The Sweet Taste of Burning by Paul Andreota (1972): Witchery Weakening

Slim oh-so-Seventies French novel detailing the life and loves of, well, French sophisticates who get mixed up with the supernatural. Savor The Sweet Taste of Burning (Le Piège in French, "The Trap"; this edition from Warner Books, Sept 1974), a mild romantic thriller with witchy undertones. Journo Serge heads to the countryside to investigate occult goings-on and regular old murder at the behest of his scandal-hungry editor—the Golden Age of peasant witchcraft, old boy! There Serge goes looking for the local healer/shaman, Bonafous, but he first meets the man's niece, Teresa, and quelle surprise things slowly start to ooh là là. Cue middle-age crisis for Serge!

Then Serge's wife gets sick, and it's the same type of sickness that had plagued some now-dead folks in the country town where Bonafous and Teresa live, the reason Serge went there in the first place. Could Teresa, in a fit of jealousy and cold hate, cast a spell on her? In this day and age? Unbelievable for modern, sophisticated people to entertain. Carry on like this and you'll soon go completely mad yourself...

Our author, Paul Andreota (1917-2007), wrote novels of suspense and witchcraft, sez the paperback's bio page, as well as screenplays for French films I've never heard of (decidedly not the arty Truffaut/Godard type) ranging from the 1950s to the 1970s. Looks like he enjoyed himself, seems a regular bon vivant type here:

 Author Andreota

The book reads easily enough, if it's the sort of thing you like, but any comparison to contemporaneous works like The Exorcist or Rosemary's Baby is wildly overstating the case. Much of it reads like an obsessive hard-boiled novel of fatalistic love but with that tinge of the otherworldly, especially the final pages. But it's too little too late.

Although I was intrigued by the idea of a French occult novel, the main reason I bought Sweet Taste was for that sweet cover. Artist Charles Sovek, best known for his work on the early Seventies series Satan Sleuth published by Warner Books (and prominently featured in Paperbacks from Hell!), has a moody model evoking just the right amount of come-hither crazy ("Sometimes at night I'm two people," she tells Serge at one point). Not a terrible book overall, nothing I'd recommend, but you could—and probably do—have books with worse covers in your collection.

To the Devil's Ballet: The Cover Art of Robert Heindel

These pale, haunting, geometric sketches for very late Sixties and very early Seventies occult paperbacks from Signet Books are a refreshing palate-cleanser for when the lurid and tacky covers one usually sees becomes overwhelming. Whispers work wonders here, thanks to the delicate, intimate style of illustrator Robert Heindel (1938-2005), an artist I only learned of after spying his signature "R. Heindel" on a recently purchased copy of the 1970 edition of The Mephisto Waltz.

The doll's head in a circle, carefully drawn hands at the piano, and eyes closed in repose reminded me of a favorite cover for a book I have been unable to find cheaply, the intriguingly titled A Feast of Eggshells. Somewhere in my searches I discovered another similar cover and noted that signature, then began to track down more by Heindel. Which is how I discovered that he's a world-famous painter of ballet and other dance, whose artwork has been collected by Princess Diana, Andrew Lloyd Weber, and George Lucas! Claaaaasssy for a guy whose earliest works appeared on these "easy-to-see large-type" Gothic/occult paperback originals. I love it!

 

I could find only these four other horror covers, Suffer a Witch, Along Came a Spider, The Ouija Board and The Devil Boy. Personally, I think these are simply wonderful, as they feature all the signifiers of genre works of the era: creepy kids, eerie witches, haunted houses, Rosemary's Baby. If anyone knows of other covers he did like this, please let me know...

 

More interesting is that I've been seeing his work on more famous paperbacks for decades and didn't even realize it: his most well-known cover illustrations are for Signet's series of Ayn Rand reprints. Crazy, right? You can even buy the originals of these here.

False Idols by Betty Ferm (1974): A Demon Needs a Maid

Remember that scene in 1979's Love at First Bite in which Richard Benjamin, the Van Helsing character, attempts to thwart George Hamilton's Dracula by pulling a crucifix from his pocket—but mistakenly takes out a Star of David? When I saw the movie as a kid I didn't get the joke, but it's a good one. Jewish-themed horror is, alas, the tiniest of subgenres in vintage horror fiction, and it can be done well (or, like anything else, not well), but I don't think it's been done enough. This explains why I was intrigued by this back cover copy hinting at a Jewish, rather than a typical Christian, origin for the otherworldly horrors and chilling premonitions promised here. Alas, there's not much going on, Jewish or otherwise, in False Idols (Fawcett Crest paperback, June 1975), a 1974 supernatural thriller that fails to thrill or do anything much at all. False is right.

Everything is leftover Levin and Blatty: the dash of social concern, a whiff of current mores, but nothing goes deep. Familiar elements are all-too-smoothly cobbled together from those better works, from Dark Shadows, soaps, TV movies, commercials, et al. (Similar contemporaneous novels by Ramona Stewart and Barbara Michaels are smarter and spookier too). The upper middle-class setting is bland and rote, and no ethnic flavor is to be found to give the novel its own identity. Our tale goes from bad to worse as soon as Fran, our beleaguered protag, leaves the home to return to the work she left behind once married, and it's the South American maids with their "almond eyes" and "faint musky scent" who cause all the demonic trouble. It's hard to get good help these days!

Mezuzahs replace crosses and the terrified old mother-in-laws shrieks about the Dybbuk, some Jewish grieving practices are only slotted in, that's all, surface details only. The possessive demon hails from Mesoamerican Incan mythology: Taguapica by name, and boy does he have it in for the Old Testament God: "Look around you, Yahweh. Your world is dead as you are dead to the world. It is Taguapica who will reign now" he bellows in the overheated climax. It's the kind of comparative religions scenario Graham Masterton would crank up to 11 in just a few short years. Maybe the novel had some effect for readers in its era as a decent enough time-waster, but nearly half a century later False Idols is simply a dull, unremarkable artifact from a bygone age.

 

Putnam hardcover, 1974

Psychiatrist Livvy Webber—the kind of smart, helpful, good-hearted character you just know is toast sooner or later—actually says at one point early in the novel that "Each time a Rosemary's Baby or an Exorcist hits the market I can be guaranteed a number of new patients who lay claim to related phenomena as the cause for the fouled-up lives." More of this contemporary self-awareness would have given a fresh coat of paint to our tired tale, which lasts a scant 174 pages. The ending is not an ending, it's all still going on, you know how it goes.

Speaking of coats of paint, at least the paperback offers up eerie cover art thanks to the masterful George Ziel, although the lusty, brazen, confident lady in red never—sadly—makes an appearance.
Author Betty Ferm (1926-2019) wrote nearly a dozen novels in various popular genres (see some below) and taught college courses in writing suspense novels.

 

 

She's an Angel Witch: The Witches Series by James Darke (1983-86)

Still so many treasures to be found in paperback horror! I was rereading a Sphere book recently and noticed this back pages ad that I had previously missed, for a horror series I had never heard of before:

Immediately I got on the Google to see what I could see and lo and behold my faithful readers I was rewarded with these delightfully vintage softcore covers for The Witches, an eight-volume series of historical horror novels by one James Darke.

If you were around in the early '80s, then these covers bring back forbidden images of men's mags like Gallery, Oui, Hustler, Penthouse, as well as MTV video starlets and instructional aerobics programs. How the janky lighting, the fog machine, and cheap set design takes me back!

James Darke is, you won't be surprised, a pseudonym; in this case, for a writer new to me, Laurence James (1942 - 2000), who wrote mostly pulp apocalyptic science fiction. The Witches was never published in the States, which certainly accounts for my unfamiliarity with it.

The few reviews I've found online range from good to not-good, neither which makes me eager to read them, but I would not pass up an opportunity to add them to my shelves! If anyone's read them, please, do tell...

Miss Finney Kills Now and Then by Al Dempsey (1982): I'm Younger Than That Now

I hope you enjoy this terrific Jim Warren cover art because that's the only enjoyment you're gonna get here: Miss Finney Kills Now and Then (Tor Aug 1989 reprint/orig Feb 1982) is inept, clunky, and dumb as hell. In short, unreadable. I began reading in all open-mindedness, but its idiocy factor is all-consuming. Nothing depicted has any relationship to humans, living or dead. If someone with a knack for the written word had attempted the same storyline (*cough* Michael McDowell *cough*), I have no doubt it would've been a lurid romp of some entertainment value. Instead we've got whoever Al Dempsey is writing what seems to be a novelization for a movie never made (copyright page notes "based on an original screenplay by Joseph Van Winkle").

Two young women, crude simpletons both, talk their rich aging aunt of the title into participating in a seance—we're in New Orleans, if you must know—and, coerced by an occult con man who only made me think of this guy, Miss Finney "learns" from the "spirit world" that she can become immortal if she simply, you know, kills people ("You must take a life and add to yours"). But she's in a wheelchair how can she do that?? Why, she'll get her two turd nieces to do the actual dirty work of killing, which Miss Finney brings up over coffee. But it's a scam solely to get money from the old biddy since they're not going to actually kill anyone and then oh my god it becomes all too real!

1st Tor edition, 1982

The first murder sequence is staged and executed in a manner reminiscent of a middle-school play made up and performed by, well, middle-schoolers. Aunt Finney's nieces, Brook and Willa (you know their names because neither one stops saying the other's) set up a rapey handyman (ain't they all) to take the "fall." They're gonna fake kill him, see, and collect $5,000 apiece ("Isn't that rather high?") from old Auntie!

Except that's not how it turns out, and from there I think there's some supernatural shit—book spine states "supernatural horror" under Tor monster logo—but by then my eyeballs were melting down my face like I was a Zap comix. I'd re-commit, take a deep breath, and try to read more, in good faith, but that was fuckin torture. I physically couldn't read this book any longer. Even with dialogue like "I've killed, Detective Scarne. I think that is pretty legal and pretty problematical!" 

Skipping to pages near the end, I discovered there's a Satanic cult ("He cannot speak. He has no tongue. Look at the power of Satan, dear Brook"), like you'd find in a satirical Levin, and bloody nonsense around the climax; I found this passage at random:

Men and women alike participated in the blood anointing of her body. Hands coursed sensually across her breasts, fingers ushered blood into her orifices... The participants in the ritual retreated and she could see that a thing, a vulgar form, was approaching her. Her efforts to cope with the horror were futile. She experienced total revulsion.... The form's skin was covered with open sores that dripped a gray mush, bearing an odor from the bowels of the earth... Its member was erect...

However it's all bargain basement rehash of shit any horror fic fan knows by heart. Turns out Dempsey was more a political thriller writer of the kinds of '80s novels with swastikas on the cover; his attempt at horror is unmitigated hackwork. I had to give up for my taste and my sanity. In all honesty Miss Finney is one of the special handful of pitiful horror novels I've attempted to read that make me despair: why am I, an adult grown-ass middle-aged man, reading, or trying to read, such shallow shitty pandering carelessly-produced garbage? Why do I do this to myself? How it got two printings from Tor boggles the mind. 

Won't Forget to Put Roses on Your Grave: The Gloomy Gothics of Victor Banis

The esteemed Jeffrey Catherine Jones painted this, one of my favorite-ever covers, of a delightfully ghoulish lass writhing upon a coffin attended to by fluttering batwings. I mean, I think it is just spectacular. My expectations weren't high for the actual novel, but even so they were dashed as I began to read, for The Vampire Women (Popular Library, 1973) is a dreary rip-off of the original opening chapters of Dracula, right down to its epistolary narrative. Victor Samuels—or should I say "Victor Samuels" for reasons that will become clear in a moment—has produced a work of pure pulp hackery. Updated to 1969, it's the tale of a man, a woman, and her younger sister traveling to Castle Drakula. Yes, Drakula, so see, as their guide through the Carpathians informs them, it's not the same Dracula as from the books and movies! Whew, glad we cleared that up.

I tried to approach the story as a cheap Dracula flick, a lesser Hammer or a Naschy or something, but even that didn't work thanks to "Samuels"'s simplistic prose and bone-headed journal entries:

What was the name of the castle again?
Drakula. Do you know of it?
I recognize that name. It's been used in books and movies. Not very pleasant ones.... He was a werewolf or something like that.

It is those silly legends about that Wallachian—Drakula, I think the name was. I gather he was the subject of some books and movies. I never had time for things like that.

We can't afford to get mixed up with Count Drakula and his government or his politics.

Carolyn giggled. "I'm going to marry Count Drakula," she chirped. She looked cocky and defiant.

1976 German edition

Of course I trudged and skimmed most of the way through to the obvious climax—"Get back, Drakula!" I warned as I snatched up the stake at my feet—groaning the whole way. Then I looked up the author and quickly found it is the pseudonym of a writer named Victor J. Banis, and o my friends, lots of fun stuff came my way. Born in 1937 in Pennsylvania, Banis is considered the father of gay pulp fiction. That's a pretty big deal, and as I read about Banis and his illustrious history in the pulp trade, I learned he also wrote many Gothic romances of the late '60s and early '70s under other various pen names (he even wrote some of the perennial Executioner men's adventure series!). In interviews Banis has no illusions about the quality of some of his output—he was simply a working writer, but his subject matter had never been explored in mass market before. Fascinating! I live for these jaunts down forgotten paperback history...

Banis, 1973

I've found a handful of glorious paperback covers for his books from that long-ago era; I think you'll recognize a Hector Garrido cover down there too...

Recent Horror Reads

Some capsule reviews of three horror novels I read early this year; none exactly essential, alas, but the first title is recommended.

With its flame-swept cover of a mysterious beauty transforming into another mysterious beauty, you might think I would've skipped this book when I found it at Powell's last year. You'd be wrong! Shouldn't surprise you now that I picked it up solely because of its cover art and also because I'd never ever heard of it before. Then, lo and behold, I was rewarded with several hours of creepy, darkly romantic, even refreshing reading. Yes: The Burning Ground (Pocket Books, July 1987, cover by Peter Caras) more than met expectation. Author Madeena Spray Nolan, whoever that is, writes in a smart, modern, lively style that belies Gothic romance origins.

Odd to feel so sad at the death of someone I had never known. Back cover synopsis a fair inkling of what to expect inside, while Nolan elevates material somewhat by her knowing skills and insights into hidden human motivation; dialogue comes from having listened to others, not from imagination. Entertaining read with elements of (mild) horror, occult, mystery, contemporary romance (couple overheated sex scenes work, maybe a laugh), and Gothic fiction. Some grim poetic imagery works well. At base is desire to live a creative life, and the stranglehold grip it can have on people whether they want it or not—and worse, whether they have talent or not.

Nolan's skill with suspense and the supernatural is laudable; the climax taut; the denouement satisfying. I could find little about Nolan online, other than that she wrote a children's book and another horror novel. But note how thoughtfully Pocket Books moved their logo to accommodate Caras's illustration!

Featuring a sexually reductive cover—from Playboy Paperbacks, natch—Satyr by Linda Crockett Gray (July 1981) is about as subtle. Imad Gurdev is a real-life satyr, escaping from his kind's historic monastic abode in the wilds of Turkey to the sleazy grindhouse streets of Tampa, FL, to get his rocks off and blaspheme. He hides his goat-legs in baggy clothes and plays mind-tricks on his female victims so they have only vague memories of the rape. Anti-rape crusader Martha Boozer speaks to high schools and women's groups—at one point she blithely shows the latter a slide show not just of questionable ancient art but also "kiddie porn" and then a snuff film "confiscated by Tampa police." Talk about triggering.

Operating almost as a feminist manifesto in the Dworkin/MacKinnon/Brownmiller mold but also offering up stalking scenarios like a slasher film, Satyr features some moments of suspense as the two characters hurtle towards confrontation, and the obligatory research visit to an anthro prof who declares "These mixed-breed creatures where the human and beast are combined have existed in every culture I have studied." Well fuckin' duh. Fortunately the other older satyrs aren't such creepos and follow the apostate to America's wang to punish and destroy him. Though not terribly written or paced—I mean, it's published by Playboy, not Zebra—I have no reason to recommend the novel.

The late Brian McNaughton is also a writer of some real ability, but it's wasted mostly on nonsense in Satan's Mistress (Carlyle Books, 1982 reprint of 1978 original), number two in a Satanic/occult series that is fairly infamous for its UK cover art (this American edition looks like adult bookstore fodder). Family of three, father, mother (with a witchy history), and son, moves into an upstate New York mill, we learn mother's own father raped her as he was leader of a religious cult and had declared himself God. Slooowly weird stuff starts to happen, dreams of hot redheaded chicks, mom and son have some sexual tension (ugh) and whatnot. There's a secret room in the basement, somebody left a lot of books down here, oh look it's the Necronomicon! Let's go ask the old lawyer nearby who also happens to be a pulp horror aficionado and Lovecraft expert all about it: "I had it this afternoon from a thoroughly reliable source that, when 'The Call of Cthulhu' was first printed in 1928, Albert Einstein panicked. He had drafted a letter urging Farnsworth Wright, Lovecraft's editor, in the strongest possible terms, not to print any more stories on similar themes..."

I did enjoy the Halloween party sequence—writing good party scenes is hard, all those characters mingling and drinking and flirting all at once, and I enjoy a good one whether in real life or on the page. Still, I don't understand how an ostensible horror writer can spend so much time writing about nothing and so little time on, you know, horror. Isn't it more fun to write of horrific events and encounters than of a neighbor's pack of dogs or a teenage boy's crush or the New York commercial art world? Grady Hendrix told me the book works better if you read it along with the other in the series. Again, I liked McNaughton's bright, adept approach, he knows people and life (not all horror writers do, one of my constant criticisms), and the climax gets Yog-Sothothy, but I'm not rushing to read the others. Although Mistress does contain my favorite line of the year so far: He went and changed to his work clothes, a pair of jeans that the Ramones would have discarded. Gabba gabba hey, that's hilarious.