Just a Kiss Away

Very early '90s sex-ay vampire stuff, post Rice, never read any, dig the covers, kinda cool.

Pick a Name, Any Name

Born on this date in 1944, Campbell Armstrong was a Scottish author who died in 2013 and wrote many thriller/horror novels under a handful of pseudonyms. These paperback covers from publishers in the US and the UK are nicely indicative of that '80s era...

 

 

 

 

 

The Bog by Michael Talbot (1986): Lost in a Roman Wilderness of Pain

Couple weeks ago on the Reddit horrorlit page someone asked for recommendations in "archaeological horror." I don't know if that's an actual sub-subgenre but it was nicely coincidental as I'd just begun reading The Bog (Jove paperback, July 1987), the second horror novel from the late Michael Talbot. I replied to the OP and I sure hope whoever it was gets around to reading this one because it's pretty much what they asked for: "archeological finds open for an unsuspected horror." Ancient evils indeed are unleashed when two unsuspecting American archaeologists, working from Oxford University, unearth "bog bodies" in West England's Hovern Bog (bog bodies are mummified human corpses, preserved for even thousands of years, that are a unique and immediate window into the past). This ancient evil hearkens back to the Roman occupation, and even to humanity's earliest civilizations, when our imaginations were in thrall to sorcerers and demons, pagan rites and sacrifice. Cool!

Above you can read the back cover copy, as solid a set-up any reader could want. Throw in an imperious, mysterious Marquis who owns a vast estate which encompasses the bog and therefore whatever's found in it, plus his super-hot companion Julia who makes our protagonist, the American archaeologist Macauley, weak in the knees. Macauley and his grad student Hollister have found two bog bodies, male and female, which they date from the Roman Britain era, well preserved but bearing unseemly wounds: the woman was a suicide, a knife buried in her stomach by her own hand; the man has animal bite marks that bear no resemblance to any known bog wildlife. Macauley must penetrate the mystery of those bog bodies and what their deaths imply...

 2015 trade pb reprint by Valancourt Books

Complications ensue: townsfolk of Fenchurch St. Jude warn Macauley against messing with the bog (in the village inn no less, evoking memories of the Hammer Horror extras who tried in vain to stop folks heading up to Dracula's castle), then some of them end up dead. The Marquis hints he has mystical magical powers, as does hottie Julia, and Macauley, so thirsty for esoteric knowledge, is tempted by them both. Of course later Macauley's wife, teen daughter and young son are threatened, and he must balance his academic ambitions against his love for his family—and whatever immortal ravenous thing that stalks the Hovern Bog.

Stepback art by Gary Ruddell, best known for his magnificent Hyperion covers

Setting a horror novel in a dangerous, creepy locale like a bog was pretty ingenious; I mean it could almost write itself, right? Talbot does a decent job of evoking atmosphere and shoe-horning in some nuts and bolts about archaeological technique and academic historical study. There are passages set in the past and one long, powerful sequence owes much to The House on the Borderland (1908). At times though Talbot underwites his intriguing storyline and characters should have had more emotional depth to bear what he puts them through. None of this gets in the way of the story and Talbot brings it all together with a real '80s-style climax. While The Bog may not have the epic, decadent, and sure-handed feel of the author's debut, 1982's The Delicate Dependency, it's still a fun, albeit uneven, '80s horror novel.

Michael Talbot (1953 - 1992)

Miming After Midnight

Clowns after midnight? Pshaw. Mimes are the true masters of silent midnight terror. Take a look at one of the best covers I've discovered recently - an unheard of novel, The Mime (HB Jove, 1978), by an unknown writer, Tony Profumo. And dig that tagline - Was she possessed by Eros - or by Satan? Spectacular!

Dean Koontz Born Today, 1945

Dean R. Koontz wrote dozens of genre paperbacks throughout the 1970s and early 1980s before he became the eternal bestseller king he's been now for over 25 years. Me, I haven't read a book of his since the first Bush Administration, and even then I quickly tired of his formula after just three novels. In fact, one of his books, Midnight (1989), has what I consider one of the worst endings I've ever read in a book written by an adult man writing for adult readers: the protagonist, after defeating some sort of science-gone-wrong evil, barges into his estranged teenage son's bedroom and proceeds to smash all his heavy metal records (revised to CDs, in the paperback reprints in the ensuing years), then forces him into an embrace. All's well that ends well, amirite? Man, as a teenage Jersey metalhead, I was all like "Fuck. You." to Mr. Koontz. Still: he got some pretty decent vintage covers, even for his various pseudonyms - Demon Seed (Bantam 1973, art by Lou Feck) and The Flesh in the Furnace (1972) definitely the high points.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Greely's Cove by John Gideon (1991): Praying for the End of Your Wide-Awake Nightmare

Fairly shouting at you from the cover that it's AN EPIC MASTERPIECE OF MODERN HORROR!, this 1991 paperback cover is generic to the point of meaninglessness: spooky castle in the mist framed by a full moon and surrounded by dark waters, its tagline boasting "It's the place where your worst nightmares come true" which could be said about any place in a work of horror fiction, and author John Gideon has no genre identity whatsoever (turns out it's the pseudonym of an Oregon politico named Lonn Hoklin, the name this novel's copyright is under). Greely's Cove was published at the outskirts of my "vintage horror fiction" dateline, and is definitely the kind of overly familiar tale that novels in the Dell/Abyss line were making obsolete. Still, I decided to take a chance since it has a bunch of rave reviews on Amazon. Maybe an overlooked classic? Er, no.

The small, foggy Washington town in Puget Sound is beset by evil and its everyday American citizens have been disappearing for months, leaving no trace behind. It's up to a regular cast of characters, some noble, some embittered, some doomed, to do battle against an ancient enemy whose evil knows no bounds...

I don't mean to sound too harsh or snarky; Greely's Cove is an agreeable and at times nicely grotesque horror novel, particularly in its climax. Its faults lie in the usual areas: there are far too many King and Straub touches, and Gideon's prose, while quite serviceable, falters under the weight of horror that he's trying to conjure up. Dialogue is often expositionary and wordy; an amateur's inexperience is all too obvious. I skimmed lots of pages after awhile, but fortunately got more into the story as the end neared, because the climactic battles and revelations were kinda epic. But only kinda.

However, I loved the modus operandi of the novel's villain - the Giver of Dreams: he forces the missing people to "live" the vast horrors of humanity's past, unwilling victims trapped in an all-too-real nightmare world. I wish Gideon had expanded on this idea as I found it truly horrific - can you imagine waking up to find you're a serial killer, a Nazi, a Mongol army's whore, a demonic child torturing its mother? And even enjoying it? Ick. I know this sounds terrible but... more please. A more powerful writer could have really taken this concept all the way, rubbed the reader's face in it, got in there deep and true. Oh well. One character really stood out too: a sad-sack boozehound named Mitch Nistler, a mortuary attendant driven to unholy extremes of lust and desire. And you know what that means!

PS. Finally I've figured out the font on the edition at top; it's ITC Benguiat. Designed in 1977, it was used on all kinds of paperbacks throughout the '70s and '80s, and has always been a favorite of mine.