The Manitou by Graham Masterton (1975): He Who Devours...

It was a distinct pleasure to finally read this vintage mid-'70s bestselling horror novel and find it tasteless and outrageous fun, taking elements of contemporaneous famous and popular works of the "occult" like The Exorcist and Rosemary's Baby but then one-upping, or a dozen-upping, them. Graham Masterton has for years been a familiar name to me but I had never read anything by him; I was vaguely aware that there had been a movie version of The Manitou, and that such a thing was some kind of ancient Native American spirit, perhaps like the Wendigo. Expecting little when I sat down to read, I actually finished the book in less than a day - it's a brisk 216 pages in its 1976 Pinnacle Books paperback edition. Masterton, even in this first novel, does a credible job weaving the dated occult aspect of Tarot cards and reincarnation (yawn) together with a Lovecraft-style twist on Native mythology (yay). Damn, I only wish I'd read this years ago!

Behold the inner cover! Artist: Ed Soyka

An attention-getting prelude introduces young Karen Tandy, who's in the hospital baffling doctors with the strange moving tumor on the back of her neck that X-rays reveal to be a developing fetus. A fetus. I know, right? Then Masterton switches to first-person narration by Harry Erskine, a 30-something guy earning his living providing sham psychic readings (are there any other kind?) to little old rich ladies in a wintry New York City. Just before she enters the hospital, Karen Tandy comes to see him about a disturbing dream she's been having.

Her sense of doom and foreboding about it causes Harry to start thinking there might be something to this occult business after all (I don't mind messing around with the occult when it behaves itself, but when it starts acting up, then I start getting a little bit of the creeps). Cue more strange happenings that Masterton makes believably unsettling and convince Harry, and soon comes the big reveal: the fetus developing in Karen's neck is the reborn spirit of the great and powerful Native American medicine man Misquamacus. Of course this being the 1970s and all, that phrase "Native American" is never uttered; instead, we get the charmingly offensive "redskin" or "Indian" or "red man." Ah well.

1977 UK edition

As the tumor grows and the arrival of Misquamacus becomes ever more imminent, Karen's life hangs by a thread. Harry consults the anthropologist Dr. Snow, who tells him about "Red Indian" spirits and how this Misquamacus was able to magically implant himself in Karen's body, to be reborn 300 years after his tribe was exploited, caught disease and run off by Dutch settlers. The "manitou" is his spirit, and we learn everything that exists has its own manitou. Misquamacus now wants vengeance, and his occult powers are virtually unstoppable by modern scientific men. Only another medicine man fully in control of these powers can stop him - and perhaps that is not even possible. Can they even find a modern-day medicine man to fight back?

1982 UK edition - more cover art here

If all this is making you think, what the fuck? you'd be right. But Masterton makes it work. Despite its implausibility, I actually loved how everyone seemed to accept the reality of what was going on: Karen's doctors and parents, Dr. Snow, Harry himself. The only people skeptical are the police, and they come to a very bad and very gruesome - and very awesome - end. Pretty graphic for the era, I thought; a great shock moment.

Tor Books edition, 1987

Masterton's style may sometimes inadvertently belie his Britishness but he really keeps the action going while also touching on broader, more thoughtful concerns. Harry's seeming skepticism about the reality of occult powers is treated with some ambivalence, and at one point Karen's doctor, Jack Hughes, wonders aloud about the inherent guilt the white race must feel about their treatment of Native Americans, and shouldn't they feel at least a little sympathy for Misquamacus? Which, as it turns out, is a terrible idea: as the story races to its climax, Masterton introduces a wonderful Lovecraftian menace as Misquamacus attempts to open the gateway for the Great Old One, aka The Great Devourer or He-Who-Feeds-in-the-Pit. You know that's never good.

But it was not Misquamacus himself that struck the greatest terror in us - it was what we could dimly perceive through the densest clouds of smoke - a boiling turmoil of sinister shadow that seemed to grow and grow through the gloom like a squid or some raw and massive confusion of snakes and beasts and monsters.

The Manitou is a pulpy, funny, gory, and even ridiculous read; like I said, a damn-near perfect example of vintage '70s horror fiction that strikes just the right balance between each of those aspects. Glad I also bought a copy of its sequel, Revenge of the Manitou (1979). So well done Mr. Masterton - I'd say I made my favorites-of-the-year list one book too early!

You were expecting a 1970s horror author to look otherwise?

Revenge of the Manitou by Graham Masterton (1979): If the Kids Are United...

It's no surprise that after the success of his debut horror novel The Manitou in 1975 that Graham Masterton would want to return to his Lovecraft-inspired mythology of Native American medicine men and their attempts to wreak vengeance on the evil, plundering white man. Invoking the unpronounceable names of inhuman gods and demons from the great beyond, these powerful priests are virtually unstoppable, and can reincarnate themselves in unsuspecting humans almost at will. Perfect for sequelization! Revenge of the Manitou (Pinnacle 1982), however, is not that perfect sequel. I felt it lacked the eyebrow-raising absurdity of the original novel, its sense of fun and menace as it dispensed with rational believability in the service of a ripping horror yarn. Revenge was all too easy to put down for a day or two, as it retreads ground already covered in the original, and doesn't really bring any unique characters to the proceedings.

Sphere UK 1980

The story has plenty of potential: a boy named Toby Fenner begins to freak out his parents when he and his classmates start seeing ghostly apparitions, having nightmares, drawing horrendous pictures in crayon, and speaking in guttural voices about nonsense like "the day of dark stars" and "the prophecy buried on the stone redwood." Cue more mysterious and deadly occurrences that convince the boy's father, Neil, that his son is being controlled by the dread Misquamacus, the most powerful medicine man, like, ever. He, and 20 other great old Indian medicine men of enormous occult skills, have taken over the bodies of Toby and his young friends in an attempt to call down, using all their combined powers, those amorphous entities of darkness and tentacles (the most fearsome of which has the oddly familiar-sounding name of Ka-tua-la-hu) that will demand the blood of the white man for all his destruction of the Indian way of life. Masterton puts it all too plainly:

The day of the dark stars begins at noon and lasts through to the following noon. It's supposed to be 24 hours of chaos and butchery and torture, the day when the Indian people have their revenge for hundreds of years of treachery and slaughter and rape, all in one huge massacre.

Tor Books 1987

Uh-oh. Mostly the novel feels a bit half-hearted and even under-written in places, although things pick up with the return of that sham occultist Harry Erskine (and I now see a bemused, cynical Tony Curtis in my head after watching him as Erskine in the movie version of The Manitou) and his pal Singing Rock, the modern-day medicine man who uses his powers for good, you know. The lurid cover of the Pinnacle paperback at top (by Paul Stinson) depicts the climax: a schoolbus on a treacherous bridge with the possessed schoolchildren battling it out against Erskine, Fenner, and Singing Rock, as well as a bunch of unfortunate cops and National Guardsmen (the usual expendables). The climax is violent and grotesque, but simply not as exciting as the original novel's; as I said, seems too much a retread.

If you're a Masterton completist you've probably already read Revenge; if not, I'd say you could maybe skip it. However, I'm still eager to read his other titles like The Djinn, Picture of Evil, and Pariah, but I think I'm done visiting with the likes of Misquamacus. As Tony Curt--I mean Erskine hilariously understates at the end, "I don't want to meet that goddamned Misquamacus again as long as I live."

The Djinn by Graham Masterton (1977): Jean Genie Let Yourself Go!

It's the return of Harry Erskine, Graham Masterton's dry-witted, comic-hardboiled phony "clairvoyant," first seen in the masterful The Manitou. This time Harry's tangling with The Djinn, an Arabian supernatural entity (from which we get the English word "genie"). But this is no lantern-bound wish-granting jokester; it has 40 monstrous manifestations and they're all, well, fatal for humans. A slim and economic 200 pages, you can read it in one night whilst enjoying its vintage-y paperback horror goodness, as seen in its inside cover:

Art by Ed Soyka. Thanks to The Cover Art of Graham Masterton

It begins with the funeral of Harry's godfather, Max Greaves, who committed a horrendous, self-mutilating suicide. Max was a respected amateur scholar and collector of Islamic artifacts who, in his last years, grew increasingly cantankerous and paranoid. Max's widow Marjorie unsettles Harry when she tells him Max wanted their house, a rambling old Cape Cod estate called Winter Sails, burned down, along with all the Arabian artifacts inside, after his death. One item in particular, a very large jar decorated with eyeless horses that Harry remembers from childhood visits, is now locked away at Max's insistence. But with the help of the foxy-eyed woman Anna who shows up at the funeral (whose pants Harry is dead-set on getting into), a Middle East folklore professor, and an old doctor, we get to the very black heart of this Arabian mystery.

Tor reprint 1988

Brimming with pseudo-scholarship and ancient mythology - for which I'm a total and complete sucker when featured in horror fiction - Masterton's novel is simple and fast-moving. Passages about the fearsome djinn and their unholy powers fascinated me. They are also utterly repulsive in that outrageous '70s way:

"The Arabs used to say that Ali Babah had made a pact with a strange and evil sect of necromancers who lived in the hills. These wizards performed extraordinary and quite obscene rites, one of which was said to involve carrying around a young girl on top of a long pole which had been pushed through her vagina. This sect is sometimes known as the N'zwaa or the Unswa, and sometimes by an unpronouncable name which means Those-Who-Adore-The-Terrible."

Star UK edition 1977

Oh hells yes. You can probably guess at some of the mayhem that's coming. Or maybe you can't. Masterton writes without extraneous plot or detail, but with lots of corny/snarky comments from Erskine (Not that I was frightened or anything like that, but I prefer to meet the supernatural on my own terms - in broad daylight, with running shoes on), entertainingly clunky dialogue from everyone else, and a mounting dread that culminates in a graphic and bloody good climax. The Djinn is no Manitou, but it's certainly a fun, though minor, example of '70s horror fiction (comparing it to 'Salem's Lot is of course ridiculous). Thanks again, Graham!

Mr. Masterton

Walkers by Graham Masterton (1989): Just Wanna Walk Right Out of This World

You know what's really crazy about this absurd cover art for Graham Masterton's 14th horror novel Walkers? It's completely accurate. It is! Walls and floors are somehow horribly alive, thanks to artist Joe DeVito. Masterton's penchant for making the ridiculous seem plausible is in full effect in this violent, quick read. Going by the reviews on Amazon and Goodreads, Walkers seems to have a pretty good reputation in the Masterton canon, which is why I chose to make it my second novel of his after I absolutely loved The Manitou, his 1975 horror debut. While it isn't close to being as much fun as that horror-fiction classic, it follows the same formula: ridiculously horrible thing happens for no good reason - oh, wait, it's some kind of ancient religious mythology! In this case, the Druid myth of earth-walkers: men whose spiritual powers allow them to walk inside the earth, inside walls, floors, glass, etc. I don't even know if that's a real Druid myth and kinda don't care. There is some bosh about ley lines, as well.

There is a very good haunted-house style opening in which Jack Reed discovers an abandoned, decrepit building called the Oaks, hidden from view for decades and forgotten. Jack wants to turn it into a country club, and in his effort to buy the place learns that 60 years ago, it was an asylum for the criminally insane - but one night they all disappeared. The ostensible criminal "leader," a truly despicable human called Quintus Miller, found Druid spellbooks in the warden's library - but of course - and in an attempt at freedom, led his fellow inmates into the very walls themselves. However, they were trapped by Father Bell, using his own Christian brand of hocus-pocus, and Quintus vows revenge, and "kidnaps" Jack's young son Randy by pulling him into the walls. But of course. Quintus wants out, wants some kind of eternal Druidic godhood, and plans on sacrificing not only Jack's son but hundreds of other innocent people. Masterton really knows how to ante up.

1991 UK paperback

Novels like Walkers are essentially critic-proof; what can I say about it? It's the sort of thing you'll like if this is the sort of thing you like. There's no depth or real thought here, no overarching theme or human concern, nothing to really talk about other than the many scenes of graphic horror which are, yes, cringingly gruesome and lovingly detailed. Masterton's characterization is crudely succinct and rather unimaginative: the blue-collar regular guy, the shrewish wife, the busty blonde who wears high heels everywhere, the resourceful British scholar. Masterton doesn't waste time trying to make dialogue believable, or even having his characters behave believably (particularly Jack's reaction after he realizes his son is missing, as well as the final chapter). But he's good at pacing and conjuring up a storyline solely for the payoff of those big, bloody scenes of horror: people getting dragged into walls and floors and through the bottoms of cars by the imprisoned madfolk and Masterton, as ever, spares us no grisly detail.

Walkers isn't bad at all; it's fun but disposable, definitely one for fans of trashy '80s horror and Masterton himself. Just like The Manitou, there are moments of dated cultural insensitivity and a couple head-smacking bits of obvious dialogue. It's also got a crazy final showdown between Jack and Quintus and the rotting corpse of a two-headed dog. If you like that sort of thing. And I kinda do!

Killer Crabs by Guy N. Smith (1978): Death Comes Clicking

Prolific British pulp-horror writer Guy N. Smith's second novel in his infamous Crabs saga - although the first published in the United States - is a slim and fast-moving account of seriously gigantic, man-eating crabs invading a resort island off Australia's Great Barrier Reef. Now you may not believe me and it may disappoint you to hear it, but Killer Crabs (Signet Dec 1979) is not the outrageously trashy and poorly-written horror novel I'd expected. Yes, it is trashy and yes, there's a lot of bad writing, but at no point did I practically exclaim aloud, "Get the fuck outta here with this shit!" or "You gotta be kidding me!" or some other bit of disbelief. Nope, Killer Crabs is just a run-of-the-mill '70s horror novel in the "giant monster" or "nature running amok" traditions. Pincers sever limbs, entrails are devoured, buildings destroyed, watch out, here they come: Click, click, clickety-click...

I can only imagine these books became "famous" because Smith kept the shtick going over half a dozen novels and a few short stories. Maybe as the years went on he became a better bad writer so as to make reading the books guilty pleasures; the handful of boner lines in this volume are bad, but they're not so bad that they're entertaining. No, they're mostly kind of dull and drab. For your suspect delectation I noted a few of the better lines:

An aura of evil emanated from the crab, a force that was far in excess of its physical atrocities. It was a reincarnation of the Ancient Mariner, compelling an audience.

It was hunting - for human victims!... Once again the giant crabs had proven their supremacy over mankind. This was just the beginning.

She reached down and fondled him, her fingers demonstrating their expertise even on a morning following a night which had seen one of the most terrifying battles in history.

Mercifully he passed out before the razor-sharp incisors which had amputated both his legs found hold on his neck and beheaded him.

1989 Dell Books reprint

Compared to two other pulp horror '70s classics that I enjoyed, Killer Crabs is unremarkable. Unlike The Manitou, which has the utter conviction of Graham Masterton at the helm no matter how ridiculous the story gets, or The Rats, which has James Herbert's colorful, gritty vignettes of everyday English life, Smith's novel just sorta hangs around, going through the motions with a desultory air. The plot is banal simplicity itself, the "characterization" de rigueur: the fearless, seasoned fisherman, the oversexed female with a secret, the ex-con with a secret, the big-game hunter with a secret, the scientist with the hot wife (but of course!). There are a couple cool moments however: a drunk discovers a severed head; various politically-incorrect sex scenes; an exploration of a coral reef cave that houses not the monster crabs but dozens of venomous sea snakes. That was creepy.

 Original UK edition, New English Library, May 1978

Alas, Killer Crabs is not particularly gripping, with no surprise or "what the fuck" moments; it is more by-the-numbers than a cult classic should be. If you can find it for cheap, as I did - the Signet '79 edition is readily available, but the Dell reprint is pricey - pick it up if you like creature horror. Of course, my lack of enthusiasm about the novel will not stop me from picking up more of the series when I can, if only for the cover art alone.

The Searing by John Coyne (1980): Now She's Got No Cerebellum

Despite its all-too-glaring titular indebtedness to the vastly superior bestselling horror novel The Shining, The Searing is not a part of any horror fiction tradition as I consider it. There's a slick superficial feel to this John Coyne novel that means one forgets it not long after reading it; already it's drifted from my mind even though I finished it less than a week ago. It may be billed as a novel of unrelenting terror, but it exists in that bland and banal universe of yesterday bestsellerdom. There's no Lovecraftian awe, no attempt to depict "how-we-live-now" of King, nor the prosaic reality of Matheson or the maniacal tasteless glee of Masterton. Spoilers coming so highlight if you know or don't care: The Searing's a thin soup of then-current pop culture "ideas" like telepathy and Uri Geller, sexual "liberation" books about the female orgasm, Von Daniken's ancient aliens BS, and even a nominal nod in the direction of Carl Sagan's Cosmos popularity, all obviously thrown in to get people to part with their money.

1980 Putnam hardcover

Women in a newly-developed suburban enclave in what was once the Virginia wilds outside DC suddenly experience horrifyingly intense orgasms while feeling what they describe as a "searing" in their brains. It proves fatal for some - seared brains blown out noses and such - then the intensity grows and the others fear for their lives. There's also a young autistic girl (constantly referred to as "retarded" reminding you this was the late '70s, folks) who seems to have some connection to it all. Factor in some manly men and passages like this:

He knew he had to control, to make decisions for both of them, and without giving her a chance to protest, he stood and picked her up in his arms. She was lighter than he expected, a child's weight, and he carried her across the living room and up the dark stairs to her bedroom. He would protect her...

1987 reprint Charter Books

That's an adult woman being carried up the stairs. Blech. Still, Coyne isn't a terrible writer, and the mystery of "the searing" along with a few shocks of violence against infants and women make turning the pages easy, but overall it's just a blurt of hackneyed situations and execution. Much of The Searing reminded me of mediocre '70s Hollywood horror films like Burnt Offerings, The Sentinel, The Manitou, Audrey Rose, etc. In fact I'm sure the movie rights were bought up for this, and that at one time Jane Fonda, say, or Faye Dunaway or Katharine Ross or Farrah Fawcett or Sissy Spacek were, as they say, "attached" to the project. Anyway, it's a diverting read, dated and inconsequential, but by no means a must-read, and really with no connection at all to the horror fiction we all truly love.

Ghost Story by Peter Straub (1979): Old Man Take a Look at Your Life

"What was the worst thing you've ever done?"

"I won't tell you that, but I'll tell you the worst thing that ever happened to me... the most dreadful thing..."

What more bewitching words could a horror fan want as the opening lines of a novel? There is no doubt that Peter Straub intended his breakthrough bestselling third book to be a summation and continuance of its literary forebears. Straub consciously evoked those great ghost-story tellers of antiquary: Poe, M.R. James, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Henry James, Ambrose Bierce, and the like. A reader doesn't have to be familiar with those writers to enjoy Ghost Story, not at all (I've really only a passing acquaintance with them myself) but I'm sure anyone who is will find Straub's allusions done with skill and respect. Just as much as Stephen King's bestselling horror novels of that day, Ghost Story, a critical and commercial success, ushered in the great era of '80s horror. Few modern horror novels can compare with its ambitions.

Back cover of 1980 Pocket Books edition

In fictional Milburn, a small town in upstate New York that's soon to be under siege by a terrifying Christmas blizzard, the members of the Chowder Society meet over whiskey and cigars to keep one another company as age creeps up on them: Frederick "Ricky" Hawthorne, Sears James, Lawrence Benedikt, John Jaffrey, and, till his death one year prior, Edward Wanderley. They are bound by a past more important than their present, a past some 50 years gone but that includes dead women and feral children. Nightmares have become prevalent for all the men since Edward's utterly unexpected death at a party for a beautiful young actress named Ann-Veronica Moore (Edward was a celebrity ghost writer - heh). Ghost stories have become their means of passing time, but they find in the town around them - and in Edward's fear-stricken face in death - hints that their past, their unholy past, is catching up with them. In distress, they write to Edward's nephew Donald Wanderley, who is, of all things, a horror writer.

Pocket Books 1994 reprint

Now I love horror fiction about horror writers! Don's novel Nightwatchers impresses the Chowder Society and is the impetus for their letter asking for aid (I'm their Van Helsing, Don wryly notes). Although this aspect isn't fully developed as it could have been, Don's creative faculties play into what happens later in the novel; it gets rather meta as the book comes full circle. He must tell a story, of course, to gain the old men's trust, and his past also reveals a relationship with a strange woman... who leaves him to be in a relationship with Don's brother David, who ends up dead. Don suspects this woman, Alma Mobley, of the worst, but can prove nothing. When the Chowder Society, or what's left of it, finally tells him the story of Eva Galli, an improbably beautiful and vexing woman they knew in their youth, and of her wretched fate, Don realizes she was a kind of shape-shifter, perhaps even our old friend the manitou. Indeed, Straub gives us a ghost, a werewolf, and a vampire, of sorts: all the horror essentials. She, and her minions, have come back, and the men are now launched into a time when madness offered a truer picture of events than sanity.

2001 Pocket Books edition. Meh.

Straub spins out his long novel in short chapters, mostly, crisscrossing between characters that, early on, can be confusing. I simply wrote the character names on my bookmark, a habit I picked up when plowing through the Russian novels I used to read before the internet came along. Once the characters came into focus for me I found Ghost Story a rich and very readable novel; Straub's style is literary without being pretentious or ostentatious, his ability to create and populate a believable setting is really second to King's if not, at times, the equal. 'Salem's Lot is, without doubt, its structural model, which is interesting: Straub is linking the great old ghost stories of yesteryear with modern large-scale horror storytelling. And while it works, I wasn't as emotionally invested in the novel as I was with his Floating Dragon. It's chilling and chilly, despite its rich tapestry of character and psychology, and remains just at a distance. This certainly could have been an intentional effect on Straub's part.

There is so much going on in Ghost Story I can only sketch out a few details that struck me as essential. Pay particular attention to the vague prologue and epilogue about a man and a little girl; they are of an illuminating piece. The vengeful manifestations of Eva Galli all take names with the initials A.M., which I'm supposing should make you think of identity, as in "I am." The old American ghost stories located the inherent sin and guilt of humanity in the wild woods of New England; this is where Lewis Benedikt confronts a deadly fantasy of his life's guiltiest moment. There is Sears James's astonishing story of the nightmarish little boy Fenny Bate, as filthy and ignorant as our most prehistoric forebears, who evokes his pity but ensures his doom. Other inhabitants of Milburn will meet frigid, horrid deaths as they pay for a sin that was not theirs, against which they have no defense, but is as much a part of the landscape as the fields and forests. Could you defeat a cloud, a dream, a poem?

Lovely UK cover art by Tom Adams (thanks to Trashotron)

As its rudimentary title implies, Ghost Story wants to be an urtext of horror, encompassing all the stories that have come before it... and that will come after it. One supernatural battle takes place in a movie theater showing the first modern horror film, Night of the Living Dead. The striking similarity to 'Salem's Lot and, in one tiny reference in the epilogue, to The Shining, is intentional; old and new in one story. The shape-shifting obscenities that terrorize Milburn and the Chowder Society have been with us forever: You are at the mercy of your human imaginations, and when you look for us, you should always look in the places of your imagination... where we make up stories to exorcise demons, but we forget who those demons are. In these tales within tales, characters within characters, mirrors within mirrors, the conceit is that which haunts us is only ourselves: I am a ghost.