World Dracula Day!

Dracula. First published May 26, 1897. I consider it the most important, most essential, horror novel of all. All of horror is in his shadow. Enjoy some of these fangtastic vintage covers!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

"You play your wits against me, mine, who commanded armies hundreds of years before you were born?"

To the Devil's Ballet: The Cover Art of Robert Heindel

These pale, haunting, geometric sketches for very late Sixties and very early Seventies occult paperbacks from Signet Books are a refreshing palate-cleanser for when the lurid and tacky covers one usually sees becomes overwhelming. Whispers work wonders here, thanks to the delicate, intimate style of illustrator Robert Heindel (1938-2005), an artist I only learned of after spying his signature "R. Heindel" on a recently purchased copy of the 1970 edition of The Mephisto Waltz.

The doll's head in a circle, carefully drawn hands at the piano, and eyes closed in repose reminded me of a favorite cover for a book I have been unable to find cheaply, the intriguingly titled A Feast of Eggshells. Somewhere in my searches I discovered another similar cover and noted that signature, then began to track down more by Heindel. Which is how I discovered that he's a world-famous painter of ballet and other dance, whose artwork has been collected by Princess Diana, Andrew Lloyd Weber, and George Lucas! Claaaaasssy for a guy whose earliest works appeared on these "easy-to-see large-type" Gothic/occult paperback originals. I love it!

  

I found five other horror covers from Heindel: Neither the Sea nor the Sand, Suffer a Witch, Along Came a Spider, The Ouija Board, and The Devil Boy. Personally, I think these are simply wonderful, as they feature all the signifiers of genre works of the era: creepy kids, eerie witches, haunted houses, Rosemary's Baby. If anyone knows of other covers he did like this, please let me know...

 

 

More interesting is that I've been seeing his work on more famous paperbacks for decades and didn't even realize it: his most well-known cover illustrations are for Signet's series of Ayn Rand reprints. Crazy, right? You can even buy the originals of these here.

Recent Horror Reads

Some capsule reviews of three horror novels I read early this year; none exactly essential, alas, but the first title is recommended.

With its flame-swept cover of a mysterious beauty transforming into another mysterious beauty, you might think I would've skipped this book when I found it at Powell's last year. You'd be wrong! Shouldn't surprise you now that I picked it up solely because of its cover art and also because I'd never ever heard of it before. Then, lo and behold, I was rewarded with several hours of creepy, darkly romantic, even refreshing reading. Yes: The Burning Ground (Pocket Books, July 1987, cover by Peter Caras) more than met expectation. Author Madeena Spray Nolan, whoever that is, writes in a smart, modern, lively style that belies Gothic romance origins.

Odd to feel so sad at the death of someone I had never known. Back cover synopsis a fair inkling of what to expect inside, while Nolan elevates material somewhat by her knowing skills and insights into hidden human motivation; dialogue comes from having listened to others, not from imagination. Entertaining read with elements of (mild) horror, occult, mystery, contemporary romance (couple overheated sex scenes work, maybe a laugh), and Gothic fiction. Some grim poetic imagery works well. At base is desire to live a creative life, and the stranglehold grip it can have on people whether they want it or not—and worse, whether they have talent or not.

Nolan's skill with suspense and the supernatural is laudable; the climax taut; the denouement satisfying. I could find little about Nolan online, other than that she wrote a children's book and another horror novel. But note how thoughtfully Pocket Books moved their logo to accommodate Caras's illustration!

Featuring a sexually reductive cover—from Playboy Paperbacks, natch—Satyr by Linda Crockett Gray (July 1981) is about as subtle. Imad Gurdev is a real-life satyr, escaping from his kind's historic monastic abode in the wilds of Turkey to the sleazy grindhouse streets of Tampa, FL, to get his rocks off and blaspheme. He hides his goat-legs in baggy clothes and plays mind-tricks on his female victims so they have only vague memories of the rape. Anti-rape crusader Martha Boozer speaks to high schools and women's groups—at one point she blithely shows the latter a slide show not just of questionable ancient art but also "kiddie porn" and then a snuff film "confiscated by Tampa police." Talk about triggering.

Operating almost as a feminist manifesto in the Dworkin/MacKinnon/Brownmiller mold but also offering up stalking scenarios like a slasher film, Satyr features some moments of suspense as the two characters hurtle towards confrontation, and the obligatory research visit to an anthro prof who declares "These mixed-breed creatures where the human and beast are combined have existed in every culture I have studied." Well fuckin' duh. Fortunately the other older satyrs aren't such creepos and follow the apostate to America's wang to punish and destroy him. Though not terribly written or paced—I mean, it's published by Playboy, not Zebra—I have no reason to recommend the novel.

The late Brian McNaughton is also a writer of some real ability, but it's wasted mostly on nonsense in Satan's Mistress (Carlyle Books, 1982 reprint of 1978 original), number two in a Satanic/occult series that is fairly infamous for its UK cover art (this American edition looks like adult bookstore fodder). Family of three, father, mother (with a witchy history), and son, moves into an upstate New York mill, we learn mother's own father raped her as he was leader of a religious cult and had declared himself God. Slooowly weird stuff starts to happen, dreams of hot redheaded chicks, mom and son have some sexual tension (ugh) and whatnot. There's a secret room in the basement, somebody left a lot of books down here, oh look it's the Necronomicon! Let's go ask the old lawyer nearby who also happens to be a pulp horror aficionado and Lovecraft expert all about it: "I had it this afternoon from a thoroughly reliable source that, when 'The Call of Cthulhu' was first printed in 1928, Albert Einstein panicked. He had drafted a letter urging Farnsworth Wright, Lovecraft's editor, in the strongest possible terms, not to print any more stories on similar themes..."

I did enjoy the Halloween party sequence—writing good party scenes is hard, all those characters mingling and drinking and flirting all at once, and I enjoy a good one whether in real life or on the page. Still, I don't understand how an ostensible horror writer can spend so much time writing about nothing and so little time on, you know, horror. Isn't it more fun to write of horrific events and encounters than of a neighbor's pack of dogs or a teenage boy's crush or the New York commercial art world? Grady Hendrix told me the book works better if you read it along with the other in the series. Again, I liked McNaughton's bright, adept approach, he knows people and life (not all horror writers do, one of my constant criticisms), and the climax gets Yog-Sothothy, but I'm not rushing to read the others. Although Mistress does contain my favorite line of the year so far: He went and changed to his work clothes, a pair of jeans that the Ramones would have discarded. Gabba gabba hey, that's hilarious.

This Place is Creepy and It's Somber Too

Something Evil by Arthur Hoffe (1968): Oh, Sister

After half a dozen chapters I knew Something Evil (Avon Books, Sept 1968) wasn't gonna be evil enough for me. The opening prologue, in italics—which I kinda hate—is set literally on a dark and stormy night with a guy sneaking up to a spooky old house, finding creepy statues in a stable, and then hiding when a woman comes running in... followed by another who then, to the man's horror, stabs the first woman! O horrors. Dude books off into the "murky blackness":

A flash of lightning illumined her face as she stared in fury after the retreating figure. Her eyes, in the light of the electric bolt, were deep, piercing, wild—the eyes of a thing gone mad.

Following chapters are set on the foggy New England coast, it's the 19th century, and you'll meet a cast of characters from any period melodrama, engaged in boilerplate soap operatics with the Gothic flair (moodiness, gloominess, doominess, craziness, drunkeness, murderousness) and one morning reading over coffee I realized the twist. I skipped to the final pages and, lo and behold, there it was. There's an incest angle (god again?) and a Psycho angle and a nice wrap-up with all the ugliness politely put away.

My impression is that most Gothic paperbacks of this era followed, as strictly as any Harlequin romance or detective series, the most restrictive of conventions, with nary a whiff of originality or uniqueness (I believe in some cases publishers had writers sign contracts to this effect). Now I'm always looking for something, anything, to relieve this conformity of genre, but Something Evil doesn't have it. Even searching for author Arthur Hoffe turns up precisely nothing other than this tome. Out of the void and back into the void.

But I was happy to find the cover artist acknowledged on the copyright page, one Bob Foster. Since Something Evil has always been a minor fave cover (I mean who doesn't love baby alligators, altho' I didn't read enough to see if they're actually in the book), I was happy to look up Foster and find his resumé includes lots of '60s and '70s science fiction paperback covers, along with other illustrations of the day. So let's say something good came out of Something Evil.

 

 

 

 

Dead End Zone for a Dead End Girl

The Gothic Cover Art of Victor Kalin

These 1960s paperback covers comprise only a fraction of the output of American-born illustrator Victor Kalin (1919-1991). The man was incredibly prolific, with his work appearing first in the slick magazines of the 1940s, then thriving during the paperback boom of the 1950s and '60s. In the later '60s and into the 1970s Kalin moved on to painting record album covers. His art really is iconic for each decade it appeared in; you've seen plenty of his work without, perhaps, even knowing his name!