This Devil's Work

Last week I received an email from a TMHF reader asking for help identifying a half-remembered horror novel from the '70s or maybe '80s. Thanks to her clue of the title - a name like Luka - I recalled recently seeing the cover for a book called Lupe, a mainstream thriller/horror/occult novel by somebody named Gene Thompson (actually a writer of TV classix like "Beverly Hillbillies" and "Gilligan's Island"), published in mass market paperback by Ballantine in 1978. Turns out that was the right one!

The back cover makes it sound like pretty standard post Rosemary's Baby/Exorcist-style bestseller fiction, with its historical prologue and afterward, a modern woman suddenly at odds with the supernatural. Dig the none-too-tasteless bit about "a grotesque eleven-year-old boy with a demonic sexual craving"! You've got the rave blurbs from horror fiction experts like Newsweek and Cleveland Plains Dealer (oh and New York Post, what the eff are "the bejabbers"?!). Add in a creepy-kid stepback cover and you have a pretty decent example of paperback horror fiction of the 1970s.

And this is the generic 1977 hardcover from Random House:

So a reminder: any of you TMHF readers out there looking for a book you read years and years and even decades ago, don't hesitate to email me about it! I love a good challenge....

The Keep by F. Paul Wilson (1981): Just One Deathless Night

Nazism will forever be the benchmark by which all other human evil is measured (well, until something worse comes along). So what do you get when you pit the SS against an unimaginably malevolent supernatural force that, with their stubborn reliance on "rationality," they can scarcely comprehend? You get The Keep, the first horror novel from New Jersey physician/author F. Paul Wilson, who spent the 1970s writing science fiction tales when not practicing medicine (and apparently has spent the decades since writing a series that began with The Keep). There is nothing resembling science fiction in this highly-regarded (going by reviews on Goodreads and Amazon) "novel of deep horror," and it's dedicated to pulp horror/fantasy icons Lovecraft, Clark Ashton Smith, and Robert E. Howard. This is no surprise - The Keep's fictional grimoires, subterranean lairs, manly adventuring, and even some sword-and-sorcerering, find Wilson emulating those classic writers but not slavishly imitating them. After finishing the novel, and at various moments throughout, I wished he had emulated those guys more. Much, much more.

A few words to preface this review: I read Wilson's short story collection Soft and Others couple years back and mostly hated it because his writing was so one-dimensional, dull, and tone deaf. Honestly, I think Wilson can be a downright terrible writer, so I was relieved to find when I began reading The Keep he'd seemingly improved (how could he not?). What keeps the reader glued to the pages is the sheer power of the story. I mean it's Nazis, in a keep - a type of fortified tower built within castles during the Middle Ages by European nobility, Wikipedia tells me - battling an evil entity who slaughters Nazis handily. I'm in!

Or... am I?

 Original 1981 hardcover

So we've got a German army, led by Captain Klaus Woermann, stationed in a keep high in the Alps of Romania, to protect precious oil fields needed for the Nazi war effort. But when two grunts dig into the fortification trying to find out if the oddly-shaped metal crosses embedded in the stone walls everywhere in the keep are made of real gold and silver, they find behind those stones an opening that leads to... Well, evil and darkness and decapitation. And unsolvable impossible deaths follow after, each night for a week, till an exhausted, reluctant Woermann sends for help from the Nazis, whom he regards with skepticism and distrust, himself too old to have been seduced by the charismatic Hitler (I found this detail quite satisfying). He words his missive carefully: Request immediate relocation. Something is murdering my men... That ought to get their attention!

Enter SS Major Erich Kaempffer, an honest-to-God Nazi, and his einsatzkommandos, reinforcements for the beleaguered soldiers, to find out what the hell that something is that's killing Woermann's men. Kaempffer is eager to begin his post as commandant of a coming-soon death camp in Ploiesti, and feels this assignment is almost beneath him, but must impress his superiors. If he succeeds in discovering the murderer, he knows he will make Woermann look like an ineffective fool - something he's longed to do since Woermann witnessed an unfortunate incident of cowardice on Kaempffer's part in the Great War. The two men barely tolerate one another, and their conflict, well-done by Wilson in the first third of the novel, propels much of the story.

But Kaempffer has no luck sniffing out the killer even though he scoffs at notions that it might be a supernatural agent of some kind - surely it's just local guerrillas. Then his men start turning up dead, two of them even walk right into his room from their post, their throats torn out, and collapse before him (all kinda cool). Reluctantly he accepts the advice of the local innkeeper - after terrorizing him and threatening to kill the nearby villagers he's taken into the keep - and brings in Theodore Cuza, an old sick man who lost his position as an esteemed professor because of his Judaism. Cuza is an expert on the history and folklore of the region. Along with Cuza comes his 30-ish daughter Magda, his caretaker, beautiful and untouched. Meanwhile, a strange scarred unnamed red-headed man is doggedly traveling miles across land and sea, avoiding wartime danger zones, for some unknown reason to meet an evil in Romania he thought had been vanquished ages before...

And now The Keep begins to crumble. One prominent weakness is the thoughtless, cliched romance that grows between Magda and that redheaded man - Glenn, at first - a relationship practically clipped with scissors out of a cheap historical or Harlequin romance novel, seemingly inserted to make the novel fit the bestseller mold: She had found the man unattractive in the extreme; in addition to his odor and grimy appearance, there was a trace of arrogance and condescension that she found equally offensive. Ugh! There is no originality, no human insight, just gross lazy simplifications about men and women and sex. Would that Wilson had just left this part out completely, or rewrote the passages another time or two to tone down the rank sexism, or at least evince a sort of detached or ironic attitude about it. Or something to make it palatable, anything!

And the depiction of Nazis and their reign of terror - an easily exploitable topic, a hack writer's dream! I like tasteless exploitation/horror when done right, but Wilson doesn't rise - or sink - to the occasion. The Nazis are barely cardboard - as the novel goes on, all the characters become cardboard pieces. When we first meet the god-like evil denizen of the keep, a baddie named Molasar, there are the de rigueur horror moments, such as his "friendship" with Ol' Vlad Tepes back in the day and talk about feeding off the evils of humanity. But Molasar is dressed like a comic-book villain and speaks like one too: "I have my own means of moving about which does not require doors or secret passages. A method quite beyond your comprehension."  My God, who knew evil was so dorky?

 Map of the Keep itself

(Some spoilers) Other faults: Wilson makes an interesting observation about vampire lore when Cuza, a devout Jew, sees Molasar's fear of the Christian cross - does that mean that faith is the true one, and not Cuza's Judaism? He agonizes over his own potential loss of belief, but for Wilson, it's only a dead end. Later Cuza gets Molasar all riled up when he informs him what "death camps" are and that the Nazis are planning on rounding up Molasar's Wallachian "people" and exterminating them. So Malasar decides he's going to kill Hitler and his crew, with Cuza helping out as daytime dogsbody, getting out of the keep and up into Hitler's shit. Yep, that hoariest of tropes, KILL HITLER, seems too convenient a turnabout (to be fair this novel is over 30 years old so I guess the trope wasn't as hoary then). Molasar's gonna gain power from all that Nazi badness, don't you know, then take over the world...

1983 Dutch edition - creepier than any scene in the book

I haven't even mentioned the thudding dialogue, unimaginative scenes of violent mayhem, the climax of ageless good v. evil, and the sappy, unearned epilogue, all of which have been seen a hundred, a thousand times before. It all adds up to the reader never feeling that tingle, that can't-turn-pages-fast-enough vibe that makes this kind of mainstream bestseller work. There's a notable lack of atmosphere too, which makes The Keep deadly dull in places: I mean, the setting is a fucking castle in the mountains of Romania occupied by terrified Nazis because a mysterious monstrous vampire is trying kill them all! You gotta work it hard in the opposite direction to suck the creepy out of that set-up. And Wilson, unfortunately, is up to the task.

Yes, even as the bodies piled up and the mystery deepened, I struggled with this one. You'd think a horror novel like this would be pretty bad-ass and the ever-popular "unputdownable," but it's not at all. I'd put it down for a few days, a week, and almost forget I'd been reading it. I'd pick it up and start yawning after a couple pages, since Wilson's prose style overall is vapid. That dedication to HPL, Howard, and Smith becomes ludicrous - this is some of the lamest "pulp" I've read, and trying to excuse its lameness by calling it pulp doesn't help. If Wilson weren't such a trite, banal writer - Never had the supernatural been so real to him. Never would he be able to view the world or existence itself as he had before -  he could've produced a richly detailed novel of historical horror and eternal evil. But neither his handling of the supernatural nor of the natural has enough conviction or weight; the story is there, and like the proverbial sculptor who knows his subject is hiding in that hunk of marble, all F. Paul Wilson has to do is find it. But most often he doesn't, or he can't; The Keep is a boring blank surface that, while sometimes interesting in and of itself, refuses to reveal the true horror novel that resides within.

Red Dragon by Thomas Harris (1981): Terror the Human Form

Featuring the infamous first appearance of dreaded Dr. Hannibal "the Cannibal" Lecter, perhaps the most iconic, most powerful, most thrillingly nightmarish of modern pop-fictional villains, the bestselling Red Dragon is a police procedural par excellence, depicting the cutting-edge techniques of serial killers and their profilers with utmost clarity, thanks to the brilliant honed sheen of Thomas Harris's prose. I don't have the space to go into everything I enjoyed about Red Dragon; the entire story and characters are perfectly imagined and executed (sorry). We peer not only into the broken jagged minds of murderers driven mad by an early life of neglect and deformity, but also the brilliant, tireless lawmen who go after them no matter the personal consequences.

While The Silence of the Lambs is much more well-known both as book and movie, I'm sure many readers are on familiar terms with Red Dragon as well. Again, Lecter isn't necessarily the main villain. Will Graham, only 38, is an early-retired "special investigator" for the FBI, asked by his former supervisor, Jack Crawford, to help find the serial killer dubbed "The Tooth Fairy" (because of his biting fetish) who has just murdered two whole families in their homes. Graham left the force when he was very nearly killed by Dr. Hannibal Lecter several years earlier. Lecter was captured and imprisoned right after but Graham still lives with the scars, mental, emotional, physical. This is a brilliant backstory for both characters; putting such a dramatic event in the past is a stroke of genius on Harris's part. For Graham, going back into the field looking for a monster, just as he's started a new life with a woman and her son... well, it's beyond the last thing he wants to do.

Back cover of reprint, Bantam Mar 1987

No surprise, Red Dragon can be depressing reading, a grim, immersive experience one can get uncomfortably lost in, unable to come up from its suffocating depths for breath. Airless, without any attempt at a creeping atmosphere that would place it firmly in the horror genre (yet it is rightfully included in Newman and Jones's Horror: 100 Best Novels), this is realistic fiction told in a toneless prose that withholds judgment. It is amoral and matter-of-fact about the grossest of human depravities. This is precisely Will Graham's grotesque talent, what makes him the only man for the job, why Crawford is so desperate for his help: Will Graham can slip inside a killer's mind and see all from his perspective without the clouding effects of socialization, morality, and compassion:

 Often his thoughts were not tasty... His learned values of decency and propriety tagged along, shocked at his associations, appalled at his dreams; sorry that in the bone arena of his skull there were no forts for what he loved... His value judgments... could never keep up and direct this thinking.

Obsessed with an apocalyptic painting by English poet William Blake, from whose works the title comes, Francis Dolarhyde is the 42-year-old serial killer Graham is after. With grandiose fantasies of his Great Becoming, Dolarhyde is held in a strange thrall to Blake's painting The Great Red Dragon: Never before had he seen anything that approached his graphic thought. He felt that Blake must have peeked in his ear and seen the Red Dragon. For weeks Dolarhyde had worried that his thoughts might glow out his ears. When the narrative begins Dolarhyde has already murdered two families, the Jacobis and the Leeds - he chose them after seeing their home movies, which he develops in his day job at a film processing company - and is planning on a third (Families were mailing their applications to him every day). A classic if over-melodramatic psychopath, he is utterly detached from his victims; they are only a means to an end: becoming fully the Red Dragon itself. The dead were not people, they...

are not flesh, but light and air and color and quick sounds quickly ended when you change them. Like balloons of color bursting... they are more important for the changing, more important than the lives they scrabble after, pleading.

Dolarhyde bore screams as a sculptor bears dust from the beaten stone.

Original 1981 hardcover with Blake's conception of the Red Dragon

Francis Dolarhyde's dire childhood is relayed in all its sad and shocking array, a tale we know all too well now that serial killers are cultural mainstays (thank in large part to Harris's fiction). These may be the most gripping parts of the novel: born with facial deformities (he looked more like a leaf-nosed bat than a baby... Springfield in 1938 was not a center for plastic surgery. In Springfield you wore your face as it was), abandoned by his mother, left in an orphanage. Five years later, his grandmother comes for Francis. For the first time someone smiles when they see him. His deformed mouth makes speech nearly impossible. However, Grandmother Dolarhyde insists he tell her his name. We are shocked, heartbroken, and filled with the knowledge that it all begins here.

The child's face brightened. The big boys had helped him with this. He wanted to please. He collected himself.

"Cunt Face," he said.

And eventually, grandmother threatens to cut off his penis if he continues to wet his bed. Her mental health collapses. Francis learns to cope through killing chickens on his grandmother's farm (the peace was endless and all around him). The horrifying connection is made, the emotions become entwined in a waking nightmare: Francis sat silently at his place, opening and closing his hand on the memory of an eye blinking against his palm. Sometimes in bed he held himself to be sure he hadn't been cut. Sometimes when he held himself he thought he felt a blink. God god that line crawled up my spine. There are plenty others.

Original paperback, Bantam Oct 1982

Today we are also familiar with the people who chase these killers, the profilers who can parse out their identities from things insignificant to the untrained eye. The agents and detectives after Dolarhyde are professional men who, with icy resolve, do a very serious and very dangerous job. Underneath they are sick with fear that they will not find Dolarhyde before he slaughters another thriving American family. Harris engages in no cop-show hysterics, no macho thundering, no young hotshots fighting against the system and defying their by-the-book superiors. Nope. Jack Crawford, based on the first FBI profiling expert John E. Douglas, knows he has to stand back and let Graham do the ugliest work inside his head and at the scenes of the crimes, and he needs calm, reflective quiet. And a good chilled martini or three doesn’t hurt either.

Will Graham's bravery is a testimony to this commitment and seen early. At night he walks through the home of the Leeds family, the second group of murder victims, after investigators have left. What clues did they miss? All that's left are the bloodstains, whose patterns hold secret codes that Will must crack. He was an old hand at fear. He could manage this one. He simply was afraid, and he could go on anyway. He could see and hear better afraid... Walking around a bloodstained house at night in which people had been mass murdered only days before? Holy shit that freaked me out. Imagining myself doing it? Out of the fucking question.
 

Early '90s Dell reprint after Lecter became famous

It's no surprise Dolarhyde is a Lecter fan, and his letter to the good doctor is discovered just after Graham visits Hannibal in the Chesapeake Hospital for the Criminally Insane. This really sets the chase in motion. While not as dramatic or intimate as Clarice Starling’s visit to Dr. Lecter, Graham’s seeking out of him is an act he realizes that he must do if he is to stop the Tooth Fairy. Unlike Starling, Graham has a past with Lecter, so he's unnerved to talk with him again. Why wouldn't he be? Lecter makes the most of this time to fuck expertly with Graham's head: "Do you dream much, Will? Do you know how you caught me? The reason you caught me is that we're just alike!" Good God. I know that's become a cliche, killer and cop psychological twins, but Harris makes it work. We revisit how Graham realized Lecter was the killer he was looking for years before. It was this image, the Wound Man illustration from a Middle Ages surgical text, that was the final clue.

It's this kind of esoteric detail that makes Red Dragon an especially fascinating read, one that makes you want to - carefully! - Google asides in the story and dialogue, like references to medical textbooks and forensics methods and physical deformities and psychological tests and of course Blake's biblical art and poetry. Harris inserts tiny details about people's lives and possessions that read like real things observed with a restless mature eye, not simply made up on the spot and tossed into the mix. Even while writing of monsters, Harris is a fully sensitive humanitarian, taking a minor note - the rising color of someone's face, a deft hand on a shoulder, a speech tic, a particular lack of sympathy - and letting it bloom with import. Characters, even ones we meet a single time, live and breathe and exist; we can imagine them outside the narrative itself. Harris follows the stone-carved dictum for all creators of fiction: show, don't tell. Harris implies; the reader infers. Harris can do more damage with one understated sentence - "Cunt Face," he said - than many horror writers can do in a 400-page novel. The ending? Fine and deep and true and haunting. I fucking love it.

Wow. Maybe I need to start looking into large-print book covers too.

If not the equal of Silence of the Lambs, Red Dragon is as good a precursor to it as possible (I find Clarice Starling a more captivating and sympathetic protagonist than Will Graham). It is not a novel to approach lightly; it is not simply a popular bestselling thriller to kill a few hours on a flight or waiting at the dentist (oof). Yes, it moves with lightning speed but Harris never lets the reader to get lost in the settings. Whether it’s a film processing lab, an insane asylum, a police headquarters or a newspaper-printing press, Harris writes of them with an authenticity and economy learned from his days as an AP reporter. Sometimes the suspense is unbearable as we move between two worlds so effortlessly, sucked into a drama filled with moments we recognize - the frustrations of work, fraught relationships with spouses and offspring, even budding romance - and those we hope in a million eternities never to face.  

Red Dragon needs nothing supernatural or otherwordly to horrify, it simply and honestly confronts and exposes a nightmared world. It's one of those books whose unrelenting nature will snatch you up and carry you away, leaving you bleary-eyed and sleepless, an aching emptiness inside you from peering into all the darknesses people can hide... and the flesh- and mind-rending terror they can visit upon their fellow man without remorse.

The Hunger by Whitley Strieber (1981): Bela Lugosi's Not Dead

Not all that nature wants from its children is innocent.

After the success of his debut horror novel The Wolfen, in which he provided a convincing naturalistic explanation for intelligent werewolf-like predators who've lived side-by-side with humanity throughout the ages, Whitley Strieber reappraised the vampire in the same manner in The Hunger. A mainstream, bestselling thriller with plenty of audience-pleasing sex and violence, The Hunger is also richly veined with concerns about love, relationships, aging and the waning of desire. It follows the arc of history as humanity and its secret vampiric brethren have risen up from the glory of ancient Egypt and the Roman Empire to the mud and muck of the Middle Ages to the brightly-lit but still so dangerous modern era. But for whom is this modern era more dangerous?

 Stepback cover, Pocket Books Jan 1982

For whatever reason this novel was made into a glitzy, Gothy, soft-porn movie in 1983, but there is no glitz or Goth here (soft porn, yes). And, smartly I think, the word vampire is never used. Still: there is copious blood-drinking, blood-sharing, blood-shedding, like any self-respecting horror/vampire novel. Then there were moments I felt like Strieber veered into Michael Crichton territory, with renegade scientists researching at the cutting edge of human physiology, making discoveries that will change the world - making the discovery that will change the world. Since Strieber is a powerful and intelligent writer, this concession to bestseller-dom doesn't irritate, since it's presented with the dispassion of a field observer. I rather like a clinical approach to the this kind of material; it makes for an interesting juxtaposition with the hot, unyielding desire for blood.

Don't let his goofball smile fool you...

Miriam Blaylock is an eons old "vampire," a vivid but contradictory character, bold and fearless but endlessly careful in her choosing of victims, terrified of exposing herself to accident and injury which would make her vulnerable to a fate that is, yes, worse than death. The fires of the villagers hundreds of years ago taught her that her kind is not invincible. Her Manhattan home is a veritable fortress battened down with numerous security devices, albeit one that provides beauty and respite, with its luxurious rose garden and old-world furnishings. But Miriam has no relationship with her kith and kin; for centuries she has "enlisted" various specimens of excellent "human stock" to be her companions. And now, she and her current "partner," John Blaylock - 200 years earlier a young British nobleman whose father procured Miriam's illicit services  - are growing irrevocably apart.

After epigrams from Keats and Tennyson, the novel opens with a dramatic violent sequence and then reveals that John is unable to "Sleep" (the rejuvenating rest which resembles death) and is aging considerably, woefully, his face in the mirror showing the rack and ruin of years and years, which can only mean he is now facing the end of his unnatural life. Gripped with panic and maddening hunger, his feedings grow more and more careless and desperate as they become less and less satisfying. His rage towards Miriam is growing as he learns there is no escape from a nightmare doom... one for which she alone is responsible.

1981 hardcover

Also introduced in early chapters is Sarah Roberts, a doctor studying sleep and aging and who, after a harrowing tragedy involving her rhesus monkey research subject, seems to have found the link between the two. Her controversial book on the topic has greatly interested Miriam Blaylock. Was it possible for humans to stave off aging utilizing Sarah's discoveries? If so, Miriam could use this knowledge for her own selfish ends when "transitioning" humans via blood transfusion to be her immortal consorts. However, for humans this state of actual immortality is unachievable, as John is so bitterly learning. Sarah's research will indeed mean immortality for humankind. Miriam, longing for eternal companionship, will do anything, even give herself up to scientific research and risk exposure, to convince Sarah to share with her what's she's discovered. And perhaps Sarah - brilliant, lusty, ambitious Sarah - will make the greatest companion of all.

Strieber sketches in Miriam's background with terrific historical passages - ancient Rome, the Dark Ages of Middle Europe, 18th century London - which are economically presented for emotional resonance, adding shades to her and not simply ornamenting the story. It is a life that stretches back to before the Roman Empire; her lineage extends all the way to Lamia herself. These are some of the most enjoyable sequences in The Hunger, so well-conceived and presented as they are. As in The Wolfen, he provides a plausible, ingenious source for the vampire legend. We learn of Miriam's past lovers, that one of her most beloved partners was Eumenes, a youth she rescues after torture by the Roman authorities. 

She invented a goddess, Thera, and called herself a priestess. She spun a web of faith and beguiling ritual. They slit the throat of a child and drank the salty wine of sacrifice. She showed him the priceless mosaic of her mother Lamia, and taught him the legends and truths of her people.

Cliched contemporary cover

I've really only touched on what makes The Hunger such a gripping, exciting, illuminating read. Strieber strikes out on a successful path through the psychological intricacies and intimacies that grow between between Miriam and John, between Miriam and Sarah, between Sarah and her fellow scientist and lover Tom Haver, between predator and prey, the seduced and the seducer. There is real darkness here, human darkness and human pain, loss and despair. But also there is the pain of being inhuman, of being, by one's very  nature, condemned to exist with a restless intelligence, an insurmountable will to survive, an utterly endless appetite.

 Avon Books reprint 1988. No Goth chicks inside however.

And I'm happy to say that as the novel concludes, Strieber ratchets up the stakes with a professional's skill and timing, drawing together the threads of all his characters' disparate stories, till they collide in one ferociously fatal sex scene you gotta read to believe. I mean, that's what we're all waiting for anyway, right? And you get that, and you get much more. This Hunger is one that truly satisfies.

He thought of Sarah and cried aloud. She was in the hands of a monster. It was a simple as that. Perhaps science would never explain such things, perhaps it couldn't.

And yet Miriam was real, living in the real world, right now. Her life mocked the laws of nature, at least as Tom understood them. 

Slowly, the first shaft of sunlight spread across the wall. Tom imagined the earth, a little green mote of dust sailing around the sun, lost in the enormous darkness. The universe seemed a cold place indeed, malignant and secret. 

Was that the truth of it?

Thomas Tryon Born Today, 1926

Author-turned-actor Thomas Tryon wrote two of the best of pre-Stephen King horror bestsellers of the early 1970s, The Other (1971) and Harvest Home (1973). Here are the UK paperback editions; you can see the US editions here. If you haven't read 'em, get to it! Such chilling delights.

They were also made into movies, of course, the former title I've seen, while the latter was made for TV but still starred Bette Davis. Creepy kids and malevolent old ladies...

Stephen King: The Signet Paperback Covers

You know 'em, you love 'em - well, probably you do - these are the classic early novels from Stephen King, all published by Signet/New American Library. The bold, striking, even iconic original first-edition paperback cover art for The Stand (Jan 1980) is by Don Brautigam, and is (mostly) superior in every way to all the countless King reprints that have followed. The short novels in Different Seasons (August 1983) are my favorites of these, followed very closely by The Dead Zone (August 1980), while Cujo (August 1982) and Firestarter (August 1981/art for both by Stephen Stroud) I've always felt were somewhat minor works. I haven't reviewed any of these titles here yet but they provided me hours upon hours of pure horror entertainment, and there's not much more I want!

(Check out other first-edition paperback covers of earlier King classics: Carrie, 'Salem's Lot, The Shining, and Night Shift. I loves 'em all.)

The Godsend by Bernard Taylor (1976): She Killed Your Baby Today

The cover of this bestselling paperback boasts the whole gamut of '70s genre cliches, with a slightly menacing child glowering out at prospective book buyers, its vaguely religious-sounding title, and that inescapable triumvirate of previous successes, The Exorcist, The Other, and Rosemary's Baby. I'd read Bernard Taylor's effective ghostly love story Sweetheart, Sweetheart, so was looking forward to The Godsend, his debut novel. I've seen copies of this old Avon paperback (March 1977) for years and years during my bookstore searches, and got it for a buck recently. It is squarely in that early pre-King tradition of unassuming horror novels that go for the creeping chill, the subtle intimation, the growing unease, rather than the full-bore, two-fisted approach we'd see later with, say, The Shining. There's little of the pulp tradition in The Godsend, but that's not to say it doesn't like to boil the pot a little...

Lowering us gently into the cozy ease of family life in the English countryside, Taylor introduces us to the Marlowes: husband and father Alan - our narrator - his wife Kate, and their four young children as they laze a day away lakeside. And so it begins when they see a solitary young pregnant woman relaxing nearby. Kate strikes up a pleasant, mild conversation with her but describes the woman, named Jane, to Alan as funny, strange, odd, sad... stray. But Alan thinks little of it till several days later when, returning from his work as an illustrator, he arrives home and one of his toddler sons, Sam, tells him the lady, that lady, is inside. Driven by a politeness bred in the bone, neither Alan nor Kate can bear to ask Jane to leave, and she stays long into the evening (ah-ha! Crawlspace!). Just as she's finally about to leave... well, of course: Jane goes into labor. Alan runs off to rouse the village doctor from bed, but when they return, Jane is asleep in their spare room while Kate, smiling, holds the newborn babe in her arms. (Some spoilers ahead.)

1991 Leisure Books reprint

But Jane mysteriously disappears into the night leaving her baby behind. No trace of her is found (early '70s in a little British village, you know). Kate is besotted with the infant girl, and efforts begin to not just foster the newly-christened Bonnie, but to adopt her outright, adding even more joy, affection, and love to the Marlowe family life. And then... and then begins the creeping, almost unbelievable descent into the horror of murdered children. You knew that was coming, right? Because it does come, and it comes without surcease. And little Bonnie is always, always, nearby, and each death seems accidental. I inwardly moaned each time I realized Taylor was setting up a death scene for one of the children, because they come in the midst of sun-drenched afternoons in the family bosom.

I can still see Kate as she ran from the house that afternoon, her hair flying, coming at me like a wild woman, crazed, clutching at Sam's body as I held him... I can still see her as she sits there, rocking back and forth, supporting his head on his broken neck, her mouth opening and closing, emitting sounds like that of some mortally wounded animal, eyes staring in disbelief... What is miraculous is that a person can keep such memories and keep on living.

 1977 UK paperback

The years move on and the Marlowes rally, their grief and heartbreak over these "accidents" moving into the past. But it's only Alan who begins to suspect the angelic little Bonnie is anything but that; she is some sort of human cuckoo, a baby left in another's nest to purloin the affections from the biological Marlowe children by the most diabolical means. Alan and Kate's marriage begins to crumble beneath this unimaginable weight; Alan "kidnaps" Lucy away to safety, begging a distraught Kate to abandon her beloved Bonnie, that the child is responsible for the deaths of their own children. Kate simply, in that quiet British way, calls Alan mad. So now it's time for Alan to resort to other methods to save what's left of his family.

And here is where we hit the utter datedness of the novel: Taylor seems not to be much concerned with the legal complexities of adoption and child protective agencies. He touches on it some. There's one brief scene in which Alan tries to convince a social worker that he wants to basically get rid of Bonnie (by telling the woman Bonnie is evil!), and at another point he tells Kate that the police wouldn't want to be "dragged into" their little contretemps and that he's not breaking the law by taking their eldest child Lucy away to hide out. I mean - what? It felt like glib plotting that avoids real-life snares so as to generate suspense. But then again, maybe I'm thinking too much of how this scenario would play out in today's rabidly (over?)protective stance towards children.

1976 hardcover

Nor does Taylor overburden the novel with anything in the way of an explanation for Bonnie; I was awaiting some supernatural reveal of appropriately evil proportions, but got nothing. Once Bonnie's real mother walks out of the Marlowes' home she is literally never seen or heard from again (compare this with the 1980 movie adaptation). Now this may have been Taylor trying to heighten the terror by making it inexplicable, but I found it, in a way, somewhat lazy. Still, The Godsend is a gripping if at times dispiriting read that sloooowly becomes horrific. It's certainly not the best of the creepy-kid books, but I don't think you'll be disappointed reading it; little Bonnie might not be Rosemary's baby, but you'll still dig her style.

The Religion by Nicholas Condé (1982): I Am a Cliché

Wow, I haven't had much luck lately finding good, forgotten horror fiction surprises. Comparing this book to Rosemary's Baby is wildly inaccurate. Ira Levin's classic novel is a concise and wittily ironic tale of urban paranoia and maternal instinct disguised as a Satanic horror story, while Nicholas Condé's (nope, I have no idea who he is either) first novel The Religion is a straightforward, one-dimensional, vaguely entertaining, extremely mainstream novel whose every attempt at suspense fails utterly. Each detail the author includes to hide who the real bad guys are only convinces you otherwise; his misdirection leads you right to the actual culprits. It hardly counts as true horror fiction, only an of-the-moment bit of bestseller flotsam. The Religion attempts terror but in the most superficial pop culture way possible.

Since both book and author were unknown to me, and the back cover copy didn't make it sound horrible, I took a chance when I bought it (do I really care that a Publishers Weekly or Louisville Times book critic couldn't put the book down? Bah). But there are no surprises anywhere, not in characterization or plot development (well, one character seems based on Margaret Mead, which made for some decent reading).

 Made into a movie I've never seen

Every single New York City setting is presented like an '80s TV movie, with about as much invention: Central Park, Columbia University, the psychiatrist's office, the occult paraphernalia store, the morgue, the police station, the cult ceremony. Even the downbeat ending was telegraphed. Early on I liked the academic anthropology angle, but making "the religion" an actual one - Santeria, a voodoo variant - showed little imagination and a weird sort of tasteless cultural appropriation. I think if Condé had created a bizarre cult of his own, I'd have been much more into The Religion, but I guess I'm just a horror fiction atheist after all.

Nightwing by Martin Cruz Smith (1977): How the Gods Kill

There's a moment early in Nightwing as three men explore a verminous vampire bat cave rife with unimaginable creepy-crawlies and filth and endure a moment of agonizing nightmare tragedy; it could be an otherworldly scene of horror straight out of Lovecraft or Clark Ashton Smith, but it's not - it's real, it's this world, and it's disgusting. Nature is great, except when it's trying to kill you. Or actually does.

The floor was a world of its own, a steaming brown soup of digested nectar, meat, insects, and blood. Twenty percent protein, it supported pools of bacteria. Over a million mites, scavenger beetles, toads and mountain crabs to a square yard. Giant cockroaches and venomous snakes. For them all, guano was a steady rain of food, or food for their food. The fall of an unlucky bat was a bonanza for them, and seconds of agony for the bat.

That's kind of the set-up for Martin Cruz Smith's novel. Not horror per se, the bestselling Nightwing still adheres to the generic template, and its pop cultural origins can be clearly seen: first and foremost, its killer-creature setup followed in the wake of Jaws; then there's is the "alternative spirituality" concerns of the Native American tribes; the threads of white guilt that had been gaining in the liberal conscience since the late 1960s; and overall a general sense that if humans fuck with nature, it will fuck right back (you'll recall Jaws had none of these angles; it was only about a thing with teeth that wanted to eat you). Vampire bats are bringing plague to the Painted Desert, but is it a natural disaster, or a bitter old Hopi shaman's curse to end the world?

UK paperback

No less an authority than Stephen King included Nightwing in his list of important horror fiction in an appendix of Danse Macabre. Honestly I don't really see why, and I have little to say about the novel: it's boringly straight in most places with a few bouts of decently written bat attacks, with bits of biology and mythology woven in. Smith writes of the tensions between the white man and the Native American well in that he doesn't seem to be writing a polemic; the conflict feels natural, exacerbated by the "bat situation," and the Native protagonist, a man in his late 20s, is interestingly a conflicted failure. But Smith takes forever to get to the climax as various folks fall victim to the bats and others don't believe the plague is real: all your standard "creature horror" is here.

My favorite parts were definitely those in which one character speaks of vampire bat biology, Matt Hooper-style, of its unique evolutionary adaptations and heritage - "The two glorious specimens descended from tree-hopping insectivores are man and bats. We climbed down and they flew out, although we share the same hand in different forms... and the closest of all bats to man is the vampire." I'm a big fan of pop-science books so I preferred that stuff to the actual story. Also, dig the mythic past in which bats were considered gods by the various Native tribes:

But in the New World, the bat was god. His Mayan name was Zotzilaha. Whole cities and people bore his name and throughout Mexico temples carried his image: a striding man with the wings, face, teeth and tongue of a bat, holding a severed human head in one hand and a heart in the other.

The original paperback (Jove/HBJ June 1978, at top) has a dumb title logo that looks like it was copped straight from a '70s hard rock band's album cover; the UK and later reprint paperbacks fare much better, though there is nary a goth moment to be found in the book itself. Smith was the kind of bestselling author I never had any interest in reading, which is why I've only come to Nightwing now. I remember watching the crappy movie when I was a kid and being utterly bored stiff; apparently the director made more of a "socially conscious" film (see Prophecy from the era as well) than a horror flick. Bleh!

 Martin Cruz Smith, 1977