Psycho by Robert Bloch (1959): Motel Money Murder Madness

Then the horror wasn't in the house... it was in his head.

Modern horror entertainment would not be what it is today were it not for the seminal work Psycho, the sixth novel by the vastly prolific Robert Bloch. The book's main character, Norman Bates, has become an immortal symbol of the madness hiding behind the banal, the prosaic, the mundane. It is horror rooted in the everyday; it does not haunt a crumbling Gothic castle, nor does it reside outside space and time. It's here and it's now and it's coming through the bathroom door...

Famously inspired by the Ed Gein case, Bloch pieced together the vague details he'd heard about his fellow Wisconsinite and created Bates, a fellow with, shall we say, mother issues. In the novel, Bates is balding, overweight, a voracious reader and somewhat of a drunk - one of the few changes Hitchcock and screenwriter Joseph Stefano made when they adapted Psycho for film. Another is - probably a major disappointment for readers hungry for violence; I know I was when I first read Psycho as a teenager - the infamous shower murder. Bloch dispatches the character in a single lurid, pulpy sentence; there is nothing that even hints of what Hitchcock would put on the screen.

And I must admit I found it difficult to keep from picturing Anthony Perkins, Janet Leigh, Martin Balsam, etc., in my head. Suspense and mystery are mostly muted when reading Psycho because of that classic movie. That's why I appreciated seeing how Bloch concealed the fact that Mother Bates is dead; I think those who read it before the movie would never have suspected she's an exhumed corpse. Bloch takes us right inside Bates's head, understanding the origins of his homicidal rage and impotent fury. The conversations between mother and son are ultimately one-sided, her vicious beratements taking on a pathetic poignancy, knowing as we do that they're Norman's own thoughts:

"I'm the one who has the strength. I've always had it. Enough for both of us. That's why you'll never rid of me, even if you really wanted to. Of course, deep down, you don't want to. You need me, boy. That's the truth, isn't it?"

Young Bloch in undated photo, from www.wisconsinhistory.org

One of my favorite parts was when Lila Crane is sneaking through the Bates home, looking for clues to her sister's disappearance, and finds Norman's library:

Here Lila found herself pausing, puzzling, then peering in perplexity at the incongruous contents of Norman Bates's library. A New Model of the Universe, The Extension of Consciousness, The Witch-Cult in Western Europe, Dimension and Being. These were not the books of a small boy, and there were equally out of place in the home of a rural motel proprietor. She scanned the shelves rapidly. Abnormal psychology, occultism, theosophy. Translations of La Bas, Justine. And here, on the bottom shelf, a nondescript assortment of untitled volumes, poorly bound. Lila pulled one out at random and opened it. The illustration that leaped out at her was almost pathologically pornographic.

Warner Books reprint (with stepback), 1982

We get some of Bloch's famous word play in that first line, as well as the "forbidden books" trope so popular in weird pulp fiction. Bloch wrote an unassuming little thriller that shows touches of real-life horror in places, and one that's as singularly important to the horror genre - pre-King of course - as anything by Lovecraft or Matheson or Levin. That it's overshadowed by its unparalleled film adaptation is no inherent fault, and Psycho should still be read and savored today. See more paperback editions here.

On Vacation

On vacation out of town, of course I've got my huge book list, and here are just some of the paperbacks I hope to acquire - so wish me luck guys. See you in about two weeks!
 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Headhunter by Michael Slade (1984): I Guarantee You That It Ain't Your Day - Chop Chop!

I got more than I bargained for with Headhunter, the debut novel from Michael Slade (a pseudonym for several Canadian criminal lawyers, mainly one Jay Clarke). It's much more complex and wide-ranging than I'd anticipated, less cheesy, smarter and more ferocious too. The Royal Canadian Mounted Police are after a brutal killer in Vancouver who decapitates women, sometimes sexually assaulting them, then places their heads on spikes... and then takes a picture of that to taunt the law with. The RCMP team is led by the haunted Robert DeClercq, a great and respected detective who retired after a tragedy involving his wife and daughter; he is now back doing what he does best. But at what price?

UK paperback reprint, 1993

What feels like dozens of characters and impressive set pieces of murder and fright are crammed into the 420 pages, as well as lots of detailed forensic and surveillance science. Decades-old events feature into the narrative, some more obviously than others. Great details of Vancouver city life, of New Orleans decadence, of frigid 19th century Canadian wastes are presented in which the reader can get lost. There's a voodoo ceremony and LSD trips and whole lot of graphic S&M and mutilation. The author(s) even throw in '70s British punk rock, using the Clash's tipply classic "Jimmy Jazz" as a clue (the lines "Cut off his ears and chop off his head/Police come looking for Jimmy Jazz...").

Overly-literal 1985 cover, Star Books UK

Slade's novel is a melange of behind-the-scenes police procedural, horror fiction tropes like decapitation and voodoo ceremonies, and true-crime serial killer exposé. But Slade definitely goes for a supernatural mood in several scenes despite writing a an otherwise completely realistic, if overheated, thriller. You won't find that in James Ellroy's works, when he upped the crime-horror ante with novels like The Black Dahlia and L.A. Confidential; I suppose that's why Slade's books were generally found on the horror shelves. The cover of this Onyx paperback from '86 is creepy but not all that eye-catching, although I'd say the quote from the author of Psycho is apt.


Anyway, there was lots to like about Headhunter, it definitely brings the '80s horror goodies, but by about page 300 I was a bit exhausted. I didn't mind the textbook-like pages on voodooism, serial killer psychology, the cannibalism of Native American tribes, even the international drug trade (this is one of those novels that includes a bibliography). But the scale, the twists, the complexity started to wear on me. Characterization is rich in some places and quite thin in others, and that narrative that skips about had me flipping back through pages, trying to remember someone's name or some plot point I might've only skimmed. Slade has continued in cult popularity, still writing, still publishing gruesome crime thrillers, and I remember seeing lots of his books around back in the day (Ghoul from 1987 seems to be a particular favorite of horror fans). Headhunter is pretty cool indeed but be prepared for some iffy acrobatics as Slade tries to keep you guessing to the very... last... sentence.

Act of Love by Joe R. Lansdale (1981): Feel the Knife Pierce You Intensely

Why oh why did I not keep my brand-new copy of Joe R. Lansdale's debut novel, Act of Love? It was 1991, I'd just flipped out over The Nightrunners, and got my hands on all his books that were in print at the time (which were mostly crime and westerns back then). Well, as I read the reviews on Amazon, I was reminded this was about cops hunting a serial killer of women - not really my horror thing back then. Ah well.... Still wonder if a strawberry really figures in the story.

But wait! Check out this cover, also from Zebra, the very same year! Hmmm.

The Girl Next Door by Jack Ketchum (1989): How Do the Angels Get to Sleep?

Whew, where to begin? The Girl Next Door has, in the near quarter-century since its publication, achieved a notoriety few other modern horror novels can match. It was the third novel from Dallas Mayr, written under his now-famous pseudonym Jack Ketchum. Now, I hadn't even heard of Ketchum or this book until the last five or six years, I guess around the time it was reprinted by Leisure Books. None of his other vintage-era books, Off Season (1980), Cover (1987), or She Wakes (1989), look familiar to me, and he didn't start getting nominated for the Bram Stoker Award till the mid-'90s by which time I'd stopped reading modern horror, so it seems the book's reputation grew as a result of the reprints and the internet. Which isn't to say it isn't deserved, because it is. Oh is it.

The Girl Next Door is loosely based on the mind-curdling 1965 torture/murder case of 16-year-old Sylvia Likens. While some readers, if not most, may balk at the depths to which Ketchum goes in "recreating" what happened, he fills out his book with enough convincing details so that the matter never seems exploited or cheapened. Ketchum is, for better or worse, a reliable and insightful guide as he delves into these places of heartlessness and cruelty found not in the supernatural or the extraterrestrial but, well, literally, next door. He presents it all in plain strong prose that neither titillates nor overstates; he is in command of his words and images in a way a cheap and foolish writer - whose ranks in the horror genre are legion - could only ever dream.

It's told in first person by David, 30 years after the horrific events, which occurred when he was about 12 years old. His regret and sadness and confusion set everything in motion. Pondering his three failed marriages, he attempts to tell the story. The whole story, without faltering, of when teenage Meg Loughlin and her 11-year-old sister Susan come to live with David's next-door neighbors, the Chandlers, after the girls' parents are killed in a car crash. Ruth Chandler, a distant relation to the Loughlin girls, middle-aged, a heavy smoker and drinker but not without her looks, is well-known to all the kids living on the tree-lined, dead-end street as the parent who will give beers to them while they hang out with her own pre-teen sons Willie, Woofer, and Donny. Her husband left the family years earlier, running off with another woman (which explains some of her future behavior towards Meg).

David becomes smitten with Meg in a not-quite-romantic way; he's three years younger than her anyway, but spends some nice, memorable moments with her early in the story. Cute, sweet, well-done, a yearning without knowing quite what one is yearning for. Which makes the following descent the more upsetting. When the boys try from a tree outside her window to spy on Meg undressing and are denied it, David's response is bitter and black: I could have smashed something. I could have torn that house to bits. That surprised me; it could have come straight from one of James Ellroy's noir crime novels, for sure (more on Ellroy later).

Overlook Connection Press 2002

The most difficult thing about reading the book is that you know where it's going. When it happens - when Ruth's abuse of Meg begins - it happens fast but it also happens slow, if you know what I mean. The pall of inescapable doom threads through the early narrative, a malevolence hovering over every scene of innocence. It waits. It waits. It will not be denied. There is simply no other word for what happens: torture, physical and mental and sexual. First restricted from eating on her own, Meg then physically defies Ruth in front of David and other boys. Outraged beyond measure, and with the help of her sons, Ruth ties her up in the abandoned bomb shelter in the basement and the horror starts. This goes beyond the "horror" genre into what Douglas Winter talked about: that horror is not a genre, but an emotion. An emotion that's going to settle in and stay awhile.

There are things you know you'll die before telling, things you know you should have died before ever having seen. 

I watched and saw.

Since Ketchum structures the novel as a troubled adult looking back on a traumatic occurrence in his past, The Girl Next Door reminded me of Stephen King's novella "The Body" (found in Different Seasons from 1982, and the basis for Stand By Me. I guess I don't need to tell you that). Still utterly haunted by Ruth, adult David slips in at times and explains why this or why that, and especially how he was able to stand by while Ruth orchestrated such horror and why his friends went along. And it simply makes sense. Kids are powerless. Kids are supposed to endure humiliation. Adults control every avenue of kids' lives. I find this especially convincing in children growing up in the early 1960s, when adult authority was divine order. The divide between the world of children and the world of adults was vast and unbridgeable. Why didn't he try to tell? Meg actually does, once, to a cop who doesn't take her very seriously. This causes the boys to begin to feel a vague contempt for her. (Let's not forget Matt Dillon's immortal words in that teenage riot classic Over the Edge: "A kid who tells on another kid is a dead kid"). Because, as David reminds us:

Shit, [adults] could just dump is in a river if they wanted to. We were just kids. We were property. We belonged to our parents, body and soul. It meant we were doomed in the face of any real danger from the adult world and that meant hopelessness, and humiliation and anger.

The kids know better than to try to tell. Telling is bullshit. Telling makes things worse. Telling is an insult and a cheat. The kids even play what they call "the Game," a questionable past-time which, when Ruth learns of it, wants to play. And that makes it all even easier for the kids to go along... it's all a game, right? If Ruth says it's okay, well, it's okay for the kids no matter what is inflicted upon flesh ("You said that we could cut her, Mrs. Chandler"). This is when David admits he "flicked a slow mental switch [and] turned off on [Meg] entirely." Because How could she be so dumb as to think a cop was going to side with a kid against an adult, anyway? So I think Ketchum does a dead-on job of getting into a mindset that would become a willing witness to Hell, even drink a Coke and play crazy eights while doing so. It is totally believable.

2005 Leisure Books reprint

So other neighborhood kids get involved and it's all just normal, they're spending boring summer afternoons in the basement of the Chandlers', hey, didja hear, they got a girl down there and they... do stuff to her. When describing the sniggering remarks and dispensed humiliations and then the torturous cruelty in unflinching detail, Ketchum is carefully dispassionate, even when things turn, unsurprisingly, sexual for the young boys, as well as for Ruth and even a young neighborhood girl (at first Ruth restricts the boys from touching Meg after she's been stripped, not because molestation or rape is wrong but... because who knows what diseases this whore has. Did you just feel your throat close up? Good). He has David wonder if it all would have happened had Meg not been so pretty, had her body not been young and health and strong, but ugly, fat, flabby. Possibly not. The inevitable punishment of the outsider. But he reconsiders as he looks back on it:

But it seems to me more likely that it was precisely because she was beautiful and strong, and we were not, that Ruth and the rest of us had done this to her. To make a sort of judgment on that beauty, on what it meant and didn't mean to us.

Notice it says 'Terror,' not 'Horror'

It's this kind of insight that allows Girl Next Door to work so well when you might think it couldn't: This is true, this is how people who do these things think. Debase, degrade, deflower. Once the words I FUCK FUCK ME are burned onto her stomach - yes, you read that right - it's as if the boys lose interest; Meg has been reduced to a nothing. David tries to help her escape, and he fails. He tries to tell his father, then his mother, but cannot find the words to express something so... so. I mean, could you? Knowing you knew the whole time? David realizes he's the only one who has the imagination to conceive of the enormity of what's going on. I think that's what makes this book stand out from other "extreme" horror novels. The darkness may be complete, but it is true and real.

You may not be surprised to learn that I read The Girl Next Door in a one-sitting white-heat rush, utterly compelled and spellbound, my eyes burning and wet by the end. I could feel a thick sadness in my chest and shoulders. But it's not without its faults, and I can't really go into the major one because it's a spoiler, but I understand it. I do. I've seen it in other books and films too. Can't really blame Ketchum either, I suppose. But none of the faults are the result of the subject matter or the graphic detail; this is an "extreme" novel done right, with an understanding and an honesty I found utterly sincere.

Look at it again, in case you forgot how dumb it was

This is no tawdry paperback filled with high-school horror hijinks, as the clueless cover implies; there is no fun nor ridiculous cheese. In fact, that Warner Books cover art is one of the most insidious of paperback horror covers ever, an affront to both readers and the book itself (I don't blame artist Lisa Falkenstern; it's likely she had no idea what cover she was illustrating). Who the fuck okayed it? Someone who doesn't give a shit about books, that's for sure.

In some of the Amazon reviews I skimmed over after finishing I saw that many people hated the fact that Ketchum fictionalized the Likens case, but so what? What Ketchum does with the novel is quite similar to what Ellroy did with The Black Dahlia: take a real-life case of murderous savagery and fictionalize it, inventing characters so as to probe the psychology of those involved in a way unavailable to us normally, to attempt an understanding of the weakness, the fear, the rage, that could lead to such incomprehensible acts. In this respect Ketchum's book has more in common with crime fiction than it does with horror fiction. Which is absolutely fine with me. Horror fiction or crime novel or a hellish concoction of both, or perhaps something else entirely, The Girl Next Door gets my highest, but most reserved, recommendations.

The Silence of the Lambs by Thomas Harris (1988): Don't Wanna Go Down to the Basement

Bought this battered, chewed-up (natch) first edition paperback copy of The Silence of the Lambs (St. Martin's Press June 1989) off the 10-cent rack at a local bookstore last week and spent the next day and a half utterly immersed in it. Larry King's "double-dare-ya" is no joke, guys, as there's no putting this one down. About 10 years ago I read Red Dragon (1981) and was duly impressed, although today I remember little of it; I put off reading Silence for so long because the movie is so etched in my - and everyone's - imagination. But what struck me most about the book is that while Thomas Harris gets credit for creating one of the great pop villains of all time, his female protagonist is every bit that villain's equal. Before Hopkins and Foster even stepped before the camera, Hannibal Lector and Clarice Starling had been created and depicted with total mastery and psychological realism.

I've wondered before if Silence can be considered horror, and after reading the novel I'm still not sure if it is or not. The violence and degradation is presented so starkly that there is nary a whiff of exploitation or gleeful malevolence in Harris's intent. However, in this edition I found, the original paperback from 1989, you can see who the book was being marketed to originally, with Clive Barker's blurb emblazoned prominently on the front cover... something quite noticeable in its absence on the later movie tie-in edition.

While reading it the film buff in me marveled at the screenwriter's adaptation of such a psychologically taut and precise work; he knew just what to leave in and what to leave out. What got left out works wonderfully in the novel but would have weighed the film down: Starling's precarious place as a rookie on such a treacherous case, Crawford's dying wife, the intricacies and political jostlings of the FBI Academy, Lector's maroon eyes and six fingers on one hand, and especially, the hideous history of Jame Gumb presented in almost police-report detail.

Harris is that kind of popular writer that can move a story forward with power, with conviction, but doesn't stint on those tiny insights into human nature that convince you you're reading something real, by a writer who's lived and isn't just repeating what he's heard. Describing the crude dirty joke to Crawford that gave Gumb the serial-killer nickname "Buffalo Bill," Starling discovered she had traded feeling frightened for feeling cheap. Of the two, she preferred feeling frightened. Later, when in a rural funeral home processing the monstrously wounded victim found in a river, Crawford knows he made the right choice in plucking Starling from school to help in this case:

Crawford saw that in this place, Starling was heir to the granny women, to the wise women, the herb healers, the stalwart country women who have always done the needful, who keep the watch and when the watch is over, wash and dress the country dead.

One of the men who had a relationship with Gumb describes him well and truly, chilling in its simplicity: You always felt the room was a little emptier when he came in. Whew. That's good. And poor Catherine Martin, Gumb's current victim, who in that horrid hole dreams the dark came into her, insidious, up her nose and into her ears, damp fingers of dark proposed themselves to each opening of her body.

As for Lecter, he is quite what we saw in the movie version, although Dr. Chilton (god, that asshole!) and imposing orderly Barney both have insights into his nature that are quite penetrating: Lecter is not afraid of pain, of solitude; no, what he fears most is boredom and indignity. A mind as vast and all-consuming as Lecter's cannot bear those things, and it is with these coins that Starling attempts to bargain...

If you've seen the movie but haven't read the book thinking there's no point: read the book. If you've read the book but not seen the movie - what? - then see it and marvel over its wonderful adaptation to the screen. If you've done both, do both again! I think both are popular culture in its finest hour, horror or not.

Next, Lecter dropped a note to Dr. Frederick Chilton, in federal protective custody, suggesting that he would be paying Dr. Chilton a visit in the near future. After this visit, he wrote, it would make sense for the hospital to tattoo feeding instructions on Chilton's forehead to save paperwork.

The Wolfen by Whitley Strieber (1978): Werewolf? There Wolf!

How does it feel to be ripped to pieces: will there be desperate agony or will some mechanism of the brain provide relief?

Total coincidence, but here's yet another novel that works in both the crime and the horror genres. Less well-known than its loose 1981 film adaptation with Albert Finney, Whitley Strieber's The Wolfen is a mainstream thriller through and through but with a strong evocation of, and rational explanation for, vampire and werewolf myths throughout history. The Wolfen are a superior species of wolf-like creatures who have till now hidden themselves from civilization. While certainly not evil by any means, the ferocity and intelligence with which they dispatch of their human victims lends them a malevolent yet fascinating nobility and grace.

Avon 1988 reprint

The police procedural aspects are in full effect from the start: detective partners George Wilson and Becky Neff are total opposites, a veritable Felix and Oscar of the police force who are much resented by their superiors; Wilson is an aging lazy slob with a real attitude problem, and Becky - well, Becky's a woman. And for mid-1970s New York City cops, that's practically a crime itself. Even Wilson seems to resent her, when he's not falling for her. The novel begins with two hapless police officers finding themselves face-to-face with the terrifying Wolfen in a city impound lot, and then torn apart before they can barely reach their weapons. The grisly attack baffles and sickens the police force, and Wilson and Neff get down to the exhausting business of tracking the killer. Of course they have no idea what they're up against.

Strieber

At a loss, Wilson and Neff enlist Ferguson, a zoologist from the Museum of Natural History; he does some serious research based on the clues they've given him and realizes these creatures were the impetus for the werewolf legend. More primitive people, coming into contact with the Wolfen, couldn't believe that animals so smart weren't part human... Ferguson begins to respect the Wolfen, and thinks he can communicate with them peacefully. You know how that's gonna go.

Now, if you can believe that these super-wolves can exist alongside mankind and yet not leave behind any trace of themselves, you're probably really gonna love The Wolfen. In fact I had a bit of a hard time suspending disbelief at first, but Strieber is skilled and convincing in presenting a fairly believable pack of intelligent and cooperative creatures and their thought processes. What makes the novel unique is this depiction of their furtive lives on the fringes of human society. There are some terrifically suspenseful moments when Wilson and Neff inadvertently come close to the Wolfen's lair in an abandoned building. Lots of police department and city politics may detract from the eerie fact that the two cops are now being stalked through the city by these "monsters," and high-rise apartment buildings are no protection. These animals know that the two humans are aware of them and it angers them. When the Wolfen ambush on Neff and Wilson fails, they go after Dr. Evans, the medical examiner to whom the cops revealed their suspicions:

Then they were on him, pulling and tearing, ripping full of rage, spitting the bloody bits out , angry that the two important ones had been missed, angry that this one also dared confront them with his evil knowledge. They had cracked open the head and plunged their claws into the brains, plunged and torn to utterly and completely destroy the filthy knowledge.

The paperback at the top (Bantam 1981) seems like the movie tie-in edition, while this bland and amateurish cover, the first-edition paperback (my copy, Bantam July 1979) basically meant the publisher was trying to appeal to the widest possible audience, people who wouldn't buy one of those down-market trashy-looking horror novels with their lurid paperback cover art. The Wolfen simply don't go after screaming blonde ladies as the pupils of those stupid cut-out eyes insist. That said, the book should still find a pretty wide audience because it is definitely a gripping, suspenseful, scary read; I found it compulsively readable. Strieber's first novel has a good balance between pulpy creature horror and investigative police procedural, between awe and wonder at the predatory perfection of the Wolfen and the stark inescapable fear their kind will always engender in that weaker and stupider species, mankind.

The Black Dahlia by James Ellroy (1987): If You Want Blood You've Got It

My introduction to the disturbing real-life horror story that is the death of Elizabeth Short came in the form of James Ellroy's novel The Black Dahlia. I've been thinking about Ellroy since he's got this new TV series starting up on the history of Los Angeles murders and scandals, as well as my recent musings about the intersection of crime and horror fiction. The two genres delve into human depravity but approach it in different manners: crime is generally matter-of-fact in its dealings with violence; horror wants to reduce you to whimpers and overwhelm you. It's all in the intent.

The genres seem to split fans too: how many people deny The Silence of the Lambs is horror? And yet it's about a serial killer and a cannibal. But because it's concerned with the procedural aspects of tracking down criminals, and not solely trying to freak you out, it gets a pass on the horror label. Horror, to paraphrase Poe and Lovecraft, is about that singular frisson of terror itself. But The Black Dahlia thrives in both arenas.

I read The Black Dahlia for the first time in early 1991. Why did I choose to read it? I'd never read a crime novel before. In those days I was, like many young men, pretty much obsessed with Sherilyn Fenn and her character Audrey Horne on David Lynch's 1990/91 TV show, "Twin Peaks." Her noir-tastic photo from the previous summer's Rolling Stone magazine was one I couldn't shake.

Then when I saw the artist's (Stephen Peringer) rendering of Short on the cover of the Mysterious Press paperback of The Black Dahlia awhile later, I was struck by its similarity to Fenn. I had to read the book; it was that simple. And it turned out to be one of the most horrifying novels I'd ever read.

The following is a review I wrote of the book nearly 10 years ago for some long-gone website or another, and I think it's wholly appropriate for Too Much Horror Fiction...

The woman is severed, the two halves of her pale, bloodless body placed as carefully in a Los Angeles lot as one would hang a painting in an art gallery. Her face bears a split-open camprachico smile, battered sunken eyes, a pulped nose. Cigarette burns stubble her breasts, one of which is still attached by only a gristle of meat. Beneath the rib cage, nothing; she is disassembled. Her second half begins above her pubic bone, her legs spread in a necrophiliac's wet dream pose, an open gash like an arrow pointing towards her vagina. Her knees are broken and a triangle of flesh is missing from her left thigh. We can easily read the secrets she will never tell: days of unspeakable torture, and, in her portrait photos, of dreams deformed into horror. She will come to be known as the Black Dahlia, a young woman named Elizabeth Short, and her murderer will never be found.

Los Angeles, 1947. Two young pugilistic cops burning with ambition and haunted pasts, Bucky Bleichert and Lee Blanchard, become obsessed with the alluring murder victim. Glamor photos of her in tight black dresses with her pale blue eyes - as well as the gruesome images of the famous corpse she would come to be - become talismanic. Each finds his life in disarray because of it. Now all of the LAPD is on the case as the largest manhunt in the state's history gathers to find the murderer, but in the end only one man will be strong enough to handle (or, indeed, care) about the truth.

Ellroy rubs our noses in the grit and the dirt of investigating the murder of a beautiful girl on the skids; as Bucky and Lee roust lowlifes in LA's warzones you can smell the cheap liquor, the stench of bum urine, feel the California heat as it shimmers on the blacktop, your bourbon hangover gripping your skull like a vice as you try to slice through interdepartmental bullshit, the politics and the lies, to find out who killed a worthless two-bit beautiful piece of cheap Hollywood cooze (as Ellroy himself might put it).

The atmosphere is heavy with neon, rain-slicked streets at night and reeking bachelor pads, dive bars, cheap smut-movie sets, with sunlight filtering through venetian blinds, men and women frozen in a time we can only imagine as film noir. The dialogue is realistic, staccato, and filled with tough-guy slang of bebop jazz and cop-shop talk liberally peppered with the racist and sexist epithets of the period. The labyrinthine plot twists and turns, with a long jaunt to a filthy Mexico graveyard, where Bucky literally digs up his past; to the early Hollywood machinations of (real-life) Keystone Kops director Mack Sennett and mobster Bugsy Siegel and Mickey Cohen. Lee Blanchard disappears, leaving Bucky to fend off three women: Kay Lake, who loved Lee; Madeleine Sprague, a Dahlia-lookalike; and the Black Dahlia herself, who even in death casts a spell over men.

Elizabeth Short's final hours are revealed in gut-wrenching detail that is true horror (She bit on the gag and blood from where I took the Joe DiMaggio to her teeth came out due to her biting so hard. I stuck the knife down to a little bone I felt, then I twisted it). The breathless climax is drawn out over the final 30 pages in a jagged wave of secrets uncovered and killers come forth. Ellroy completes the novel with the killer caught and in his wish-fulfilling conclusion, one of the saddest of all unsolved murder mystery cases is finally laid to rest.

This is a relentlessly intense pulpy crime novel, bursting at the seams with violence, perversion, macho aggression (and weakness), and the gutter-glimmer of a Hollywood buried beneath over 60 years of history. Ellroy gives you your money's worth, that's for sure, and The Black Dahlia a must-read for a horror-fiction fan. It is so dark it's virtually a horror novel anyway; horror not in the sense of Stephen King but in the direst sense of the word: awe at the depths to which humanity can sink and how it stains all our lives. It is only the first book in his LA Quartet, which comprises some of the bleakest, most ambitious, and most violent crime novels ever penned. Ellroy calls Black Dahlia his "Valediction in Blood" and it's easy to see why: as a boy, his own mother was killed by an unknown man, and here he has solved one murder for another. RIP.

Cellars by John Shirley (1982): Well, New York City Really Has It All

Cellars (Avon May 1982) is the first book I've read by John Shirley, a multi-talented author and musician who has published novels and short stories not just in the horror fiction field but also in crime/suspense and science fiction. SF icons like William Gibson and Bruce Sterling have named his early works as influential on the legendary cyberpunk movement, although Shirley certainly never became as famous or as widely-read as those two. Shirley had actually been a singer in a punk-rock band and since his background was in that kind of counterculture, it's no surprise that his second horror novel, an Avon Books original, is also seen as a precursor to - you guessed it - splatterpunk.

I'd heard of Shirley for years, but his books have only recently become widely available in mass-market paperbacks; his 1992 novel Wetbones and his 1997 collection of short horror stories Black Butterflies have been republished by Leisure Books. Both apparently fall into the "graphic horror" category; Cellars has its share of gore and many think it paved the way for Clive Barker and the like, as well as today's extreme horror writers. With a grim view of human nature, a concern for urban fringe characters who've fallen through society's cracks, and the whole "sex, drugs, and rock 'n' roll" attitude - an attitude which Shirley displays much more effectively and believably than the splatterpunks - I can definitely see how Shirley must have inspired Skipp and Spector and David Schow. I can't imagine something like The Light at the End or The Kill Riff without it.

Cellars begins with the investigation of a series of what appear to be ritual murders, bodies flayed open in abandoned New York City subway stops or dirt-strewn basements of old apartment buildings. Bizarre scribblings accompany the bodies and the investigating cop, weary Cyril Gribner, calls in Carl Lanyard. A skeptical journalist for a trashy occult tabloid who had once been an assistant professor of anthropology, Lanyard is in New York to interview Madelaine Springer, a hopeful, beautiful actress with unwanted psychic powers. When Lanyard identifies the phrases as probably ancient Persian, and referring to the malevolent deity Ahriman, the action proper can begin. Well, all right! Darian Trismegestes, Lanyard's boss at the tabloid, offers him an oddly huge amount of cash to hang around and write about the investigation.

Lanyard is an interesting character, a divorced, somewhat troubled man, a definite skeptic but still seeing strange dark shapes swirling around and who heard voices as a bullied kid. Is his skepticism preventing him from seeing what's truly going on? Gribner sees quite a bit of what's really going on when he realizes his nine-year-old nephew who's living with him may also be involved (finding his nephew in the bathtub listening to a strange growling coming from the drain is a chilling moment). Then there is Joey Minder, a pompous theater and film producer with Madelaine under his thumb, who is deeply involved with the occult world and sees human sacrifice as a way to gain unlimited power. Don't they all.

2006 edition

 Shirley's style only hits a few sour notes; his writing is smooth and assured, and the dialogue rings true. He has a detailer's eye for the the gritty, nonsupernatural dangers of New York City streets of 1981 and the attendant drug trade, criminal youth, abandoned buildings and miles of subways drenched in graffiti, and filthy homeless people - less like a horror novel and more like big-city crime fiction, although at times his penchant for adding a mildly askew, hallucinatory effect to these descriptions reminded me of Ramsey Campbell. He's walked these mean streets and the authenticity is palpable. But at 300 pages Cellars feels a bit overlong; some pruning could have worked well in the middle of the book to make it more of the intense, shuddering experience Shirley seems to want it to be, quick and dirty and raw and unblinking. (Cellars was partially rewritten and republished in 2006).

Shirley is a punk, punk, a punk rocker

The graphic quality of the ritual murders and the environs seems less intended to shock or upset than to simply pull back the curtain and deal honestly with human depravity. In that sense Cellars also has more in common with crime fiction than with horror. But then Shirley's cult members aren't just psycho; in the end they're right. The Blessed People - many of whom are monstrous and bloodthirsty children who swarm through the sewers - are worshiping not a figment of their deranged imaginations but a monstrous creature that actually lives below the city, below the subways: the Head Underneath. I just love that name, which hints at some sociopathic child's fantasy. Once this guy appears at the wonderfully gross and sadistic climax, there's no doubt Cellars is a vintage horror novel without apology. But then punk rock means never saying sorry.