Spook by Steve Vance (1989): The Day the World Turned Day-Glo

Neon was a popular genre paperback coloring for titles and cover art in the very early '90s, I can remember authors as varied as Joseph Citro and Iain Banks having their books adorned with it. Vaguely psychedelic, but also kinda cheap, these Day-Glo colors glaring out at your from the shelves. I guess you almost had to pick 'em  up, though, didn't you? And if you picked up Spook (Berkley Books, Nov 1991) back in the day and flipped it open expecting to see some more eye-penetrating imagery, you'd get instead:

Yep, critical blurbs in place of stepback art. So weird. And yet, Spook offers nothing but that toothy skull and neon typeface. Author Steve Vance has written other horror novels but I can't imagine reading any of them. This is really one of the most nothing books I've read in some time, and while I was intrigued by one aspect of the narrative—failed artist seeks vengeance on the man who impregnated her with the titular "spook"—this aspect should have been most of the story. Instead we get hohum romance, indistinguishable cops, a slackly-characterized protagonist, and a cast of the most obnoxious, tedious teenage morons you ever saw. The whole shebang is here on the back:

"Spellbinding"? Hardly. Vance can write, I guess, and you can tell he wants to produce a serious horror/thriller novel, but he has absolutely no sense of pacing, POV, dialogue, suspense, chills or thrills—you know, all the reasons you read. Maybe if he'd used this as a first draft and then broke the novel down into individual parts and reassembled it, making his backstory the story or something. The twist is good, but I feel the book was reverse-engineered from it. 

 

But I kept waiting for something, anything, to alleviate my lack of interest; it never came. I didn't find the book stupid or insulting, crass or tacky or inept like other bad horror novels; I found it utterly unengaging, devoid of almost anything unique, fresh, inventive. There's no there there. Even though I finished Spook, I have to recommend you keep far, far away from it—If you're smart, you'll keep your distance. As for reading Vance's other novels, I don't think that day will ever come.

Child of Hell by William Dobson (1982): Flaming Youth

...the elemental passion that forever rumbled in his belly: 

the delight in the mystical properties of flame, its godlike destructiveness, 

its leaping, growing, consuming might.

With cover art that is a near-perfect example of vintage paperback horror fiction, this slim volume from Signet Books is adorned by one of artist Tom Hallman's most dramatically lurid images, bowl-cut notwithstanding. Love how the firelight is reflected in his eyes, a nice derangement of the senses. Dig the menace of the title, Child of Hell, and its glorious ITC Benguiat typeface, stark and unmissable against an inky black background. William Dobson is a perfectly non-descript name (a pseudonym too). Yep, creepy kid, similarity to a previous bestseller (King's Firestarter of course), typeface and tagline—all that's missing is a comparison to The Other or Rosemary's Baby!

Dobson is the pen name of British writer Michael Butterworth (copyright is under this name). Under this name he published Fangs, The Child Player, and The Ripper, all early '80s and also from Signet.  Unfortunately there are two British writers named Michael Butterworth so parsing between the two was tricky, but I'm pretty sure this Butterworth was also a writer of crime thrillers and comic books, while the other Butterworth was a New Wave science fiction publisher and author. Our Butterworth died in 1986 at age 62.

With those bibliographic deets out of the way, let's discuss. Less a horror novel than a psychological potboiler with some very graphic scenes of pyromaniacal mayhem, Child of Hell isn't really about a child at all (thank ye gods), although the novel begins with a little boy of just seven burning down his house with his family inside on Christmas in the non-descript American town of Midchester. Good heavens, why? Well, because instead of the super-cool radio-controlled model fighter plane he asked for, his folks ripped him off with a goddamn cheapo jigsaw puzzle! The discarded wrapping paper smolders in the ash of the dying living room fire and then catches on the Christmas tree branches and*poof*—fire!... and little Davie Fosset runs outside and along with horrified neighbors, watches his family burn to death unable to escape.

When he heard their screams—and they screamed till they died, 

and they died neither soon nor easily—he only grinned.

Jeff Angel is a young family man and a firefighter on the rise; while Little Davie is setting his family home alight, the firefighters are have a literal ball. Jeff is chatted up by a delightful woman named Marie, and they argue wittily about the Mad Arsonist, who's been lighting up Midchester for two years now. What motivates him? What's his background? How can he be caught, and how should he be punished? This conversation, as well as the ball itself, is interrupted by the blaze at the Fossets', and Angel is off to fight this war he can never win.

Arriving on the scene and finds ambulance nurse Janice Hooper comforting the young survivor. Now Janice nursed neither a motherly nor a platonic regard for the young rookie fireman, and Dobson neatly sets up some romantic interests for our ostensible hero within the first 10 pages. Then Janice hears the boy mutter that weirdo phrase again: goddamned cheapo jigsaw puzzle...

As I said, Child of Hell isn't exactly about a child: Dobson allows Davie to grow up as the novel progresses, and it's a solid narrative arc I think. He's adopted by an older preacher and his wife, Marvin and Teresa Allaun; they're strict adherents of the severe religion that founded the town, the Church of the Lonely Wanderers. One night at dinner our incipient maniac admits—"Speak out straight, lad"—that he wants to be a fireman when he grows up! O irony, like fire, you are an elemental force of the universe.

Then we follow Dave through grade school and college, with terrible glimpses of his fire mania and growing hatred toward the women who reject him. When making a date, he mutters to himself, You'd better be there, you little prick-teasing bitch, or you'll be goddamn sorry. He traps vagrants in abandoned buildings and then sets them alight.

He watched it all from the shadows beyond the inferno, and gloried in what he was doing, had done, and not with any unholy mirth, but with an awe and wonder at the power that lay in his hands.

Other than those personality tics, Dave grows into a fine upstanding fellow.

Meanwhile, Jeff Angel has married Marie, and they plan to start a family. Jeff's work is paramount, though, and Dobson gets into some police and firefighter politics, with chiefs and officers and all that, filler to make a fuller novel; not boring exactly but not always my favorite type of reading unless handled by a master. With pressure from various city muckety-mucks, the firefighters are determined to catch this arsonist, but Angel often thought that at his retirement party and presentation, he would be handing over the arsonist's dossier to his successor...

About halfway through the novel Dobson sets up a major setpiece of conflagratory terror, hearkening to the climax of Carrie. It's epic, cruel, horrifying. Debby Shearer, the belle of the Armadillo Country Club, is having her nineteenth birthday party there. Our Dave has become a busboy/waiter/bartender there, and even though he is of the lower classes, Debby has her eye on him—and seduces our pyro easily. Thinking of herself as a highborn lady of the eighteenth century, she knows she can take a lover beneath her station and is hidebound neither by convention nor by the acclaim of disapproval of the mob. But she certainly won't marry him... Yes, she's a terrible snob, and you know what happens to snobs in books like these.

And so Child of Hell progresses, twining the stories of Fosset and Angel as they move through normal life, its ups and downs, and the madness of one and the determination of the other. Characterization is economic but believable; there is even some early serial-killer profiling, as Janice reappears in Jeff's world and tries to assist in the identification and capture of the Mad Arson. Was it feasible that a child of six or seven would deliberately destroy his own family by fire, then go on to commit fourteen years of dedicated arson and murder? The mind recoiled away from it. And yet... and yet...

Dobson writes well enough, his dialogue doesn't distract (at times it sounds a little plummy),  and his ability to generate suspense is laudable. I did though notice a few particulars that either made me wince or laugh. His sex scenes, well, he's the kind of writer who uses the phrases "amatory vocabulary" and "couplings" and even, god save us, "darling." More distressing is the appearance, albeit brief, of  sibling incest, almost as if paperback horror contracts of the '80s were written with an ironclad clause that could not be unheeded. I had a chuckle at Dobson's failure to convince me he knew anything about America.

You'll be happy to hear I've not even mentioned all of the twists and turns and shocks that make up the entirety of this barely 200-page novel. Dobson is great at scenes of fiery destruction, at depicting Dave's psychopathic desires that he can suppress for a time—he even meets a nice girl! the killer fell in love at first sight—but oh how it can't be denied.When Dave lights up a theater full of retirees at a matinee, he sits eating a burger and watches it burn, in the curious amalgam of tension and relaxation, of cold-bloodedness and erotic excitement that informed his excursions into death, disfigurement, and destruction. As a fireman, how can he ever be suspected? How can he ever be found out? Dave Fosset has the perfect cover. Yes, Child of Hell brings the goods, hot and ready for you.

And speaking of perfect covers...

Paperbacks from Hell table of contents

Shadows 4, edited by Charles L. Grant (1981): I Was Born Here and I'll Die Here

"This volume breaks almost every one of my rules," states esteemed author and editor Charles L. Grant (1942-2006)  in his introduction to the fourth volume of his long-running anthology series of quiet horror stories, Shadows. Published in hardcover by Doubleday in 1981, this Berkley paperback from 1985 promises ghoulish, skeletal frights by the cover art (artist unknown), but in truth the tales within aren't quite obvious as a mouldering corpse looking for revenge. But you can't deny the eye-catching quality, which is what it's really about, no? The lantern is a nice touch, I mean you can't expect that skeleton to see, he's got no eyeballs.

Grant's "rules" are that stories for Shadows had to be contemporary and nontraditional. He's right: rules are broken by several stories here that aren't contemporary or nontraditional, but still achieve the chilling vibes that Grant's name was associated with. Though at times I find this quiet horror style too mild or old-fashioned for my personal taste, I'm also open to subtle terrors that don't reveal themselves in a blast of super-heated prose or vistas of inhuman cruelty. Suppose my main issue with quiet horror from this era is that it's too cozy, too slacks-and-slippers, to truly disturb or unsettle. Oh well, these stories date from 1981, the big bulldozer of more graphic horror is still beyond the horizon. But our tastes are not so jaded and degraded that we can't enjoy a few more refined horror treasures?

Anyway. Check out the names in the contents list, I'm surprised not a one of them made it onto the paperback cover! You got Steve King, you got Tabitha King, and Ramsey Campbell and Chelsea Quinn Yarbro and Tanith Lee, Alan Ryan and Lisa Tuttle... I was even impressed that there was a story from science fiction giant William Gibson, albeit from before he was a science fiction giant as publication of his epoch-defining Neuromancer was still a few years off (although the Berkley paperback came out after that novel). Written with jack-of-all-trades John Shirley, "The Belonging Kind" is a story I've read before, in Gibson's own short-story collection of his early cyberpunk works, Burning Chrome (1985). Glad to have read it again!

Gibson, Shirley, 1980s

Set in countless bars, discos, nightclubs and cocktail lounges, "Kind" is mildly SF, with some bio-weirdness and identity crises as a slacker-slob kinda guy meets an attractive woman while out drinking one night and ends up following her from bar to bar (I can't help but picture a neon-lit cyberland of synths and urban squalor). But she's changing, always in flux, to "belong" in whatever environs she finds herself in.  

She stepped off the curb and it began. It began with tints in her hair—at first he thought they were reflections. But there was no neon there to cast the blobs of color that appeared, color sliding and merging like oil slicks. Then the colors bled away and in three seconds she was white-blonde. He was sure it was a trick of the light until her dress began to writhe, twisting across her body like shrink0wrap plastic. Part of it fell away entirely and lay in curling shreds on the pavement, shed like the skin of some fabulous animal... 

This is quality short fiction, not easily fitting into any genre, but capable enough to belong anywhere it chooses.

Tanith Lee's "Meow" presents the ultimate cat-lady scenario. Writerly fella meets a shy, independent woman... and her cats. Lee's story is so charmingly, brightly written, so fresh and winning, so unexpected in some of its imagery, that I will forgive its maybe short-sighted generic climax; Lee could have gone for bigger, deeper rewards with the end. Passages like I'd spot their eyes in the early morning darkness when I brought her home, ten disembodied dots of creme de menthe neon spilled over the air. Demons would manifest like that make "Meow" a high point of the antho.

Another favorite turns up as he does in many of the era's anthologies: fellow author/editor Alan Ryan. "A Trip to Brighton" breaks no new ground, yet it does its deed with all the clarity, precision, and sensitivity that Ryan is known for. A doll left behind on a train ride promises to be the perfect gift for a loathsome little girl, an ill-mannered, ungrateful little thing. A perfect beast.

Children are the main characters in both Steve Rasnic Tem's "The Giveaway" and Al Sarrantonio's "Under the Bed." They're competently written and creepy-clever enough, but the climactic twists can be seen coming and going, not uncommon when reading horror tales of this vintage; both authors have better-realized works elsewhere. "Need" I'd read in Lisa Tuttle's splendid collection A Nest of Nightmares (1986). A college student has her pleasant walk through a quiet cemetery spoiled by a clueless dude who sneaks up on her. She felt uneasy now, her pleasant mood shattered. She had no desire to be standing in a cemetery, talking to an odd boy who had watched her without her being aware. But force of habit kept her polite. Ugh, guys, really, leave women alone. And then he goes and kills himself and still won't stop bugging her? Seriously, this guy's the worst.

"Hearing is Believing" is Ramsey Campbell's contribution, and fine, vintage Campbell it is. A lonely man with a drab job begins hearing voices and pouring rain from his stereo speakers; the clerk at the repair shop is no help. Things get worse. My appreciation for Campbell's style has grown immeasurably since beginning this blog (nearly 10 years ago now!) and his twilight world of disorientation, decay, and dribbling rain that smears vision is the stuff of my literal nightmares. At one end of the unknown street, amid a chorus of unhurried breathing, something was feeling for him along the broken facades.

Although she's published several novels, I've never read anything by Tabitha King till "The Blue Chair." It's perfectly cromulent, a well-described tale of a businesswoman alone in her hotel room with the titular object who meets up with a male cousin she once had a crush on. Things get hot and heavy—you know that's totally legal and fine, right?—but that chair isn't gonna let things end so easily.

Would you shake hands with this man?

Does anyone actually talk like the characters in some of Stephen King's stories? Oh, who cares: in "The Man Who Would Not Shake Hands," King employs one of the most effective tools in his arsenal, the tale-within-a-tale (whyyy is that so terrifying?!). Group of old men at the old-men's club play a game with a stranger, a young man who won't—you guessed it. Much of the tale includes blow-by-blow card hands, which I never understand. Grant calls this one "Kiplingesque" and maybe that's so, I wouldn't know myself, but the story is minor King yet readable and satisfying, you can tell Steve's having some fun writing in a mannered period style.

Brower staggered away from the table, holding hand out in front of him like a masculine Lady MacBeth. He was as white as a corpse, and the stark terror on his face is beyond my powers of description. I felt a bolt of horror go through me... Then he began to moan. It was a hollow, awful sound, cryptlike. I remember thinking, Why, the man's quite insane...

1988 Doubleday hardcover, art by Christopher Zacharow

There are other stories, too: short-shorts and whatnot, meager morsels I found neither here nor there, so I won't bother noting them except that they made passably engaging reads while on the bus or at the bar for happy hour. Grant notes in one of his intros to each contribution that finding and publishing new writers is one of the joys of his job, and while he says nice things like "This is their first story but it won't be their last," it is often the case that some of these new writers never published again. Cherie Wilkerson's "Echoes from a Darkened Shore" is an accomplished work for a first-timer, a moody bit of parental love and guilt, a child who refuses to grow up, and an old man wandering the sea shore.

"How long has it been since you've been to sea?" 

"A long time," he said without glancing up. I stared at him and felt my scalp trying to lift from my skull. 

"Did you ever have children?" 

The Captain nodded slowly. "My grandson was about her age when he died." 

"I don't want you to touch her," I said, trying unsuccessfully to control the quiver in my voice.

There are also writers, such as Juleen Brantigham, who rarely wrote anything but stories for Grant's anthologies, so much so that I wonder if that's one of Grant's pen names! "The Hour of Silhouette" is all slithering shadows and misdirection, hallmarks of the Grant style.

The longest story is the last, "The Spider Glass" by Chelsea Quinn Yarbro, one of her exquisitely detailed historicals featuring the Count St.-Germain, the "decadent foreigner" who is also a vampire. Another tale-within-a-tale, another men's club, a bookend to King's opener, it's lush, witty, somewhat romantic. Glistening in the mirror, the spider hung in its jeweled web. The body was red as rubies or fresh blood. The eight, finely-made legs were garnet at the joints and tourmaline elsewhere, delicate as a dancer...

I've enjoyed other volumes of Shadows more, but for the completist there might be an hour or two of whiling-away reading. Overall the stories are professional, mature, varied, and eerie (which is not always the case with horror anthologies as the Eighties continued). The whole series is, of course, essential for any paperback horror library, perfect for dipping into when one wants a bit of tasteful terror to darken the light.

Miss Finney Kills Now and Then by Al Dempsey (1982): I'm Younger Than That Now

I hope you enjoy this terrific Jim Warren cover art because that's the only enjoyment you're gonna get here: Miss Finney Kills Now and Then (Tor Aug 1989 reprint/orig Feb 1982) is inept, clunky, and dumb as hell. In short, unreadable. I began reading in all open-mindedness, but its idiocy factor is all-consuming. Nothing depicted has any relationship to humans, living or dead. If someone with a knack for the written word had attempted the same storyline (*cough* Michael McDowell *cough*), I have no doubt it would've been a lurid romp of some entertainment value. Instead we've got whoever Al Dempsey is writing what seems to be a novelization for a movie never made (copyright page notes "based on an original screenplay by Joseph Van Winkle").

Two young women, crude simpletons both, talk their rich aging aunt of the title into participating in a seance—we're in New Orleans, if you must know—and, coerced by an occult con man who only made me think of this guy, Miss Finney "learns" from the "spirit world" that she can become immortal if she simply, you know, kills people ("You must take a life and add to yours"). But she's in a wheelchair how can she do that?? Why, she'll get her two turd nieces to do the actual dirty work of killing, which Miss Finney brings up over coffee. But it's a scam solely to get money from the old biddy since they're not going to actually kill anyone and then oh my god it becomes all too real!

1st Tor edition, 1982

The first murder sequence is staged and executed in a manner reminiscent of a middle-school play made up and performed by, well, middle-schoolers. Aunt Finney's nieces, Brook and Willa (you know their names because neither one stops saying the other's) set up a rapey handyman (ain't they all) to take the "fall." They're gonna fake kill him, see, and collect $5,000 apiece ("Isn't that rather high?") from old Auntie!

Except that's not how it turns out, and from there I think there's some supernatural shit—book spine states "supernatural horror" under Tor monster logo—but by then my eyeballs were melting down my face like I was a Zap comix. I'd re-commit, take a deep breath, and try to read more, in good faith, but that was fuckin torture. I physically couldn't read this book any longer. Even with dialogue like "I've killed, Detective Scarne. I think that is pretty legal and pretty problematical!" 

Skipping to pages near the end, I discovered there's a Satanic cult ("He cannot speak. He has no tongue. Look at the power of Satan, dear Brook"), like you'd find in a satirical Levin, and bloody nonsense around the climax; I found this passage at random:

Men and women alike participated in the blood anointing of her body. Hands coursed sensually across her breasts, fingers ushered blood into her orifices... The participants in the ritual retreated and she could see that a thing, a vulgar form, was approaching her. Her efforts to cope with the horror were futile. She experienced total revulsion.... The form's skin was covered with open sores that dripped a gray mush, bearing an odor from the bowels of the earth... Its member was erect...

However it's all bargain basement rehash of shit any horror fic fan knows by heart. Turns out Dempsey was more a political thriller writer of the kinds of '80s novels with swastikas on the cover; his attempt at horror is unmitigated hackwork. I had to give up for my taste and my sanity. In all honesty Miss Finney is one of the special handful of pitiful horror novels I've attempted to read that make me despair: why am I, an adult grown-ass middle-aged man, reading, or trying to read, such shallow shitty pandering carelessly-produced garbage? Why do I do this to myself? How it got two printings from Tor boggles the mind. 

Winter Wolves by Earle Westcott (1988): The Ice Age is Coming

Cold was there to greet you when you got out of bed in the morning, and keep you company when you climbed back in at night. It sought out your weaknesses like a patient enemy and whispered to your bones of death. It wore you down, physically and mentally, and long bouts of it could break you. 

I've noted before how horror works terrifically when set in a cold environment, and Winter Wolves (Bantam Books, March 1989, cover art by the great Tom Hallman) by its title alone fits the bill. And with this vividly written, powerfully-told tale, creative writing professor and one-time novelist Earle Wescott (b. 1946) has fashioned a frigid adventure yarn crammed with convincing details of horror, madness, and death.

It is a shame Westcott published no other novels, for here all the moving parts work just right: setting, character, dialogue, relationships, motivation. His scenarios, whether in a newspaper office, a homey restaurant, a hermit's shack, or the wintered forest itself, are all presented with utmost realism, with the palpable sense of real life as lived, all put down honestly by a person who understands and respects the craft of the written word. You know, a real book written by a real writer: something all too rare in the world of paperback horror fiction.

New English Library, 1989

Winter Wolves begins as all creature-horror tales must: thrilling the reader with the hapless fate of one who encounters the beast(s). An elderly drunk stumbling across frozen flats notices two shapes blacker than night coming closer, and then a third blocking his way to any safety, and it smiled at him with a mouthful of star-bright teeth. Man that's a tough break, going out like that, drunk but scared sober. Chapter Two begins with another familiar confrontation: the offices of a small Maine newspaper, where editor Ray Neville wants journalist Fran Thomas to go to Thomas's hometown of Steel Harbor to report on the story behind the dead drunk found with his body mutilated. Was the drunk, name of Sam Comstock, dead of natural causes catching up with him and then mauled post mortem? Was it a pack of dogs? Was it wolves? In Maine?

When his editor said the word wolves, Fran thought of an assembly line. He thought of the exhibit of prehistoric dire wolf skulls at the Page Museum in LA, dozens of them with only minor variation in size... how brutally mechanistic nature really was, stamping out skullcaps like brass shell casings in a wartime munitions plant.

After a quick sketch of Fran's personal life—He found relief only in quitting things— it's on to a couple other settings you'll recognize: the backwater funeral home and doctor's office. Fran chats with old Dr. Tagen, who's shadowed by two giant Great Danes. Tagen examined Comstock's mangled remains: "The extremities received great attention. The flesh torn from the corpse wasn't eaten. It was scattered around. I might say playfully." Like other creature horrors, the culprit is at first misidentified: this wasn't a wild animal but maybe a large dog (Like a Great Dane? Fran asks, and Tagen scoffs, noting the breed's cowardice in the face of cold.)

Fran speaks with Police Chief Boulting, who wants Fran to "educate the public" about the dangers of letting domestic animals run wild; no one thinks wolves are responsible, save Woody Parker, who discovered Comstock's corpse. Knowing he must speak to the reclusive, queer old man, Fran enlists the help of Caroline Parker (Westcott describes her as homely in the beautiful way redheads sometimes are), Woody's niece. From there they head out to his lonely fortified enclave where Woody sticks to his wolf story: "Nobody catches these wolves... They do the catching."

After another mutilation death, Woody is arrested, “the worst thing that could happen to a hermit, his worst nightmare, surely as harrowing as the torment of wolves real or imagined… he had become a public figure.” Before he’s taken away he says to Fran, “Think you know something, do you? Study the winter of ’24 in your newspaper and you’ll know something for sure.” And from there Fran learns of eerily similar deaths, and that old Dr. Tagen who was young then had been the medical examiner. Fran asks Tagen about it, who crotchedly reminds Fran that he is a Thomas, of the local Thomases, and implies Fran knows more about this creature case than he thinks he does…. More research follows, again as it always must, and Fran reads in an 1820 newspaper about “the extermination of a verminous infestation of Wolves.” He learns that, and a little more, a fact that binds him tighter to this mystery than he had foreseen.

1988 hardcover

Fran and Caroline dance around their attraction to one another, and the consummation is detailed with an experienced eye: She whispered the most marvelous things to him, sweet and obscene, in a voice that was not entirely her own. As if she were possessed, bewitched, and her words an incantation. Westcott adds workplace drama too: Angela DeGregorio, 20-something copy assistant with some exotic kind of bone cancer that has crippled one leg and chemotherapy has turned her raven hair silver; and Tommy Blackburn, an ambitious colleague who resents Fran for what he sees as the editor's favoritism. Sexual tension between Fran and Angela is uncomfortable yet all too sad and real; violent tension between Fran and Tom also so.

Throughout the novel Fran is visited by dreams of a woman, her gown was made of snowflakes and he could see her nakedness beneath. She gave him a bold look, and he saw her eyes for the first time. They were not human. Westcott weaves notes of predestination and the otherworldly into his narrative, frigid little moments that speak of a man navigating his lost chances, failed ambitions, family ties to the proceedings, a doom-and-gloom vibe that every character seem to be fending off: It seemed to him that the pain, the deception, the chaos, the helplessness (especially the helplessness—everybody thinking he was a victim and nobody wrong) were all part of the universal state of human relationships...

The gripping climax of adventure and violence does not disappoint: Winter Wolves becomes both an ecological and personal nightmare. Westcott's prose achieves a natural poetry, a silvery sheen of terrible beauty as Fran confronts the phantoms of his life and dreams.

The glow was cold, faceted, like blood crystals in the snow, rubies, Mars. More aura than actual light, the ghost of a light, yet it did its job. As Fran stood at the edge, one of the pack charged, snapping with ferocious yanks of the head and threatening to bound across... cracking its jaws and casting a covetous glance at the man just out of reach...

A work of adult themes and situations, Westcott has produced an accomplished '80s horror novel, filled with fine writing, deft characterization, and satisfying scenes of bloodshed and eerie visions. When I began reading I expected nothing, and at first the pace seemed leisurely, leaving me somewhat cold (no pun intended); but by the end, as pieces fell into place and Westcott's abilities truly emerged, I was engaged, stimulated, chilled to the final lines. Make no mistake: track down these Winter Wolves and marvel at their icy, merciless power.

Coming in 2019: Paperbacks from Hell Reprint Line from Valancourt Books!

Great news: at first it was just a secret dream among a few die-hard paperback horror fanatics, now it's a reality! In August, specialty publisher Valancourt Books announced that they would be launching a series of reprint vintage horror paperback titles, all of which have been featured in the Stoker Award-winning Paperbacks from Hell (Quirk Books, 2017), by Grady Hendrix and me (you may have heard of it!). They've asked Grady and me to choose the titles and write introductions, and Valancourt hopes to be able to use original cover art when possible.

It's beautiful!

Since virtually every book discussed in PfH is out of print and often going for expensive collector prices online, Valancourt Books hit on the excellent idea of reprinting some in quality trade paperback editions. Thanks to Quirk Books for agreeing to this amazing deal. Offering obscure and long-sought-after books anew to an eager reading public seems like the right thing to do! I'm thrilled to be part of this horrific venture.

Planned publication is early 2019, with maybe half a dozen titles at first, starting with Elizabeth Engstrom's 1985 collection of two novellas, When Darkness Loves Us, published in paperback by Tor in 1986 with a fantastic Jill Bauman cover illustration. Also featuring in the line will be Bari Woods's The Tribe and T. Chris Martindale's Nightblood. More titles to come, of course, and Grady and I are hot on the heels of potential reprint horrors. Tracking down authors or their estates and sorting the tangle of copyright is no mean feat but Valancourt is doing a stellar job of it. And don't forget: over the past several years Valancourt has already reprinted many of the books you've read about here on this blog and in PfH.

She Wakes and A Cold Blue Light: Recent '80s Horror Reads

Hola amigos, I know it's been a long time since I rapped at ya, but I've been real busy here. Been buying paperbacks like crazy, in and out of town, and have even had time to read a few. Unfortunately nothing has blown me away, a real bummer, but here are two brief reviews of the titles I've finished this summer.

While at first I was kind of digging She Wakes, the late Jack Ketchum's novel from 1989 published by Berkley Books, as it neared its end I realized I'd long lost any sense of enjoyment. Pretentious and mean-spirited, Ketchum seems to be floundering a bit in this rather overlooked title in his oeuvre. A supernatural story set in a well-depicted Greece, the She of the title is of course an ancient scary goddess ravenous for sex and death in the guise of vacation fling. You know how it goes. Characterization is dull and hollow, prose is Hemingway lite, and scares and/or creepiness marginal. The unrelenting conviction that made Girl Next Door and Off Season such horror powerhouses is missing.

I do like the at times despairing tone of Ketchum's style—He felt a moment of impotent fury. These were all good people. They didn't deserve this. None of them did—because it gets at my understanding of horror: that terrible things happen to good people for no reason. I mean, that's life, right? I'm not crazy about horror in which awful people get a dreadful comeuppance; that seems a cheap satisfaction. And while zombies and gore and flesh-eating appear in the last quarter of the story (a few sex scenes are written pretty well too in a sort of erotic horror manner), they produce no horrific frisson; no, it's just there, and it did nothing whatsoever for me. Lots of time drawing characters together for what promises to be a doozy of climax, but it is dead on arrival, muted, overwrought, even distasteful in an ugly way.

Apparently Ketchum wanted to try his hand at a "Stephen King style" work instead of his usual non-supernatural fare, but She Wakes is NOTHING like a King work, so I don't know what he (or the publisher?) was thinking. The combo of Ketchum's clipped, existential sentences and malevolent mythology, intriguing at first, adds up to nothing. I'm not surprised Ketchum gained genre fame only years later; his style, affect, and approach were pretty much the opposite of what was going on in horror writing at the time (although I suppose it bears the vaguest similarities to Simmons's Song of Kali). Despite a few interesting tidbits scattered throughout—his evocation of the Greek landscape and its people is admirable, but I mean come on, it's no Colossus of Maroussi!—She Wakes is a real miss.

In late summer of last year, three men and two women came to Aubrey House, each seeking something intensely personal. Five separate houses, if you will, all of them haunted.

1983's Charter Books original A Cold Blue Light, by fantasy writing team Marvin Kaye and Parke Godwin, is a title I searched for awhile; I'm not sure exactly why. I think I liked the vibe the title and cover had, implying a chilly tale of atmospheric hauntings ("beckoning horror," anyone?). Another riff on Haunting of Hill House, you got your investigators all up in what was a summer rental for backstory folks who went mad. Back-cover copy really sells it:

Psychically speaking, it's a whole new equation. Good, Evil, God, Heaven or hell—I doubt that any of those words have much relevance in Aubrey House.

Didn't know anything about the authors, looked them up, they don't write at all the kinds of fiction I pay attention to. Which is ironic because Cold Blue is engagingly written, smart, insightful, sharp and observant—a party scene early in the story promised a bright, modern '80s novel of witty banter, solid characterization, believable motivation, paranormal skepticism, metaphysical ramblings (last two things not my favorite but I'll make an exception if there's some real creepiness to be had)—but there are absolutely no scares whatsoever until maaaybe the final couple pages. Cold Blue was a solid read otherwise, yet I can't recommend it as any kind of horror fiction. The authors were simply going through generic motions for commercial reasons. There's a sequel, I might buy it for completist reasons only.

Rockabye Baby by Stephen Gresham (1984): I Just Met a Nurse That I Could Go For

With its distressing yet utterly striking cover image, you'd probably think there was no way the novel Rockabye Baby (Zebra, Nov 1984) could live up to it. Aaaand... you'd be right. Prolific '80s author Stephen Gresham penned a solid handful of paperbacks for the infamous Zebra line of horror fiction and this is the first I've read. Gresham's writing is a touch better than his Zebra fellows, but that's about all: I found Rockabye to be interesting only in fits and starts, was not taken with its young protagonist, a towheaded boy named—wait for it—Prince, and while the psycho dude depicted on the cover features in the story, he doesn't quite feature enough. He was the most readable character, a nutjob with real psychosexual identity concerns.

Sorry, Judy Packett, but I must respectfully disagree

There's the out-of-town cop trying to solve the children murders, the country occult old lady and young girl, Aunt Evvie and Nandina, living in the woods who possess supernatural powers that Prince attempts to learn and master to find the killer's identity, various other kids from Prince's class—I really am done with kids in my horror fiction—and then there is Maris Macready, our cover model. What a piece of work he is. He calls his female identity, in a classy, literate horror reference, "the Bloofer Lady." No one will be surprised that Macready has a shelf crammed with

dolls, an array that would please any little girl. But these dolls had been given a different sort of attention from the apprentice mothering common to little girls. These dolls were naked. As a result, peering down into the box was like peering down into flesh-colored water—a pool of arms, legs, heads, and torsos. And each had been marked with a black felt-tip pen. Their anatomies were strewn with black circles, arrows, doodlings and a few indecipherable words...

This is on page 27. Without a doubt I had images of a deranged Joe Spinell in the role, so I was psyched at this early point. If only Gresham had drilled down on this perversity. If only. Instead, he doubles down on a gloomy coming-of-age story as Prince learns about "darkness" from Aunt Evvie and Nandina. Their phonetic Southern dialect is a constant distraction. Yeah, I definitely wanted more of dude on the cover (by Lisa Falkenstern, perhaps?), and more of the "Macready family of monsters" as it's put. Alas.

Frankly, I gave up more than halfway through, skimmed through the last part and found nothing of import to note. The first chapters were intriguing; I was relieved that Gresham could write. His sense of place and setting isn't too bad, and I appreciated his attempt at melding a vague Southern Gothic vibe with dark fantasy as well as the exploitative child-killer angle. Gresham adds some depth to the story when Prince's beloved father discovers he has cancer. But there remains an earnest, amateur vibe that I think one finds in a lot of Zebra books, a vibe I find hard to forgive and after awhile, harder to read. When I can hardly bother to pick up the book I'm ostensibly reading, going several days without any desire to find out what's happening to the characters, putting it in my jacket pocket to read on the bus and then not actually reading it, I know it's time to shelve the book. Bye-bye, Baby, bye-bye. 

New Terrors, edited by Ramsey Campbell (1980): There's a Place for You In Between the Sheets

Throughout the 1980s paperback horror boom, there was no shortage of horror anthologies. Sure, prior decades had seen their share of tomes of short horror fiction, but often they were mixed with tales of science fiction, fantasy, and crime. The American paperback original edition of New Terrors (Pocket Books, October 1982), showcased writers of various genres right there on the cover. As the '80s wore on this practice was seen less and less and horror anthologies began to feature solely horror writers. For the most part, horror anthos were a treat, even if they were uneven; useful for voracious readers to sample writers they were unfamiliar with, to see what short sharp shocks they could deliver, to learn in a bite-size morsel who might be worth reading an entire novel by and who might be best to avoid.

Pan Books UK, 1980

The American edition doesn't include all the stories as the 1980 original from across the pond, but it does have an utterly delightful cover. Lisa Falkenstern, illustrator extraordinaire, painted vivid portraits of the macabre that have become icons of the era. Sure, okay, the lovely wrapped in bedsheets doesn't exactly align with what's going on between the covers (heh) but who cares? Did anyone ever try to return a book because what was depicted on the cover never actually occurred inside?

As an author Ramsey Campbell is one of the modern horror greats, that hardly needs to be stated, and he is no slouch as an editor either. For New Terrors he's chosen short works of various styles and themes, but which are wrought with fine instruments, presented with an artist's care, then deployed just so for maximum horror impact. The authors wield scalpels, not sledgehammers. The caliber of imagination at work here and the general quality of the prose in its service is impeccable. There is no jokiness, no ill-timed humor, very little grue. The writers strive for elevated implication rather than spell-it-out twists. For the most part the writers succeed at this distinctive style of quieter horror—indeed, many if not most stories have a Campbellian quality to them.

Aickman (1914-1981) 

New Terrors reveals its high pedigree from the first. It begins with one of Robert Aickman's inimitable stories, "The Stains," and it is the longest tale here at nearly 60 pages. Stephen is a middle-aged widower who visits his brother at his small parish in the British moors, where Stephen goes on long lonesome walks. He meets a young woman collecting lichen-covered rocks for her father; Stephen's brother is an amateur expert on the topic but she seems unimpressed, and knows her illiterate father won't care either. This is Aickman's version of "meet cute." He entices the girl to meet him the next day, and they do, exploring an abandoned primitive country home which contains an old mattress in a small room upstairs, where:

...every night the moon shone across their bed and their bodies in wide streaks, oddly angled. "You are like a long, sweet parsnip," Stephen said. "Succulent but really rather tough." "I know nothing at all," she said. "I only know you." The mark below her shoulder stood out darkly, but, God be praised, in isolation. What did the rapidly deteriorating state of the walls and appurtenances matter by comparison with that?  

Allusive, symbolic, literary, lightly weird: yep, this is vintage Aickman, and it won the 1981 British Fantasy Award for Best Short Fiction. I appreciated its mild earthy eroticism, the "stains" that creep up on Stephen and slooowly subsume him. Give yourself some time to savor this mature master.

Wellman (1903-1986) 

"Yare" by Manly Wade Wellman is written in his own country grammar, which I can enjoy in doses very small. But Wellman's pen is sure and fine as he characterizes well rough-hewn working men with good trustworthy hunting dogs and backwoods superstitions that turn out to not be superstitions at all. One man has been summoned: "Hark at me good. It ain't no fox that we come out here tonight to have the dogs run." A tale of rural dark fantasy, it's good, but I think it would would have been more at home in Stuart David Schiff's Whispers anthologies.

One of Steve Rasnic's earliest stories, "City Fishing," has two men and their two young sons going out on a fishing trip. Simple. Except they had to physically restrain the mothers:  Jimmy overhears his mom: "You can't take them!"... then there was a struggle as his dad and Bill's dad started forcing the women to the bedrooms. Bill's mother was especially squirmy, and Bill's father was slapping her hard across the face to make her stop. His own mother was a bit quieter, especially after Bill's mother got hurt, but she still cried. Yikes. The travelogue that follows grows more surreal as the men drive into a city that grows more and more decrepit but buildings begin to appear hung down from the sky on wires. Is this an initiation rite of toxic masculinity? Perhaps; its weirdness stands on its own.

Lee (1947-2015) 

Filled with graceful contours and female perception, the late Tanith Lee's "A Room with a Vie" (that's not a misspelling) has no mythic dark fantasy, but an English country vacation home, a rented room, a former tenant now deceased, and Caroline, who must get away. But escape from one's past and personal problems is impossible in horror, and her "hallucinations of fecundity" will bring the room to life. "Oh, Christ, please die," she said. Her lucid prose, even when depicting impossibilities, as well as a tinge of black humor at the climax, make Lee's story a standout.

"Tissue" by a young Marc Laidlaw has some unsettling imagery of the flesh as you might guess by its title, and it works beautifully. Macabre, insane family issues come to the fore when a young man brings his girlfriend to meet his father after the death of his mother. Dad's idea of family? "One optimally functioning individual organism." Laidlaw gets literally under the skin with some startling imagery and ideas, assisted by certain Campbellian touches. Another high point.

Shaw (1931-1996) 

Bob Shaw was a beloved Irish science fiction writer. His "Love Me Tender" reads like a '40s crime story with an escaped convict named Massick on the lam, trudging through muddy forest, following train tracks, a city boy in a prehistoric landscape. He comes upon a shack and an old man drinking whiskey, sorting dead butterflies for the university nearby, talking about mimics and lookalikes. When Massick gets a look inside the shack's sole locked door, he's eager... but of course all that stuff about lookalikes wasn't idle chatter, and the common noir trope of femme fatale becomes all too literal. Good stuff, great payoff.

Another science fiction author offers another very good story: "Kevin Malone" by the highly-regarded Gene Wolfe. A couple in dire straits answer an ad for free living arrangements in exchange for "minimal services." Oh my god, seriously people?! Do not do this ever. Though brief, in his stately, sophisticated prose Wolfe's literate story bewitches: I felt that pricking at the neck that comes when one reads Poe alone at night.

Reed (1932-2017) 

"Chicken Soup" is about Harry, who loved being sick, and thus develops a rather unhealthy relationship between Harry and his mother. Another writer known for SF as well as mystery, Kit Reed, in addition to be a revered professor and who died last fall, ventures into domestic Shirley Jackson territory, with perhaps a hint of Harlan Ellison's 1976 darkly comic story of Jewish guilt, "Mom." Like all happy couples they had their fights which lasted only an hour or two and cleared the air nicely. Reed wraps it all up in traditional horror manner. Not bad. Neither "The Pursuer" by James Wade nor "The Spot" by Dennis Etchison and Mark Johnson rose higher than "that was okay" for me: the former is a rescue from 1951, an "urban horror" not unlike Beaumont or Matheson; the latter is, as Campbell even notes "more allegorical than most of the tales in this book," make that "too allegorical for its own good."

Wilder (1930-2002) 

New Zealand SF/F author Cherry Wilder contributes "The Gingerbread House," which has some familiar touches but a couple fresh notes. Amanda visits her brother Douglas, newly divorced and cranky as hell, living in a German cottage owned by a madwoman now in a sanitarium. Together they face ugly secrets about themselves: he may have killed a child in a hit-and-run, she suffers from anorexia (a rare acknowledgement of the disease in that day).

"You must stop running away." 

"So must you," he said, with a reassuring touch of the old self-righteousness. "Yes," she said, "yes, I promise. I'll eat... I'll put on ten pounds, twelve. Only we must leave this house... this is a rotten place. It plays tricks." 

His eyes swiveled nervously in the direction of the cupboard. 

"You may be right," he whispered.

Wagner (1945-1994)

".220 Swift" is one of Karl Edward Wagner's long, major works. It's a sweaty, claustrophobic tale of two men heading into a cavern in a North Carolina hillside, inspired by, as Wagner put it, "archaeological curiosa." Solid dialogue, solid grounding in reality, solid everything, it has all the components that made Wagner a legend in his lifetime. While I could do without passages about guns and ammo (it's the title), I realize this is something Wagner knew intimately. And Campbell's own contribution "The Fit" also hit my horror sweet spot; it also features everything that makes Campbell great. Rather alienated young man spends holidays with his aunt who is a dress-maker. She runs afoul of local crone named Fanny Cave (I kept imagining her in her cottage, her long limbs folded up like a spider's in hiding) who lives down by the water. Notes of uncomfortable sexual tension and inanimate dress dummies and clothing that take on sinister agency appear—Eventually I managed to sleep, only to dream that dresses were waddling limblessly through the doorway of my room, towards the bed. Add a shuddery finish and you've got a maybe a precursor to his classic The Face That Must Die. 

New Terrors ends on a celebrity note, and Stephen King's name looks great on the cover, but wow has this one always been one of my least favorites by the man. I first encountered "Big Wheels: A Tale of the Laundry Game" in Skeleton Crew, when it was published some years after first appearing here, and in that collection it was rewritten for whatever reason and to whatever effect. Either version is a lesser work. One creepy image can't make up for these characters' drunken, tiresome, pointless antics. "This is his strangest story," Campbell notes, sure, but it offers little else.

Taken as a whole, New Terrors does feature some terrific writing, effectively horrific scenarios, and a couple first-rate stories, but today, some weeks after reading it, I'm hard-pressed recalling specifics about the lesser stories. Strong works from Aickman, Lee, Laidlaw, Wolfe, Wilder, Wagner, and Campbell; okay ones from the others and a couple "why bother?" equal around a 75 or 80% competency rate, so like a C+ or B if we're grading. However that Falkenstern cover is an A+ on its own merits, I think you'll agree!