Moths by Rosalind Ashe (1976): She Loves Naked Sin

How do you tell a man, gently, that his wife is a homicidal nymphomaniac?

This moody, erotically-charged cover art, by American romance illustrator H. Tom Hall, is perfectly fit for a sophisticated novel of doomed romance and obsession; I bought this paperback over a decade ago solely for its melodramatic atmosphere. I knew nothing of author Rosalind Ashe (1931-2006), and assumed the title, Moths, referred to the hapless male victims of a magnetic, alluring, possibly dangerous woman of incomparable beauty and passions. And... I was right.

back cover, 1977 Warner Books

The blurb comparison to Daphne du Maurier and her classic 1938 novel Rebecca is apt, though Moths doesn't reach the heights of suspense and emotional turmoil of that work. How could it? Yet this novel offers some good escapist fare, kind of what they're calling "romantasy" today, I think. The style, first person by an Oxford professor, is quite a bit plummy; I was constantly Googling his various allusions and references and poetic quotes to truly grasp and appreciate what was happening. Personally I find a lot of British culture, of whatever class, very interesting (piqued by decades-long obsession with the first wave of punk rock in the mid-Seventies), so this was fine and dandy for me. Other readers might take this as a warning, however, who don't have patience for an academic approach to such goings-on.

Author Ashe, undated

Me, I was quite taken from the first with the professor's tale, lush and literate and over-heated, with that kind of charming self-satisfaction an intellectually Oxford don can have. With dripping atmosphere to spare, Prof. Harry regales us with descriptions of deep-wooded Dower House and its flowering environs (clearly evoking Rebecca's Manderley), a rustic old estate for sale which he explores in the novel's opening. Once inhabited by a mysterious actress of the Regency era, Dower House draws our Prof. inexplicably in, even though as a confirmed bachelor he has no interest in purchasing it.

Penguin UK, 1977

There, also exploring the grounds, he meets the Boyces, a couple eager to make the place their own: James, another professor who is less committed to his work than to his mistresses; and his enchanting wife "Mo" (short for Mnemosyne, Greek for memory, and mother of the Muses, not too pretentious now!), who charms Prof. more than Dower House itself. Prof. Harry is able to befriend the two and thus finds himself invited into the home and their lives... and passions. James was her senior by ten years, a self-made academic... She was the last of a line of penniless aristocrats... In California, or on another social rung, she might have turned flower-child, perhaps Jesus-freak. As it was, she had an altogether unusual charm...

1990 reprint

Ashe weaves a luscious stew of supernatural hints and erotic trysts in a delightfully dated Seventies style, very Jolly Old England, very gender-normative, very femme fatale. But is the femme fatale a ghost, a possession, an imagination? Who is this madwoman who, as the title explicitly implies, draws hapless men into her fiery embrace? Bodies turn up, cops are on the case, a diary is read revealing murder... poor Harry, can't he catch a break? This woman, Mo, (also called Nemo, which is Latin for "no one"—not too pretentious now!) is alluring, even unto death. Mood swings, migraines, to put up with her idiosyncrasies requires utmost submission, because you know the sex gonna be goood. Never had she been more lovely, more violently alive. The Regency actress who inhabited her seemed positively recharged by another victim: the dead thriving on the dead.

Japanese edition, perfectly captures the setting

Moths will more appeal to readers who enjoy long-fuse occult/supernatural novels like Sweetheart, Sweetheart and Burnt Offerings. This was Ashe's first novel (and recently reprinted by Valancourt!), and the others she wrote all seem to have a similar Gothic vibe of windswept locales, mysterious romances, the vague and distant threat of madness and death, supplied in that overheated prose, which might turn off readers looking for real gruesome horror business. Yet I myself enjoyed its literate, allusive nature, as it moves slowly but inexorably to its conclusion—I am nothing more than that moth.

The Snake by John Godey (1978): My, My, My Serpentine

The gritty, grimy New York City of the 1970s looms large in our pop cultural imagination. Movies like Taxi Driver, Saturday Night Fever, The French Connection, to name a quick few, are today all virtually everyday notions, while progressive music from Blondie, Talking Heads, the Ramones, and early hip-hop continue to symbolize the absolute essence of "cool." The politics of the day were hardball and hard-won, like President Ford telling the town to (apocryphally as a headline in the local news) "Drop dead," and later, Mayor Ed Koch practically became a celebrity and known to folks who wouldn't dare step foot on those profane mean streets. 

Enter The Snake: a 1978 thriller from a writer named John Godey. This was the crime fiction pseudonym of Brooklyn-born author Morton Freedgood, who had worked in NYC's film industry for all the giant movie companies, like Paramount and 20th Century Fox. As noted on the cover of the 1979 Berkley paperback, Godey previously wrote The Taking of Pelham 1-2-3, which was made into a 1974 movie that also captured NYC at its most lawless. Letting loose a giant slithering atavistic reptile into the gleaming greenery of Central Park must have seemed like a no-brainer to the author, especially in the wake of Jaws. The cover of the original hardcover captures it nicely:

Godey seems to know every inch of the city, doling out places names and addresses like any reader will know exactly what he's talking about (ah, New Yorkers!), and I often plugged in such into Google Maps to get a clear view of the specific environs the action was happening in. His depiction of the titular creature is both scientifically sound and aesthetically unsettling. The reasoning for its arrival and escape is believable in its randomness, a backstory both intriguing but also blackly comical in a way, and very NYC-coded. "Two dead in less than twenty-four hours, that's one thing... People die all the time. But the other thing, the politics, that's serious."

Characters are familiar: the beleaguered cop, the cocky young herpetologist, the lovely journalist, the sweaty mayor, the religious nuts who make it their mission to find and kill the demonic reptile, plus various hapless victims introduced and dispatched with maximum suspense. Godey may be writing a slick bestseller, and he's a bit above the pulp pay-grade; still, lots of vulgar '70s slang and profanities and ethnic slurs you'll remember from the movies of the day, with less enlightened folks going about their daily grind in a city that can swallow you whole—and now even has the ability to inject fast-acting fatal venom right into your veins. New York City really has it all, don't it? "Any other city, if somebody got bitten by a snake, the public would blame the snake. Here they blame the mayor." 

I read The Snake quickly, enjoying a little imaginative time-travel to a place and time I do dearly love. As a horror novel of snaky scares it's not on a par with The Accursed, but Godey is quite adept at his descriptions of the 11-foot black mamba and its shenanigans, how it hides in the wilds of Central Park and is pretty much an innocent creature going about its own primal business. This is a thriller through and through. The set-up is solid, the sense of locale impeccable, the climax breathless, and the very ending you might guess—but ultimately The Snake is a satisfying bit of '70s suspense.

The snake in the park became a jewel in the crown of the city's obsession with its own eccentricity. The public reasserted its prideful conviction that it inhabited the most put-upon city in the whole world. When bigger and better and more unendurable disasters were contrived, they were visited justly upon the city that matched them in stature, which was to say, the city that was superlatively dirty, declining, expensive, crime-ridden, unmanageable, and glamorously unlivable beyond any other city in the world.

Punish the Sinners by John Saul (1978): I Got a Catholic Block

Busting out of nowhere in 1977 with his debut novel from Dell, John Saul had success immediately, watching as Suffer the Children hit the bestseller charts and sold millions of copies, thanks to an easy-to-remember name and a first-ever tv commercial ad campaign. Saul wrote his books fast, like in a month, so the publisher was always happy to have a new paperback original from him every year. With ominous, biblical-sounding titles and cover art featuring young women in grave danger (the remnants of the Gothic romance and evoking the twin icons of Rosemary's Baby and The Exorcist), his dense, 400-plus-page books were marketed to and scooped up by teen girls and young mothers, who could identify most with the anxieties inside.

But me, personally? I was never once interested enough in one of his paperbacks to pick one up, not with babies and dolls and cribs on the covers (very Mary Higgins Clark, no thanks). Working in bookstores used and new from the late Eighties to the late Nineties, I bemoaned the popularity of his work, even though I hadn't bother to read him. To me, all of his books looked, as is said today, mid. There were countless copies of his derivative-looking titles always around, jamming up the horror section, all read to tatters in the used paperback exchange I worked at in college, and later, upscale hardcovers for those eager and solvent enough to drop twenty-plus (!) bucks on his reheated hashwork.

Saul's books seemed to me fodder only; not truly horror fiction in its grand tradition, just disposable tchochkes for the less adventurous reader. And now that I’ve read one, let me tell you: my impression was absolutely correct. A duller, drier, more inconsequential book I have rarely read in the decade and a half that I've been keeping this blog. Punish the Sinners (Dell, June 1978) was Saul's second paperback original; maybe he got better, maybe he got worse. I'll never know, because I don't care. And although I have a few of his early paperbacks in my collection—these days, I do kinda appreciate the cover art—I'm in no hurry to read another.

I won't bother to rehash the plot, as the back cover gives it all to you, but really oversells it, making the novel sound like a real religious creepfest (cover art obviously a Carrie clone). In reality Sinners is plodding, melodramatic nonsense without any sense of atmosphere or urgency. One pseudo-event after another rather than a plot, one talking teenager indistinguishable from the next, one conversation between virtually non-existent characters after another, and cheating POV shifts to end a scene on some phony note of "suspense." 

You feel no jeopardy for the boring teenage girls who are killing themselves one by one (which only starts after some hundreds of pages) in a small, barely-described town in Washington state. You'll see the "surprise" twist coming; while the half-hearted ending is dark, it is not disturbing. Unlike the genre’s worst talents, Saul’s prose is serviceable and actually readable, but utterly devoid of wit, insight, observation, or conviction. The overall impression Saul gives is one of indifference.

I don't know how any experienced horror fiction reader would find any sustenance in this book at all; I do know that many people avidly read Saul while in their young teen years, and so recall him as a fond memory of an illicit behavior, reading-with-a-flashlight-under-the-covers kind of thing. Many of the one-star Goodreads reviews are basically, this scared me as a kid. But also many adults enjoy his stuff still. Which of course is fine, sure, but not for me, not for this blog, not for any recommendation I'd give.

This is the type of "horror" that my blog is a reaction to and against. While better writers sold fewer books, Saul's sold in the millions (and probably still do). I've always wanted to find the forgotten and the overlooked, the authors lost in the shadow of their lessers, shine a light on those who were worthy of rediscovery—not simply tread the same old worn-out ground of yesteryear's dusty bestsellers. Nobody needs to be told to read John Saul, and I rue horror fan pages on Reddit and Facebook and social media elsewhere in which his books are still recommended to innocent readers not around during his peak popularity and thus ignorant of the poverty of his imagination.

This kind of by-the-numbers banality is what the splatterpunks were rebelling against in the mid-Eighties. What any good, thoughtful horror writer of any stripe should be against (King rightly lambastes him a couple times in Danse Macabre). The folks spearheading the Dell/Abyss line also had to have Saul's books in mind as they stated in their manifesto. 

Sinners exists in some netherworld, some purgatory, of the undistinguished, a gray rock of a novel that requires no imagination or effort on the part of the reader. Two bloody characters walking towards each other on the street of the small town at the "climax" was about the only unique, vaguely interesting moment in the whole 400-page slog. Oh, right, almost forgot, there's a graphic priest orgy, too, which Saul attempts to use as shock but in his slow-witted manner only manages to lazily disgust. 

In interviews over the years Saul has said that while he doesn't mind being considered a "horror novelist," he is no fan of the genre, either in fiction or film. No shit. John Saul is, simply, a supreme hack. And far from being a horror novel, Punish the Sinners is manufactured product, unit shifter widget, maximally conceived, designed, and produced to get readers to part with their money at the airport, the drugstore, the mall bookstore: exactly what I'd always assumed Saul's books were lo the past four decades. While it's a slight satisfaction to have my suspicions vindicated, it was no fun finding out first-hand.

To sum up my feelings about this novel—in case you couldn’t tell!—I will quote from that other musty old tome, the biblical Book of Revelation: "So, because you are lukewarm, and neither hot nor cold, I will vomit you out of My mouth." 

John Saul retired in 2009 and was awarded the HWA Lifetime Achievement Award in 2023. 

The Accursed by Paul Boorstin (1977): Coils of the Serpent Unwind

Snake-handling, a bizarre cult behavior formed from several lines in the Bible, is ripe for horrific exploitation. While I was working in a Southern indie bookstore in the mid-Nineties we sold lots of copies of Salvation on Sand Mountain, a nonfiction account of the phenomenon. Eighties horror giant John Farris wrote a harrowing scene of it in his book Wildwood. Earlier, in 1976, noted grit-lit groundbreaker Harry Crews gave adventurous readers A Feast of Snakes, a grimy, raucous, raunchy bit of violent Southern Gothic grue with a literary air. I mean, dig this cover art:

And who can forget that great line from the Scorsese version of Cape Fear, with deranged De Niro snarling, "Granddaddy used to handle snakes in church, granny drank strychnine"? I haven't seen that flick since the grunge era and yet have never forgotten it. I was reminded of it recently when I picked up a book that's long taken up residence on my bookshelves, The Accursed, a slim novel published by Signet in November 1977. With a perfectly-rendered cover of innocence and evil, reduced to their most primeval, Paul Boorstin's first novel is one of the many titles Signet put out that feature animals run amok. This time, the animals are snakes of various deadly varieties, all part of the worshipful country cult ceremonies held by one Preacher Varek. [He] seized a hissing Indian cobra, the scaly coils writhing in his grasp, its forked tongue, sophisticated  sensor both taste and smell, flicking, bringing minute chemical particles back to be analyzed in the Jacobsen's organ above its jaws.

At the edge of Desperation Swamp in Clay-Ashland County, South Carolina, sits Thornwald Memorial Hospital, a time-worn edifice showing its age in the sweltering clime of mid-July. Run by a power-hungry administrator with no medical degree and rotating crew of indifferent, autocratic, and/or horny employees, the hospital is hardly a place one would want to spend any time in, much less perform as a doctor or recuperate as a patient. Unfortunately for Dr. Adam Corbett, a man of character and do-goodery vibes, perform here he must, and when he learns that the newborn baby of poor swamp denizen Mary Ann Cotter is suddenly and inexplicably dead, a baby he elivered, he is not convinced of the coroner's explanation of crib death: Adam would have to tread lightly or lose his job.

There's no doubt what's going on: dangerous serpents are about in the dark hidden places of Thornwald Memorial; just like in the movies of the era, we've encountered the creature from the outset, and now all we can do is watch/read in suspense as our cast of characters slowly come to the ultimate realization. The perplexing noises of Clay-Ashland County after dark were enough to convince anyone that man was not the source of all evil, that there were other more sinister forces at work in the universe, powers all the more terrifying because they were unknown, removed from the familiar, even endearing sins and vices of humanity.

 

Early on, we learn that this crumbling hospital was built on the site of a Confederate infirmary that, in 1863, was attacked and laid waste by Yankee soldiers, forever a place where bloodshed and black powder had poisoned that strip of land overlooking the swamp forever... the only thing the property was good for was a hospital or a graveyard, take your pick. More than once I was reminded of the late great Michael McDowell and his Avon paperbacks, and the Southern territory, both physical and psychological, that he would mine in a few short years. Author Boorstin certainly doesn't have the meanness, the mercilessness, the weird vivid characters, the deadly droll narrative of McDowell's works, but that's fine; Boorstin acquits himself well in these proceedings.

We're not here for finely-wrought characterization of human foible, we're here for monster mayhem, and Boorstin has the skills for just that, getting right at the skin-crawling repulsion that coiling serpents engender in us: Man's world seemed a simple matter of neat geometry, straights lines precisely drawn to meet at sensible right angles. But this cold-blooded hunter curved, twisted, a devious, sinewy, supple being eluding rational explanations.

The paperback's bio page states that he was inspired to write The Accursed while "filming in the Amazon interior" and spending time in the hot South Carolina sun. Boorstin's experience is wide-ranging, a professional documentary filmmaker/producer and TV screenwriter; his father was American historian and author Daniel J. Boorstin. His next novel, Savage (which I own but have not read), also happens to feature some fantastic cover art:

The Accursed especially snaps to life when Preacher Varek, a giant of a man shrouded in black, [his] head shaved bald by a straight razor, is onstage. Suspense ratchets up when he comes into contact with Jean, Dr. Corbett's pregnant wife, rescuing her when her car gets stuck in the mire, and shames her for wanting to have, you know, her baby in a hospital with modern medicine and all. The preacher contradicted everything the young doctor stood for and Adam worried where Jean's naive belief in this swamp healer might lead.

Other unsavory characters abound, mostly snake fodder, and Boorstin isn't above the cheap thrills of the Seventies, like the sexy nurse who caresses herself—not too tacky now!—and meets an inspired "sex and death" end in a bubbly bathtub. Unhooking her bra with one hand, she rubbed the icy champagne bottle along her bare, sweaty breasts, beds of moisture condensing around the enlarged crests of her nipples. Or the poor burn victim bastard who tries to get an old nurse to read him dirty magazines, utterly immobilized, a free meal for a ferocious reptile. Maynard's eyes peered over the coils of his murderer, the orbs nearly popping out of their sockets from the pressure...

Yeah, I gotta say, Boorstin has written some truly tasty scenes of serpentian gore and horror. There are two climactic scenes of confrontation; the first is good, yes, but the second is a fuckin' ripper, and I could easily see the fake blood flying and the mechanical snake writhing and roiling in a cheap TV-hospital set. Her blood mingled with the serpent's, to drench her nightdress in gory impasto. 

Boorstin, 1980

Like the previous novel I read, The Night Creature, this book got better as it went on, doling out its suspense level in a workmanlike manner, crisscrossing plotlines, very much in a cinematic narrative. You're definitely getting you your dollar-ninety-five's worth of B-movie entertainment. Did Boorstin miss a few opportunities to imbue a little more, I dunno, gravitas here and there? Sure, I guess; there are several times when the author's voice rings out over the standard cliche melodramatic proceedings that you wish he'd have given this baby one more writerly polish. But even its more lackluster moments didn't last too long. Boorstin's adeptness at describing ophidian destruction makes The Accursed a satisfying pulpy read, and its inclusion on the very cover of Paperbacks from Hell is thus the perfect place for it.               

The intruder seemed to congeal out of the moist and heavy air, gliding stealthily,
almost as if knowing this was a place of such fragility that it must trespass with infinite care.
Thick as a fire hose, it slithered slowly from the air-conditioning vent: five, ten, fifteen feet long, and still extending, an uninvited guest so out of place in the room it hardly seemed possible the interloper was there at all...              

The Night Creature by Brian N. Ball (1974): She Rides

All over the social media of bibliophiles you can see people who insist that they must finish any book they've started reading. Sometimes this dogged commitment comes off as bragging; more often, as a kind of desperation, a sad realization of a fault: the utter inability to not finish a book that is simply not grabbing you in the way you wanna be grabbed. Me, I've quit more books than I recall, and have my entire book-reading life, but ever since starting this blog I've tried harder to finish the horror novels I start. What if the best part of the book is the ending?! Let me tell you, book lover—and I'm probably not telling you anything you didn't already know—that is rarely the case.

Fortunately it is the case for this 1974 novel The Night Creature (published in the UK as The Venomous Serpent), by British scribe Brian (N.) Ball. For several weeks I meandered through the first two-thirds of it. Not because it was bad, or uninteresting; Ball, a prolific writer of SF, is a capable author, if kinda dry (it's told in first person, a style I've found myself losing interest in over the years). No, I just found it all rather tame and indistinct; for every little aspect that made me perk up, I'd have another several pages of, sure, okay, whatever. The book would sit on my nightstand for days untouched, till last week. Dammit, I can finish this guy! Spurred on by a few positive reviews on Goodreads, I sat down early one afternoon determined to get to the end. And I did! And boy was I glad!

Anyway. I found the hippie-ish young couple, Andy and Sally, enjoyable enough, picturing their artsy 18th century stone farmhouse Seventies-style charmed me, as did their making a living selling crafty antiques and landscape paintings in the touristy British countryside. Everything changes in their idyllic life when Sally comes home with a brass rubbing and... wait, what the fuck is a "brass rubbing"?! Turns out it's a chiefly British hobby, so it made sense, born and bred Yank that I am, that I had no idea what the dang thing was that starts all the trouble. Then I recalled I had seen the cover for the UK edition of the book, under its original title The Venomous Serpent; had, even posted it to this very blog a decade ago! Wonder of wonders.

One night Andy gets the fright of his life when the woman on the rubbing, as well as her dog, seem to come to life when the moonlight filtering in through the high barn windows illuminates it. Ball does a decent enough job describing the eerie escapade, which happens several times, each time more and more disturbing to the young man: I had never known the condition which we call "terror" before. It's something far beyond fear, for it's unreasoning.

(oddly, incorrect names of people on the rubbing on back of NEL edition)

And thus follows standard procedure: Andy convincing Sally what he's seen, a visit to the ruined church where Sally first made the rubbing, learning the local lore of the people in said rubbing, intimidating locals warning them off the church property, cranky coppers (I was fool enough to call on our local policeman), and one truly old eccentric priest Andy tries to enlist in his aid when Sally disappears one day. The lady Andy seeks is one of the blood-drinking living dead: Undead, blood-crazed, monstrous thing from the tomb she might be, there was no doubting her beauty. Can he rescue Sally in time from the Lady Sybil?

Not unlike a contemporaneous Hammer horror film, The Night Creature is a mere wisp of a book at barely 150 pages. It truly does ramp up suspense and interest in the last third, so by the end, the tale has found that sweet spot, the one I personally truly adore and crave, and nuzzles there, suckling and secure.

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.

The Cats by Nick Sharman (1977): Apocalypse Meow

Scott Grønmark was his name and writing pulp horror paperbacks under the pseudonym "Nick Sharman" was his game. Born in Oslo, Norway, in 1952, he was working in the PR department of New English Library (which is why of course he had to use a pseudonym) when he began his published career with The Cats. It was originally published by NEL in 1977 (below), and then by Signet in America in May 1979. Subsequently he wrote six or seven novels, only one under his real name. Notoriety came Grønmark's way some years back when internet wags postulated that he was the person responsible for the infamous sleaze-horror "classic" Eat Them Alive, which wasn't so; you can read his response here.

An early entry into the animal attack publishing craze led, of course by Jaws and The Rats, The Cats offers up most, but not all, of the usual template, even though the subgenre had only been going on a couple years by 1977. Most characters are irritable, stuffy, smug, and/or macho. Or American, for no reason I could discern. Victims run the gamut of British society, briefly introduced, quickly dispatched. Requisite cynicism about politicians while the mighty military comes in swinging their dicks. Science is responsible for the poor kitties' condition. There isn't even a love interest, believe it or not, but there is an attempted rape—about the only woman who appears (the assault is prevented at the last second). Two sets of estranged fathers and sons lend a tad bit of character conflict. One human is afflicted by the same disease as the cats have, maybe there's a psychic connection too, an addition I found intriguing.

I wish Grønmark had attempted to give his rampaging cats a smidge of personality. We all know cats in our personal lives who are more interesting than some people in our social circles. Imagine if he'd spent just a chapter on the creatures themselves, even just a couple kitties, perhaps even inspired by then-bestselling juggernaut Watership Down—recall how Richard Adams did marvels with cuddly rabbits! That would've given this slight 154-page novel some much needed ballast as well as some empathy for innocent animals.

But that's not what this book is or wants to be. Despite several vivid attacks early on, Grønmark doesn't seem to have much energy to inject his tale with anything but the driest essentials. There's little spark in the proceedings, not even anything but the most workmanlike approach to feline slaughter. Prose is competent, serviceable, but lacking any real juice. He simply keeps the narrative going faster and faster but with diminishing results, I mean I've kind of already forgotten the specifics of the climax, such as it is, and the cute yet utter by-the-numbers final paragraphs fail to surprise. I did like the guy who tries in vain to fight back against the beasts with acid, is still overwhelmed, and croaks, as his last words, "Oh well, you can't win 'em all."

Previous Grønmark books I've read, The Surrogate and Childmare, were more entertaining, written with a bit more skill and conviction. As noted, The Cats was Grønmark 's debut novel, and I guess he simply didn't have the chops yet. (At least it led to a successful writing career, I'll give it that; he died in 2020 aged 68.) Unfortunately, I found The Cats lackluster, offering nothing fresh to the all-too-common cliches of animal-attack literature. If you're a collector, you'll want the Signet edition with that spectacular Don Ivan Punchatz cover, but unless you're an animal-attacks obsessive, you can probably leave the book on the shelf.

As he lay on the ground he could see people jumping from the smashed upper windows of the double-decker bus, and then his eyes locked with those of the black cat. Its jaws gaped for a ghastly instant before its teeth rammed straight through the flesh of the man's nose and crunched into the hard knuckle of gristle underneath.

Kiki by John Gill (1979): Plastic Fantastic Lover

When I first saw a copy of the gloriously-covered Kiki (Fawcett Popular Library, Oct 1980, no cover art credit) on a fellow paperback horror fan's Instagram, I bought a copy immediately, $5 on Abebooks. Mannequin horror, it looked like, promising illicit erotic thrills, you know I had to have it. How had this book passed me by? I'd never come across it before, and the author's name, John Gill, meant nothing to me. Factor in that Publishers Weekly blurb about "A cool little horror story with a triple twist at the end," and I was expecting a nice, tight creepy thriller. Which is, happily, about what I got...

Ellis Sargesson, "Sarge" for short, is an American physician practicing medicine in the French Riviera. He is grieving the death of his teenage daughter. He is looking for an out-of-the-way house with a basement that can be soundproofed. Some nights Sarge drinks an iceless martini with a single olive soaking in it and listens to the Ray Noble Orchestra; other times its Armagnac while he plays the soundtrack to Singin' in the Rain. He buys Kiki, a Swedish-blonde, anatomically-correct blow-up doll—she's not a mannequin after all!—in a sex shop in Nice. The shop also sells Black and Asian dolls, even a rosy-lipped boy, an imitation catamite ("You would prefer a boy?" the clerk asks Sarge in halting English, "The boy is very popular with the priests.") More than that of the plot I don't want to say.

Nor can I say much about Gill himself. A brief bio of him (born in the South Pacific, no birth year given, "now" lives in Europe) is appended to the last page of the Kiki paperback; my bibliographic Googling turned up little about him other than that he once apparently was the head of drama at the BBC. Copies of his other novels were on eBay, all suspense thrillers. He had no Goodreads author page and his books were misattributed, identifying him as a John Gill who was a Catholic theologian in, oh, the 18th century. I corrected that as well as I could.

 

There's a very subtle, creepy quality to Kiki that I think would appeal to horror fans who appreciate offbeat, genre-adjacent works. If you've enjoyed past TMHF favorites The Happy Man, The Tenant, The Cormorant, you just might find Kiki to your taste. Gill’s smoothly professional prose and pacing isn’t entirely original, but much welcomed anyway. The vibe is reminiscent of vintage Polanski: European, insular, obsessive, cool, detached; Hitchcock himself would have approved of the goings-on as well. Twists and turns are ably deployed; the climactic confrontation(s) satisfy, all laced with a delicious black irony. I went into Kiki blind; I'd encourage everyone else to do the same!

Living in Fear: A History of Horror in Mass Media by Les Daniels (1975): Immaculately Frightful

 

Despite being able to Google any and all topics at any and all times, I still cherish having my own nonfiction collection of horror reference books. I've always been interested in author biographies and critical appreciations of the genre, especially for the general reader and not (necessarily) the literary academic. While my shelf of these titles pales in comparison to my shelves of actual horror fiction, this latest addition to my library deserves a post of its own.

Living in Fear: A History of Horror in the Mass Media (Da Capo Press oversize paperback, 1983) is virtually a one-stop shop for most of your horror literacy requirements. Author Les Daniels (1943-2011) made his bones in the early Seventies when he published Comix: A History of Comic Books in America, one of the very first books on the topic. He gained a reputation as a serious, but not stuffy, chronicler of the overlooked, the forgotten, the thrown-away popular enjoyments of the past. (Hmm, sounds familiar...)

 

Daniels continued to write about comic books, with histories of Superman, Wonder Woman, and others following later. As his favorites had been the notorious EC horror comics of the Fifties, it's no wonder that he soon turned his attention to that also much-maligned genre in toto. We should be glad he did, because he almost effortlessly draws a line from Greek mythology, Biblical mystery plays, epic poetry, and proto Gothic literature to early American religious sermons, and then more recognizable horror fare like The Monk, Frankenstein, Varney the Vampyre, Dracula, Poe, Bierce, Washington Irving, et. al. 

But of course he's practically just getting started. The Order of the Golden Dawn, Weird Tales, the Lovecraft circle, "Inner Sanctum," Universal monster movies, Boris Karloff, William Gaines, Richard Matheson, Rod Serling, Hammer flicks, even a brief consideration of the Rolling Stones, Bob Dylan, Jim Morrison, and Alice Cooper in the context of psychological horror and nihilism—all come under his discerning eye and fluid pen. Daniels also generously included several classic short stories to serve as markers of their era, from Poe, M.R. James, Machen and more, including a solid-gold personal fave-rave, Matheson's "Blood Son."

 

I haven't even mentioned the lovely b&w art that accompanies the text, vintage illustrations from down the ages,woodcuts, iconic movie stills, comic and magazines covers (but nary a single, believe it or not, actual book cover) even a full-length EC Comics story. I can't tell you how excited I was to learn about Irish artist Harry Clarke's Art Nouveau-inspired drawings for Poe's dreadful tales (above). 

 

 

As for "modern" horror, Daniels seems almost dismissive of both film adaptations of Rosemary's Baby and The Exorcist, which maybe made sense back then but today I find inexplicable: those two movies are, along with their base novels, the tent poles of modern horror entertainment. Thomas Tryon gets a mention of a paragraph, as does non-horror author John Fowles, and a few other "contemporary" writers, but Daniels wrote this book prior to Stephen King's ascension and domination of even the very concept of "horror." Daniels himself would start to publish his own horror novels, a historical series about the vampire Don Sebastian de Villanueva, in the ensuing years. The final words are about the monster cereals of the Seventies, perhaps an ignominious end to such a towering work, alas...

1975 Scribner hardcover

 

Obviously a precursor to King's chummy horror/Cold War kid memoir Danse Macabre from 1981, Living in Fear is a reference work at heart. I think anyone attempting to read it from cover to cover would simply get bogged down by the sheer weight and heft of Daniels' approach. You may be thinking now that this isn't the type of book you read straight through, and you'd be right.

Indeed, I see many fans online make this mistake with Danse, and then give up in frustration. I was introduced to King's book in 19-effing-86 and I still don't think I've read it in its entirety. Books like these are to nosh and nibble at, appetizers and hors d'oeuvres for the brain. It is something to keep on your shelf and when you run across some horror blank spot and you think, What did ol' Les Daniels have to say about "The Night Stalker"? Or Creepy magazine? Or Robert Bloch? Think how ridiculous it'd be if you tried to eat an entire Thanksgiving dinner spread all by yourself. No, you help yourself to a serving, go back for seconds later, eat some leftovers for a midnight snack or the day after.

I'll be honest: Daniels writes with such casual authority, from such a wellspring of knowledge and experience, in such clear prose, that I found myself dealing with pangs of jealousy as I read. While I knew of many of the topics and names and stories contained herein, it is the brisk aplomb with which Daniels sets down his insights that impressed me most mightily. His ability to synthesize and summarize decades upon decades of fearsome entertainments, to move from classic literature to pulp fiction, from silent film to the Seventies cinematic excesses, from radio to television and magazines, is nothing short of magnificent. 

Striking a path between the academic and the aficionado, Daniels has offered up a clear, deep well to drink from. Despite it being almost half a century old, Living in Fear provides so much context, insight, enthusiasm, and appreciation for the origins of, and the genre as a whole, that it belongs in every serious horror and pop culture fan's library.