Feels Like I'm Going to Lose My Mind

The other day, the 10th, was John Shirley's birthday, so I was perusing his vintage paperback covers and this one jumped out at me. I haven't read In Darkness Waiting (Onyx, Apr 1988) and I've come across this cover before, but damn if it didn't strike me this time as a certain female pop singer c. early-mid 1980s. Does anybody else see it, or am I just crazy?

Evans Light and His Paperback Finds

Horror writer Evans Light has been having some great luck with his book-buying sprees recently, finding lots of books I was unfamiliar with. He has graciously allowed me to share their cover art. The title above, The Craving (Dell 1982), was one a TMHF reader was looking for, who provided a description of the cover which I posted on the Facebook page. Evans came to the rescue, ID-ing the book right away, one he'd just purchased himself! Screaming Whitman's Sampler, totally brilliant. Be sure to check out his (and his brother's) site, www.lightbrothershorror.com.

The Sharing (Avon 1984) shows some folks all going for--what? Moist brownies? An evil lust for moist brownies? Is that it?

The Heirloom (Pocket 1981) is by one of Graham Masterton's pseudonyms. '80s kids had all the fun...

Don't Tell Mommy (Pocket 1985) with more face-melting mayhem.

Masques (Berkley 1981) has a creeptastic voodoo doll and a nice tagline and that font I love, ITC Benguiat. Pronzini is a crime writer but his books were often marketed to horror readers; you can see this title's other covers here.

The Breeze Horror (Onyx 1988) Hungry hungry curtains! I find breezy winds rather foreboding, but will that work for a whole novel?

And a couple creepy kids to wrap up: Children of the Dark (Ballantine 1980) and Satan's Spawn (Avon 1988).

You Best Believe I'm in Love, L-U-V

Headhunter by Michael Slade (1984): I Guarantee You That It Ain't Your Day - Chop Chop!

I got more than I bargained for with Headhunter, the debut novel from Michael Slade (a pseudonym for several Canadian criminal lawyers, mainly one Jay Clarke). It's much more complex and wide-ranging than I'd anticipated, less cheesy, smarter and more ferocious too. The Royal Canadian Mounted Police are after a brutal killer in Vancouver who decapitates women, sometimes sexually assaulting them, then places their heads on spikes... and then takes a picture of that to taunt the law with. The RCMP team is led by the haunted Robert DeClercq, a great and respected detective who retired after a tragedy involving his wife and daughter; he is now back doing what he does best. But at what price?

UK paperback reprint, 1993

What feels like dozens of characters and impressive set pieces of murder and fright are crammed into the 420 pages, as well as lots of detailed forensic and surveillance science. Decades-old events feature into the narrative, some more obviously than others. Great details of Vancouver city life, of New Orleans decadence, of frigid 19th century Canadian wastes are presented in which the reader can get lost. There's a voodoo ceremony and LSD trips and whole lot of graphic S&M and mutilation. The author(s) even throw in '70s British punk rock, using the Clash's tipply classic "Jimmy Jazz" as a clue (the lines "Cut off his ears and chop off his head/Police come looking for Jimmy Jazz...").

Overly-literal 1985 cover, Star Books UK

Slade's novel is a melange of behind-the-scenes police procedural, horror fiction tropes like decapitation and voodoo ceremonies, and true-crime serial killer exposé. But Slade definitely goes for a supernatural mood in several scenes despite writing a an otherwise completely realistic, if overheated, thriller. You won't find that in James Ellroy's works, when he upped the crime-horror ante with novels like The Black Dahlia and L.A. Confidential; I suppose that's why Slade's books were generally found on the horror shelves. The cover of this Onyx paperback from '86 is creepy but not all that eye-catching, although I'd say the quote from the author of Psycho is apt.


Anyway, there was lots to like about Headhunter, it definitely brings the '80s horror goodies, but by about page 300 I was a bit exhausted. I didn't mind the textbook-like pages on voodooism, serial killer psychology, the cannibalism of Native American tribes, even the international drug trade (this is one of those novels that includes a bibliography). But the scale, the twists, the complexity started to wear on me. Characterization is rich in some places and quite thin in others, and that narrative that skips about had me flipping back through pages, trying to remember someone's name or some plot point I might've only skimmed. Slade has continued in cult popularity, still writing, still publishing gruesome crime thrillers, and I remember seeing lots of his books around back in the day (Ghoul from 1987 seems to be a particular favorite of horror fans). Headhunter is pretty cool indeed but be prepared for some iffy acrobatics as Slade tries to keep you guessing to the very... last... sentence.

Fear by R. Patrick Gates (1988): This Book's Alright If You Like Crap

Somewhere I'd seen this unlauded - and seemingly unloved - horror paperback (it features no critical blurbs whatsoever) on a list of forgotten-but-good horror novels of the 1980s. But I beg to differ, whoever composed said list: R. Patrick Gates's first novel Fear should be forgotten for good. With its ridiculously generic title, clunky pacing, boring plot, inept characterization of kids and their abusive parents, idiot dope-smoking teens, elementary-school level intro to psychic phenomena, pretentious prologue and epilogue which reference Adam, Eve, and the serpent... where do I stop? Along with the author's rudimentary attempts, and wholly successful failures, at engendering said fear in its readers, it is horror fiction at ebb tide, where you can see all the wreckage that better writers rejected.

And last but not least, its most egregious failure is the always-unwelcome '80s trope of sibling incest (He turned and walked out of the bathroom, but not before he stole one more glance at his sister's tight buttocks). Fear not, fair reader, I read this stuff - or skim, to save eyeballs and brain - so you don't have to. Fear is an utter travesty. Avoid at all costs. Blue-black skulls ain't so bad, though.

Lost Angels by David J. Schow (1990): See the City's Ripped Insides

Despite David J. Schow's reputation in the late 1980s as a young horror writer who could gross out readers and critics at 10 paces with tales of pustular zombies redolent of rot and gore, the longish stories of Lost Angels (Onyx/Mar 1990) are anything but. The five stories in this collection are filled with true-to-life details about relationships romantic and platonic, fables about city life and industry careers and urban societal pressures. But in slips just a touch, just a bare breath of the weird or the satanic, something arcane yet organic that butts up against all that steel and glass and marble and silk and black leather of Los Angeles near the end of the century.

Yep, though Schow himself jokingly coined the term "splatterpunk" which defined a whole subgenre of horror from about 1986 to 1995, he is actually most adept at thoughtful works, maybe verbally manic and overwrought and a bit too self-consciously hip (well, '80s hip anyway, which is kind of awkward), but more concerned with basic human conflict rather than supernatural doings. Any such goings-on tend to be abstract metaphors for the elusive qualities of friendship, loyalty, honor, betrayal, identity, sex, and love - very much in the style of Harlan Ellison circa Strange Wine (1978) or Shatterday (1980), I realized upon this rereading: modern guys, often broken, often clueless for all their state-of-the-art status trappings, dodging the landmines of contemporary sexual politics. You wouldn't know it from the weird neon biker imagery on the 1990 cover, however.

The lead-off story, "Red Light," is, as you can see from the cover above, an 1987 award-winning tale set San Francisco and not originally intended to be part of this LA-based collection. The central conceit - that fame devours - is certainly timeworn by today's paparazzi-dazzled media, but the carefully detailed setting and relationship between the photographer narrator and his long-lost love win out. I believe the story it's referencing is Robert Bloch's "The Model," or maybe Fritz Lieber's "The Girl with Hungry Eyes."

Babbage Press revised edition, 2000

The grim sexual underbelly of Hollywood and fellows like Aleister Crowley form "Brass." It's always awkward learning about your parents' sex life. When you find out your father was part of a sybaritic cult then consorted with demons and now one may be after you in the form of a brilliant and gorgeous soulmate? Chilling. "Falling Man," despite its director main character and behind-the-scenes glimpses of TV production, which I usually like, unfortunately overstays its welcome at over 60 pages. "Pamela's Get" was just a little too oblique for me but has a nicely realistic depiction of female friendship at its core. "Monster Movies" sweetly finishes the collection and pays reverence to the child in the man, the one who worshiped at the late-night TV altar of The Mummy and The Creature but who may have lost his faith as an adult in the corporate world and happy-hour martini bars.

While it hits some false notes - particularly in its hyper-verbal dialogue, which is sometimes cringeworthy in its affectedness - and seems at times like it's perhaps just playing grown-up, Lost Angels is a worthy collection from the era; Schow's got a knack for realism as well as fantasy. Nothing really scary here, except for dreams deferred and hopes lost and loves betrayed. Nah, those things aren't scary at all.

Resurrection Dreams by Richard Laymon (1989): Rockin' Bones

Now we get into the realm of the truly ridiculous horror fiction cover art. Let's parse this one a sec, shall we? Where do we begin? There is a skeleton driving a car. Not a rotting, pustulant, zombified corpse driving a vintage badass hot rod, but a simple, goofy, grinning Halloween-y skeleton, bared phalanxes at a sharp 10 and 2, careering off in a late-model sedan from what looks like a bordello of fellow active skeletons. And one of those skeletons has hair, quite feminine hair. Do you see the woman in the window? Second floor, middle. Ooh-la-la! Also, a skeleton pondering a noose and one swinging an ax. Huh. Skeletons are not scary; they're silly. And what about ol' mom jeans giving our skeletal pal the once-over twice? I do believe the fates have something in store for these two, putting them on a cover of a fairly lame '80s horror novel like Resurrection Dreams, Richard Laymon's agreeable but ultimately underwhelming and underwritten 1989 novel.

Laymon, who died in 2001, has had most if not all of his old novels republished in mass market paperback editions due to his growing posthumous cult status in the field. I do not belong to this cult. He was the type of author I avoided in my horror-reading heyday of the late '80s and early '90s and this book confirms my suspicions: I was seriously judging his books by their covers and the only story I'd read of his, "Mess Hall" in Book of the Dead, seemed to me an artless mess of sexual violence and gore.

Evoking the film version of Lovecraft's Re-Animator, with a madman trying to resurrect dead bodies, Dreams is hackwork of the most inoffensive kind. Melvin Dodds is the high school nerd (you can tell that by his name) who, in a completely unbelievable moment just a few pages in, shocks the town with a horrifying experiment he displays at the school's science fair: trying to resurrect the body (with jumper cables!) of a popular female classmate, recently killed in a drunk driving accident. He ends up locked away in a mental hospital for 20 years; after he's released he heads back into town and operates a gas station. One of his former classmates, now Dr. Vicki Chandler, returns, and Melvin realizes he's loved her all along. The resurrection techniques he began in high school are now perfected, and if Vicki won't love him willingly, well....

I am certainly a fan of ladies resurrected from the dead and the unholy passion that will thus occur, but Laymon really misses out on a chance to explore this taboo. There are a couple rom-com moments when Melvin realizes he's in a relationship with a zombie woman, Patricia, his first victim, rather than the woman of his dreams; Laymon is too poor of a writer and scenarist to make something out of this. Resurrection Dreams is ham-fisted and obvious, gory in the dullest manner, lacking the wit or passion or intensity that could have made his somewhat intriguing premise memorable. Let's just turn off the lights and close the door, shall we, and never speak of this again.

Sunglasses After Dark by Nancy A. Collins (1989): They're So Sharp

I don't remember a thing about the vampire novel Sunglasses After Dark except that at one point, Jim Morrison comes back as a vampire for a chapter, or something like that, which I thought was pretty cool back in the day. Nancy Collins wrote some sequels to this featuring her character Sonja Blue, a vampire hunter, but I never read them. This was part of the post-Anne Rice generation when authors were reimagining vampires for the modern age. I guess that's better than reimagining them teenage and glittery. These days I'd just as soon put on an old Siouxsie Sioux album and be done with it. I've heard Collins was not too keen on the Underworld movies since they seemed too similar to her Sonja Blue series and sued the producers. But you can't deny the striking artistry (courtesy of Mel Odom) of this cover, which is the sole reason I kept my copy for 20 years in pretty nice condition. I love that the title and author are only on the back cover; later printings added them to the front which is far less effective.