A Vast Sadistic Feast

Got to love a pile of severed limbs! Added this one to my to-read list but the 1968 Bantam paperback is going for collectors' prices and I refuse to pay that. So who knows...

Such Throbbing Terror

 

At Five O'Clock They Take Me to the Gallows Pole

Lies That Life is Black and White Spoke from My Skull

Horror Fiction Help XV

As Halloween approaches, I'm finishing up a couple novels and hope to have reviews up soon, and I'm also watching 1970s made-for-TV thriller/horror movies on YouTube. Meanwhile, folks are still looking for forgotten horror fiction. Who can help?

1. A late 90's paperback cover, predominantly back but with a large white and red clown leering down at the viewer. I remember the author being obscure to me but he had made it big enough to be in Barnes and Noble. Thought it might be Al Sarrantonio but it's not. If I remember correctly it was either a jester or one of those European whiteface clowns. Anyhow... I bought it and the book sucked and had no scary clowns in it whatsoever. Found! It's:

2. A short story about a botanist who created a plant from an ill or dying boy.  I think the twist of the story was the parents' shocked realization.

3. A Caucasian fellow goes to see an old Indian (Native American) in his tepee to make a deal involving some kind of vengeance demon/spirit--I forget what for--and the Indian was in over his head; the demon came and killed him and took off wreaking havoc in the white guy's life. I think it raped his daughter or threatened her somehow. Anyhow, one of the details that stuck in my memory is that he didn't like his daughter's boyfriend because, for one thing, he was too audacious, i.e. he didn't even try to hide where his fingers were stained from smoking pot. Which he was doing out on a country road alone when the demon got him. Best I remember the cover showed the old Indian conjuring in his tepee and maybe the demon coming up.

4. I was reading a magazine a couple years ago, for the life of me I can not remember which but it had reviews for horror/thrillers, etc.... it described one book's plot, about a snowstorm and a group of people holed up in a roadside truck stop type of thing, and they soon realize there is a sniper outside, and won't let them leave. Found! It's:

5. Any information on a story about an escaped killed called "Mad Maurice."  It was in a kids' horror anthology.  I read it in the 80s but it may have been much older.  There was a bit about branches scratching a window but it really being the killer.  It wasn't really that great, but it is a story I have never forgotten. Found! It's:

6. 1980s Playboy paperback... A rapist gets caught... and nether regions are put in his taped-shut mouth.

The Gothic Cover Art of Victor Kalin

These 1960s paperback covers comprise only a fraction of the output of American-born illustrator Victor Kalin (1919-1991). The man was incredibly prolific, with his work appearing first in the slick magazines of the 1940s, then thriving during the paperback boom of the 1950s and '60s. In the later '60s and into the 1970s Kalin moved on to painting record album covers. His art really is iconic for each decade it appeared in; you've seen plenty of his work without, perhaps, even knowing his name!

They Got Me Tied Up to a Woe Tree

Read more on Saxon; back cover thanks to La Creeperie

Clive Barker's Shadows in Eden, ed. by Stephen Jones (1991): Of Minds to Madness, Flesh to Wounding

"I don't scare easily," said Clive Barker to a journalist in 1990, while promoting his then brand-new novel The Great and Secret Show. Barker continued: "But I'm terrified of two things. One is the general condition of being flesh and blood. Of minds to madness and flesh to wounding. The other is banality. My characters are constantly escaping from banality." That quote struck me back then and it still strikes me today. The great thing about Barker is that he's so in tune to his own wavelength; he knows just what and why he's writing and what he wants his readers to experience, and he's eager to talk about it too.


And that's just what Clive Barker's Shadows in Eden (Underwood-Miller, Oct 1991) gives us. An anthology of interviews, discussions, reviews, quotes, and endless illustrations, it's a beautifully produced hardcover. At 450+ pages, this is Barker unadulterated, talking at length about his art, his influences, and anything else he might want to expound upon. Shadows covers the gamut of his early career: his plays (and minor forays into stage acting), stories, novels, movies, and comics. I can hardly overstate its importance for the Barker fan. I bought this lovely title from the specialty-press Underwood-Miller as soon as it was published, and have happily revisited it for 25 years.

"I was very aware that if I was going to rise I was going to have to be a proselytizer for my work. I'm aware that many writers are actively reluctant to do that. They don't like to do public readings, they don't like to do television and so on... I have, no pun intended, something of the carnival barker in me."

Disturbingly erotic yet humorous front/endpiece art by Stephen Player.

Shadows in Eden is littered with Barker's sketches in the margins and rough drafts of paintings, some representative of characters and scenes from his fiction, others simply unlimbered escapees from his fevered brain. Some years ago I was waited on by a bartender who had a tattoo of one of these sketches and I said as she served me my beer, "Hey, that's a Clive Barker!" She told me I was literally the only person who'd ever recognized it.

Who doesn't love seeing their favorite writer's handwritten manuscripts?! Critical essays are also included, exposing the metaphors and subtleties—and yes, when necessary, the weaknesses—of Barker's literary output. Alas, Shadows doesn't include anything about Barker's magnum opus Imajica, since that novel was published pretty much concurrently.

Creepy art—Brother Frank?—and Ramsey Campbell's original introduction to the first editions of the Books of Blood. I'm still not sure what a Balaclava is and now I don't even want to find out, I enjoy the tantalizing mystery of it.

Of course: the first time I ever heard the word "meme" and learned what it was was reading this conversation between Barker and Neil Gaiman. They talk comics and how, in the late '80s and early '90s, they were rather like twins, figuratively and literally. And literarily. (Gaiman doesn't get the definition of meme exactly right, but ah well, the point is made.)

Movies: Hellraiser and more are featured. Nightbreed was going into production as Shadows of Eden was being put together, so it was cool to see some behind-the-scenes goodies. Here Barker's with illustrator icon Ralph McQuarrie. And then there's some stuff on, uh, Rawhead Rex.

The great Lisa Tuttle, who'd been featured with Barker in Night Visions III, contributes this wonderful piece in which she and Clive discuss Cabal and all manner of horror and art. "Whenever Clive and I have met to discuss horror, writing, fantasy and similar topics—whether on a public platform, or in private—I've always enjoyed it. More than enjoyed it: found it exhilarating. There's an intellectual rapport, so that even though we don't agree about everything, we're on the same wavelengths, shortcuts can be taken, intuitive leaps made; we spark responses in each other. I find what he has to say invariably interesting, and often illuminating, not only about his work, but about my own, as well as about art and life in general."

A treat from the Barker scrapbook! My God I can't imagine a bigger treat than sharing a bottle with Barker and discussing Books of Blood. Except maybe sharing a bottle with Barker and King and discussing Books of Blood (see below).

You'll recognize lots of the journalists and writers included: J.G. Ballard, Douglas E. Winter, Dennis Etchison, Kim Newman, Philip Nutman, Stanley Wiater, and oh yeah good ol' Steve King, whose piece "You Are Here Because You Want the Real Thing" opens Shadows. He recalls the first time he heard the name "Clive Barker" (New Haven World Fantasy Convention 1983, "drunk, drunk" as he puts it) and mused, since there was so much talk about him being a real game-changer, on the famous quote about Bruce Springsteen back in the mid-1970s, "I have seen the future of rock'n'roll, and his name is Bruce Springsteen." (King—drunk, drunk—misremembers and misattributes the quote, according it to Rolling Stone mag founder Jan Wenner. Not so but ah well, the point is made.) Of Barker King says: "And, oh my God, can the man write. No matter how gruesome the material, you are witched into the story, hooked, and then propelled onward."

My goodness what a perfect image for Barker's work. Jesus wept.

Stephen King Born 9.21.47

Wow who didn't love the '80s??

The Reaping by Bernard Taylor (1980): Make It Real Not Fantasy

Who doesn't love a creepy fetus with devil horns smirking at you from the womb on a horror paperback  cover? That thing's practically about to wink at you, isn't it? There's no actual evil fetus in The Reaping (Leisure Books, Feb 1982) so that might bum some of you out; no, Bernard Taylor (British author of quiet, effective horror novels like Sweetheart, Sweetheart and The Godsend) doesn't stoop to such crass imaginings. Taylor is more interested in taking his sweet, character-developing time, guiding the patient reader through a subtle psychological tale of grown-up concerns and fears before deploying the malevolent goods in what I found to be a satisfying, unsettling, and successful climax. Sure, I mean it's kinda ridiculous after all the care that's gone before, but I can overlook that. The book is out and done before 250 pages are up.

The Reaping isn't the type of novel I'm gonna get in deep about, you can get the gist of it from back-cover copy. You wouldn't get it from that freaky fetus cover, but Taylor writes well of intelligent, thoughtful yet flawed adult humans and their often painful relationships, their disappointments, their compromises and their regrets (as I've said before, many many horror writers have no idea how to describe adulting). I mean, the main character is an artist who, when not painting the commissioned portrait, relaxes with the novels of Muriel Spark and Thomas Hardy. With the subject of his painting, the mysterious and shy and lovely Catherine, he discusses the novelistic merits of the Brontë sisters. Don't know about you but I like when characters in horror exist in the real world and not just as fodder for supernatural or psychopathic evil.

 1992 Leisure reprint

Rigby's desire to actually be an artist, working and paid and successful, rather than just a widowed shop owner who lost children in a car accident several years prior, motivates him to accept that commission. But what strangeness ensues in that countryside estate! And hot sex. And the most cringe-worthy massage this side of George Costanza. Guess he should've known... Suspense builds in workmanlike style, heading toward a finale the clues to which I actually was unable to spot and which I think Taylor kept well-hidden. But it all makes sense in the end, which is more than I can say for other novels, right?
 

1980 UK hardcover, Souvenir Press: quite accurate

Want a none-too-taxing read written by a grown man who knows his way around the English language, who presents his characters in a relaxed, believable manner, and who can raise a goosebump or two about the invisible machinations some people will undertake to gain ultimate power? Maybe check out The Reaping: it's not gonna change your horror-loving life or anything, but don't you want people to see you reading a book with such delightful cover art? Of course you do! *wink wink*