Bats Out of Hell by Guy N. Smith (1978): Wings of Pain Reach Out for You

Can you believe it's been over a decade since I read a Guy N. Smith novel?! Despite his having written a near countless number of books, none ever made it to the top of my to-read list. In my paperback collection I have maybe eight or so of his titles, some part of his infamous Crabs series, and others just random I've bought over the years. The itch was coming upon me to revisit the infamous pulp novelist, but I wanted something other than those giant crustaceans, so chose Bats Out of Hell (Signet/Nov 1979) from my shelves. Similar in size and shape to simultaneously-published Killer Crabs—both part of the many "animal attacks" works Signet put out back then—Bats is a sleek 150 pages or so, and doesn't muck about with unnecessary plot or character. Smith knew exactly what worked for him, and for that cool $1.75 price tag, he was gonna give it to ya.

We begin in a science lab at the Midlands Biological Research Center, smack-dab middle of beloved tourist spot Cannock Chase, acres of natural land. Against the wishes of the locals, this "ugly scar on the landscape" now is filled with scientists studying disease, ostensibly "to benefit the good of all mankind Except for... for this!" That emphatic "this" refers to the study subjects of Professor Brian Newman: bats. The poor experimental animals locked in cages, have been injected with disease, in a rage, flying futilely about, dying paralyzed, ugh, poor things. I'll let manly Prof. Newman himself explain the  method to the madness:

"The virus is a mutated one caused by experimenting. I've tried to determine the difference between bacterial and viral meningitis... I've never known the disease lead to madness or such awful agony. And I have created a new horror. A mutated virus! God knows how it happened... my God, how far could it spread... even humans? It doesn't bear thinking about!"

1st printing, New English Library, Bob Martin cover art

Newman's pulp hysteria is calmed by sensible on/off gal-pal and fellow scientist Susan Wylie, as she notes this disease, is trapped inside the cages with the bats, surely nothing bad will happen, there's no way it can escape, they can wait till the creatures die off, be cremated, and Newman will admit to his superiors that his experiment was a failure. How big of him! Then Susan and he argue over their romantic entanglement after he breaks their date for that night; then Newman and his boss Haynes argue, all the while, many of the enraged bats are dying in agony beside them. Its eyes seemed to meet his, and they glittered accusingly, with sheer malevolence. Blaming Man, as though in its last seconds it understood.

I'm sure you can see where this is going...

1985 reprint, NEL, Terry Oakes cover art

Newman has broken his date with Susan to hook up with Fiona at a local pub, and of course Susan sees them together. Next morning at the lab, before Susan arrives, he notices the death rate of the bats has slowed and the creatures still alive seem more agitated than ever. Newman again ponders what he hath wrought: 

Whereas earlier he had been repulsed, he now experience a morbid fascination almost to the point of being hypnotized. He had crated something, death in a form that had not hitherto existed. It was all his doing... This was different, exciting. Death could occur at any second.

Well, dear reader, here comes the part we've been waiting for. Susan arrives and is cool and dismissive towards him—how dare she! It's back to professional relationship only. Newman's masculinity is so shattered by this he of course cries "You bitch!" and cracks her in the face. Enraged, Susan attacks him, and Newman falls against the glass bat cage and breaks it wide open... and the last living disease-bearing animals have their escape at last. Wow, can you say toxic masculinity?

1987 reprint, NEL, cover artists unknown

Smith now embarks on the time-honored tradition of vignettes of bat swarms attacking hapless British (specifically Birmingham) citizens in farms, banks, churches, wherever. Now, as noted, the bats are spreading a gruesome disease that causes agonizing pain, insanity, and paralysis; they are not blood-suckers out looking for a treat. Authorities are called in, Newman wants to accept responsibility—there's a novel idea!—as the bats wreak their havoc. The media have a field day and call out Newman by name, putting his life at risk. Vigilantes patrol the streets as thousands die from contagion. Cities burn, armored tanks fire upon citizens who try to gather in protest of the stay-at-home directive. Petty politicians rise up with conspiracy theories. What will it take to stop the bat epidemic? It's all a little unsettling to read these days!

I was impressed with Smith's steady narrative and solid, no-nonsense prose as he depicts his tale of apocalypse. His dialogue is generally poor; that's where you can tell he's not too concerned with realism. But his scenes of attacks are effectively creepy, his depictions of nature overrun with maddened bats chill, and his ability to draw a picture of the workaday lives of various characters is solid. Are there lapses in taste and sensibilities, seen from the vantage point of nearly half a century? Sure, but that's Seventies pulp horror. Smith seems committed to his tale, and that is truly all I ask from my paperback horror fiction. While not reaching the hallowed heights of The Rats or The Nest, these Bats Out of Hell should definitely find a home on your bookshelves.

Once an infected bat touched you, that was it. Finis.
There was no antidote.
Nothing on God's earth could save you.

Gila! by Les Simons (1981): Big Lizard in My Backyard

Boasting one of the purest examples of vintage horror paperback cover art, Gila! is a title burned into my brain from discovering it when it first appeared in the spinner rack of my local library. I was 10 years old when it was published by Signet Books in October 1981, and mesmerized by the carnival barker-like tagline, as well as its back cover copy that luridly mixed sex and death into one noxious stew that froze my child's brain. Plus that exclamation point!

I don't recall if I actually read the book, I doubt it, but I cannot forget the sense of the forbidden, the aura of "don't let an adult see you looking at it" that came off it like a miasma. I was taken by the stark simplicity of the cover art, familiar with movies like Them! (there's that exclamation point again!) and other giant-animals-run-amuck movies thanks not only to Saturday afternoon creature double features but also my endless hunger for devouring the weekly TV Guide and monster movie books checked out from that same library. Gazing at that lurid, gaudy cover enflamed my imagination, about the same way dinosaur picture books did. Thanks be to the wonderful artist Tom Hallman for his mad skillz.

"Les Simons" is the one-time pseudonym of Kathryn Ptacek, who wrote and edited a fair amount of horror fiction and nonfiction in the Eighties and Nineties, and still puts out short stories today. Born in Omaha in 1952, she was raised in Albuquerque, and much of her fiction is set in the American Southwest and utilizes local native mythologies. The anthology Ptacek edited in 1988, Women of Darkness, is a terrific high point of the era, featuring only women writers (there was a second volume as well, which I haven't read and was only issued in a Tor hardcover). She was married to esteemed "quiet horror" writer and editor Charles L. Grant from 1982 until his death in 2006.

Grant & Ptacek, c. late 1970s

Now, four decades later, and Gila! is hard to find these days, and try as I might I cannot remember how I came to have a beat-up copy in my library. I used to be good at that, remembering when and where I'd gotten the books in my collection, but as the years have piled on and the shelves get bigger, I can't keep that info in my head anymore. No matter. I read this guy in a couple days, the kind of book you don't expend a lot of mental energy on, it's pure pulp with all that entails.

Swedish edition, 1983, title translates as Nightmare without End!

Main characters are having sex in the midst of all the monster mayhem, disposable stock characters arrive on the scene and spout cliches, everyone says everyone's name a million times in conversation, dated references to native peoples, simplistic musings on the environment, war, nuclear power. And oh yeah, the depiction of giant, nuclear-radiated Gilas chomping on us poor humans! It all veers close to the inanity of gore "classick" Eat Them Alive; no attempt at gritty realism, but only the absurd descriptions of violence and carnage. And yes, the cover art is a thing that happens...

The Gila monster reached its massive head down and began chewing on the bodies at its feet, pawing through them as though searching for a choice morsel. Legs, arms, and torsos disappeared into the cavernous maw. Disjointed bones, flesh still clinging to them, were scattered...

Recommended reading for all you monster maniacs, you know who you are!

RIP Guy N. Smith (1939 - 2020)

Prolific pulp-horror writer Guy N. Smith has passed at age 81, according to his website, from what looks to be COVID-19 complications. 2020 is just determined to squeeze out every last bit of misery from us, ugh. Maybe soothe yourself with even more Smith covers here and here. Be well, everybody.

Carnosaur by Harry Adam Knight (1984): Bang a Gong Get It On

I can't imagine it'd surprise you to learn that I was a pretty mean dinosaur fanatic when I was a kid in the 1970s. Visits to the local library were never complete without a stack of books on these fantastic creatures. Most of these titles were from the '50s and '60s and out of date by the time I was reading them, illustrated by timid little black-and-white pencil sketches of tail-dragging creatures, but I still recall with great fondness two from that actual decade:

A family trip to New York's American Museum of Natural History when I was in second or third grade allowed me to see the immense fossils in person. Relatives would ask me to name the various dinos, which I could rattle off pretty easily (I could also do the same with classic monster movies thanks to the infamous Crestwood series). There was this early '70s model kit. Lots of plastic toys. Factor in the original King Kong, movies like The Land that Time Forgot, oh and especially the bottom-of-the-barrel TV movie The Last Dinosaur, with a drunk Richard Boone battling a Tyrannosaurus and other baddies in a land at the center of the earth. Or how about the actual Journey to the Center of the Earth? Or The Lost World? And who can forget Bradbury's "A Sound of Thunder"? So. Yeah. Dinosaurs.

 

In 1993 I went to see Spielberg's adaptation of Jurassic Park twice the weekend it opened and was well rewarded: yep, that's the stuff I've been wanting to see since I was a kid. I even went to the mall afterwards and bought the T. Rex, the toy I had dreamed of all my childhood (just the right size have battled an alien or eaten a rebel!) and proudly displayed it in all my homes for over 20 years. All of this brings me to...

Harry Adam Knight was a pseudonym used for a small handful of pulp novels by John Brosnan (sometimes with the assist of Leroy Kettle), a prolific Australian author who also wrote nonfiction genre studies. A fleet-footed, old-fashioned thriller with plenty of gore, in the tradition of James Herbert, Carnosaur (Star Books, June 1984 UK/Bart Books, Feb 1989 US) is as solid a trashy paperback horror novel as one could want. Knight ticks all the boxes and doesn't muck about with the unnecessaries. 

This is pulp horror done right: mean, nasty, brutish, and short. Sometimes every character is so glum and rude you kinda think, Jeez, doesn't anyone have a nice polite word to say? Everyone's all Johnny Rotten all the time. Kill the lot of 'em. Unpleasant, ungrateful, folk fodder for the dinosaur. Right... now.

Our tale begins at 2:17 a.m. sharp when a poultry farmer is woken by his wife ("fat lazy cow" he thinks. See what I mean? What a turd) because their chickens are squawking up a ruckus. Of course, you're reading a book called Carnosaur so you know what's about to happen when Rudie McRuderson goes out to investigate. And it does. 

Then the action switches to two teens doing it in the backseat and it's more of the same, with some class-consciousness woven in as British pulp fiction seems to always do: "She'd been flattered to have been picked up by someone who was so upper-class. Well, sort of upper class."

Daytime: David Pascal is a late 20s guy working as a "journalist" at a newspaper that's barely a newspaper in the small English town of Warchester, "where nothing exciting ever happened." He's just dumped his wonderful girlfriend, a coworker named Jenny, because of his dreams of leaving for a job on a Fleet Street scandal rag. Who knows when that'll happen since those papers keep ignoring his applications. 

So here Pascal is, still working on a paper that's practically a local business flyer and having awkward moments with Jenny in the office. But you're reading a book called Carnosaur, so you know that Warchester is gonna offer up something soon that Fleet Street dared never dream.

Sir Darren Penward (erroneously referred to as "Sir Penward" throughout the novel) is Warchester's wealthy eccentric, the big-game hunter with his own personal zoo on his vast estate, filled with exotic and dangerous animals—including his ravenous nympho wife, Lady Jane. But again, you're reading a book called Carnosaur, and you know that Warchester will soon be under siege by animals much more exotic and dangerous than *yawn* tigers and panthers. 

The police begin their investigation, and "Sir Penward" blames the attacks on an escaped Siberian tiger. Pascal suspects a cover-up, and along with a reluctant Jenny, begins some investigation of his own. This leads him into the clutches of Lady Jane (aka Lady Fang, and looking "like something out of The Story of O"), well-known amongst the locals for her penchant of seducing younger men while her husband tends to his menagerie. Pascal realizes he can use her to get inside the zoo to peek around. That can't be a bad idea, can it?

Pascal has a confrontation with Penward in which all is revealed about how these extinct monsters are suddenly alive again: the painstaking genetic process that the obsessed Penward explains almost like a Bond villain, which leaves Pascal muttering, "Incredible. Chickens into dinosaurs." Brosnan's science when it comes to dinos sounds pretty spot-on to me from what I recall of more modern paleontology books, and the distinction between dinosaurs—terrestrial prehistoric creatures—and other ancient reptiles will prove more important than anyone but an actual scientist could imagine. But you're reading a book called Carnosaur so that shouldn't surprise you. 

I don't need to rehash the rest: Brosnan does nothing new with the plot—but that's entirely beside the point. This baby zips along with a confident rhythm and pacing precisely because the author doesn't try to add new twists or turns to his narrative (indeed I could have done with less "You've got to believe me, dinosaurs are in the streets, there's no time to explain!" but that is to quibble). Pulp is, in essence, comfort reading.

Brosnan, 1947-2005

Okay, okay, I'm getting to it: the "carno" part of the title. Well, gentle reader, you won't be disappointed. The residents of Warchester—the ones still alive—woke up to a world that was vastly different to the one they'd gone to sleep in. Brosnan serves up the grue that satisfies. Behold: Tarbosaurus, a T. Rex in everything but name, wreaks delightful havoc wherever it goes; Deinonychus, with its scythe-clawed foot that it uses like a prehistoric exponent of Kung-Fu, guts hapless farmers and other locals from neck to groin; and a plesiosaur joins a boating party that none of the invitees will soon forget: After a long, stunned silence a man's voice said, with an edge of hysteria to it, "Well, you've got to say one thing for good old Dickie; he sure throws a hell of a party..." 

Brosnan doesn't quite take it to ridiculous Dinosaurs Attack! levels, but pulp fans should still have plenty to chew on. Sex, violence, nerdy dino facts: Carnosaur has it all.

Above I mentioned Jurassic Park, and I can't leave this review without mentioning that Carnosaur features many facets that would become famous, indeed iconic, when Spielberg adapted Crichton's 1990 bestseller: chase scenes, close calls, and especially the scientific basis of resurrecting dinos are all first seen in this novel (itself adapted into a post-JP cheapie by Roger Corman). While I've never had much interest in Crichton's fiction, after reading this I feel I need to see if Crichton really did read a book called Carnosaur... or if it's simply a case of a great idea whose time had, like the dinosaurs, come again.

Eat Them Alive by Pierce Nace (1977): Green Hell

They were monsters—greedy green monsters! 

They looked as if they would eat anything they could catch, chewing it to bits in their enormous jaws... One of the mantises had cornered a man... who couldn't run enough to escape the wildly dashing insect. It flopped him onto the ground and began eating him as if he were a fish, a hunk of meat, anything edible. 

And it did not bother to kill him before devouring him. 

He lay kicking, and no doubt screaming, as the green monster ate him alive.

From a mind deranged springs this ludicrous, bat-shit bonkers sleaze-horror novel about giant people-eating praying mantises. This is the book that's either the zenith or the nadir of paperback pulp-horror fiction. In fact I feel guilty selling it as either because as of today, this book is impossible to obtain for less than $300, and it is not worth that no matter where it stands on the horror scale. Eat Them Alive—its title alone appealing to our basest fears, crude and simplistic as a tabloid headline, humanity reduced to food—is truly garbage. There's no percentage in arguing otherwise. And yet...

First published by Manor Books in 1977 and then by New English Library (with cover art by Tim White), Alive is amateurish, moronic, thoughtless, sadistic, repetitive schlock with no redeeming value whatsoever. What enjoyment there is comes in the form of disbelief. You'll be amazed at the lack of any attempt at realism in any aspect. You'll be astounded at the depraved depths to which the author can descend! Pierce Nace (more on this person later) piles one outrageously graphic scene on top of another like a pulp writer suffering a fever dream.

They were clambering over each other to escape their caves or undersea holes or wherever else they had lived. They must have dwelt beneath the island for thousands of years. They must be a throw back to the dinosaurs...

Our main guy Dyke Mellis is just the worst, a craven, cowardly, ultra-violent crook. He's been living on the island in exile for 11 years, since being tortured almost to death by the criminal gang he tried to double-cross. This back-story in Chapter Two is torn right from dimestore crime stories, akin to the sere, spare, nihilistic works of David Goodis, Jim Thompson, Dan J. Marlowe, or Richard Stark—only in attitude, not in execution, good god no—in which men outside the law are betrayed (or as in this case, are the betrayer), beaten, and abandoned for dead by their (justifiably angry) crew. Dyke Mellis is almost superhumanly equipped with a taste for vengeance that keeps him alive despite coming so close to death; he bears hideous scars, poor vision, constant headaches.

Nace shoves in your face and smashes in your mouth what other pulp writers hinted at and around, that Dyke is hardly a man, as he was castrated by the four men he tried to rip off ("No, no! Don't cut me there! Slice off anything else, but leave me that!"). You won't forget this because Nace will lapse into repetition at a moment's notice. It's hilarious how Nace has Dyke talk to himself about his lust for vengeance, reiterating his personal motivation, as if Nace is writing a work of such complexity and nuance that the reader may have become unclear on the basics: "It's the only thing I've got to live for, because it'll further my plan for revenge on those four guys for making me what I am, an impotent no-man... I want to watch... as the giant mantises eat them alive!" Oh shit, how about that, that's the title of the book, wow, it totally slipped my mind. Way to bring it all back home, Pierce Nace!

Anyway, Dyke sees the destruction on that island from the safety of his fishing boat, he thinks: If he could tame this one insect, teach it to respect and follow his commands, then he could tame others, make them a powerful force to do his bidding. And par for the course in landscape of illogicality, Dyke does train the biggest mantis. Nace goes into lots of spurious logistics about how he goes about this without getting eaten. He paints its head red to tell it apart and then mutters to himself:

A name. The thing's got to have a name... But what will it be? How do you name a beast whose sole purpose is acting as your instrument of boiling revenge, of mind-racking torture, of slow and horrendous death? Well, how about "Slayer"? This man-sized bug is going to slay for me... Slayer will be the torturer, but I'll be the watcher, the enjoyer, the cheerer-on. I'll love watching my great green mantis as he rips into bodies, as he eats them part by part. I'll feel excited, obsessed, I'll grow tall in the feeling...

Manor Books, 1977, with accurate cover art (by artist unknown alas) so that's something

"Good boy, Slayer, You're the biggest of them all—and the only one with a red head. 

You will command them as I will command you!"

Somebody please tell me Kerry King read this book back in the early '80s. The story plods on, as thin as the paper it's printed on, with lots of gore and nonsense (the beasts lovingly devour women's breasts), till yes, he tracks down each of the men who tortured him... they all happen to live nearby. How fortuitous!

The unsparing of any detail in depicting the creatures' ravenous appetite and the ease with which they tear part the "human food" has a dehumanizing effect on the reader if one tries to imagine such a scene in the real world. And yet violence never gets next level: for all its intensity, the same descriptions of gore are used over and over again. Sure, the monsters do love eating the stomach contents of other mantises, and squeezing out human intestines for a dipping sauce. But when describing the massive trauma of tearing off of limbs and heads you won't read vocabulary like ligament, cartilage, tissue, or anything that would require any knowledge besides a child's understanding of anatomy. No one ever vomits or shits their pants in fear—why, that would be too far!

Many times Slayer ran his claws inside the pieces of skull, as if to be sure hew as getting every edible bite...

Next the beast pulled the arms from the man as Dyke had done to grasshoppers a thousand times when he was a boy. The arms came out of their sockets like paper in the mantis's pull. While the man screamed on, the enormous insect ate his hands, his wrists, his elbows, the whole of his arms...

Before the mantis rent the organs from the chest and stomach cavities, he bent low over the girl and filled his great maw with all that stamped the body as female. Watching, Dyke thought, God, I think I could eat that part myself. I could never touch a woman's privacy otherwise. Perhaps sometime I can share such a part with one of the beasts when he eats it...

Slayer crouched beside his master, eating babies and children almost whole, not bothering to tear them to bits—and finding his ultimate joy in the women he stripped and slit and ate.

One redeeming factor is that since Dyke is castrated, he can't really get erotically aroused by watching these monster consume human meat; I mean he almost gets there but it's one place the author stops short—on purpose? As he ponders to himself watching an old man he knew become mantis prey:

I'm not sure Nace even gets the biology of the mantis correct. The descriptions don't get more than "the mantis broke off a leg with its hands" and I don't think mantises even have hands but that's the word Nace keeps using. I don't think Nace ever mentions "mandibles," only "jaws," which doesn't sound right either. Nor does Nace seem to have familiarity with human speech. Cringe-worthy dialogue from Dyke's targets like "Don't let them eat her to death!" and "Are they really... eating my... folks?" and "I'm not going to stand here and see those prehistoric animals eat my wife and kids!" is nothing anyone would ever say, you have to laugh. Don't you?! Like when Dyke and his creepy-crawlies show up at a victim's home at breakfast and he sits down and devours the carefully laid-out meal, á la Vlad the Impaler, while watching the bugs slaughter the man and his family. I had to give points on that scene.

Now, about Nace. For a long time there was doubt and debate about who Nace really was, but according to various internet sources who have really done some legwork, it seems near-certain the author was one Evelyn Pierce Nace, a part-time insurance secretary who published in men's crime magazines under "Pierce Nace." I wonder how many people who knew her in real life were aware that she wrote one of the sleaziest, most heartless works of horror fiction of all time?

Would not Dyke's four enemies beg pitifully, on their abject knees, if he came marching at the head of a hungry horde of praying mantises that were commanded to devour Dyke's torturers? God, what a devil's joy that would be!

To wrap up: not one of the books I've read by other sewage-purveyors like Guy N. Smith, Shaun Hutson, or Richard Laymon can compare with the trashtastic lunacy on display here. But it is obsessed with human degradation, humiliation, emotional torment, and the limits of physical pain while understanding none of it. Nace has produced a work that is the creative equivalent of pulling wings off flies, a childish cruelty that is virtually sociopathic in its divorce from actual human comprehension. As I said, there's no attempt to present the events realistically. I guess it's like reading porn written by someone who's never had sex.

Unlike other pulp-horror novels, which are often mediocre and boring in the extreme, Alive at least is hilariously inept; so poor and idiotic and unrelenting, going along for the ride offers sick thrills one doesn't get often. You will keep reading no matter what! For fans of that style of bottom-of-the-barrel horror fiction, Alive will provide the tackiest, most tasteless of delights.

I read Eat Them Alive in one day, finishing it up alone in my library on a Saturday night, my head buzzing pleasantly from beer and smoke, and my god, I found I was enjoying this degrading, damnable book! I actually couldn't put it down. When we get to the culmination of Dyke's vengeance, it's a delirious surreal kaleidoscope of bloody, gut-wrenching yet utterly ridiculous violence. The final chapter has the feel and the logic of an eight-year-old, tired of playing make-believe, crashing all his toys together at once in an apocalyptic blow-out. Those final sentences are a weird satisfaction.

Yes, this novel beggars all critical approach. I know it sounds irresistible, but I still don't know if I can recommend Eat Them Alive, and like I said it is not worth $300! I mean, I bought a copy, the New English Library edition maybe a year and a half ago, for $5 plus $10 shipping from the UK; is that luck, or something else? But it is part of the paperback horror boom so I feel duty-bound to write about it... such is my lot, my curse, my devil's joy.

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...