Let Fury Have the Hour

Apropos of nothing, simply some cover art I really dig for a novel I couldn't get into (although the movie version is something of a psychic '70s pleasure). All are pretty striking: above, the '80s reprint with feathered 'do art by John Melo, a couple UK editions complete with King references, then the terrific stepback from the original 1977 US paperback, and at bottom the de rigueur movie tie-in edition. Enjoy!

 

 

Armies of the Hungry Ones

No, this is not the VHS box cover art for a forgotten Italian zombie flick! Gloriously depraved and aglow with the green-grey hue of putrescence, this cover for the horror novel Disembodied (St. Martin's Press, 1988) is one of the most graphic I've seen. I snatched it up on that basis alone! But one glance at the back cover to see what's the haps and we're in trouble:

"Psychic adventurer"? "Astral self"? Ugh. My least favorite horror fiction involves these dopey old hippy tropes. Is the cover a bait and switch, promising extreme zombie mayhem but not delivering? Anyone know? Alas, Disembodied joins the ever-growing legion of the unread. 

The Chill Series by Jory Sherman

Thanks to random Google adventuring, I just discovered this Chill series, published by Pinnacle from 1978 through 1980, all by an author I was previously unfamiliar with named Jory Sherman. Actually I am still pretty unfamiliar with him, although I've learned he's written about a gajillion Westerns over the decades. This psychic investigator stuff looks like sheer pulp fiction cashing in on the pseudoscientific tabloid trends of that wild n' wooly decade known as the 1970s.

 

The series title is the nickname of one Dr. Russell V. Chillders, the aforementioned "psychic investigator" (why do psychics need to "investigate" shit? Wouldn't they already know?) Cover art is by Paul Stinson, save for Chill at top; its more mildly Gothic imagery done by Jack Thurston (for UK cover art and some plot synopses, go here). I can't get over that Cabbage Patch doll head at the bottom! As you peruse the covers, note the wonderfully dated fashions, standard horror tropes, occult fads, and paperbacks that cost merely a buck seventy-five. The '70s indeed.

Please, if anybody out there's read any of 'em, let us know!

Carrie by Stephen King (1974): Her Long-Time Curse Hurts But What's Worse Is...

What happens if there are others like her? 

What happens to the world?

So asks a survivor of Prom Night, the name the media has given to the tragedy that befell Chamberlain, Maine, on the night and early morning  of May 27/28, 1979. Despite all the investigations and interviews and biographies and memoirs about that unbelievable event, it's a question no one can answer. It's a question that leapt out and haunted me deeply when I read it, because it is an innocent, honest question, one that intuits the unimaginable changes and dangers humanity faces if the powers that Carrie White had at her command are also shared with unknown people the planet over. With no answer forthcoming, both its terror and its perception are enhanced. With such invisible forces at the hands of our fellow man, what hope would any of us have to survive such rage? Always at the mercy of someone who can... well, as an academic commentator on the Prom Night horror posits: For if Carrie White is the truth, then what of Newton?

I read Stephen King's debut novel Carrie 25 years ago when I was in high school - when I read the bulk of his then-published works - but found it mitigated by its classic '76 De Palma film adaptation, so it's always been at the bottom of my list of King books to reread. But with the release of this new movie version I knew it was time for a revisit. And found the novel was spectacular.  I was pleasantly surprised, nicely creeped out, at the power and conviction this little book still has. Had King written it later in his career, I imagine he would've expanded on the characters - the home lives of Carrie's classmates Chris Hargensen and Sue Snell, Principal Grayle, and even that half-assed '50s-style greaser Billy Nolan would've been fascinating reading - but as it is, Carrie is a lightning-paced unassuming thriller that has moments of real electric shock and real human emotion.

The infamous opening gym shower sequence alone, of menstrual blood and sanitary napkins and the horrifying chant "Plug it up, plug it up, plug it up" is surely one of the most humiliating moments in horror, and still taps into that cringing shadow in us that is both the bullied and the bully. Fewer than 10 pages into his first novel and King has given us one of the greatest imaginings of abjection in pop fiction.

Like Bram Stoker did in Dracula, King uses a variety of sources to tell his story: there are AP teletypes and passages from science journals, academic books like The Shadow Exploded, transcripts of court depositions, popular magazine interviews with Carrie's neighbors, Sue Snell's own memoir. None has the complete truth; only King's omniscient voice fills in the gaps and satisfies the ignorance and unknowns all the other documents ultimately labor under. Nor does he disguise the tragic climax; we know right away that many people died and the town destroyed in a massive conflagration from these sources. The uneasy suspense this generates, as we wait for all these accounts to converge, is masterful.

A staple of King's fiction to come, class conflicts are prominent at the outset. King clearly delineates the economics of his characters and the town. Lots of talk about adults joining country clubs and living in the right neighborhood - the hypocrisy of the middle-class, the bourgeois values that are ultimately a facade for the same hatreds found in someone like teenage queen sociopath Chris Hargensen. Once a high school teacher, King's depictions of the ins and outs of the teenage social cliques feels real, as do the administrative politics of principals and teachers.

The girls who assaulted Carrie are given a week-long detention - avoidance of which will result in suspension and loss of prom tickets. When the girls' gym coach, Miss Desjardin, pushes Chris and screams at her when telling the girls how far over the line the girls went and gets personal ("if any of you girls think I'm wearing my teacher hat right now, you're making a bad mistake"), Chris Hargensen thinks her lawyer father will sue the school and fire the coach. But in the novel's most satisfying scene, slick legal eagle Daddy Hargensen is sent packing by Principal Gayle after Gayle states the school can easily sue Chris and her cohorts for criminal assault on Carrie White.

"You apparently haven't realized all the implications of in loco parentis in this matter, Mr. Hargensen. The same umbrella that covers your daughter also covers Carrie White. And the minute you file for damages on the ground of physcial and verbal abuse, we will cross-file against your daughter on those same grounds for Carrie White." 
Hargensen's mouth dropped open.

Daddy can't do anything for Chris now. This enrages her, of course, so she turns on the one girl who wants to be an adult and accept her punishment and move on: Sue Snell, the novel's ambivalent heroine. This tension is explicated perfectly in a soda shop confrontation:

"Aren't you getting to be the Joan of Arc around here? I seem to remember you were in there pitching with the rest of us." 

"Yes," Sue said, trembling. "But I stopped." 

"Oh, aren't you just it?" Chris marveled. "Oh my yes. Take your root beer with you. I'm afraid I might touch it and turn to gold."

How dare Sue think she's better than the rest of the evil children who assaulted Carrie White? This pecking order of high school society, so often a mainstay of popular entertainment even for people decades removed from the setting, is seen in sharp relief. While Chris gets an almost erotic thrill - probably no "almost" about it from the vibe of her and Billy's trysts - from doling out "punishment," Sue is ashamed, even mystified, of her involvement with the shower incident, and this is the impetus for her getting her boyfriend Tommy Ross to ask Carrie White to the senior prom. Poor doomed good-kid Tommy, huh? No good deed, etc.

Still, Sue is uncomfortable about her own motives and afraid to examine them too deeply, lest she discover a jewel of selfishness glowing and winking at her from the black velvet of her subconscious. Does she enjoy a manipulative power over Tommy, as Chris does over Billy? Tommy comes across as utterly sincere in his brief relationship with Carrie White. But Sue must protect what she has: And having something she had always longed for - a sense of place, of security, of status - she found that it carried uneasiness with it like a darker sister. Ah-ha! the reader should think, and this darker sister has a name, it's right there.

The Black Man grinned at her with his jackal mouth, and his scarlet eyes knew all the secrets of woman-blood.

Mother Margaret, our true villain, is almost unbelievably deranged. Her religious hysteria is her sole characterization, and even in her back story we find that she was always maniacal. Carrie's powers have exposed themselves when she was a child, and the infant was only saved by her late father. Their arguments are exhausting, leaving you drained, despairing even. What adolescent could live in such choking insane environs? In times of stress and rebellion, Carrie makes her talents known as she flexes flexes FLEXES and terrifies Margaret with whirling dervishes of plates, tables, knickknacks, bursting lightbulbs, etc....  except now Carrie is practically an adult, and Margaret has little say any longer. No more will Carrie be dragged into the prayer room, the altar, the worst place of all, the home of terror, the cave where all hope, all resistance to God's will - and Momma's - was extinguished.

And what of Carrie herself? King is sympathetic but not sentimental. Her thoughts and impressions are scattered everywhere, in parenthetical snippets and well-drawn passages of her inner life: her utter fear of being tricked again, her bewilderment about the most basic facts of physical life, her growing confidence in her skills - her dressmaking and her unfathomable power - as well as her growing distrust of her mother... and perhaps a tiny hopeful glimmer that her prom night with Tommy Ross will be no trick. Carrie is no freak, but desires a normalcy she knows she'll never have; in a school notebook she sadly quotes Dylan: "Till she finally sees that she's like all the rest." No, her mother is the freak; Chris Hargensen might be one too, but Carrie is the one with the tragic flaw, that power that allows her an otherworldly vengeance upon the guilty and the innocent alike.

And finally: the devastation that has been foretold rolls out in the final third of the book and it's breathtaking. King fills in his climax with interviews from survivors, ordinary men and women in the thrall of unimaginable powers; in bold-faced objective AP wire reports; more quotes from his academic sources. Fires burn out of control with no firefighters available, nearby towns send in equipment and men but much too late, and if we look at these flash points on a municipal map, we can pick out Carrie's route - a wandering, looping path of destruction through the town, but one with an almost certain destination: home....

Many of the surviving townspeople inexplicably know Carrie White was responsible, even though they did not know her on sight. As they saw her on the streets wreaking her havoc, they knew. How did they know? the investigators ask; how did they know Carrie if they'd never seen her before? They knew it. They just did. Her psychic emanations, her desperate flailing about in pain and despair, impress themselves upon the besieged and innocent townsfolk. And when Sue finds the pig-bloodied and mortally wounded Carrie and is overwhelmed by the swirling images psychically transmitted... Sue still can't help but think the bleeding freak on this oil-stained asphalt suddenly seemed meaningless and awful in its pain and dying. She thinks that, and she stumbles away, screaming, and then of course, oh but of course, she feels the slow course of dark menstrual blood down her thighs.

We actually do find out that the origin of telekinesis is genetic, so perhaps not all is lost in confronting it. But perhaps all is, as a science journalist ponders: If overt TK ability occurs as a part of puberty, and if this hypothetical TK test is performed on children entering the first grade, we shall certainly be forewarned. But in this case, is forewarned forearmed? If the TB test shows positive, a child can be  treated or isolated. If the TK test shows positive, we have no treatment excpet a bullet in the head. And how is it possible to isolate a person who will eventually have the power to knock down all walls?

If this is truth, what will happen to the world? What of Newton?

In a recent New Yorker article that refreshingly refrained from the sort of backhanded complimentary tone which that mag often adopts when talking about bestselling writers of pop fiction, the perceptive author writes "Carrie succeeds because it feels accurate about things that are unreal... There are lots of writers who tell it like it is, but only a few who, with such commitment and intensity, tell it like it isn’t." Goddamn right. Commitment and intensity, that's what I want!

And there's a comfort I find in revisiting King's prose and storytelling - for better or worse - a feeling of settling back with old friends, with his familiar stylistic tics and peccadilloes, the warmth of his humanity and the coldness of his horrors. You can trust King. Sure, he may get some of the details wrong - a slip into cliche or a banal metaphor, a weak phrasing, a character from central casting - but as we all know, when King is good he's great, his commitment paramount, and you can read it, see it, fucking feel it, from the very first pages of Carrie, his very first book. 

Howling in the Bones of Her Face

Do I love me a creepy pencil-sketch! The stark simplicity of it is a terrific contrast to the usually colorful and garish cover art of the day. Artist unknown, however...

Greely's Cove by John Gideon (1991): Praying for the End of Your Wide-Awake Nightmare

Fairly shouting at you from the cover that it's AN EPIC MASTERPIECE OF MODERN HORROR!, this 1991 paperback cover is generic to the point of meaninglessness: spooky castle in the mist framed by a full moon and surrounded by dark waters, its tagline boasting "It's the place where your worst nightmares come true" which could be said about any place in a work of horror fiction, and author John Gideon has no genre identity whatsoever (turns out it's the pseudonym of an Oregon politico named Lonn Hoklin, the name this novel's copyright is under). Greely's Cove was published at the outskirts of my "vintage horror fiction" dateline, and is definitely the kind of overly familiar tale that novels in the Dell/Abyss line were making obsolete. Still, I decided to take a chance since it has a bunch of rave reviews on Amazon. Maybe an overlooked classic? Er, no.

The small, foggy Washington town in Puget Sound is beset by evil and its everyday American citizens have been disappearing for months, leaving no trace behind. It's up to a regular cast of characters, some noble, some embittered, some doomed, to do battle against an ancient enemy whose evil knows no bounds...

I don't mean to sound too harsh or snarky; Greely's Cove is an agreeable and at times nicely grotesque horror novel, particularly in its climax. Its faults lie in the usual areas: there are far too many King and Straub touches, and Gideon's prose, while quite serviceable, falters under the weight of horror that he's trying to conjure up. Dialogue is often expositionary and wordy; an amateur's inexperience is all too obvious. I skimmed lots of pages after awhile, but fortunately got more into the story as the end neared, because the climactic battles and revelations were kinda epic. But only kinda.

However, I loved the modus operandi of the novel's villain - the Giver of Dreams: he forces the missing people to "live" the vast horrors of humanity's past, unwilling victims trapped in an all-too-real nightmare world. I wish Gideon had expanded on this idea as I found it truly horrific - can you imagine waking up to find you're a serial killer, a Nazi, a Mongol army's whore, a demonic child torturing its mother? And even enjoying it? Ick. I know this sounds terrible but... more please. A more powerful writer could have really taken this concept all the way, rubbed the reader's face in it, got in there deep and true. Oh well. One character really stood out too: a sad-sack boozehound named Mitch Nistler, a mortuary attendant driven to unholy extremes of lust and desire. And you know what that means!

PS. Finally I've figured out the font on the edition at top; it's ITC Benguiat. Designed in 1977, it was used on all kinds of paperbacks throughout the '70s and '80s, and has always been a favorite of mine.

The Night Hunter Series by Robert Faulcon

Until today I had never heard of this series, Night Hunter, first published in the States in the late 1980s by Charter Books. Robert Faulcon is a pen name of respected British dark fantasy author Robert Holdstock. The series seems to be an odd mash-up of men's adventure novels and pulpy occult horror fiction. In the anthology I'm reading right now there's an ad for the series, so while I'm finishing that book and working up a review, check out these perfectly vintage paperback covers! Read a review here.

 

Carrie by Stephen King (1974): Signet First Edition Paperback

One of my great finds this weekend at my local library's enormous book sale was a first edition paperback copy of Stephen King's famous debut novel, Carrie. It's not in mint condition, but considering it's nearly 40 years old (Signet/New American Library April 1975) I'd say it looks pretty damn good. I also found a 3rd printing with the same cover, and a 3rd paperback print of the original Night Shift! (Images to come of course). I haven't read the book since I was in high school myself, but I may soon as there is another film adaptation in the works. This paperback-collecting gene in me has been expressing itself pretty ferociously recently; so I hope Carrie, and the 30 other books I bought at the sale, keeps it satisfied for some time.

Back cover

Inside cover

Inside back cover

The dapper King himself, author photo from the hardcover

Hell House by Richard Matheson (1971): Come On Up to the Devil's Whorehouse

Love this unlikely cover art for Hell House, the haunted house novel by the one and only Richard Matheson. Showcasing the classic Gothic romance elements that were then so popular in mass-market paperbacks, this 1972 Bantam paperback features a woman threatened and fearful of a house she cannot even see from the position she's standing in. Wonder how many old ladies picked this up thinking it was your standard Goth romance, but then ended up on a tour of real horror and perversion not even hinted at on the cover... Heh.

This edition from 1973 includes the two essential horror buzzwords of the era, "possession" and "occult" - and even by '73, two years after its original publication in hardcover, Hell House was considered a "classic novel." Oddly it doesn't mention either Rosemary's Baby or The Exorcist! A horror fiction rarity indeed in those pre-King days.

Did you notice that all the women are in the exact same stance?! This Warner Books cover from '85 is a little too starkly blocky for my taste, and having King's and Straub's names above the author's must have stung Matheson a bit - but this had to really stand out on the paperback racks. And after actually reading Hell House I am not at all surprised to see their blurbs here.

The plot: four people enter the famously haunted Hell House and... well, not all of them leave. The original owner and occupant of the house, the legendary Emeric Belasco, got up to some pretty nasty stuff there, and it seems his negative vibes still permeate the place: no one ever saw him after a November night in 1929, when all his party guests ended up dead. Skeptic physicist/paranormal investigator Dr. Barrett brings his electronic ghost-detector called the Reversor, basically a framus that intersects with the ramistan approximately at the paternoster. Florence Tanner is a kind of Christian medium who can contact the spirit world. Ben Fischer was a child prodigy medium and a member of a previous and tragic endeavor into Hell House that left him the only survivor. Edith is Barrett's wife, prim, proper, unsure why she's along. Hired by the cranky old Rolf Deutsch, a rich eccentric man who wants them to determine if there is life after death, they plan to spend one week within its walls...

So, the good: early chapters include some tasty details about Belasco's predilections at home, which put him in a locus of Crowley, de Sade, and de Rais. Matheson strikes a somber and bleak tone throughout, hinting at times at a Gothic atmosphere - Hell House sits enshrouded in an eternal fog, its windows all bricked up, its rooms enormous and arrogant, the grounds a marshy, deadly tarn. Later, unfortunate characters pinball through this house of horrors, hit by wave after wave of fear and disbelief and pain in nightmarish collisions with their deepest repressions (revealing, I felt, where King and Straub got a lot of ideas for their own excesses). "It's me!" cries one character over and over again at the climax, maddening in idiocy, perhaps my favorite chilling moment in the whole book.

The bad: too much down-time and repetition in the week's activities and lots of bickering. Barrett's Reversor and his and the others' theories on psychic phenomena bore me silly and aren't scary at all. That "somber and bleak tone" becomes humorlessness; the book isn't really any fun in that "gotta keep turning the pages" way I like my vintage horror fiction. And the characters are virtually sympathy-free: Barrett's imperious, Florence a whiner, Fischer's generally out of sorts, and Edith's... well, her name's Edith, you can figure it out.

1999 cover art

The ugly: mostly the graphic sexual assaults, all originating in the rampant orgies of sex and death that were the norm during Belasco's reign in the house. One attack, on Florence, is lurid and somewhat ridiculous in its over-the-topness. Overall it's pretty baldly obvious that Matheson took The Haunting of Hill House and made it faster, cruder, meaner - but a lot shallower too, stuck in its '70s vibe of psychic/paranormal BS, which is my least favorite kind of horror fiction. The author bio states that Matheson is "a man who knows of what he writes, he is a long student of ESP and related psychic phenomena." Big whoop, honestly. Maybe in the stoned '70s that carried some cred, but not today. You might want to stop by Hell House for a visit, there's some really funky stuff going on there you'd like, but if you wanted to skip this tour and spend more quality time with, say, I Am Legend, I wouldn't blame you.

The Shining by Stephen King (1977): Now I Wanna Be a Good Boy

Although it may be Stephen King's most famous horror novel and certainly the one that made him a household name, I must confess that for many years, The Shining was not a novel I really liked. It was never a book that I revisited as I did with many of King's other works, although I knew its reputation was stellar. About five years ago I skimmed through a copy and was even more disheartened as it seemed to me—yes, it's true, I thought this—poorly written and conceived. Well, I don't know what the hell I was smoking: I picked up my recently-acquired Signet '78 first-edition paperback (only edition with that fantastic, yet easily faded, Mylar cover, thanks to art New American Library designer James Plumeri) on Friday morning, ready to give it another try and... could barely put it down all weekend: this time I got it. I raced through The Shining and barely gave myself the time to jot down a note or page number. It is awesome fun to find that a reread of a once-dismissed book is so rewarding. If you haven't read King, The Shining would be a fine intro.

Original 1977 hardcover

Do I even need to recount the plot and the characters? Jack Torrance is a struggling writer, trying to create believable people and conflicts in his play, when he's had no shortage of conflict in his life. His alcoholism has put serious rifts in his relationships with his wife Wendy and five-year-old son Danny; he's lost his job as prep school English instructor; he's also had two very grave moments of violence. But all that, he hopes - they all hope - that's in the past now that he's hired to be the winter caretaker for the Overlook Hotel, thanks to an huge favor from an old drinking buddy who's cleaned up. Sitting high atop a frigid, panoramic Colorado mountain, the enormous hotel is closed for the season and the only occupants will be the Torrance family.

Jack's feelings of inadequacy are front and center in the opening chapter, in his humiliating job interview with that infamous officious little prick, Mr. Ullman (one of my favorite scenes in the book is when Jack calls Ullman and tells him he's going to write a book about the history of the Overlook and Ullman freaks the fuck out). But Jack knows it's time to do right by his family, and taking this job is the classic point of starting over. He's not drinking and he's writing again, but Jack's about to go on one hell of a dry drunk, and have one motherfuck of a writer's block.

UK hardcover 1977

As for "the shining" itself: Danny's psychic power comes in the form of Tony, a little boy a bit older than Danny who appears inside mirrors and as a tiny shadow down a midnight street, always with some bit of information that Danny would have no other way of knowing. It is this ability of Danny's that the Overlook "wants," so it "employs" Jack's troubled past as it spurs Jack on to murder his family, to truly own the Overlook and inherit its foul nature. You almost ache for Danny, who so wants to please his parents, his daddy most of all (which makes Wendy feel guiltily jealous), who wants his daddy to be well and not do the Bad Stuff. King is great at getting inside kids' heads, their goggle-eyed yet strangely rational perception of the strange adult world that surrounds them.

Thematically, The Shining is one of King's richest. Yes, the Overlook Hotel is a repository of human evil; Jack knows this when, in the basement, he finds the scrapbook containing clippings of its unsavory past. Generations pass on their faults; sons pay for their father's transgressions. Abuse becomes a family trait. These are all very much in the grand tradition of haunted house and Gothic tales. Jack's creativity suffers; the real first sign of his madness is a complete 180-degree reversal of his feelings towards his play's characters. The relationship between Jack and Danny is mirrored in the memories of Jack's relationship with his own father, as both are fraught with a heartbreaking mixture not only of love and concern, but also of violence and alcoholism.

UK paperback 2007

It is the back-story in which King *ahem* shines, as he reveals what he wants when he wants for maximum impact. There's the Overlook's blood-drenched past, of course. We get glimpses throughout the novel of Jack's fearsome father, as well as harrowing moments from his drinking days with a colleague. The tortuous memory of accidentally breaking little Danny's arm plagues him, as does his beating of a debate student of his whom he had to kick off the debate team because of a stutter. Both Danny and this student had destroyed something of Jack's: Danny, as a toddler, pours beer over the manuscript of Jack's play, while the student slashes Jack's car tires. He was drunk when abusing Danny but sober when attacking the student, but no matter: it's all Jack Torrance.

UK paperback 1984

The novel is easily one of the most "unputdownable" - wretched word - I've ever read, at least it was this read. The pacing is relentless, lulling you at one moment and then shocking you the next. Suspense wracks up in the final chapters by interlacing chapters on the family's last stand against Jack - or whatever he is at that point - with Dick Hallorann's journey through the snowstorm, the Overlook head cook who also has "the shining" and is heeding Danny's psychic call. But still, we must ask: are there faults in The Shining? Of course. King's writing can be thin in places, too familiar, too pedestrian; there are times where a character's feelings of horror are told to us, instead of simply letting the horrific scenarios speak for themselves. The constant italicized interior thoughts, or maybe too many flashbacks. That final chapter, perhaps (King has intimated he may write a sequel).

Holy shit, they made a movie out of it?!

But these are to quibble; when you're reading King you know you're not getting an elegant flight of poetic prose or a delicately composed novel of modern manners and foibles. Fuck no! You're getting shrieking blasts of icy terror happening to real people. That might sound like one of the myriad cheesy critical blurbs from the first page ("REAL SCARE-ABILITY!" "DELICIOUSLY SHIVERY READING!" "BACK-PRICKLING!") but I don't know how else to phrase it. My moments of fear? When the wasps come back. When Jack hears his dead father's voice on the radio. When the unmanned elevator starts to clank into use. When Danny enters Room 217. When Wendy turns around and sees Jack. When the long-dead masquerade party guests screech "Unmask! Unmask!" and reveal rotting insect faces...

Mmm, now that's good horror, from a good little boy.