Feast by Graham Masterton (1988): Stay Hungry

Published as a Pinnacle paperback original in 1988 with some fanfuckingtastic cover/stepback art by comic book artist Bob Larkin, Feast is today one of the more sought-after books of its era, usually going for close to $100, alas. Graham Masterton, an author who churned out—who still churns out!—reliably gruesome and fast-paced horror novels, presents a tale about a cult of enormous proportions, and a man and his teenage son who become mixed up in it. I was able to find a copy online four or five years ago for only a few dollars—diligence and patience is the key in collecting these vintage horror paperbacks—in very good condition. It's a sturdy one too, the spine held up and didn't crack while I read it. O huzzah!

Charlie and Martin are father and teen son and not, as their names would suggest, two late-middle-aged men, eating in a palate-displeasing restaurant when the novel begins. Charlie, the father, is a 40-year-old divorced restaurant reviewer for a traveling salesman guidebook, and let me tell you, Masterton really gets his digs in when it comes to subpar cookery and presentation; I think it's personal. Martin, 15, is along for the roadtrip, but he's been living with his mother and estranged from Charlie, so said roadtrip has not been a roaring success. It's about to get worse, though, a whole lot worse than just a gloppy sauce on dried-out schnitzel.

 All my friends are gonna be there too

While dining in The Iron Kettle, a dire New England restaurant with dismal food, their waitress casually mentions a rival spot called Le Reposoir. But Kettle proprietress Mrs. Foss  takes much offense—"Don't you even whisper that name! Don't even breathe it!" Le Reposoir is actually the headquarters of a religious/mystical organization known as The Célèstines, or The Heavenly People. It's "a secret eating society," Charlie is told, made up of folks who eat what "they're not supposed to." Uh-oh. And they don't let in just anybody.

Run by our villains, the refined M. and Mme. Musette, this "dinner club" is in a Gothic-y old house out of an Edward Gorey illustration, a place spoken of with distaste and barely-disguised fear. In this town of Allen's Corner, teens have been going missing, and while people suspect the Musettes and their various hangers-on and acolytes having something to do with it, there are no hard facts for the police to investigate.

Intrigued, fascinated despite himself (and in a fit of pique because he may not be allowed in), Charlie and Martin find this disreputable restaurant and are promptly rebuffed at the gated entrance by M. Musette himself—who already knows who Charlie is: "We are a very exclusive society, and I am afraid that the presence of a restaurant reviewer would not by our membership with any particular warmth." Father and son go back to their hotel. After a desultory meal alone in the dining room, Charlie finds himself in the dimly-lit hotel lounge being chatted up by a woman named Velma, who is exactly the kind of woman you expect to find in dimly-lit hotel lounges:

She sat down and crossed her legs. Her shiny black dress rode high on her thighs. He recognized her scent: Calvin Klein's "Obsession." She blew smoke over him but he wasn't sure he particularly minded. The top three buttons of her blouse were unfastened and Charlie could see a very deep cleavage indeed. White breasts with a single beckoning mole between them.

After a night of torrid porno foreshadowing action with Velma—recall that Masterton wrote popular paperback sex guides in the 1970s!—Charlie returns to his room and finds Martin... gone. And no one he enlists to help him, neither desk clerk nor manager, neither maitre d' nor waiter, have any memory of seeing a teenage boy with Charlie. Two useless deputies arrive and one tells him that perhaps his son was "only riding along with you inside of your mind." Being a restaurant critic is exhausting work, maybe you overtaxed your brain and imagined your son with you, sure, it happens! Charlie suspects that he knows someplace where there'll be answers... and heads back to Le Reposoir.

Storming into the building, Charlie learns much: not just about his son, but about the believers themselves. As the beautiful yet near-fingerless Mme. Musette explains, in the most rational of tones, how the Célèstines came to believe that true communion with God could only be consummated by the eating of human flesh and the drinking of human blood... one's own, and others' freely given. Dig:

"Did not Jesus say 'Take, eat, this is My body.' And did he not say 'Drink, for this is the blood of My covenant.' The whole essence of Christianity is concerned with the sharing of flesh and blood. Not murderously, of course, but voluntarily—the devoted giving of one's body for the greater glory of all..."

 

That's right: people are eating themselves to get closer to God! In a twist everyone saw coming, Charles finds Martin holed up in the Célèstine compound and wants nothing more than to self-sacrifice himself and become one of the auto-cannibals. Even more disturbing, they are convinced the Second Coming is at hand, and Martin is an essential component to bringing it about. Convinced he's been brainwashed or worse, Charlie is hellbent on getting his estranged son out of the clutches of these crazies. He even begins to blame himself, surmising that these fanatics have appeal for young people because their parents' way of life holds no appeal... "I mean, what have we given our children that has any spiritual value whatsoever?" Masterton is trading on the '70s phenomenon of Manson, Jesus freaks, and teenage runaways, perhaps a bit of stale sociology by the late '80s when kids were besotted with MTV and home video games.

To get Martin out, Charlie enlists the help of Robyn Harris, a smart, capable, oh yes and beautiful, hot-to-trot local reporter. Events conspire, gruesome and graphic, that put the two on an escape route out of Allen's Corners, which includes a delightful reference to an Elliott Gould movie. Although the two lovebirds get in some quality banging while on the run and get to take a leisurely walk around lovely New Orleans, ground zero for the Célèstines, Charlie may have to commit the ultimate sacrifice himself to save his beloved son.

Writing with more control and restraint than one would think in a book about a cannibal cult, Masterton's traditional over-the-top approach has been corralled into a sleeker format. I've read some reviews and comments on Feast about it being "bonkers" and "outrageous" but I did not find it so; scenes of ritual self-destruction and consumption are depicted with clean, austere, I guess you'd say a spiritual precision. I was reminded of the films Dead Ringers and, especially, Martyrs:

A young naked girl was... sawing through her own arm at the elbow. Her eyes were fixed and wild-looking. Her teeth were clenched on a rubber wedge to prevent her from biting her tongue. She had cut through the skin and muscle of her forearm with a surgical scalpel, and now she was rasping her way through the bones, radius, and ulna—bone dust mushing white into her bright leaking blood.

Sphere UK paperback, Aug 1989

Masterton is as always more than adept at keeping his story and characters trucking right along, always introducing a new threat or character or situation at the right moment—he's a pulp pro, and you'll enjoy the various skirmishes, confrontations, and well-described American settings (yet American characters still speak in British). But he never tries to scare you or present you with an eerie chill; all the "horror" here is (mostly) limited to scenes of cannibalism, or more accurately, self-cannibalism. What's more, this is a novel featuring skeletons on its cover and cannibalism inside, but is not exactly, I feel, a horror novel. Hear me out. 

Thriller from Tor looks almost like a horror paperback

Feast reads more like a paranoid suspense thriller (a genre in which he's written many novels) about a religious cult that's taken the Eucharist to its literal end. There is an ostensible kidnapping, fugitives on the run, a worldwide conspiracy angle competently executed but that's about all: Masterton's blocky explanations, his usual awkward dialogue, and exposition without any sense of humor or irony, actually undermine his setup, clever though it is. I wanted, like one of the cult acolytes, more.

Ira Levin would've used this scenario as comment on, say, faddish food trends, or cult-like psychologies, or the young generation's desire to escape their parents' hypocrisies and failures... but would have given us some real creeps and scares included in the recipe. And who can forget The Happy Man, the Eric Higgs novel that is surely the apex of '80s cannibal horror fiction that understands the bones beneath this flesh.

German paperback, 1988

If Masterton had acknowledged the absurdity of his cult creation I think the fear quotient would've been great: what's scarier than something ridiculous that's dangerous (there's a psycho "dwarf" stomping around who hearkens back to Masterton's ludicrously horrific monstrosities in minor form)? And what about the ultimate irony (a delicious irony, one could even say), a restaurant getting back at a food critic by kidnapping his son and getting him to believe that cannibalizing himself is the ultimate act of achieving godhood?! Masterton moves so fast, as is his M.O., that he doesn't let himself ponder this concept.

I wish he had engaged with the satire/parody of religion, Christianity, and doomsday cults that seems to suggest itself from the start. Unfortunately, for this reader, he leaves all that untouched, which gives the book a half-baked feeling in its scenes about the beliefs and behaviors of the cult. Masterton plays it straight, almost too straight, po-faced and literal. The twist at the end comes from a misreading of Célèstines scripture, something Charlie alone figures out, but Masterton implies no larger irony in that. Which is fine, I guess, because everything still works as it is. The climax is fiery, explosive, satisfying... but there is of course more to come after. I'm not sure how much I was into that.

Severn House UK hardcover, 1988

Oh, one biblographic fact that may help in your search for this work: Feast is the American title; in the UK it's known as Ritual, a distinction I feel is not much of a difference. I myself prefer this glorious Feast edition, not least because of that Larkin cover art and the presence of ITC Benguiat typeface, the premier horror typeface of the '80s. Either way, it might not be the tastiest Masterton treat you'll ever eat, but if you can find an inexpensive copy, dig right in.

Wormwood by Poppy Z. Brite (1993): Being Nothingness

Horror's purview is one of good versus evil, obviously, but that's one battle which doesn't interest me much in fiction; I do not think art has to be didactic or proselytize to be effective. In Poppy Z. Brite's first stories, collected in Wormwood, there is no real sense of good or evil, just the aesthete's pose of worldliness and boredom. She was concerned not with morality but with sensuality and brought a sort of fin de siecle decadence to the genre just as its paperback popularity seemed to be fizzling out. This approach was something horror mostly lacked in the era, concerned as it was with middle American families, or children and teenagers.

A teenager herself when her stories were being published in The Horror Show magazine in the mid 1980s, Brite's characters were the misfit kids, part of subcultural movements that I was familiar with and sympathetic to—punk and goth and whatever the mixture of the two beget. They hung out in filthy, ill-lit clubs, wore black rags and had messy hair and crashed in abandoned houses and churches, sleeping on stained mattresses and consorting intimately with a variety of partners, usually all in a New Orleans of perfume and rot. Certainly to an audience used to the familiar comforts of Koontz, King, or Saul this wasn't going to go over well at all, but it didn't need to; Brite's first novel, the highly anticipated Lost Souls (1992), was part of Dell's line of innovative and edgy horror novels not geared towards a mainstream audience. Published in hardcover, Lost Souls made Brite the hot horror commodity of the early 1990s. And it didn't hurt that her two earliest champions were Dan Simmons (who wrote the introduction for this collection) and the mighty Harlan Ellison.

When I first read most of these stories it was late 1993 and the collection was entitled Swamp Foetus, a limited-edition hardcover from Borderlands Press. This paperback edition from Dell did not come out until 1996, and then retitled Wormwood probably because someone took offense at the original. Still, it's a good title, evoking the poison and delirium of absinthe, then still a more or less obscure liqueur beloved of true arty decadent types. But it's also relevant since it refers to "His Mouth Will Taste of Wormwood," which was the first story I ever read by Brite, in 1990's Borderlands. I was hooked immediately. This story always reminded me of Lovecraft's minor tale "The Hound," yet it is undeniably Brite's own. Two young men, jaded and bored beyond belief by their excesses in art, sensuality, drink, and drugs, turn to grave-robbing for ghoulish kicks. Then, in a dank punk rock nightclub, they meet another boy who may offer them their greatest and most final thrill.

Dying: the final shock of pain or nothingness that is the price we pay for everything. Could it not be the sweetest thrill, the only salvation we can attain... the only true moment of self-knowledge? The dark pools of his eyes will open, still and deep enough to drown in. He will hold out his arms to me, inviting me to lie down with him in his rich wormy bed.

Original limited-edition hardcover, 1993

As the above passage might attest, much of Brite's fiction was populated by gay or bisexual young men; homoerotic overtones were the norm for her and definitely gave her work a true "outsider" edge. Her darkly elegant conflation of sex and death, usually so clumsily done in paperback horror, owes more to Baudelaire or Gautier than Barker or Rice (with whom she was often, and erroneously, compared). This is best seen in the later stories, both from 1991, the marvelous "Calcutta, Lord of Nerves" (which I wrote about here) and "The Sixth Sentinel," which show Brite maturing as a stylist. They are poisonous confections, two of my favorites from the time, and ripe with the beauty of putrescence and the stink of sex. In "Sentinel" she lovingly describes a flooded, ancient graveyard:

Some of the things that have floated to the surface are little more than bone. Others are swollen to two or three times their size, gassy mounds of decomposed flesh... silk flower petals stuck to them like obscene decorations... Yawning eyeless faces thrust out of stagnant pools, seem to gasp for breath. Rotting hands unfold like blighted tiger lilies. Every drop of water, every inch of earth in the graveyard is foul with the effluvium of the dead.

1992 hardcover, Delacorte Press

Two friends from her first novel Lost Souls (1992), Ghost and Steve, appear in "How to Get Ahead in New York" and "Angels," adrift and wayward, on their own for the first time. The sleazy environs of 1980s New York comes right to life in the former tale while the latter evokes the circus-freak setting of Katherine Dunn's Geek Love (1989). Unkempt, doomed musicians play large roles in "A Georgia Story" and "Optional Music for Voice and Piano," depicted sympathetically and believably. "The Ash of Memory, the Dust of Desire" is set in the restaurant industry - many years later, all her novels would be - in a brutally modern world that has little need for love or flesh. Certainly the earlier stories, like "The Elder" and "Missing," may be a little slight, but it's obvious they were written with passion and care and intensity.

All in all, I feel Wormwood is a must-read; it's been good, rewarding fun revisiting it. Are the stories scary? Not really, no. This, as well as the brooding teenage characters and sensual depictions of death, might be a turnoff off for some readers. But with their strange and compelling visions of a world populated by the outcast, the marginalized—indeed, by the dead themselves—Poppy Z. Brite's short stories show that true horror, facing it and embracing all its woes, may be bravest, most beautiful, the most rewarding thing of all.

Interview with the Vampire by Anne Rice (1976): Whining for Centuries

Anne Rice gets blamed for the whole "emo"-ing of the vampire in the horror genre today but you'd never know it from the cover art of this amazing 1979 reprint of the Ballantine paperback edition of Interview with the Vampire. That is some classic Gothic Dracula-style action going on. I've got too many new books piling up these days to reread it, but damn if I don't love this cover! I didn't even know this edition existed until a couple months ago.

It's been 20 years since I read Interview but I can still recall the self-absorption, the self-dramatization, the self-victimization, of Louis, the titular vampire, as he recounts his "life" story. No wonder young adults love this stuff; I once heard it described as "Catcher in the Rye for the Goth crowd." Yet the art has virtually nothing - and I mean nothing - to do with the book itself; in fact, one of the points of Interview was that it shed the whole opera-cape-and-tuxedo look of Lugosi and Lee. Rice's vampires didn't go after swooning ladies in nightgowns; they fed on criminals and even family members, as I recall. However it's certainly a striking piece of Gothic horror art, by recently deceased artist H. Tom Hall (uncredited).

And on the back cover we see, what? Ejaculatory blurbs, and two vampires in Dracula capes (Louis and Lestat, one presumes), one semaphoring like he's signaling in an airplane. Claudia is there, so maybe somebody told the artist about the poor little girl who's damned to be a vampire. Truthfully I only liked the first few Vampire Chronicles, as they were unlike anything else in the horror fiction field; however in the intervening years I've glanced back at parts of them and found her prose overheated, overwrought, and in some places, just plain bad. When Tale of the Body Thief came out in '92 I bought it straightaway but only got about a chapter or two in when I simply said, "Done. This is just awful." Never looked back either, until now.

There are other '70s paperbacks of Rice's first novel with cool cover art that I need to track down. I've seen this edition going for some fair cash on eBay but I was able to buy it recently for $2. It has that comforting old-book smell that hints of age and imagination and escape, and it's not too beaten up. Another vintage paperback coup for Too Much Horror Fiction!

Fevre Dream by George R.R. Martin (1982): His Weapon is Teeth

Set aboard an Ohio River steamship in 1857, George R. R. Martin's only horror novel Fevre Dream may have an original setting but it's squarely in the traditional vampire sub-genre. Regal creatures of the night dressed in the finest dark velvet and flowing pirate shirts pontificate upon the nature of master and slave, life and death, good and evil, when not gulping down steaming freshets of blood. Or reading a volume of Byron poetry, natch. Look upon my works, ye Mighty, etc.

Since the period is pre-Civil War America, we see some of the grim literal actuality of the vampires' metaphor of master and slave. It's an interesting dynamic Martin's created. All humans are unwitting slaves to the vampire - a name the creatures reject - and the vampires are slaves to the "red thirst," while privileged whites make other races into subhumans. Horrified to learn that the all-too-real vampires refer to the human race as "cattle," Abner Marsh, the ugly, cantankerous yet still likable owner of the Fevre Dream steamboat, slowly makes the connection with that other plague upon humanity.

Martin's characters are colorfully drawn, from the various men - some former slaves, many seasoned rivermen - who run Marsh's ship to the mysterious Joshua York who enlists Marsh to build Fevre Dream for some unspoken reason, to the mad vampire "bloodmaster" Damon Julian and his cruel and cowardly human dogsbody Sour Billy Tipton; truly an impressive supporting cast. With a gift of pure storytelling and and historic detail, Martin spices his tale with time- and character-appropriate grammar and slang. And in its own gruesome and believable way, this story is ultimately about friendship.

However, it resembles Anne Rice's Vampire Chronicles in its New Orleans and Revolutionary-era France portions. I don't know when Martin first conceived of this novel, so perhaps his predates hers; perhaps not. And its rich setting and descriptions of the river-boating working life also seem, after awhile, to bog it down so that about three-quarters of the way through, it rather runs out of, er, steam, despite an impending climax between Marsh and the "night people." I liked Martin's origin myth for his vampires - shades of Clark Ashton Smith...

From all lips I had heard a legend of a city we had built, a great city of the night, wrought in iron and black marble in some dark caverns in the heart of Asia, by the shores of an underground river a sea never touched by the sun... we had been expelled from our city for some crime, had wandered forgetful and lost for thousands of years... some day a king would be born to our people, a bloodmaster who would gather our scattered race together and lead us back to the city of the night beside its sunless sea.

Overall Fevre Dream is a good read; if not particularly scary, it is vividly imagined, quite violent, and mostly engaging; Martin is a solid writer and I can see why so many people devoured his later novels of heroic fantasy. Vampire fiction fans should pick it up for its unique setting, but it's not the kind of paperback horror novel I'd tell fans that they must drop everything for so they can scour old stores for a vintage copy. In fact, I somehow missed it on the shelf while browsing a warehouse-sized bookstore here in town; my girlfriend spotted it quickly and snatched it up. I had to promise not to wear it out any more than it already was if I wanted to read it first. I'm not sure what's up with that ketchup-letter font on the 1983 Pocket Books paperback edition; I much prefer that paperback's inner flap (below), which was the original hardcover art.