Love from beyond the grave - it's a common theme in horror fiction. Emotional bonds made during life, our superstitious forefathers thought, surely cannot simply disappear when one of the lovers dies; that powerful and undeniable connection with another must carry on even into eternity, right? Well, yes; the person
living still carries that torch - we all love people who've passed on - but what about the lover who
dies? Do
their emotions continue on? Well, I seriously doubt it myself, but
Bernard Taylor's second novel,
Sweetheart, Sweetheart, utilizes this aspect of the genre to pretty decent effect, creating a female ghost who likes her men... a
lot.
Ghosts often seem to be made not of ectoplasm and smoke and the like but of actual human emotions like love, like hate, like jealousy and possessiveness. The places they haunt are redolent of their strongest passions. Most of the horror fiction I've read has actually not been in this area, just as I haven't read a lot of satanic possession stories. I find it - them - quite old-fashioned. They are, but they can still be effectively creepy.
Sweetheart, Sweetheart is that. I don't know if I agree with
Charles L. Grant, who chose it as his selection for the
100 greatest horror novels, but with his love of subtle moods and shadows I can see why he so admired it.
1990s reprint from Leisure Books
Mostly set in a cozy cottage in the English countryside, Taylor carefully details the homecoming of David Warwick, who had been living in New York City for years until the deaths of this twin brother, Colin, and sister-in-law, Helen, bring him back. They had lived in the cottage; Helen died horribly falling off the roof trying to rescue her kitten while Colin died in a vicious car wreck days later. David takes up residence there and over time meets the quaint locals who are the tiniest bit taken aback seeing as how he's Colin's twin. He meets Jean, the hypersensitive caretaker for the cottage; her father knows some of the secrets from the cottage's past.
UK paperback
There are a few sad, touching moments as David grieves for his brother, with whom in recent years he'd not been close, and especially when he sees the remains of the car he'd been driving in the crash that killed him. As he learns more about Colin and Helen's lives at the cottage, he also seems ambivalent about his girlfriend Shelagh back in New York as well as his emotionally-stunted elderly father, who resents Colin's final attempt at reaching out to David. The mystery deepens as David learns more about the cottage's previous tenants and their unfortunate demises. Then there's the body he finds buried in the garden. And the spirit that so obviously stalks the halls... and David's bedroom.
1977 original hardcover
Like a lot of ghost-haunting fiction
Sweetheart takes its own sweet time getting to the good stuff, as it were, trying to build suspense and discomfort - although honestly even
that stuff doesn't get going until nearly the halfway mark. But once it does it doesn't let up. Read carefully in the first half; I didn't - I almost didn't finish the book, it has such a leisurely build-up - and so when everything is falling into place near the climax I had to flip back to figure out some characters' relevance. I really did like the horrifying culmination, sad and bloody and shocking as it was.
When I first saw
Sweetheart's hardcover art I knew I had to read it - a '70s dude nuzzling a skull-headed woman, awesome! The Ballantine paperback from '79 is the edition I read, which at first glance seems a romance but then you realize the letters are stylized blood; the glaring eye of the madwoman is pretty wicked too (thanks to artist
George Ziel). I don't get why both depict mansions; it's definitely a cottage that the ghost-lady is haunting. And that is one dirty ghost-lady, David finds out, who knows just how to keep the men in the cottage from ever leaving.
Ever.
Gorgeous, gorgeous, utterly gorgeous cover art (artist unknown, alas - *update: it's actually George Ziel) for a novel I've only recently found out about, a sort of fantasy-horror about evil and mind-controlling plants. I love everything about it, and don't you? Gwen, in Green you can be sure has been added to my must-have list! Read a review here, which features the UK paperback.
Speaking of my must-have list: this past weekend I took a mini-vacation up to my hometown in South Jersey and was able to visit that used bookstore I worked at in the early '90s, now called Bogart's Books. Armed with that list, and with the memories of many vintage-era horror "classics" on the shelves, I went in Friday morning and... bought nearly 20 paperback horror novels!
I couldn't believe the stuff I found, couldn't even afford to buy everything I wanted. Some stuff I wanted but didn't buy because it was in poor shape - Skipp and Spector's The Cleanup, Strieber's The Hunger, Leiber's Night's Black Agents - but what I did pick up will keep this site in good stead for some time. There is Masterton and Garton and Wright and Etchison and Hodge and Rice and more, much more. Hell, I even snagged a copy of John McCarty's essential and completely thorough Splatter Movies: Breaking the Last Taboo of the Screen, from 1984 (cover image from Blue Eyes of the Broken Doll).
Also, my girlfriend is on her own little vacation and stopped in at the famous Powell's City of Books in Portland, OR, and called to say she'd found a few gems for me, some Grant, Matheson, and F. Paul Wilson, as I recall. Lucky me!
And on a personal note, I probably haven't mentioned it here but I've been laid off so far this entire year... till this week. Now that I'm back to full-time work I'm not sure if I'll be updating Too Much Horror Fiction as often as I have been. But I always make time to read - in fact, I don't even have to make time to read; I just read, and always have - and now I've got more than a dozen novels added to my shelves and to-read list. Oh well, I wouldn't have it any other way!
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