Lovers Living, Lovers Dead by Richard Lortz (1977): Go Rimbaud!

How I love when my low expectations are shattered by a horror novel. Nothing like that feeling of giddiness when a nondescript book rises above the slag heap of cliche and convention to offer surprising, even—especially?—perverse, bizarre chills and thrills. Published in hardcover in 1977, Lovers Living, Lovers Dead (Dell paperback, June 1979), by playwright/TV writer/novelist Richard Lortz, is a dated humdinger of a horror novel, replete with cringe-worthy sexual politics that seem positively Neanderthal today. However it still manages to fascinate with an ethereal female protagonist, her murky psychological depths, and the analytic attempts to plumb them. And oh, her put-upon husband! Won't someone please think of him? It's a good thing it's the '70s because he can talk freely with his wife's psychiatrist to get to the bottom of her mysterious ways.

Richard Lortz (1917–1980)

Our protagonist, Michael Kouris, is a hale-and-hearty comparative lit professor of late middle-age, an egotistical, masculine manly-man, married for seven years to the much younger Christine, who earlier had been one of his English students (more on that later). With their two children, little weirods Jamie and Rose, they've just moved into a many-roomed ramshackle home in a New England forest. But something's not right: in the unsettling scene which opens the novel, Christine displays a violent streak by shooting up a nest of starlings in one of the huge trees on their new property. Also: the children are unruly and worst of all, the Kourises have been celibate for almost the entirety of their marriage! This simply won't do.

All this conflict stems, Michael is certain, from Christine's vagabond childhood, thanks to her father, Marcus Damenian, a brilliant eccentric anthropologist who took her on his many adventures deep into the exotic, dangerous jungles of far, far away, where they lived with primitive tribal peoples. Father's been dead for years now but his memory lives on, up in the couple's attic, in a trunk belonging to Christine which she keeps forever locked...

Poor unfathomable Christine is depicted as a woman-child who charms everyone she meets, especially Michael's dowdy old academic colleagues and their wives ("Where is that delightful creature? I simply must see her!") and who plays pretend, acts theatrically, as if she's playing a joke on everyone. But Michael must have her, Lortz tell us, and marries her after knowing her four days, the man must possess his bride, he will not be denied this elusive creature! The May-December romance seems so, so incredibly dated today, as does the domestic abuse portrayed as a lovers' game of passion and teasing ("Go on, hit me!") but with no clear line of consent (the old adage "better to ask for forgiveness than permission" seems to be employed). Even the cops are called, and one of them smiles "knowingly" as he leaves. It's a bit of a groaner.

Other dated groaners: that sexual relationships between older professors and their students as a given; the comparison of a wife to a child as a compliment; Michael and Christine's therapist talk together about Christine's sessions; drawing a link, perhaps tenuous, between the idea of feral children and autistic children. Christine also functions as a proto manic pixie dream girl, which in its day was not nearly as noted as it is now: the young woman's lack of convention and self-consciousness, her quirkiness and spontaneity, her almost-literally animalistic nature, are a balm to grown-up uptight Michael, helping him get in touch with a less rigid masculine persona.

But her intermittent fugue states and hallucinations (of a chauffeur no less!) lead to regression therapy with MDMA, administered by a psychiatrist, Dr. Ellen Ellenbogen (yes that's right), which becomes an entertaining mishmash of Freud and Jung as Christine mentally travels back to her unusual, to say the least, upbringing. Michael eventually allows the doctor access to his psyche as well, but it's all about getting Christine to explain the source her paternal obsession... and why can't this wife lay her husband once in awhile?!

1977 Putnam hardcover

Lortz's style might take some getting used to; the first few pages are shaky, while the opening chapter is a grotesque scene of obscure motivation in Christine's violence against starlings. The fussy, digressive manner can cause the reader to get lost in a tangle of brief asides, rife with sensual imagery which evokes classical Romantic poetry, high-minded yet earthy, somewhat pretentious yet not off-putting (for this reader anyway). Epigrams courtesy of iconic 19th-century teenage rebel-poet Rimbaud, perhaps a nod to Christine's wild, untamed manner: He entertained himself with the torture of rare aimals. He set palaces flame. He rushed into crowds and slaughtered all who were near him. Yet throngs, gilded roofs, beautiful animals remained. 

Overall however Lortz seems to be having a weird sort of fun with his outrageous (and truly shocking, even offensive to many probably) conceit, threading the narrative with unconventional sexual mores, anthropological, mythological, and psychological musings, all delivered in an allusive prose that maintains an intellectual distance from the perverse proceedings.

Conversion is an unconscious incubation (of knowledge forgotten or slowly acquired and synthesized) that enters consciousness with something like a burst.

So with Christine: not conversion exactly, but what she had previously understood to be être vu: a flooding up of subliminal knowledge whose sum is more than its parts... left her chilled from spinal column to surface skin...

 Ooh, kinky!

1991 reprint

My review is only scratching the surface of the book's transgressive qualities. Despite being only nominally a horror novel—it's creepy and weird, there are some suspenseful chills, a few violent acts, and the shock of that ultimate discovery—I pretty much loved every minute of Lovers Living, Lovers Dead (now that I think about it, it was the hauntingly romantic title that originally piqued my interest). I dug how Lortz totally pulls off his nutso surprise, it's pure delight for thrill seekers like me. Like two other TMHF '70s favorites, Incubus and Gwen, In Green, Lortz's work is a pure product of its era. An uncomfortable echo of our sexual past, warts and all, highlighting scenarios we'd never countenance today, I can recommend this novel to those readers who enjoy such inappropriate dalliances. Cock an eyebrow at the shenanigans delivered with a straight face, laugh ironically from the comfortable vantage point of 40 years' distance, and wait to be amazed at what Michael eventually finds in Christine's locked box.

With a croak of loathing, he dropped it back into the trunk and slammed the lid, collapsing over it, his head and stomach pounding in waves of vertigo and nausea.

The Possession of Joel Delaney by Ramona Stewart (1970): Supernatural City

Published a year prior to epoch-making The Exorcist, this slim 1970 novel by Ramona Stewart (1922 - 2006) features a young man in thrall not to a demonic power of the netherworld but to a dead serial killer. I don't think The Possession of Joel Delaney (Bantam paperback/Oct 1971) is much talked-about these days in the small subset of people who talk about vintage horror novels; I can find little about Stewart herself online. She seems like a mainstream novelist who produced some other derivative minor thrillers (The Sixth Sense; The Nightmare Candidate; see below) that got some middling reviews and more middling cover art. None sound all that interesting to me.

1980 Dell reprint, Paul Caras cover art?

Happily for me, Possession is interesting: it's set in the Manhattan of the late '60s and early '70s, and is quite convincing at what it does. Stewart's depiction of the city, from the Upper West Side enclave in which our narrator Norah Benson lives to the rough-and-tumble neighborhoods of immigrants, is vivid, lived-in, and sympathetic but not overwrought or sanitized. Akin to Blatty's iconic novel, Stewart lays down a bedrock of normalcy and realism as Norah describes her life in plain terms in the opening pages:  It's when I'm skating along on smooth ice that the dark crack splits open at my feet.

Back cover gives you the low-down, 

good so I don't have to waste time rehashing it

The voice she provides for the story is refreshingly confident. Norah is self-aware, intelligent, and self-possessed, without an ounce of self-pity for her past. Our family hadn't been the cheery thing of children's books: her youth was made difficult by her wayward, somewhat grifter of a father and a mother who committed suicide leaving Norah to mostly raise her decade-younger brother Joel. She married a professor and left for the University of California, and feels lingering guilt about abandoning her brother. Now divorced, she maintains a civil relationship with her ex, raising two citified children with the help of Veronica, her Puerto Rican maid (this detail will become important).

 Dell Books 1980; Kirkus review here

Certainly, the night the trouble began with Joel, I had no prickling sense of the extraordinary. When Joel doesn't show up for dinner, she calls him but when the phone is answered no one is there, just music and a stranger's strangled voice. Concerned, she rushes to his downtown apartment, in an unsavory neighborhood ("Sure this is the place you want?" inquires the cabbie) and finds Joel on the floor, his face contorted like a man in a nightmare. He's off to the hospital, then Bellevue, you know it's the late '60s, maybe he's taking LSD. Norah speaks to the building manager, glimpses into his apartment: she recognizes an Espiritismo shrine, a religion invoking water and air spirits.

This will play a large part in the "possession" angle of the novel, as Norah investigates Joel's increasingly bizarre behavior with the help of a psychiatrist friend and a couple of professors. Together she and the reader learn about Tonio Perez, who lived in Joel's apartment before him, an immigrant teenager with a terrible childhood and a murderous hand, who suffers a ruthless death and who has struggled back from the other side... "There's a supernatural city all around you," Dr. Reichman said. "Belief working on thousands of psyches."

Okay: I have to note the ethnic tensions in the book. This is an indelicate matter. Thing is, Norah is the one who notices them; she is well aware of being an interloper into the minority community and its esoteric belief system (which may or may not be a sham/scam). Is Stewart/Norah evincing a fear of ethnic taint, of "white American culture" being far too influenced by a dangerous foreign one (literally possessed by it here)? If so, author/narrator seem ambivalent about their feelings, knowing that that's a secret fear one should keep bottled up; an irrational, unwarranted fear with no place in polite society. This could be taken the other way: that's what oblivious white people get for moving unwelcome into minority neighborhoods: taken possession of by murderers. The fear of the other, so often invoked in cultural horror criticism, isn't so high-minded or abstract: to each individual, everything is other/foreign/potentially dangerous, no? Anyway.

Dell Books 1981; Kirkus review here

There are several comparative religion lectures as a couple scholars talk about the long history of religion, possession, exorcism, and the occult in general dating back to ancient days. I'm always up for that!

Dr. Reichman seemed embarrassed. "My dear Mrs. Benson, it is not so simple. The history of exorcism is largely one of failure. Not only does it often increase the state of possession but the exorcising priests risk falling victims to the state themselves.... Even the spectators are liable to it. All over the world, in every culture, this is considered dangerous."

Stewart's narrative pace is snappy and her characters, intelligent and modern, believably drawn, although at times her descriptions of domestic detail borders on boring readers when they should be tingling with suspense. At its core its a novel of its era, showing the incursion of the supernatural into the everyday that broke from the ghetto genres onto the bestseller lists. The film version a few years later, with a perfectly-cast Shirley MacLaine as Norah, amps up the Fire Island climax to an unbelievable, uncomfortable degree but also offers some authentic scares. As a novel, Possession of Joel Delaney is an enjoyable minor work of mild occult thrills and a lovely window into vintage NYC city life. It is in no way better than Rosemary's Baby, nor The Exorcist, but as I said, Stewart's writing is clear and captivating and the backstory of the serial killer is heartbreakingly horrifying. Those readers who appreciate the quieter vibe of pre-Stephen King horror might dig it.

The Inquisitor Series, 1974-1975

Proof that there are still horror-related paperbacks of the 1970s I have never heard of before! Thanks to critic Andrew Nette of Pulp Curry, I've been introduced to this six-volume series The Inquisitor, by Simon Quinn. Published by Dell Books throughout 1974 and '75, the covers feature incredible imagery of their day, conflating spy and occult tropes with a steely-jawed hairdo dude depicting one Francis Xavier Killy, "an Irish American lay brother of the Militia Christi, a tertiary branch of the Dominicans, working for the Holy Office of the Inquisition in Rome."

I don't know what any of that means, but I do know that "Simon Quinn" is the pseudonym of bestselling author Martin Cruz Smith, best known for Gorky Park and Nightwing. You can read more about the books here, here, and here. A search of Abebooks shows most of these paperbacks in the $10-$45 range.

The Legacy by Jere Cunningham (1977): That Demon Life Got Me in Its Sway

You might or might not be familiar with the name Jere Cunningham, a writer who published several horror paperbacks during the classic vintage era but who moved on to Hollywood screenplays later in his career (couldn't turn up a photo of him anywhere, only an illuminating interview, and I'm never sure if the name "Jere" is pronounced "Jare" or like the standard spelling "Jerry"). Not to be confused with that other late 1970s horror paperback of the same title—a novelization of the Katharine Ross/Sam Elliott/uh Roger Daltry movie—Fawcett Gold Medal's The Legacy, with art-student nude-model cover art and a cawing raven 'cause ravens are always spooky, is a 1977 paperback original. Cunningham's not a complete unknown, as other books of his have been rediscovered, but I haven't read any. That could change, since I found The Legacy to be an effective horror read, with all the hallmarks of its day and few of the faults.

A prologue of mysterious import on a stormy night, death, madness, and despair, sets the stage (and not in italics, thank the gods!). Then switch the scene to Dr. David Rawlings, wife Sandra, daughter Melanie, and her Doberman Streak; he's a successful Memphis doctor but as the novel begins he has an upsetting dream about his estranged father one night. Chester Rawlings has died, suicide by gunshot—a-ha, that prologue! Father's lawyer calls David to break the news, maybe they could come to the small Mississippi town of Bickford in which David grew up in but left for med school against Chester's wishes, to where his father met his untimely doom.

You've got the wrong Legacy

He reacquaints himself with the old family estate, Whitewood, and its attendant memories, including old Sam, his father's stalwart friend, who in many ways raised David himself. Sam gets off one of the creepiest lines in the novel, one night when they're trying not to talk about the weirdness going on as they watch the Mississippi beneath a bright moon: "They says if you sleep under the moon without a rag over your face you go moon-crazy. That the moon got blood on it and it'll come down and get in your head." Uh, yeah, thanks for the advice, Sam.

Lots of pages are spent on the Rawlings marriage, of Melanie and Streak playing in the fields surrounding the estate, of David tooling around Bickford and realizing what a shithole it is and seeing old faces again. Other characters come into David's orbit: Dewey Pounds, with whom David had played football in high school, now Bickford sheriff well aware if he doesn't solve this issue of a missing body he'll be working in a gas station. There's sketchy teenager Woody, long-haired and resentful, son of Ruth, the local soothsayer living in a trailer and another old friend of Chester's. She drops mysterious hints and warnings, inscrutably vague (basically "You should get the fuck outta Dodge"). Then there is blind Philip Sprague, a man of perhaps 70 who looks younger (uh-oh), who arrived in town some years before and rebuilt a nearby old DeBois manor into a grand new edifice.

The first true note of oddness comes when dad's lawyer Barksdale reads the will and its requirements of David: "I ask that you stay on at Whitewood for seven weeks, never leaving for a single night. Check the seal on the crypt daily. Tend the ivy around the manor and my crypt. I am sure that Sam will stay on with you"—hold up hold up! Did he say check the seal on the crypt?! The fuck? Except Sandy seems to think it an unreasonable burden on David's burgeoning medical practice, but David knows he must do it. Unlike other sons in horror novels, in which family secrets metamorphose into supernatural elements, David loved and respected his father, even if they had grown estranged over his decision to leave.

Exploring his father's library one afternoon, David seemed to feel the hours and hours of his father's presence here. As if the man and years had soaked into the books and walls and floors. Chester Rawlings was a closet intellectual, reading ancient history and philosophy in Latin and Greek. But David is taken aback when he finds a new shelf of books on sorcery and witchcraft and whatnot. There's even a locked door with more spooky shit behind it. Wizard and sorcerer spooky to be precise:

Daddy, he thought, my poor daddy... is that what happened in your mind? Did fantasies kill you? Don't you know that one real cigarette is more evil than all that silly occult shit put together?... A foulness clung to his hands from the cloying leather. in the light the stretched hide looked almost like human epidermis... He left the room with a sadness tainted by revulsion. Never would he have dreamed his father—of all people—would have sought solace or refuge in an area so degrading in its vulgar absurdity. The foulness of the iron-bound book felt ugly on his hands.

Sphere Books UK paperback, 1980

I don't have to tell you, dedicated reader of horror fiction, how important this is. This kind of exploration and discovery is one of my favorite genre devices. And Cunningham deploys it well; a foreshadowing that hovers even though it will be quite awhile before the payoff. Slowly but surely all kinds of horrible things will happen: a missing corpse, a vandalized crypt, a dead friend, Sandra sleepwalking, a figure following Melanie and Streak through the nearby woods. Add in a backstory of the recent suicide of a Bickford banker, the institutionalization of his wife, and the disappearance of their young daughter, and you've got a sweet potboiler recipe.

Eventually David finds his father's journal and learns Chester knew Sprague, also dined with him, was taken on a tour of the manor's foundation, and there saw something that drove him to near madness, breaking his heart and setting Chester into a morass of despair.

Now I am considering the murder of Sprague. Or the end of myself. No night of rest.... I spoke with Ruth. She is more afraid than I am, if that is possible, and she knows nothing we can do. What can we say about the little girl? What would the authorities believe? That we are mad?

Cunningham's 1982 novel, UK paperback

One of the best scenes in the novel is a dinner party, of course. Sprague invites the family to dinner, unerringly pouring them drinks and serving them an elaborate European meal. He is a continental sort and his blindness poses no real problems; in fact it seems to give him a preternatural sense for anyone around him. Après dinner Sprague entices Sandra—whose pretensions to culture and wealth he appeals to—to play for them on his luxurious piano, even joining in with her on his violin. What beautiful music they make ("That was really wonderful," she beamed, hardly able to retain modesty)! And you can be sure David isn't too happy about it. This sequence sets up the finale in high style.

I must admit though that early on, The Legacy had me iffy on continuing; there is a lot of build-up. The narrative tightens up considerably as the book nears conclusion, with occult horror and mayhem rampant, elevating this unassuming-looking paperback original beyond others of its ilk. Cunningham is adept at writing dialogue and character, mood and suspense: aspects horror writers much more famous and wealthy often suck at. Plentiful sex scenes are warm, believable, titillating but restrained. There are touches of early King in the depiction of modern family life while some gruesome set-pieces—David and the dog, David and the corpse fingers, Sandra sleepwalking with Melanie in tow—which reminded me of the work Michael McDowell would soon publish. Despite the leisure taken with setting the story in motion, once it kicks into gear, The Legacy delivers the demonic goods.

Cernunnos, Lord of my Fathers, Lord of Ages, I summon thee. Lord of Agonies, of Carthage and Hiroshima and Doomed Great Ones, I summon thee to wed and to sup. Rise from thy eternal legions and I shall perform thy shapely introduction as ages ago I vowed in time upon time upon time to fulfill...

Burnt Offerings by Robert Marasco (1973): Ride Ride Ride in a Long Black Limousine

The house was absolutely essential, 

a vital part of herself 

which she recognized immediately. 

There's no getting around it, and if you've read  it (or seen the movie adaptation), I'd wager the most memorable aspect of Burnt Offerings (Dell Books/Mar 1974) by Robert Marasco has to be that chauffeur driving a limousine, a suave harbinger of luxurious death. One of the "four horseman" of the early 1970s horror apocalypse—you see the other three guilty parties named on this cover—Burnt Offerings is remembered only by the die-hard horror fans, but I'm not sure how beloved it is. Marasco's novel is a staid, stately, slow-burn exploration of domestic ruin; it offers the mildest of chills with the very occasional horror set-piece. It's a modified haunted-house novel; there are no ghosts, no rattling chains, but an overarching evil power nonetheless.

Marasco (1936 - 1998)

New York City sucked in the '70s and it sucked especially in the summer back when A/C wasn't a commonplace household item. Everyone was looking to get out (a bit of a theme in vintage horror) and if you could afford it, renting a summer home was tops. Knowing she can't spend another sweltering season in their Queens apartment, Marian Rolfe finds and shows her husband Ben an ad in the paper about a countryside home to rent "for the right people," (Ben hears a dog whistle and comments racist pigs but Marian is not dissuaded). Along with their young son David in tow, they drive the couple hours upstate, out of the city, and find a home, a mansion, an estate really, set back in foresty wilds. Towering above them, ballustraded and pavillioned and mullioined and multi-storeyed, it leaves the Rolfes with jaws agape. Yet on close inspection there is much wear and tear; a mortal sin, Marian thinks.

Once inside—even more astonishing than outside—they meet the caretaker Walker and then the eccentric Allardyce siblings, sixty-ish, who chat and charm and finally do the hard sell:

"And, God, Brother!" Miss Allardyce said, "—it comes alive—tell them that, tell them what it's like in the summer." 

"They wouldn't believe it... It's beyond anything you ever seen..."

But they needn't have bothered for Marian, and they even raise the price from the unbelievably low $700 for the summer to a still-unbelievable $900. And then comes the hitch, the hitch Ben has suspected: the Allardyces' "dear darling" Mother, "a woman solid as this rock of a house." She lives in an upstairs room, locked away, and will remain so even while the Rolfes live there. All you have to do, the Allardyces explain, is leave her a meal tray three times a day. They'll never even see her. No one who rented the house in previous summers—and there have been plenty!—ever saw her either. Surely there is nothing to be concerned about? Marian can sense the greatness beneath the disarray and disuse, the greatness that she can bring out and restore over their stay. And stay they do, even inviting along Ben's old yet still lively and independent Aunt Elizabeth.

Ben remains aloof from the house; an introspective, rational English teacher, he hopes to prepare for his fall courses but never seems to get around to it. For too long he cannot put his finger on the change in Marian's behavior. Marian becomes fascinated by the extensive photos of faces from Mother Allardyce's past which decorate her sitting room; Marian will sit there in a wingback chair when she delivers meals, rarely touched, to the old woman's bedroom door. That door is carved with elaborate decoration (referenced in cover art), shifting in the light, almost hypnotic. Soon Marian lies to both Ben and Aunt Elizabeth that she's actually spoken to and seen Mother, and then even begins eating her food....

Marian spends hours cleaning, polishing, dusting, rearranging, bringing the house to life, as it were. Clocks begin ticking again, the pool filter starts working, the neglected gardens spring back to lushness. A rift begin in the Rolfes' marriage ("Christ, it's a rented house, it's two months...." "Don't remind me."), and their sex life dissolves in several rather unpleasant scenes that are too tame to be truly disturbing (All Marian could think was "Let him come, for Christ's sake let him come. Now."). Things aren't good between little David and his parents: he and his father are playing around in the pool when Ben suddenly gets seriously violent, shocking poor Aunt Elizabeth who watches helplessly till David has to practically wallop his dad in the mouth with a diving mask. Afterwards, Ben feels like he's hallucinating, as an old image haunts him in reality:

There was a dream—the playback of an image really—which had been recurring, whenever he was on the verge of illness, ever since his childhood. The dream itself was  symptom of illness, as valid as an ache or a queasy feeling or a fever. The details were always the same: the throbbing first, like a heartbeat, which became the sound of motor idling; then the limousine; then, behind the tinted glass, the vague figure of the chauffeur.... What's death? —he'd have to say a black limousine with its motor idling and a chauffeur waiting behind the tinted glass.

1974 French edition

And poor little Davey! The astute reader will wonder why more emphasis wasn't put on his view of the proceedings. He hurts himself climbing on some rocks the very first visit to the house, his dad tries to kill him playing in the pool, his mom's hair turns grey then white, his beloved Aunt Elizabeth is showing her fragility more and more. One night, somehow, the gas in his room is turned on and he almost dies (again!) in a harrowing bit. Marian suspects Aunt Elizabeth, who's actually a sweet character and you hate to see her so upset by Marian's hints. Things don't go well for Elizabeth after that, but that does provide one of the novel's few shock scenes.

In distressed vain Ben watches his wife drift from him, the house assuming a larger and larger psychic area in her mind and in her life: "It is the house. As crazy as it sounds, I know it's the house." "How is that possible, Ben?" "I don't know." "If it were true, darling, if I could believe what you're saying—God, don't you think we'd leave? I'd drag us all out of here so fast. But it's a house, nothing more than a house...." So yes, as the novel begins its descent into the maelstrom, as it were, and we wonder like Marian what the deal is with Mother Allardyce, we're rather drained by all the steps we've taken to get here. We will meet her, in a way, and I found the climax—"Burn it! Burn it out of me!"—and denouement to be a satisfying, eerie conclusion, open-ended but fair play to the final line.

We have to remember this was a mainstream novel aimed at general readers who gobbled up, I dunno, Jonathan Livingston Seagull, Love Story, Valley of the Dolls, The Flame and the Flower, you know the names, and not just those other apocalyptic horsemen. Modern readers may be frustrated with the holding-pattern narrative: too many implied threats, too many indecisive arguments, and experienced horror fans already know what's going on, what's been going on, but Marasco is not a genre writer, and there's nothing in Burnt Offerings that would make you think he'd  read any horror.

I felt the same about Blatty and The Exorcist, but Blatty is a much more powerful, visceral writer. Ira Levin would've used this scenario to score some ironic points about the expected role of women in married life, or the perils of being a renter. Tom Tryon might not have kept Mother Allardyce hidden away, or delved deeper into the physical and psychological obsessions. But as it is, Robert Marasco has written a quiet, polite "horror" novel decidedly of its time, with barest minimum notes of blood and madness. And I mean the bare minimum. I wish he'd gone darker, deeper, with the chauffeur and the limo; it's quite a creepy concept but still feels somehow reserved.

Personally I don't rate or enjoy Burnt Offerings as much as those three other works of the same era, nor as highly as similar titles like The House Next Door, The Shining, or The Elementals. When I first read it back in 1994, I was deeply unimpressed. Then again I was reading some powerhouse stuff at the time: Haunting of Hill House, Our Lady of Darkness, Grimscribe, as I recall. This reread, I found it to be more agreeable, but it is not gonna scare the bejabbers out of you, nor is it unputdownable or scarifyingly chilling—all those quoted blurbs are so much PR hot air—but it is an integral work of the pre-King horror-bestseller era. Perhaps it is subtler and more sophisticated than I'm giving it credit for and my brain muscles are just atrophied from reading too much, well, horror fiction. While not a forgotten masterpiece, Burnt Offerings is a work that can reward the patient, thorough reader, and remains in print today. You could spend your summer worse places.

Valancourt Books, 2015

This Place is Creepy and It's Somber Too

Artist Murray Tinkelman Born on This Date, 1933

Murray Tinkelman, who died last year, produced covers for the mid-'70s Ballantine reprints of Lovecraft which are almost as iconic as the Michael Whelan ones in the early '80s. This is my small collection, as I don't often see his editions in used bookstores. See a more comprehensive collection of his Lovecraft paperback covers here (which also includes a great interview with the artist) and more Matheson here.

RIP Berni Wrightson (1948-2017)

The horror world mourns as it learns of the passing of unsurpassable artist Berni(e) Wrightson, who died Saturday after a long battle with brain cancer.

I first became aware of his work in 1983, when Cycle of the Werewolf was published in hardcover. A very short Stephen King "novel" with astonishing illustrations by Wrightson, my 12-year-old self was obsessed with it from the first time I saw a copy on that bookstore shelf. I saved up my paper route money and bought a copy ($28.95!) and pored over those great and gory images. Even smuggled the book into school to astonish my classmates. I'm virtually positive it was my first King story as well.

 

 

 

A few years later, junior high, I met a guy my age who was a true comic book aficionado. Although a novice myself, I went along with him to comics shops and that's where I learned more about Wrightson (and comics in general; this is precisely when The Dark Knight Returns and Watchmen were being published): his hand in Swamp Thing, Creepshow, "Jenifer" (!!!), and what I think of his masterpiece: his 1983 adaptation of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. 

I can still recall how Wrightson's delicate yet detailed art made me feel dizzy with delight. This was how the Frankenstein story was supposed to look! My god. It was perfect. Unfortunately my copy has been lost to the ages, victim of a wild North Carolina storm that flooded the basement of the house I was living in back in the late '90s (which destroyed a nice chunk of other awesome books as well). I've never replaced it, and I'm not sure why.

 

The horror world is pouring out condolences and memories of Mr. Wrightson, and it seems by all accounts he was a terrific human in addition to being a master genre artist... and a dashing '70s fellow.

Rest well, Mr. Wrightson

More Evil Than The Exorcist, Stronger Than the Grave

 Warner Paperback Library 1973, cover art by Seymour Chwast