Disturb Not the Dream by Paula Trachtman (1981): Don't Try to Take My Knife Away

The only novel by author and teacher Paula Trachtman (1931-2019), 1981's Disturb Not the Dream (Ballantine paperback, July 1982) is middle-of-the-road mainstream bestseller pop fiction, competently written, with some mild Gothic atmosphere, and lots of cheap thrills. Although Trachtman's prose veers at times into a heightened purple, she keeps the narrative at pace with only a few slowdowns. A family saga set in a ritzy village in Long Island's Southampton, based around a Victorian home estate called Mulberry... and the bloody horrific things that happened there.

This is one of the least interesting paperback covers I've ever seen (which probably helped sell some copies) and its bland, generic back-cover copy seems to promise a by-the-numbers read. Shame the cover "art" is so uninspired, as several scenes within are gruesome and inventive enough to have provided some good lurid imagery for it. I mean, this book promises trash:

Yikes!

Admitted: I read a fair amount on autopilot; there's a lot going on but it's all rather dated: prologue with horrific domestic murders ("Eat it! Eat it, whore!"), then moving on to to early 20th century chapters, then after that to the modern Seventies. Part One of the novel centers on the unlikely, and quite dysfunctional, marriage of homely Evalynn Ambrose and rakish Evan Desmond, and their lives in the Mulberry home; Part Two introduces the Bradleys, who take residence in the same house, and quite dysfunctional in their own way. As sister says to brother early on, "Going to jerk off, sonny-boy?" Oh god, no, please no. My least favorite "horror" trope of the era, incest. And Trachtman is determined to get as much cheap shock value from it as she can, regaling us with an all-too-topical scene of sex parties ("the Kinky Klique," it's called) and filmed blackmail...

                                                                                    Crown hardcover, 1981

I gave up and skipped to the end, and was not surprised by what I found. A final recursiveness, a foregone conclusion, and ending from the beginning. Any experienced reader of horror will know the beats and the payoff. But, like a lot of vintage horror, if a reader was barely a teen, then yes, the climax will be a good, serious shock. To be fair, I did pick the book back up and read the parts I'd skipped, and while nothing was surprising, I do think Trachtman wrapped up her tale in a fair, if not terribly unique, manner.

Overall, despite the general readability and the graphic violence and illicit sex, it's all rather tiresome stuff. Typical affairs and locales, fodder for the unsophisticated reader who desires to read only what is already known from daytime television and commercials for domestic products like coffee and laundry detergent (i.e., a soap opera!). References to high fashion and culture for folks who went to college (a woman says something in her best "Seven Sisters voice" and when I looked it up I was like oh right, duh). Boring-ass nuns and Catholic nonsense such as found in hohum "horror" like The Sentinel and John Saul.

Paula Trachtman (pictured above in 1981) wrote no other novels, but apparently Disturb Not sold like half a mil in paperback, so not bad for a one-off piece of commercial product. This is the kind of midlist paperback that did the horror genre no favors, and there is even not one hint of real "horror" in it, not in the lineal sense of Poe, Blackwood, HPL, Matheson, Jackson, and so on and on. I'd link it more to imitation Gothic; and going by some online reviews, the subject matter of Dream is akin to the early novels of V.C. Andrews, whom I've still not read even after years of writing this blog. (Dare I...?)

Got to wondering if Trachtman had read some Gothics and horror novels of the Seventies and thought to herself, I can do better, or at least as good as, that! Common motivation, no? Plus in those days publishers were clamoring for these tales, so who can blame her, if that's the case? And after a quick Googling, I found an interview with her from 2019 in which she said: "One evening I read a best selling mystery novel, threw it across the room and told my husband it was stupid and that I could do better. ‘So do it,’ said he. So I did." Man, I just knew it!

Trachtman goes on, revealing more that my suspicions were true, and the book was conceived as market fodder: "I read Publisher’s Weekly for months and learned that successful commercial fiction often had 3 elements: horror, sex, and violence." This is the same formula John Saul (and his silent writing partner) used to come up with his unending bestsellers. I mean, sure, everybody wants to make money, and Trachtman does say Disturb Not the Dream is basically "a potato chip book." So, marks for honesty, but for true real horror fiction: none.

Sacrament by Clive Barker (1996): You Get Me Closer to God

With his seventh novel, published in hardcover in 1996, Eighties horror icon Clive Barker outdoes even himself. Sacrament (1997 Harper Books mass market, cover by Phil Heffernan) in this story of Will Rabjohns, a gay British wildlife photographer. After a wild animal attack puts him in a coma, he dreams/remembers/revisits a strange couple he knew as a boy. Once he is well again, Will travels back to England, to confront the mystery of his past, his estranged father, and his boyhood friends. What we have here is a metaphysical mystery tale, as a man confronts the past and the present, his art and the world, and the strange powers that seem to drive them all.

As with much of Barker's fiction, it is this confrontation that drives his characters. What transformation awaits at the heart of this mystery? Who are Jacob and Rosa Steep? They live fictions, through decades. There is a dark, violent power that lies in their fingers, in their seductive charms. In Will's photography of the world's wildlife, they see a "conduit"—he brings to Jacob an unwelcome vision of a 19th century artist named Thomas Simeon. (It's my guess that Simeon is a stand-in for William Blake; it's no secret that Barker has long considered the English poet one of his literary icons, and with good reason). There is a lineage from Simeon's art and writings to Will's photography: life is hidden and waiting for apocalypse in Simeon's work; its aftermath and extinction in Will's.

This is a novel about a longing for transcendence, for transformation, to confront the mystery, to find out, "Why have I lived?" Barker writes that perhaps, at the end, "There'd be understanding, there'd be revelation, there'd be an end to the ache in him." The final scenes in the living heart of the world—the Mundus Domini—are terrific; Barker's prose is masterful, pure, poised. Here is his Thomas Simeon, in one of the book's most wonderful passages:

"It seems to me, we must invent religion every moment, as the world invents itself, for the only constant is inconsistency.... It seems to me the purpose of religion is to say: All things are so. An invented thing and a thing we call true; a living thing and a thing we call dead; a visible thing and a thing that is yet to be: All Are So."

How about that? Barker is simply an excellent, lyrical writer, whose works reflect upon the spiritual mysteries of our lives. Sacrament is, in a word, magnificent. I'm appalled upon learning of some readers' distaste for its erotic homosexual depictions—they have no business reading Clive Barker. I found this aspect to be incredibly well-done and insightful, these scenes with Will and his lover. Will has an ache for transcendence (as do so many of Barker's men and women: see Gentle and Jude in Imajica, Cal Mooney in Weaveworld, or Fletcher and the Jaff in The Great and Secret Show), as does Jacob Steep. One man who creates to get closer to God, one man who destroys.

That sometimes spirituality is a dark and violent—and sexy!—thing in no way diminishes its importance in Clive Barker's art; in fact, this quality powers its engine. Sacrament may not have the "horror cachet" of the author's more famous, more graphic stories and novels and movies, but I think it is an essential work for those who appreciate his sui generis approach to horror fiction.


(Note: I wrote this review in the unbelievable year of 1998, for a new bookselling website called Amazon)

Cold Front by Barry Hammond (1982): Frozen Warnings

Published only in Canada in 1982 by the Canadian wing of Signet/New American Library, Cold Front is one of the rarest horror paperbacks of that era. I'd bet there are only maybe dozens of copies in existence, if that. For years searchers after horror have had to contend with copies being sold online for hundreds of dollars. The handful of readers who did dole out the bucks fortunately, or perhaps frustratingly, announced that wow, the book is actually pretty good. (Never assume that a book's high secondhand market pricing has anything to do with its quality, however). This made people want the damn thing even more.

Now, independent publisher Fathom Press, taking a cue from Valancourt Books' Paperbacks from Hell line, is going after white whales like this one. And this one was captured! Fathom was able to secure reprint rights from Canadian author Barry Hammond, who even contributed an explanatory and insightful afterword about the origins of his sole horror novel. (While writing, Hammond says he was playing difficult-listening albums by Lou Reed and Nico to capture the right vibe he was imagining, truly fitting.)

In Cold Front, Hammond doesn't even pretend to try to get you to identify with his three male leads. These guys are dumb, grimy, pig-ignorant losers who speak like it; no Tarantino pulp-crime pop-culture witticisms, no self-referential jokes, no self-aware callbacks. You're in the company of some real ugly drunken dum-dums, and it ain't fun. Hammond has a way of setting up a scenario that's pure no-way-out hopelessness. The almost-sole locale of the disgusting cabin in the snowy wilderness also functions as a kind of freezing existential locus, stripped of all extraneousness, few provisions, howling storm outside, confronting sex and terror inside this desolate dwelling that seems to exist in some netherworld, a purgatory hungry for lives to send on to Hell.

Sure, there's gonna be things to be grossed out by in a trashy Eighties horror paperback novel like this: the crude jokey racial comments, the "childlike sexuality" of the bizarrely pale white girl the men find hiding in the cabin's basement, the threat of rape and worse. Silent and mysterious, yet able to kick ass and defend herself, the young woman both attracts and repels each trapped man. The blurb on the back cover gets it right: it's not the girl they need to be afraid of... 

Fathom Press reprint, Thanks for a copy! 
cover art by Stephen Andrade.

As I read, I got notes of Jim Thompson crime novels, and of Laymon/Ketchum in the simplicity of setup and prose style, grue and bloodshed. Our monster, hinted at throughout—and ably represented in the Signet cover art, by the great Tom Hallman—is underplayed till the end, which is quite the frigid whirlwind of death and mayhem. While I wouldn't say I "enjoyed" Cold Front, I absolutely appreciated its commitment to single-minded unease, disgust, and fatalistic despair. And thanks to Fathom Press, you can now "enjoy" it as I did as well!

With the sun full on them, they were the very centre of the horror before they realized what it was... Then the pieces of it hanging from the trees seared their eyes. They could see the silhouettes. Not understand them, but know who it was from the shreds of wool still attached to the raw, frozen meat. Not understand how such a thing was possible. Logic of human geometry had been thrown aside. That the human body could undergo such stretching, ravaging, seemed impossible. The image indelibly inked across their minds even when they closed their eyes. Hard to believe that such obscenity could exist in sunlight.

Seance on a Wet Afternoon by Mark McShane (1961): And She Ain't What You'd Call a Lady

A slim but successful suspense thriller, Seance on a Wet Afternoon isn't really a horror novel, but I read it solely for that wonderfully evocative, moody title alone (I've long known about the movie adaptation but have never seen it). Mark McShane (1929-2013) was an Australian author of crime fiction, which is what this novel basically is—but it is also quite a bit more in its own quiet, unassuming, indeed "kitchen sink realist" way.

The "preternatural" aspect is a psychic woman, a "medium" or a "sensitive," Myra Savage, who makes extra money by holding seances with neighborhood ladies. Myra concocts a plan of utmost practicality: kidnap a child from a well-to-do family for ransom, but then she will reveal through her powers the child's whereabouts, "find" the money, and then go from rags to riches thanks to the resulting fame such a good deed will engender. Dishonest? Sure, but it's for a good cause!

Back cover of above, cover art by the great Harry Bennett, Jan 1965

Except of course that's not how things go, they never do, thanks to her husband Bill (poor sod). Together these two make quite the toxic couple. The results are top-notch suspense and a true banger of an ending. McShane really knows the landscape of London and surrounding working-class towns, which I always appreciate reading. His depiction of morally compromised characters who justify their selfish, deluded actions is razor-sharp. 

1963 Pan Books, UK

Again, not really horror, but very tense and unsettling in places; the second half is veritable screw-tightener of suspense. The downbeat "rainy afternoon" vibe will appeal to fans of Ramsey Campbell or Robert Aickman, I think, fellow British writers with a delicate, knowing pen and a penchant for ironic twists of fate.

He took one step back from the peephole. He closed his eyes tightly. He was overpowered by a feeling of horror; black dripping horror. His lips, mouth, his whole lower jaw began to tremble. The moan that escaped him tuned up to a squeak at the end. As though he'd been stung on it, he pulled his hand from the girl's face...

Orphans by Ed Naha (1989): We're a Happy Family

Now this is some serious paperback horror cover art. Such detail. Such care. Such skulls. What's this family portrait telling us? Maybe that there are few things more frightening for a child than the idea that her parents are not who they seem? Or perhaps this novel will expose the hypocrisies of the adult world, its shallow middle-class ambitions, its forced conformity, its ability to cover up even the most hideous horrors?

But Orphans is about none of these things. Published in November 1989 by Dell, this slim little novel by Ed Naha is competently, if unimaginatively, written, occupying that weird little subgenre space of kinda-sorta medical/science fiction horror (meh) with undead-gone-amuck (yay!). Naha is mostly in young adult fiction gear, writing at the most basic, one-dimensional level, refusing in any way to engage in insight or metaphor. Every character seems to be smiling all the time; indeed I have never read a book in which the word "smile" is invoked so often and so lazily, often several times on a single page. 

Naha, a horror/mystery screenwriter/novelist, keeps the story moving, sure, his evil kids creeping out our main teacher character, but I never felt involved or intrigued. References to fog aren't enough to evoke true atmosphere, and characters who exchange banal jokes and tired flirtations just drift off the page. However, once we learn what is really going on with these creepy kids around town, things start to get juicy. Bloody. Gory. In fact, it gets almost to Re-Animator-levels of ridiculous B-movie violence. Unexpected, after such a PG-rated buildup.

Recommended lightly, and solely for the last third or so when shit gets gnarly. Otherwise, unless you're as obsessed with the cover as I am, you could probably skip it. And speaking of that cover, can anyone make out the artist's signature? "R.S. Br__"? Bottom right corner? I'd be ever so grateful if any of y'all could help ID this guy!

Postscript: the artist has been discovered: R.S. Brown

Moths by Rosalind Ashe (1976): She Loves Naked Sin

How do you tell a man, gently, that his wife is a homicidal nymphomaniac?

This moody, erotically-charged cover art, by American romance illustrator H. Tom Hall, is perfectly fit for a sophisticated novel of doomed romance and obsession; I bought this paperback over a decade ago solely for its melodramatic atmosphere. I knew nothing of author Rosalind Ashe (1931-2006), and assumed the title, Moths, referred to the hapless male victims of a magnetic, alluring, possibly dangerous woman of incomparable beauty and passions. And... I was right.

back cover, 1977 Warner Books

The blurb comparison to Daphne du Maurier and her classic 1938 novel Rebecca is apt, though Moths doesn't reach the heights of suspense and emotional turmoil of that work. How could it? Yet this novel offers some good escapist fare, kind of what they're calling "romantasy" today, I think. The style, first person by an Oxford professor, is quite a bit plummy; I was constantly Googling his various allusions and references and poetic quotes to truly grasp and appreciate what was happening. Personally I find a lot of British culture, of whatever class, very interesting (piqued by decades-long obsession with the first wave of punk rock in the mid-Seventies), so this was fine and dandy for me. Other readers might take this as a warning, however, who don't have patience for an academic approach to such goings-on.

Author Ashe, undated

Me, I was quite taken from the first with the professor's tale, lush and literate and over-heated, with that kind of charming self-satisfaction an intellectually Oxford don can have. With dripping atmosphere to spare, Prof. Harry regales us with descriptions of deep-wooded Dower House and its flowering environs (clearly evoking Rebecca's Manderley), a rustic old estate for sale which he explores in the novel's opening. Once inhabited by a mysterious actress of the Regency era, Dower House draws our Prof. inexplicably in, even though as a confirmed bachelor he has no interest in purchasing it.

Penguin UK, 1977

There, also exploring the grounds, he meets the Boyces, a couple eager to make the place their own: James, another professor who is less committed to his work than to his mistresses; and his enchanting wife "Mo" (short for Mnemosyne, Greek for memory, and mother of the Muses, not too pretentious now!), who charms Prof. more than Dower House itself. Prof. Harry is able to befriend the two and thus finds himself invited into the home and their lives... and passions. James was her senior by ten years, a self-made academic... She was the last of a line of penniless aristocrats... In California, or on another social rung, she might have turned flower-child, perhaps Jesus-freak. As it was, she had an altogether unusual charm...

1990 reprint

Ashe weaves a luscious stew of supernatural hints and erotic trysts in a delightfully dated Seventies style, very Jolly Old England, very gender-normative, very femme fatale. But is the femme fatale a ghost, a possession, an imagination? Who is this madwoman who, as the title explicitly implies, draws hapless men into her fiery embrace? Bodies turn up, cops are on the case, a diary is read revealing murder... poor Harry, can't he catch a break? This woman, Mo, (also called Nemo, which is Latin for "no one"—not too pretentious now!) is alluring, even unto death. Mood swings, migraines, to put up with her idiosyncrasies requires utmost submission, because you know the sex gonna be goood. Never had she been more lovely, more violently alive. The Regency actress who inhabited her seemed positively recharged by another victim: the dead thriving on the dead.

Japanese edition, perfectly captures the setting

Moths will more appeal to readers who enjoy long-fuse occult/supernatural novels like Sweetheart, Sweetheart and Burnt Offerings. This was Ashe's first novel (and recently reprinted by Valancourt!), and the others she wrote all seem to have a similar Gothic vibe of windswept locales, mysterious romances, the vague and distant threat of madness and death, supplied in that overheated prose, which might turn off readers looking for real gruesome horror business. Yet I myself enjoyed its literate, allusive nature, as it moves slowly but inexorably to its conclusion—I am nothing more than that moth.

The Snake by John Godey (1978): My, My, My Serpentine

The gritty, grimy New York City of the 1970s looms large in our pop cultural imagination. Movies like Taxi Driver, Saturday Night Fever, The French Connection, to name a quick few, are today all virtually everyday notions, while progressive music from Blondie, Talking Heads, the Ramones, and early hip-hop continue to symbolize the absolute essence of "cool." The politics of the day were hardball and hard-won, like President Ford telling the town to (apocryphally as a headline in the local news) "Drop dead," and later, Mayor Ed Koch practically became a celebrity and known to folks who wouldn't dare step foot on those profane mean streets. 

Enter The Snake: a 1978 thriller from a writer named John Godey. This was the crime fiction pseudonym of Brooklyn-born author Morton Freedgood, who had worked in NYC's film industry for all the giant movie companies, like Paramount and 20th Century Fox. As noted on the cover of the 1979 Berkley paperback, Godey previously wrote The Taking of Pelham 1-2-3, which was made into a 1974 movie that also captured NYC at its most lawless. Letting loose a giant slithering atavistic reptile into the gleaming greenery of Central Park must have seemed like a no-brainer to the author, especially in the wake of Jaws. The cover of the original hardcover captures it nicely:

Godey seems to know every inch of the city, doling out places names and addresses like any reader will know exactly what he's talking about (ah, New Yorkers!), and I often plugged in such into Google Maps to get a clear view of the specific environs the action was happening in. His depiction of the titular creature is both scientifically sound and aesthetically unsettling. The reasoning for its arrival and escape is believable in its randomness, a backstory both intriguing but also blackly comical in a way, and very NYC-coded. "Two dead in less than twenty-four hours, that's one thing... People die all the time. But the other thing, the politics, that's serious."

Characters are familiar: the beleaguered cop, the cocky young herpetologist, the lovely journalist, the sweaty mayor, the religious nuts who make it their mission to find and kill the demonic reptile, plus various hapless victims introduced and dispatched with maximum suspense. Godey may be writing a slick bestseller, and he's a bit above the pulp pay-grade; still, lots of vulgar '70s slang and profanities and ethnic slurs you'll remember from the movies of the day, with less enlightened folks going about their daily grind in a city that can swallow you whole—and now even has the ability to inject fast-acting fatal venom right into your veins. New York City really has it all, don't it? "Any other city, if somebody got bitten by a snake, the public would blame the snake. Here they blame the mayor." 

I read The Snake quickly, enjoying a little imaginative time-travel to a place and time I do dearly love. As a horror novel of snaky scares it's not on a par with The Accursed, but Godey is quite adept at his descriptions of the 11-foot black mamba and its shenanigans, how it hides in the wilds of Central Park and is pretty much an innocent creature going about its own primal business. This is a thriller through and through. The set-up is solid, the sense of locale impeccable, the climax breathless, and the very ending you might guess—but ultimately The Snake is a satisfying bit of '70s suspense.

The snake in the park became a jewel in the crown of the city's obsession with its own eccentricity. The public reasserted its prideful conviction that it inhabited the most put-upon city in the whole world. When bigger and better and more unendurable disasters were contrived, they were visited justly upon the city that matched them in stature, which was to say, the city that was superlatively dirty, declining, expensive, crime-ridden, unmanageable, and glamorously unlivable beyond any other city in the world.

Punish the Sinners by John Saul (1978): I Got a Catholic Block

Busting out of nowhere in 1977 with his debut novel from Dell, John Saul had success immediately, watching as Suffer the Children hit the bestseller charts and sold millions of copies, thanks to an easy-to-remember name and a first-ever tv commercial ad campaign. Saul wrote his books fast, like in a month, so the publisher was always happy to have a new paperback original from him every year. With ominous, biblical-sounding titles and cover art featuring young women in grave danger (the remnants of the Gothic romance and evoking the twin icons of Rosemary's Baby and The Exorcist), his dense, 400-plus-page books were marketed to and scooped up by teen girls and young mothers, who could identify most with the anxieties inside.

But me, personally? I was never once interested enough in one of his paperbacks to pick one up, not with babies and dolls and cribs on the covers (very Mary Higgins Clark, no thanks). Working in bookstores used and new from the late Eighties to the late Nineties, I bemoaned the popularity of his work, even though I hadn't bother to read him. To me, all of his books looked, as is said today, mid. There were countless copies of his derivative-looking titles always around, jamming up the horror section, all read to tatters in the used paperback exchange I worked at in college, and later, upscale hardcovers for those eager and solvent enough to drop twenty-plus (!) bucks on his reheated hashwork.

Saul's books seemed to me fodder only; not truly horror fiction in its grand tradition, just disposable tchochkes for the less adventurous reader. And now that I’ve read one, let me tell you: my impression was absolutely correct. A duller, drier, more inconsequential book I have rarely read in the decade and a half that I've been keeping this blog. Punish the Sinners (Dell, June 1978) was Saul's second paperback original; maybe he got better, maybe he got worse. I'll never know, because I don't care. And although I have a few of his early paperbacks in my collection—these days, I do kinda appreciate the cover art—I'm in no hurry to read another.

I won't bother to rehash the plot, as the back cover gives it all to you, but really oversells it, making the novel sound like a real religious creepfest (cover art obviously a Carrie clone). In reality Sinners is plodding, melodramatic nonsense without any sense of atmosphere or urgency. One pseudo-event after another rather than a plot, one talking teenager indistinguishable from the next, one conversation between virtually non-existent characters after another, and cheating POV shifts to end a scene on some phony note of "suspense." 

You feel no jeopardy for the boring teenage girls who are killing themselves one by one (which only starts after some hundreds of pages) in a small, barely-described town in Washington state. You'll see the "surprise" twist coming; while the half-hearted ending is dark, it is not disturbing. Unlike the genre’s worst talents, Saul’s prose is serviceable and actually readable, but utterly devoid of wit, insight, observation, or conviction. The overall impression Saul gives is one of indifference.

I don't know how any experienced horror fiction reader would find any sustenance in this book at all; I do know that many people avidly read Saul while in their young teen years, and so recall him as a fond memory of an illicit behavior, reading-with-a-flashlight-under-the-covers kind of thing. Many of the one-star Goodreads reviews are basically, this scared me as a kid. But also many adults enjoy his stuff still. Which of course is fine, sure, but not for me, not for this blog, not for any recommendation I'd give.

This is the type of "horror" that my blog is a reaction to and against. While better writers sold fewer books, Saul's sold in the millions (and probably still do). I've always wanted to find the forgotten and the overlooked, the authors lost in the shadow of their lessers, shine a light on those who were worthy of rediscovery—not simply tread the same old worn-out ground of yesteryear's dusty bestsellers. Nobody needs to be told to read John Saul, and I rue horror fan pages on Reddit and Facebook and social media elsewhere in which his books are still recommended to innocent readers not around during his peak popularity and thus ignorant of the poverty of his imagination.

This kind of by-the-numbers banality is what the splatterpunks were rebelling against in the mid-Eighties. What any good, thoughtful horror writer of any stripe should be against (King rightly lambastes him a couple times in Danse Macabre). The folks spearheading the Dell/Abyss line also had to have Saul's books in mind as they stated in their manifesto. 

Sinners exists in some netherworld, some purgatory, of the undistinguished, a gray rock of a novel that requires no imagination or effort on the part of the reader. Two bloody characters walking towards each other on the street of the small town at the "climax" was about the only unique, vaguely interesting moment in the whole 400-page slog. Oh, right, almost forgot, there's a graphic priest orgy, too, which Saul attempts to use as shock but in his slow-witted manner only manages to lazily disgust. 

In interviews over the years Saul has said that while he doesn't mind being considered a "horror novelist," he is no fan of the genre, either in fiction or film. No shit. John Saul is, simply, a supreme hack. And far from being a horror novel, Punish the Sinners is manufactured product, unit shifter widget, maximally conceived, designed, and produced to get readers to part with their money at the airport, the drugstore, the mall bookstore: exactly what I'd always assumed Saul's books were lo the past four decades. While it's a slight satisfaction to have my suspicions vindicated, it was no fun finding out first-hand.

To sum up my feelings about this novel—in case you couldn’t tell!—I will quote from that other musty old tome, the biblical Book of Revelation: "So, because you are lukewarm, and neither hot nor cold, I will vomit you out of My mouth." 

John Saul retired in 2009 and was awarded the HWA Lifetime Achievement Award in 2023. 

The Accursed by Paul Boorstin (1977): Coils of the Serpent Unwind

Snake-handling, a bizarre cult behavior formed from several lines in the Bible, is ripe for horrific exploitation. While I was working in a Southern indie bookstore in the mid-Nineties we sold lots of copies of Salvation on Sand Mountain, a nonfiction account of the phenomenon. Eighties horror giant John Farris wrote a harrowing scene of it in his book Wildwood. Earlier, in 1976, noted grit-lit groundbreaker Harry Crews gave adventurous readers A Feast of Snakes, a grimy, raucous, raunchy bit of violent Southern Gothic grue with a literary air. I mean, dig this cover art:

And who can forget that great line from the Scorsese version of Cape Fear, with deranged De Niro snarling, "Granddaddy used to handle snakes in church, granny drank strychnine"? I haven't seen that flick since the grunge era and yet have never forgotten it. I was reminded of it recently when I picked up a book that's long taken up residence on my bookshelves, The Accursed, a slim novel published by Signet in November 1977. With a perfectly-rendered cover of innocence and evil, reduced to their most primeval, Paul Boorstin's first novel is one of the many titles Signet put out that feature animals run amok. This time, the animals are snakes of various deadly varieties, all part of the worshipful country cult ceremonies held by one Preacher Varek. [He] seized a hissing Indian cobra, the scaly coils writhing in his grasp, its forked tongue, sophisticated  sensor both taste and smell, flicking, bringing minute chemical particles back to be analyzed in the Jacobsen's organ above its jaws.

At the edge of Desperation Swamp in Clay-Ashland County, South Carolina, sits Thornwald Memorial Hospital, a time-worn edifice showing its age in the sweltering clime of mid-July. Run by a power-hungry administrator with no medical degree and rotating crew of indifferent, autocratic, and/or horny employees, the hospital is hardly a place one would want to spend any time in, much less perform as a doctor or recuperate as a patient. Unfortunately for Dr. Adam Corbett, a man of character and do-goodery vibes, perform here he must, and when he learns that the newborn baby of poor swamp denizen Mary Ann Cotter is suddenly and inexplicably dead, a baby he elivered, he is not convinced of the coroner's explanation of crib death: Adam would have to tread lightly or lose his job.

There's no doubt what's going on: dangerous serpents are about in the dark hidden places of Thornwald Memorial; just like in the movies of the era, we've encountered the creature from the outset, and now all we can do is watch/read in suspense as our cast of characters slowly come to the ultimate realization. The perplexing noises of Clay-Ashland County after dark were enough to convince anyone that man was not the source of all evil, that there were other more sinister forces at work in the universe, powers all the more terrifying because they were unknown, removed from the familiar, even endearing sins and vices of humanity.

 

Early on, we learn that this crumbling hospital was built on the site of a Confederate infirmary that, in 1863, was attacked and laid waste by Yankee soldiers, forever a place where bloodshed and black powder had poisoned that strip of land overlooking the swamp forever... the only thing the property was good for was a hospital or a graveyard, take your pick. More than once I was reminded of the late great Michael McDowell and his Avon paperbacks, and the Southern territory, both physical and psychological, that he would mine in a few short years. Author Boorstin certainly doesn't have the meanness, the mercilessness, the weird vivid characters, the deadly droll narrative of McDowell's works, but that's fine; Boorstin acquits himself well in these proceedings.

We're not here for finely-wrought characterization of human foible, we're here for monster mayhem, and Boorstin has the skills for just that, getting right at the skin-crawling repulsion that coiling serpents engender in us: Man's world seemed a simple matter of neat geometry, straights lines precisely drawn to meet at sensible right angles. But this cold-blooded hunter curved, twisted, a devious, sinewy, supple being eluding rational explanations.

The paperback's bio page states that he was inspired to write The Accursed while "filming in the Amazon interior" and spending time in the hot South Carolina sun. Boorstin's experience is wide-ranging, a professional documentary filmmaker/producer and TV screenwriter; his father was American historian and author Daniel J. Boorstin. His next novel, Savage (which I own but have not read), also happens to feature some fantastic cover art:

The Accursed especially snaps to life when Preacher Varek, a giant of a man shrouded in black, [his] head shaved bald by a straight razor, is onstage. Suspense ratchets up when he comes into contact with Jean, Dr. Corbett's pregnant wife, rescuing her when her car gets stuck in the mire, and shames her for wanting to have, you know, her baby in a hospital with modern medicine and all. The preacher contradicted everything the young doctor stood for and Adam worried where Jean's naive belief in this swamp healer might lead.

Other unsavory characters abound, mostly snake fodder, and Boorstin isn't above the cheap thrills of the Seventies, like the sexy nurse who caresses herself—not too tacky now!—and meets an inspired "sex and death" end in a bubbly bathtub. Unhooking her bra with one hand, she rubbed the icy champagne bottle along her bare, sweaty breasts, beds of moisture condensing around the enlarged crests of her nipples. Or the poor burn victim bastard who tries to get an old nurse to read him dirty magazines, utterly immobilized, a free meal for a ferocious reptile. Maynard's eyes peered over the coils of his murderer, the orbs nearly popping out of their sockets from the pressure...

Yeah, I gotta say, Boorstin has written some truly tasty scenes of serpentian gore and horror. There are two climactic scenes of confrontation; the first is good, yes, but the second is a fuckin' ripper, and I could easily see the fake blood flying and the mechanical snake writhing and roiling in a cheap TV-hospital set. Her blood mingled with the serpent's, to drench her nightdress in gory impasto. 

Boorstin, 1980

Like the previous novel I read, The Night Creature, this book got better as it went on, doling out its suspense level in a workmanlike manner, crisscrossing plotlines, very much in a cinematic narrative. You're definitely getting you your dollar-ninety-five's worth of B-movie entertainment. Did Boorstin miss a few opportunities to imbue a little more, I dunno, gravitas here and there? Sure, I guess; there are several times when the author's voice rings out over the standard cliche melodramatic proceedings that you wish he'd have given this baby one more writerly polish. But even its more lackluster moments didn't last too long. Boorstin's adeptness at describing ophidian destruction makes The Accursed a satisfying pulpy read, and its inclusion on the very cover of Paperbacks from Hell is thus the perfect place for it.               

The intruder seemed to congeal out of the moist and heavy air, gliding stealthily,
almost as if knowing this was a place of such fragility that it must trespass with infinite care.
Thick as a fire hose, it slithered slowly from the air-conditioning vent: five, ten, fifteen feet long, and still extending, an uninvited guest so out of place in the room it hardly seemed possible the interloper was there at all...              

The Night Creature by Brian N. Ball (1974): She Rides

All over the social media of bibliophiles you can see people who insist that they must finish any book they've started reading. Sometimes this dogged commitment comes off as bragging; more often, as a kind of desperation, a sad realization of a fault: the utter inability to not finish a book that is simply not grabbing you in the way you wanna be grabbed. Me, I've quit more books than I recall, and have my entire book-reading life, but ever since starting this blog I've tried harder to finish the horror novels I start. What if the best part of the book is the ending?! Let me tell you, book lover—and I'm probably not telling you anything you didn't already know—that is rarely the case.

Fortunately it is the case for this 1974 novel The Night Creature (published in the UK as The Venomous Serpent), by British scribe Brian (N.) Ball. For several weeks I meandered through the first two-thirds of it. Not because it was bad, or uninteresting; Ball, a prolific writer of SF, is a capable author, if kinda dry (it's told in first person, a style I've found myself losing interest in over the years). No, I just found it all rather tame and indistinct; for every little aspect that made me perk up, I'd have another several pages of, sure, okay, whatever. The book would sit on my nightstand for days untouched, till last week. Dammit, I can finish this guy! Spurred on by a few positive reviews on Goodreads, I sat down early one afternoon determined to get to the end. And I did! And boy was I glad!

Anyway. I found the hippie-ish young couple, Andy and Sally, enjoyable enough, picturing their artsy 18th century stone farmhouse Seventies-style charmed me, as did their making a living selling crafty antiques and landscape paintings in the touristy British countryside. Everything changes in their idyllic life when Sally comes home with a brass rubbing and... wait, what the fuck is a "brass rubbing"?! Turns out it's a chiefly British hobby, so it made sense, born and bred Yank that I am, that I had no idea what the dang thing was that starts all the trouble. Then I recalled I had seen the cover for the UK edition of the book, under its original title The Venomous Serpent; had, even posted it to this very blog a decade ago! Wonder of wonders.

One night Andy gets the fright of his life when the woman on the rubbing, as well as her dog, seem to come to life when the moonlight filtering in through the high barn windows illuminates it. Ball does a decent enough job describing the eerie escapade, which happens several times, each time more and more disturbing to the young man: I had never known the condition which we call "terror" before. It's something far beyond fear, for it's unreasoning.

(oddly, incorrect names of people on the rubbing on back of NEL edition)

And thus follows standard procedure: Andy convincing Sally what he's seen, a visit to the ruined church where Sally first made the rubbing, learning the local lore of the people in said rubbing, intimidating locals warning them off the church property, cranky coppers (I was fool enough to call on our local policeman), and one truly old eccentric priest Andy tries to enlist in his aid when Sally disappears one day. The lady Andy seeks is one of the blood-drinking living dead: Undead, blood-crazed, monstrous thing from the tomb she might be, there was no doubting her beauty. Can he rescue Sally in time from the Lady Sybil?

Not unlike a contemporaneous Hammer horror film, The Night Creature is a mere wisp of a book at barely 150 pages. It truly does ramp up suspense and interest in the last third, so by the end, the tale has found that sweet spot, the one I personally truly adore and crave, and nuzzles there, suckling and secure.

Wet Work by Philip Nutman (1993): Too Tough to Die

In 1993, in my early 20s, I was working in a giant chain bookstore known as BookStar in Cary, NC. It was basically a Barnes and Noble (who eventually bought, rearranged, and then closed down the store), guys had to wear ties and dress pants, like it was fucking church. Several of my coworkers were horror fiction fans, both of the modern and classic variety, and we wasted many a working hour talking about the genre while ignoring our shelving duties. At this time the horror mass-market paperback boom was beginning its downhill swing, although I well recall the publication of many a serious title around then: Animals by John Skipp & Craig Spector, Lost Souls by Poppy Z. Brite, After Age by Yvonne Navarro, Skin by Kathe Koja, Grimscribe by Thomas Ligotti, The Golden by Lucius Shepard, as well as the continuing, final titles from the Dell/Abyss line. And in June came Wet Work, published by Jove Books, the first novel from young British author and journalist Philip Nutman.

I already knew the author's name from various Fangoria articles as well as a few of his short stories. They were good, smart, effective, and I remember shelving fresh new copies of Wet Work and thinking it might be worth a read. The critical blurbs came not from, you know, the newspaper reviewers but from fellow horror scribes like Clive Barker, Kathe Koja, Douglas E. Winter, Nancy A. Collins, Skipp n' Spector themselves, and Stephen King as well (although we've  learned how unreliable a King quote can be). All a good sign to me!

And yet—I didn't read it. My taste for the genre was waning some; sure, I was rereading some favorites but not really keeping up any longer. Like I said, I could tell the boom was slowing down, despite some interesting works arriving. This was when I was getting into my hardboiled/crime/noir phase, James Ellroy, Jim Thompson, Woolrich, Cain, Chandler, James Lee Burke. Tastes change, you gotta go where your heart leads you.

So when I finally got around to Wet Work last week, I wasn't sure if it was gonna read like a last gasp or a fresh breath. Turns out, it was neither, and it didn't need to be: it's simply a briskly-told horror novel of a zombie apocalypse. Ignore the "epic terror" comparison to The Stand on the cover; compared to King's mammoth-sized tome, Wet Work is a wee little rodent, scurrying about busily while getting the job done in a fraction of the pages.

It's radiation from a comet that sets things off, akin to the space probe origins of the zombies in the original Night of the Living Dead. Sections of the first half resemble the early parts of the 1978 Dawn of the Dead, although these characters don't know yet that they're dealing with the undead. All this is no ripoff or plagiarism, however: Wet Work is an expansion of a Nutman short story of the same name, and it was first published in 1989 in the essential undead anthology Book of the Dead, borne upon us by Skipp n' Spector. A major work of the splatterpunk movement, it featured stories all written in the ghoulish universe of Romero's (then-) trilogy of zombie horror movie classicks.

2005 reprint by Overlook Connection Press

Any consumer of popular entertainment, horror or not, will be right at home in the familiar environs of Nutman's various characters and settings: secret military assassins, rookie cops, seasoned cynical cops, adults with dying parents, the lovelorn, the alcoholic, the teenage dirtbag, the cheating rich, the drug dealer, the junkie, DC/NYC, the airport, the strip club, the lab, the White House. Nothing to criticize, really; Nutman fills in color and detail no matter where he's describing. It's all as immediate as any movie or TV show, slick but not shallow, but not overladen with heavy meaning or a desire to upend tradition. His prose is lean, cynical, our tale starting off with the whitehotwhiteheat italics and ...ellipses... so beloved of the splatterpunks, what better way to get to the meat of the matter?

Skipping in well-played rhythms, Nutman shuffles his plotlines well, not lingering too long on any one locale. This is a skill I wish more horror writers had mastered: the thrust of narrative, the propulsion of story, the ability to convey movement in time forward while invoking a sense of impending doom overall. Nutman's background as a film historian has to account for his crisp, capable hand at this task, as the novel is cinematic as hell. Horror violence and gunplay action mingle here expertly.

Nutman didn't write another novel, I'm not sure why and couldn't find out, but did write comic books and more short stories, collected in 2010's Cities of Night. He died just over 10 years ago; it's a little sad to see all these encomiums from his colleagues praising his talents and to know he wouldn't add to his bibliography. Maybe with the end of the paperback era he just couldn't get another publisher interested in a full-length horror novel? I also feel bummed because in spring 1994 I attended a comic book convention in Durham with a coworker pal, and saw Nutman himself engaged in a lively conversation with one of the movie memorabilia sellers, and I thought, hey, you should go chat with him, tell him you liked his stories... but I did not! Damn.

Overall Wet Work is a short sharp shock of splat fiction, never dwelling too long on any character(s), moving at a brisk pace as the end of the world approaches. Not that the story is shallow or insipid, it's just that Nutman knows that we know how the story goes, and isn't trying to reinvent the wheel. His fresh take on zombie myth isn't exactly mind-blowing, but it is interesting enough to keep even a seasoned horror fic fan reading to the bleak, downbeat ending. Who'd want it any other way?