a goddess, or some sort of metaphorical entity that de Castries was talking about. "She is all merciless night animal," he would say... "She knows the cities' secrets and their secret weaknesses, their ponderous rhythms and dark songs. And she herself is secret as their shadows. She is my Queen of Night, Our Lady of Darkness."