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.

Your Pretty Face is Going to Hell: The Cover Art of Peter Caras

Peter Caras (b. 1941) is a long-time and well-respected illustrator and graphic designer whose paperback cover artwork dates back to the 1960s. Inspired by the great Rockwell and mentored by James Bama, it's cool to see their styles mingled in pulpy yet highly skilled art. Much, if not most, of Caras's output was in genres I have never followed: Westerns, spy thrillers, adventure yarns, historical novels, young adult fiction, modern romances, pulpy erotica, and superhero novelizations. Appreciate his attention to the realistic detail of tormented faces, menacing leers (almost Kubrickian!), to contrasting design, and the vivid use of light and shadow. Despite his prominence in other genres, there can be no doubt Caras is a master of the paperback horror cover.

Two fairly recognizable covers for paperbacks by one Duffy Stein, The Owlsfane Horror (Dell, Nov 1981) and Ghost Child (Dell, 1982). Word is these are disposable, mediocre novels, but I gotta have them on my shelf anyway.

(thanks to La Creeperie for this stepback image)

Effigies from 1980 was one of my favorite reads of 2016. How can you not love this cover and its stepback revealing the shocking evil that lurks behind an innocent visage. Virtually perfect.

Total '60s style for this 1967 Paperback Library Black Magic Library of Terror (some kind of series, unknown number of volumes, that I'm trying to track down).

I've heard goods things about Predators (1987), I mean Nelson DeMille, trusted name in horror. Below is a smattering of various '80s titles, including one TMHF classic, 1987's Finishing Touches from the terrific Tom Tessier.

Review of this paperback coming soon!

Now the following covers are ones I was unable to find precise credit as being by Caras; however I think you'll agree after having seen Caras's style that the odds are excellent these are by him. If anyone knows otherwise, let me know.

You can see more of Peter Caras's non-horror work here.

Effigies by William K. Wells (1980): Don't Shake Me Lucifer

First things first: this might be the most soused horror novel I've ever read. Everybody's always topping off their drink, or sneaking one, or suggesting they grab one together and talk, or exclaiming they need one. They're drinking while they're frantic with worry and dread over the horrible things happening to their town of Holland County and to their family members. One guy's drinking during a seance! It's like Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf up in here. This is all okay with me. Effigies (Dell Books, Nov 1980) with its astounding Peter Caras cover of a leering visage and its lurid stepback, looks like just another creepy satanic kid paperback original of its day, with a no-name author (sorry, William K. Wells!) and lacking even the most rudimentary of relevant blurbs (what, no "Scarier than The Exorcist!", no "More shocking than The Other!", no "Makes Rosemary's Baby look like Love Story!"?). Seems like a real, well, loser. Yet I totes dug it and I did not expect to totes dig it.

The story proper: a young suburban mother, Nicole Bannister, a children's book author and illustrator, receives a terrible shock when she finds a package delivered to her contains a child's amputated finger. While police chief Frank Liscomb and medical examiner Thomas Blauvelt begin their investigation looking for a dead body, rumors start to fly in this upscale artist community that there's witchy satanic coven up in the woods, a spot called Job's Camp, occupied by young itinerants who a few years before would've been called hippies. Now they're seen—well, one of them, a crude, abusive yet charismatic 20-something named Freddie Loftus, is seen as a Charles Manson follower, perhaps eager to start his own murderous cult...

Lots of characters, get ready: Nicole's husband Jonathan, a commercial artist working in the (dangerous) city; his colleague Henry Dixon, a bitter drunk whose tipple is Boodles gin (crime readers may note this was Travis McGee's drink as well); Dixon's wife Estelle, who feels intellectually inferior in this environments of creatives, has been digging pseudoscience as of late and has discovered the Ouija board; Father Daniel Conant, a darkly handsome yet friendly, thoughtful young priest who wishes to help Nicole deal with her shock; Maria Braithwaite, a worldly European sophisticate who eyes Americans as shallow and impulsive; Judge Oliver Marquith, expansive and greedy, eager to purchase the plot of land called Job's Camp; and more. Also: little Leslie Bannister, the girl on the cover, whose invisible playmates bode unwell for her and well everyone; babysitter Susan Dixon, who straddles the line between dutiful daughter and drug and sex experimenter up in the woods; Ken Brady, maybe her boyfriend, maybe not, he hangs around too much with that creep Freddie Loftus.

Also, weird natural stuff is happening in town: the oppressive heat, the appearance of giant beetles and rattlesnakes, darkening skies, your general gloom and doom ("There seemed to be a giant pall over Holland County, like a tarpaulin covering an open grave"). To get Nicole's mind off all the unpleasantness, Jonathan throws her a birthday party and everybody's there having a high old time. One guy talks about the book he's gonna write, another declares Wertmuller can't compare to Herzog, another simply must get this recipe, and what about the "sex orgies" and LSD up in Job's Camp? Estelle and Maria and Father Conant talk about seances. Dixon gets drunk. Presents for Nicole are opened: lots of booze to ensure the party continues. And then one present in particular that no one recognizes and you can probably guess what's coming. 

Still reeling from that one present that turned a great party into a bummer one, the people who attended are encouraged by Estelle to attend a seance in which she will be the medium. Oh man you know that's not gonna turn out well. And it doesn't. Roaring tornado winds invade the house, lots of screaming in Latin, a spirit named Elvida makes contact ("I am young but old, I am alive but dead, I am flesh but not flesh") and not everyone makes it out alive. A grand set-piece of terrific mayhem, it was great sequence for this horror fan.

Meanwhile Freddie is holding his stoned gang up in the woods spellbound with his "sermons" on the illusory constructs of good and evil. Soon they're gonna have a special night where all boundaries are crossed (wait till you get a load of "the pentagon"!). This night of Rites ends in a climax of sacrifice, violent sex, and whatnot. But of course! It sends Blauvelt and Liscomb into more frantic efforts to find out who Freddie Loftus really is, and if he's behind the gruesome packages sent to Nicole Bannister. Wells takes his time drawing it all together—Effigies is not quite 500 pages—and there are ugly, guilty revelations a-plenty about Freddie, about Nicole, about Father Conant to come. The title too will become clear. Disgustingly, bizarrely, satanically so.

While it's not a great horror novel by any means, Effigies provided me with some solid hours of reading enjoyment, probably because I was expecting so little. I never once went "Oh come on!" or "Are you kidding me?" or rolled my eyes at a clunky descriptive phrase, an amateur analogy, or a wooden exclamation like one too often finds in horror paperbacks—Wells, whoever he is, is a serviceable writer. The death and degradation of the '60s revolutionary spirit is part of the novel's setup, and Wells does a nice background sketch of the era, how the '70s came on and slowly laid waste to those ideals. I did not get a sense of "You kids get off my lawn!" from the author's stance; seemed fairly judgment-free to me. Everybody felt this way after Manson, no? Maybe the author was saying something about how those lofty ideals, once corrupted by time and age and carnal pleasures and the lure of society at large, opened up a place for evil to slip in. But the Church also has its faultlines ripe for exploitation. What difference is there between Freddie Loftus and Father Conant? 

And while satanic/occult horror is one of my least favorite styles of horror, here, for me, it just seemed to work. Many sequences would have lent themselves well to a sleazy '70s or '80s horror flick, especially the seance(s) and the climax(es); shame nobody got on that. One problem is that the cast of characters remain somewhat vague; Wells could've filled in some more detailed specifics about each one, some apt note of behavior or thought or motivation that differentiated them. Sometimes I had trouble identifying some of the minor players. The ending satisfies but just maybe could've hit a note of horror I was imagining. But there's also lots of vintage goodies to enjoy, a mood of fatalism, plenty of post-Exorcist foulness (the passages from "The Journal of a Satanist" are metal as fuck) and even a couple scenes of straight-up hippie/demonic porno! Yee-ikes. Yep, Effigies kinda brings it. If you'll pardon the pun, I enjoyed the hell out of it.

As jaded Maria Braithwaite muses perceptively:

How little Americans know about spiritualism, mystery, the inexplicable, the unforeseen... Astrology, yoga, Buddhism, meditation, all become fads, something to "do"... to show off like a new possession. Psychiatry had been twisted, warped, torn asunder and completely reshaped into a meaningless mass of pseudoscience... And now the American masses had lately discovered the occult. As though it had never been there in the first place! 

Satan, Lucifer, Beelzebub were new characters in the American drama... 

What will these Americans do with their new fad?

Dagon by Fred Chappell (1968): This Very Night, Evermore

Here's a short novel from the kind of author one doesn't normally associate with the Cthulhu Mythos: a former North Carolina Poet Laureate and English professor named Fred Chappell. In Dagon, his third novel (first paperback edition 1987 from St. Martin's Press), he culls both the Southern gothic tradition and Lovecraftian tropes to produce a weird, unclassifiable whole. Written in that writerly style that prides itself on paragraphs that go on for two pages while describing in poetic prose the fetid decay of the region that seeps into the psyches of its characters, Dagon isn't just a horror novel: "My purpose in Dagon was not simply to scare people or thrill them," Chappell says in Understanding Fred Chappell. "You can do that by making a loud noise. I wanted to disturb them in a different way... the horror story is only the surface. There's a great deal of literary intention below that."

Contemporary Southern fiction has never done much for me; I find much of it too self-conscious and overwrought, often dripping in a prose so purple that pulp writers would blush. However, its concern for family lineage, the almost mystical power the very land itself has on its inhabitants, its religious strangeness and hypocritical perversity is not so far removed from Lovecraft's own fiction. I've no idea why Chappell was drawn to the Cthulhu Mythos for this novel, but both August Derleth and Karl Edward Wagner heaped praise upon it. Mostly it's a grim journey through psychological degradation and the loss of individual will, filled out with Southern-fiction staples like murder, adultery, strange religious rites, weird locals, backwoods degeneracy, creepy fish-faced women... Hey, wait a minute!

2002 edition from Louisiana State University Press

Peter Leland is a young preacher who inherits his grandparents' farmhouse in the North Carolina mountains. He comes to live there with his wife Sheila so he can work on his book about Puritanism and paganism in America (Dagon here is not Lovecraft's Dagon but the fertility god referenced in the Old Testament... or is it?). The opening chapter, a densely-written section as Leland explores his new home, had what I took to be some slight foreshadowing: In the left door his image stood, hands still over his face, and he was all cut into pieces in the panes... Which you can also see on the cover of the original 1968 hardcover here.

But Leland, while pondering dark and guilt-stricken theological notions for his book, becomes erotically obsessed with a neighbor's ugly yet mysteriously alluring daughter, Mina: She had no nose, Mina, any more than a fish. She deeped in oceans of semen. Events then take a turn for the absolute worst - Chappell strains credibility here - and soon Leland is away with Mina and on the road in an old car through the South's tangled backwoods. Along for the ride is teenage hillbilly-punk Coke Rymer (those Southern names!), who challenges Leland every chance he gets; Leland's response is to drink more of Mina's lethal moonshine. Ultimately Leland wants to give up all his earthly powers of autonomy, allows himself to be monstrously tattooed, thus encouraging Mina to take him to a finality from which he can never return.

Here, was this an inky bird struggling into shape? Really, were these great fish? Or bared unjoined tendons? Was this a clot of spiny seaweed?... A worm?... the design, if it could be called a design, appeared on him like a great lurid continent thrusting itself out of the sea.

(The interior cover above well recreates this, if you look close you'll see the head of Dagon casting a shadow as it rises from a young Warren Beatty's perfect pecs. Pretty sure it's the work of Peter Caras).

Interestingly, Chappell's novel has two endings, and I've read that he was unsure which to use: the penultimate chapter is the horrific one, while the true end of the book is a bizarre moment of, yes, Lovecraftian transcendence. I dug both. So, here, it's the destination that counts, while the journey is just too... not-horror enough for me, unfocused. Fans of Lovecraftian fiction will not find enough Dagon action; lovers of Southern fiction will be confused by references to Cthulhu and "Їa ftagn" and such. That "blinding terror" tagline on the sickly green cover is misleading, although the shackles feature in an effective scene of creepiness and Southern gothicism. Ripe with imagery and smells of rotting earth, dank vegetation, and a debased sensuality, Dagon works in places but left me unsatisfied in others; it's an intriguing and original entry in the Cthulhu Mythos but I'm simply not sure how successful of one.

On an unrelated note: I was recently interviewed by After Dark in the Playing Fields. Care to hear even more of my opinions and deathless insights into vintage horror fiction? No? That's cool. But if you do, why, click here!