The Dark Country by Dennis Etchison (1982): Nightmares Stay with You

For some time I've been searching for a copy of Dennis Etchison's first collection of short fiction, entitled The Dark Country. Finally found it on my recent trip to my hometown! Originally published by specialty publisher Scream/Press, this paperback is from Berkley in 1984. It consists of Etchison's stories from the 1970s, and his World Fantasy Award-winning 1981 title tale. Like Stephen King, Etchison had many of his short works appear in men's magazines of the day, as well as various anthologies edited by Charles L. Grant and Kirby McCauley. Interestingly, for an author so associated with the horror genre, lots of his stories here could be classified as crime noir and science fiction rather than supernatural horror. Perhaps they all fall under the never-clear "dark fantasy" tag which Grant touted.

But this is all academic: what's important is that Etchison's stories are crafted with a true writer's care and originality, although at times his penchant for experimentation and quiet intimation can lose even careful readers. Like me. Therefore I suppose you won't be surprised to learn that one Ramsey Campbell introduces The Dark Country...

A California son, Etchison often sets his fictions in the desert highways and late-night byways of his home state; he knows well this empty land and the darknesses therein. "The Late Shift," one of his more well-known works that was first published in the seminal Dark Forces (1980), reveals a sinister source for those poor souls working the graveyard shift in 7-11s and gas stations and diners throughout that region. I adored "Daughter of the Golden West," which begins as a Bradbury-esque fantasy of three college-age men (the collection is dedicated to Bradbury) and ends with a revelation of one of California's greatest tragedies. Reading the noir-ish "The Walking Man" put me in mind of the spectacular "modern" noir film Body Heat (1981) and once again shows how the horror and crime genres uneasily shadow one another.

Original '82 Scream/Press hardcover, art by JK Potter

The maddeningly enigmatic "You Can Go Now" finishes without wrapping and bow but I found its dream-like, episodic psychological structure utterly intriguing. Chilling, sad, realistic stuff... even if perhaps it doesn't quite come together. "Calling All Monsters," "The Dead Line," and "The Machine Demands a Sacrific" form what Campbell calls the "transplant trilogy... one of the most chilling achievements in contemporary horror." Blurring SF and horror in a vaguely Ellisonian manner, Etchison offhandedly imagines a future (?) of living bodies at the service of some (mad) science, evoking Moreau's House of Pain. The breaking mind of a man in extremis:

O now the obscene sucking sound growing fainter even as my hearing dissolves, wet tissue pulling apart. They suction my blood, the incision clamped wide like another mouth a monstrous Caesarean and I hear the shiny scissors clipping tissues clipping fat, the automated scalpels striking tictactoe on my torso and i know they are taking me, the blood in my head tingles draining down down and I am almost gone, O what are they doing to me the monsters ME they must be it can't be that other... I have seen the altered specimen on the table the wrapped composite the sutured One Who Waits drifting in fluid for the new brain the shaved skin the transplanted claws the feral rictus the excised hump

Futura UK 1988 edition

Others: I didn't have much for "The Nighthawk," a gothic-y tale of siblings on the rainy California coast, nor "Deathtracks." Writing's good, stories not so much. The first story, "It Only Comes out at Night," despite its generic title, is a nice little traditional horror piece, as is "Today's Special." The frigid vengeance of "We Have All Been Here Before" and especially "The Pitch" is quite satisfyingly nasty. Etchison has a skill for diversion, letting you think a story going's one way when - record scratch - it goes somewhere else.

Now, on to the award-winning title story. Nothing SF or noir or supernatural about this piece at all; it reads more like an autobiographical piece (the protagonist's name is Jack Martin, Etchison's pseudonym) of an inadvertently nightmarish vacation. His friends callously and drunkenly exploit locals at a Mexican beach resort, then he's forced to face a fate dealt at random. This is not the kind of story you expect to find in a book with the little "HORROR" label on its spine. Does that matter? I still don't know. Somewhere Martin/Etchison wait, probably not knowing either, hoping... but fearing, as always, the worst.

Friday I'm In Love 2: More Ladies of Paperback Gothics

More Gothic lovelies for your darkest delectation today. You say it's not enough? Then check out My Love-Haunted Heart!

The Edge of Running Water by William Sloane (1939)

Dig this super-creepy cover! The little-known novel The Edge of Running Water was one of only two written by William Sloane, who was born on this day in 1906 (his other book, To Walk the Night, I featured here). It was chosen for Jones and Newman's Horror: Another 100 Best Books in 2005. The above edition is from Bantam Books, 1967. For an appreciation of Sloan, be sure to read this. The article's first paragraph is excellent:

Whenever a genre writer appears whose work even literary critics can't pretend they don't enjoy--someone like Raymond Chandler, Shirley Jackson, or Philip K. Dick--he or she is officially allowed to have "transcended the genre." There's something disingenuous and galling to the genre fan about this special dispensation, as though any work of crime, horror, or science fiction that's actually good must not, by definition, actually be crime or horror or science fiction.

Indeed.

1956 retitled Dell paperback

The Psycho Paperback Covers: We All Go a Little Mad Sometimes

Today is the 112th birthday of Sir Alfred Hitchcock. I just wanted an excuse to feature some of the many paperback editions of Robert Bloch's immortal Psycho that have appeared over the years since its original publication in 1959. Now, if you're rather desperate to obtain some of these lovely paperback editions, why, I just know none of you would even hurt a fly. Enjoy...

The edition at the top is from Tor 1989, with cover art by Joe Devito. The one above is from Bantam 1969.

Warner Books 1982

Corgi UK 1962, 1977 and 1982

Crest Books 1960 and movie tie-in 1963
Don't be late...

Prime Evil, edited by Douglas E. Winter (1988): No Safe Place to Die

"Horror is not a genre," writes editor Douglas E. Winter in his introduction to the classy anthology Prime Evil, "it is an emotion." Winter was really onto something there, I thought upon first reading it, and it's been something of a philosophical beacon for me in my choices of entertainment in the two decades since. Fans don't have to limit themselves to movies or books labeled "horror" to find things that are violent, creepy, disturbing, terrifying. But I'm not telling you anything you don't already know, right?

I'd always held this anthology in high esteem but rereading it now I realize that's only because it contains one of my favorite horror stories ever, "Orange is Anguish, Blue for Insanity" (and going by reviews on Amazon and Goodreads, lots of other readers felt the same). Otherwise, these original stories in Prime Evil are so concerned with classiness that many don't quite deliver on the horror. Mood and psychology, yes, diffuse surreality and obliquity, mais oui, some good writing and imagery, true, but only a few stories are actually gruesome or horrifying or memorable. Even the moodier pieces seemed inert. So I'd say these mild, nondescript "horror" covers are rather apt.

I tried nine ways to Sunday to reread Stephen King's "The Night-Flier" but only found it dated; a sleaze journalist you'd think would actually be au courant but in King's relentless need to brand-identify everything is tiring because you keep thinking, "Oh, right, this story was written in the late 1980s," rather than, "Damn, is this story creepy." I just thought it was junky and its only reason for existence was to feature a vampire pissing blood into a urinal. I didn't reread Clive Barker's "Coming to Grief" and don't recall any of it, but Winter describes it as one of his "quiet, sentimental stories." Dennis Etchison's half-screenplay/half-short story "The Blood Kiss" is fun, nothing special; could've fit right into Schow's Silver Scream anthology that same year. "Alice's Last Adventure" I wrote a bit about here; Thomas Ligotti's story is fine, good stuff.

David Morrell, creator of Rambo himself, in "Orange is for Anguish, Blue for Insanity," delivers a terrific story of a poor art student, his friend, and an obsession: the paintings of Van Dorn, a 19th century painter driven mad by his perceptetion of the world and the colors he used to denote that madness. I love stories about crazy fictional artists of any kind, and the story also features the art students' academic research as well. Here's the narrator on one of Van Dorn's pieces:

All it took was a slight shift of perception, and there weren't any orchids or hayfields, only a terrifying gestalt of souls in hell. Van Dorn had indeed invented a new stage of impressionism. He'd impressed upon the splendor of God's creation the teeming images of his own disgust. His paintings didn't glorify. They abhorred.

David Morrell

Read Morrell's story! "Orange" won the Stoker Award for best long fiction (side note: I first read this story in high school, and was wryly delighted that my school's own colors were the very same). Jack Cady's contribution starts off very well - Cady was a professor of creative writing and it shows in his powerful detailing of the lives of three friends many years after they served together in Vietnam. It's tough and violent and poetic and impressive. The problem is that the gunfight climax lasts about, I dunno, 20 pages or something and I was completely uninterested as the tale went on and on and on; Cady broke the spell he'd woven so convincingly.

1989 Corgi UK edition

I found "The Great God Pan" (ugh, I hate stories named after better, more deservedly famous stories) by M. John Harrison far too detached and mild, thought Paul Hazel's (who are these writers?) "Having a Woman at Lunch" to be too old-fashioned, and was simply unimpressed with Charles L. Grant's "Spinning Tales with the Dead." Look, Charlie, we all know you love quiet horror but you can't just write the words "moonlight" and "cloud" and "whisper"; ya gotta do the work too.

A minor Ramsey Campbell story of a stalker who thinks writers are stealing his ideas, "Next Time You'll Know Me," is okay; nothing particularly Campbellian about it though. "Food" is sly, gross, and witty; I'd expect nothing less from the stellar Thomas Tessier. One of the solid stories with its tone of world-weary grief and loss, Whitley Strieber's "The Pool" is a dream-like tale of the death of a child who seems in touch with worlds beyond this one. Childhood trauma underlies Peter Straub's "The Juniper Tree"; specifically, some rather graphic sexual abuse and years later, its fallout. It's more mainstream lit than "horror."

And there you have it: although Winter's introduction was thoughtful and influential, Prime Evil is less a major horror anthology of the 1980s than mostly an attempt to get horror fiction read by people who wouldn't deign to read it in the first place. It's true that horror doesn't have to have "potboiler prose, lurid covers and corny titles," but why are we trying to impress people who already look down on the genre? I mean, fuck them, right? Right.

Gwen, in Green by Hugh Zachary (1974) and a Personal Update

Gorgeous, gorgeous, utterly gorgeous cover art (artist unknown, alas - *update: it's actually George Ziel) for a novel I've only recently found out about, a sort of fantasy-horror about evil and mind-controlling plants. I love everything about it, and don't you? Gwen, in Green you can be sure has been added to my must-have list! Read a review here, which features the UK paperback.

Speaking of my must-have list: this past weekend I took a mini-vacation up to my hometown in South Jersey and was able to visit that used bookstore I worked at in the early '90s, now called Bogart's Books. Armed with that list, and with the memories of many vintage-era horror "classics" on the shelves, I went in Friday morning and... bought nearly 20 paperback horror novels!

I couldn't believe the stuff I found, couldn't even afford to buy everything I wanted. Some stuff I wanted but didn't buy because it was in poor shape - Skipp and Spector's The Cleanup, Strieber's The Hunger, Leiber's Night's Black Agents - but what I did pick up will keep this site in good stead for some time. There is Masterton and Garton and Wright and Etchison and Hodge and Rice and more, much more. Hell, I even snagged a copy of John McCarty's essential and completely thorough Splatter Movies: Breaking the Last Taboo of the Screen, from 1984 (cover image from Blue Eyes of the Broken Doll).

Also, my girlfriend is on her own little vacation and stopped in at the famous Powell's City of Books in Portland, OR, and called to say she'd found a few gems for me, some Grant, Matheson, and F. Paul Wilson, as I recall. Lucky me!

And on a personal note, I probably haven't mentioned it here but I've been laid off so far this entire year... till this week. Now that I'm back to full-time work I'm not sure if I'll be updating Too Much Horror Fiction as often as I have been. But I always make time to read - in fact, I don't even have to make time to read; I just read, and always have - and now I've got more than a dozen novels added to my shelves and to-read list. Oh well, I wouldn't have it any other way!

The Vampire: His Kith and Kin in Paperback Covers

This cover for Dracula Began, a 1976 novel by Gail Kimberly, is stunning: you got Vincent Price from Tomb of Ligeia with misplaced eyes, big black bats, a Gothic castle, village people on the hunt, and a totally incongruous lady's head on a platter. Amazing. Artist George Ziel is a master of the vintage horror paperback cover!

A repulsive old-man vampire adorns Karl Alexander's Curse of the Vampire from 1984. That certainly wouldn't work today, since we all know vampires now have perfect pouts and six-pack abs.
Ahh, I love this one! Le Fanu's 1872 classic Carmilla was reprinted in 1970 with this fantastic cover. Love the font, the woodwork, the frightened hippie chick cowering. Excellent!

I've got a couple of the vampire novels by Les Daniels featuring the Spanish vampire Don Sebastian de Villanueva, but I haven't read them yet. The Black Castle from 1978 is simple and to the point.

Traditional opera-cape-and-tux-clad Drac here, part of Fred Saberhagen's long-running Dracula novels. The Holmes-Dracula File, from 1982, is labeled "science fiction," which I find odd, since neither of those dudes fits in the genre.

The first sequel to her Sunglasses After Dark, Nancy Collins's 1992 In the Blood continues the adventures of Sonja Blue, as well as again featuring the art of Mel Odom.

Gothic romance from 1970, with exotic "vampyre" spelling. Ooh!

By-the-numbers rendering of Lugosi for a 1968 reprint of Bram Stoker's lesser-known works.

Groovy vintage Drac and his lady-fiend on the US cover of The Hand of Dracula! from 1977. I especially love the UK edition. Author Robert Lory put out a whole series of these modern Dracula adventures.

1977's Hounds of Dracula. Dracula's dog. I mean really people.

Peter Tremayne also wrote another Dracula novel, called Bloodright, and returned in 1978 with The Revenge of Dracula. Pretty standard, traditional image on this. Not sure about the blow-dried 'do, though.

A murder of crows, a quiver of cobras, a streak of tigers... and A Clutch of Vampires (1974). Nice. I think that's an Edward Gorey illustration, don't you? Raymond T. McNally was the vampire expert of the '70s.

Montague Summers was an eccentric English clergyman-scholar who wrote several books on the occult - from the suspect point of view of a true believer - and his most famous was The Vampire: His Kith and Kin (1928). This is the 2011 edition.

Abracadabra by Stephen Gresham (1988): Down the Rabbit Hole

One of Zebra's finest, no? What else could one possibly say about it? I'm not gonna even try.