Disturb Not the Dream by Paula Trachtman (1981): Don't Try to Take My Knife Away

The only novel by author and teacher Paula Trachtman (1931-2019), 1981's Disturb Not the Dream (Ballantine paperback, July 1982) is middle-of-the-road mainstream bestseller pop fiction, competently written, with some mild Gothic atmosphere, and lots of cheap thrills. Although Trachtman's prose veers at times into heightened purple prose, she keeps the narrative at pace with only a few slowdowns. A family saga set in a ritzy village in Long Island's Southampton, based around a Victorian home estate called Mulberry... and the bloody horrific things that happened there.

This is one of the least interesting paperback covers I've ever seen (which probably helped sell some copies) and its bland, generic back-cover copy seems to promise a by-the-numbers read. Shame the cover "art" is so uninspired, as several scenes within are gruesome and inventive enough to have provided some good lurid imagery for it. I mean, this book promises trash:

Yikes!

Admitted: I read a fair amount on autopilot; there's a lot going on but it's all rather dated: prologue with horrific domestic murders ("Eat it! Eat it, whore!"), then moving on to to early 20th century chapters, then after that to the modern Seventies. Part One of the novel centers on the unlikely, and quite dysfunctional, marriage of homely Evalynn Ambrose and rakish Evan Desmond, and their lives in the Mulberry home; Part Two introduces the Bradleys, who take residence in the same house, and quite dysfunctional in their own way. As sister says to brother early on, "Going to jerk off, sonny-boy?" Oh god, no, please no. My least favorite "horror" trope of the era, incest. And Trachtman is determined to get as much cheap shock value from it as she can, regaling us with an all-too-topical scene of sex parties ("the Kinky Klique," it's called) and filmed blackmail...

                                                                                    Crown hardcover, 1981

I gave up and skipped to the end, and was not surprised by what I found. A final recursiveness, a foregone conclusion, and ending from the beginning. Any experienced reader of horror will know the beats and the payoff. But, like a lot of vintage horror, if a reader was barely a teen, then yes, the climax will be a good, serious shock. To be fair, I did pick the book back up and read the parts I'd skipped, and while nothing was surprising, I do think Trachtman wrapped up her tale in a fair, if not terribly unique, manner.

Overall, despite the general readability and the graphic violence and illicit sex, it's all rather tiresome stuff. Typical affairs and locales, fodder for the unsophisticated reader who desires to read only what is already known from daytime television and commercials for domestic products like coffee and laundry detergent (i.e., a soap opera!). References to high fashion and culture for folks who went to college (a woman says something in her best "Seven Sisters voice" and when I looked it up I was like oh right, duh). Boring-ass nuns and Catholic nonsense such as found in hohum "horror" like The Sentinel and John Saul.

Paula Trachtman (pictured above in 1981) wrote no any other novels, but apparently Disturb Not sold like half a mil in paperback, so not bad for a one-off piece of commercial product. This is the kind of midlist paperback that did the horror genre no favors, and there is even not one hint of real "horror" in it, not in the lineal sense of Poe, Blackwood, HPL, Matheson, Jackson, and so on and on. I'd link it more to imitation Gothic; and going by some online reviews, the subject matter of Dream is akin to the early novels of V.C. Andrews, whom I've still not read even after years of writing this blog. (Dare I...?)

Got to wondering if Trachtman had read some Gothics and horror novels of the Seventies and thought to herself, I can do better, or at least as good as, that! Common motivation, no? Plus in those days publishers were clamoring for these tales, so who can blame her, if that's the case? And after a quick Googling, I found an interview with her from 2019 in which she said: "One evening I read a best selling mystery novel, threw it across the room and told my husband it was stupid and that I could do better. ‘So do it,’ said he. So I did." Man, I just knew it!

Trachtman goes on, revealing more that my suspicions were true, and the book was conceived as market fodder: "I read Publisher’s Weekly for months and learned that successful commercial fiction often had 3 elements: horror, sex, and violence." This is the same formula John Saul (and his silent writing partner) used to come up with his unending bestsellers. I mean, sure, everybody wants to make money, and Trachtman does say Disturb Not the Dream is basically "a potato chip book." So, marks for honesty, but for true real horror fiction: none.

RIP Dan Simmons (1948 - 2026)

Sad and to me, completely unexpected news: Dan Simmons, author of some of the most popular, award-winning, thought-provoking, mind-expanding, and iconic horror and science fiction of the last 40 years, has died at age 77. 

I first read him around 1990 or so, after hearing so much about his 1985 debut horror novel, Song of Kali. Boy, did that one do a number on me! In quick succession I read a bunch of his short stories (first in The Skin Trade, and later in Prayers to Broken Stones), then soon after that dove into Hyperion, thanks to my boss and a coworker, both big SF guys. Boy, did that one do a number on me! I'd never really read any true SF before, maybe a little of Bradbury's science fantasy, so being introduced to many of its subgenres and styles in one novel blew my brain out. It hit particularly hard because I had just read, or read sections of, The Canterbury Tales in my World Lit class at community college, so I grokked the narrative device immediately. 

Today I pulled down my Simmons mass markets, and I realized for all his prolific output, I kind of lost track of his work after the mid-1990s. But I have to say many if not most of his paperbacks have some of the greatest cover art of the entire Paperbacks from Hell era, and the books themselves are treasured personal physical mementos of those days long gone. Dig:

Sacrament by Clive Barker (1996): You Get Me Closer to God

With his seventh novel, published in hardcover in 1996, Eighties horror icon Clive Barker outdoes even himself. Sacrament (1997 Harper Books mass market, cover by Phil Heffernan) in this story of Will Rabjohns, a gay British wildlife photographer. After a wild animal attack puts him in a coma, he dreams/remembers/revisits a strange couple he knew as a boy. Once he is well again, Will travels back to England, to confront the mystery of his past, his estranged father, and his boyhood friends. What we have here is a metaphysical mystery tale, as a man confronts the past and the present, his art and the world, and the strange powers that seem to drive them all.

As with much of Barker's fiction, it is this confrontation that drives his characters. What transformation awaits at the heart of this mystery? Who are Jacob and Rosa Steep? They live fictions, through decades. There is a dark, violent power that lies in their fingers, in their seductive charms. In Will's photography of the world's wildlife, they see a "conduit"—he brings to Jacob an unwelcome vision of a 19th century artist named Thomas Simeon. (It's my guess that Simeon is a stand-in for William Blake; it's no secret that Barker has long considered the English poet one of his literary icons, and with good reason). There is a lineage from Simeon's art and writings to Will's photography: life is hidden and waiting for apocalypse in Simeon's work; its aftermath and extinction in Will's.

This is a novel about a longing for transcendence, for transformation, to confront the mystery, to find out, "Why have I lived?" Barker writes that perhaps, at the end, "There'd be understanding, there'd be revelation, there'd be an end to the ache in him." The final scenes in the living heart of the world—the Mundus Domini—are terrific; Barker's prose is masterful, pure, poised. Here is his Thomas Simeon, in one of the book's most wonderful passages:

"It seems to me, we must invent religion every moment, as the world invents itself, for the only constant is inconsistency.... It seems to me the purpose of religion is to say: All things are so. An invented thing and a thing we call true; a living thing and a thing we call dead; a visible thing and a thing that is yet to be: All Are So."

How about that? Barker is simply an excellent, lyrical writer, whose works reflect upon the spiritual mysteries of our lives. Sacrament is, in a word, magnificent. I'm appalled upon learning of some readers' distaste for its erotic homosexual depictions—they have no business reading Clive Barker. I found this aspect to be incredibly well-done and insightful, these scenes with Will and his lover. Will has an ache for transcendence (as do so many of Barker's men and women: see Gentle and Jude in Imajica, Cal Mooney in Weaveworld, or Fletcher and the Jaff in The Great and Secret Show), as does Jacob Steep. One man who creates to get closer to God, one man who destroys.

That sometimes spirituality is a dark and violent—and sexy!—thing in no way diminishes its importance in Clive Barker's art; in fact, this quality powers its engine. Sacrament may not have the "horror cachet" of the author's more famous, more graphic stories and novels and movies, but I think it is an essential work for those who appreciate his sui generis approach to horror fiction.


(Note: I wrote this review in the unbelievable year of 1998, for a new bookselling website called Amazon)

Cold Front by Barry Hammond (1982): Frozen Warnings

Published only in Canada in 1982 by the Canadian wing of Signet/New American Library, Cold Front is one of the rarest horror paperbacks of that era. I'd bet there are only maybe dozens of copies in existence, if that. For years searchers after horror have had to contend with copies being sold online for hundreds of dollars. The handful of readers who did dole out the bucks fortunately, or perhaps frustratingly, announced that wow, the book is actually pretty good. (Never assume that a book's high secondhand market pricing has anything to do with its quality, however). This made people want the damn thing even more.

Now, independent publisher Fathom Press, taking a cue from Valancourt Books' Paperbacks from Hell line, is going after white whales like this one. And this one was captured! Fathom was able to secure reprint rights from Canadian author Barry Hammond, who even contributed an explanatory and insightful afterword about the origins of his sole horror novel. (While writing, Hammond says he was playing difficult-listening albums by Lou Reed and Nico to capture the right vibe he was imagining, truly fitting.)

In Cold Front, Hammond doesn't even pretend to try to get you to identify with his three male leads. These guys are dumb, grimy, pig-ignorant losers who speak like it; no Tarantino pulp-crime pop-culture witticisms, no self-referential jokes, no self-aware callbacks. You're in the company of some real ugly drunken dum-dums, and it ain't fun. Hammond has a way of setting up a scenario that's pure no-way-out hopelessness. The almost-sole locale of the disgusting cabin in the snowy wilderness also functions as a kind of freezing existential locus, stripped of all extraneousness, few provisions, howling storm outside, confronting sex and terror inside this desolate dwelling that seems to exist in some netherworld, a purgatory hungry for lives to send on to Hell.

Sure, there's gonna be things to be grossed out by in a trashy Eighties horror paperback novel like this: the crude jokey racial comments, the "childlike sexuality" of the bizarrely pale white girl the men find hiding in the cabin's basement, the threat of rape and worse. Silent and mysterious, yet able to kick ass and defend herself, the young woman both attracts and repels each trapped man. The blurb on the back cover gets it right: it's not the girl they need to be afraid of... 

Fathom Press reprint, Thanks for a copy! 
cover art by Stephen Andrade.

As I read, I got notes of Jim Thompson crime novels, and of Laymon/Ketchum in the simplicity of setup and prose style, grue and bloodshed. Our monster, hinted at throughout—and ably represented in the Signet cover art, by the great Tom Hallman—is underplayed till the end, which is quite the frigid whirlwind of death and mayhem. While I wouldn't say I "enjoyed" Cold Front, I absolutely appreciated its commitment to single-minded unease, disgust, and fatalistic despair. And thanks to Fathom Press, you can now "enjoy" it as I did as well!

With the sun full on them, they were the very centre of the horror before they realized what it was... Then the pieces of it hanging from the trees seared their eyes. They could see the silhouettes. Not understand them, but know who it was from the shreds of wool still attached to the raw, frozen meat. Not understand how such a thing was possible. Logic of human geometry had been thrown aside. That the human body could undergo such stretching, ravaging, seemed impossible. The image indelibly inked across their minds even when they closed their eyes. Hard to believe that such obscenity could exist in sunlight.