Sweetheart, Sweetheart by Bernard Taylor (1977): She's Hot, She's Sexy, and She's Dead

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.

The Elementals by Michael McDowell (1981): Just a Meanness in This World

Using the well-worn but welcome literary trope of a rich and influential Southern family who suffers grief and hardship, The Elementals is Michael McDowell's fourth paperback original horror novel from Avon Books. Meet Mother Marian Savage, matriarch of the Savage family from Mobile, Alabama. Although her strangely ritualistic funeral forms the novel's prologue, her spirit, for lack of a better word, hovers about her adult children and grandchild as the story continues. But it is not only Mother Savage who will hold nightmare sway over her brood ("Savage mothers eat their children up!"). With touches of the Gothic and the surreal, McDowell has wrought a not-quite-ghost story that's both intimately real and metaphysically unreal.

Surviving son Dauphin Savage and his wife Leigh, as well as Leigh's family the McCrays - mother Big Barbara, brother Luker, and his 13-year-old daughter India - try to escape the oppressive weight of mother's memory by spending the summer at Beldame, a bit of land on the Gulf with three Victorian homes on it. The family summers here have been going on for decades. With them is Odessa Red, the Savages' long-employed black servant, who knows virtually every secret there is about the family. Even, perhaps, why two of Beldame's homes are livable, but the third is, astonishingly, slowly being buried beneath an enormous dune of blinding white and sugar-fine beach sand. Indeed, it is piling into the rooms through every crevice and crack; it did not merely encroach upon the house, it had actually begun to swallow it... sand covered the entire front of the house to a line well above the verandah roof.

McDowell smartly pays out his story in even, rational measures, never overplaying it as he gives mild hints through dialogue, image, and circumstance that something unnatural is going on in that third house. This vacation won't be pleasurable: Big Barbara's given up her bourbon-soaked afternoons and worries about her crumbling marriage to local politician Lawton McCray, who wants to buy Beldame from Dauphin for oil drilling. None of the adults will go near the third house; Luker and Dauphin have vague disturbing memories of it from their childhood.

When India, the bright, charmingly foul-mouthed, New York-born young teenager driven to lassitude by the maddening heat during the day and the dead-silent blackness of night, becomes fascinated by the third house, she asks Odessa to help her take pictures of it. Odessa might be uneducated and superstitious but she's loyal to the family, goes along with the girl. Later, India shows her father the photograph:

It was a photo of the verandah showing the handsome curve of the dune that was overtaking the side of the third house. But Luker saw at once the fat gray creature that was huddled behind the low porch railing.... Luker thought that it might be the animated fetus of an elephant. Its white pupil stared out into the camera lens.

"It makes me want to vomit," said India matter-of-factly.

*shiver* And just what are the "elementals" you ask? Wisely McDowell alludes to them subtly; they are something like three-dimensional hallucinations, living between the very molecules of the air, the land, the sea, the house. They are human weaknesses and wounds and rot and heat and they can recreate themselves as us... imperfectly. The beleaguered family will battle them, but hopelessly, and one will see with their very own eyes the full extent of the power of the elementals.

Overall The Elementals made me think of those morbid 19th century photos of families posing with their dead children, which is quite a tone to recreate. Sadly it's out of print - as are all of McDowell's novels - but I'd love to see The Elementals (inexpensively) reprinted with a more accurate and evocative cover; there are plenty of weird and striking images from which to choose, not the least the house filling with sand; also apparitions with sand spilling out of their mouths; a lone black-and-orange sail on the Gulf horizon; and a monstrous blind baby that can still find its way by using its huge misshapen ears to hear the final tortured breaths of its victims...

Update 2014: You can now purchase a new trade paperback edition of The Elementals from Valancourt Books! Click here.

Burnt Offerings by Robert Marasco (1973): Burning Down the House

Part of the recommended reading list in Stephen King's Danse Macabre, this slim first novel Burnt Offerings occupies part of that territory of early '70s horror bestsellers mostly forgotten today, ironically because of King's own impact on the field (comparisons to other then-current classics The Other, The Exorcist, and Rosemary's Baby on paperback cover: check). Robert Marasco's lifelong output was very small, although his only play, Child's Play, was a big Tony Award-winning Broadway hit in 1970, and it sounds pretty appropriately macabre. He wrote only one other novel, Parlor Games. If you think I'm setting up a forgotten classic... I'm not. Alas.


Burnt Offerings concerns the Rolfe family after they rent a lovely big house in Long Island to escape the summer in Queens, and all the muted, allusive horrors they face after. I suppose they should have been clued in when the mansion rents for a measly $900 for the entire season. As a bonus, the renters, brother and sister Allardyce, reveal that their elderly mother will reside, unseen, in an upstairs room the whole time the Rolfes are there and all they have to do is provide her meals; another warning bell. So soon come the subtle terrors, the ambiguous chills, the inexplicable accidents, as the atmosphere darkens and the house - or is it Mrs. Allardyce? - begins to wield some unearthly power over the family. You know how that goes, dedicated follower of horror fiction. Caretakers in this type of work never seem to make out well, do they? And they don't.

King has stated its influence on The Shining, which is probably clear from that simple description. I read it in 1994 during what was my last real heavy-duty jag of horror-fiction reading until I began this blog. So I dug out an old notebook from then in which I wrote about various books and movies and lo and behold, while I'd written down that I'd actually read Burnt Offerings, it seems I didn't write anything about it. Not a good sign. But I can recall my impression pretty well, and that is, despite some glowing reviews on Amazon, where it gets called a "seminal horror novel," I was underwhelmed by its subtlety and felt it promised more than delivered, that its final reveal simply wasn't that scary or effective (I kinda dig the movie version though, with the quite astonishing cast of Karen Black, Oliver Reed, Burgess Meredith, and Bette Davis). Probably I was spoiled because around the same time I was reading Ligotti's Grimscribe, Leiber's Our Lady of Darkness, Machen's "The Great God Pan," and Jackson's Haunting of Hill House; what mostly-forgotten novel could hold up to that classic line-up?

Robert Marasco (1936 - 1998)

The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson (1959): Who Are the Mystery Girls?

No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality; even larks and katydids are supposed, by some, to dream. Hill House, not sane, stood by itself against its hills, holding darkness within; it had stood so for 80 years and might for 80 more. Within, walls continued upright, bricks met neatly, floors were firm, and doors sensibly shut; silence lay steadily against the wood and stone of Hill House, and whatever walked there, walked alone.

Often cited as the greatest opening paragraph in horror fiction, Shirley Jackson's now-classic haunted house ghost story The Haunting of Hill House was a huge popular and critical success upon publication. And what a wonderful cover; this edition is dated March 1977 from the Fawcett Popular Library, from the era of Gothic romances: always heroines fleeing across windswept moors or down castle stairs, about them flowing their black hair, in diaphanous nightdresses revealing tasteful decolletage, an imposing house in the background with one single light burning in an upstairs room. Perhaps there is a dominant, darkly-shadowed male nearby as well, with the threat of sex looming. However I don't have much interest in Gothic romance except for the covers; there's a great selection here.

Viking Books hardcover, 1959

But then, all this talk of Gothic romance only applies to the cover of this particular edition of Hill House, as the novel is not really a Gothic romance at all. I suppose a literary historian could argue that all horror fiction is, at bottom, Gothic romance - I recall that argument being made by a professor of mine back in my very early college years - but Jackson's rational approach to her tale doesn't seem "romantic" at all. The "love story" might be between Eleanor Vance and fellow intrepid haunted house investigator, the psychic Theodora. Whose hand is Eleanor holding? Is it not Theodora's? What does Theodora see but won't tell Eleanor? I know this lesbian subtext is discussed as an undercurrent in the 1963 movie version, with its images of the two women embracing each other in bed - out of fear, true. But fear of what, exactly? Ghosts? Or something much more... intimate?

Warner Books paperback, 1982

So perhaps the romance is between Eleanor and, chillingly enough, Hill House itself. Journeys end in lovers meeting, she repeats to herself throughout, this timid, mousy young woman seeking a personality. I confess it's been about 15 years since I read Hill House, my memory might be off, and I'm a bit afraid to read this little old paperback I've got because it might not stand up to the strain.

This all reminds me of starting a new job at a used bookstore back in the late '80s, when my boss was showing me how the store was organized. He asked me, "Do you know what Gothic romances are?" I had to admit complete ignorance. What use would a teenage guy have for that? And he described it just the way I have above: a girl in a nightdress beneath a house with one light on upstairs. I think he told me the perhaps apocryphal story of one such Gothic romance title whose cover art had a house with no lights on at all; the book sold miserably. Fans of genre fiction tend to want things their way or no way at all. And there's no mystery about that.

Richard Matheson's Other Classics: 3 Hits from Hell

"The occult" was what publishers called horror before Stephen King. Ursula Andress will massage your temples if you're feeling psychic. And black widow spiders aren't fuzzy.

That is all.

The House Next Door by Anne Rivers Siddons (1978): The Dinner Party Horror

I simply love that glow-in-the-dark X, remember X was a big naughty letter in the '70s, exotic and spooky and enticing all at once: you had The Exorcist phenomenon and the rise of X-rated movies. Why, who knows what goes on in that house neXt door? Wife swapping, demon possession, adultery, Satan worship, stag films, key parties, or, perhaps, someone is wearing white after Labor Day! Serving bottom-shelf liquor at dinner parties! Hanging a velvet print of dogs playing poker in the den! Quelle horreur!

1993 reprint

Indeed, that's just the kind of faux-pas that Anne Rivers Siddons, in The House Next Door, realizes terrifies up-and-coming, well-to-do folk in the New South in the modern age. They don't believe in boogeymen or poltergeists or their ilk, but an untended lawn in the dog days of August, or a family with too many kids' toys on the lawn, or a car in the drive that wasn't traded in this year, those are the types of things that make the neighborhood collectively shudder. Siddons, known today for genteel mainstream fiction, wrote her early bestseller in 1978. Stephen King himself championed it over several in-depth pages in his masterful study of horror Danse Macabre (1981), which is where I first heard of it.

Polite 1995 reprint

I've read this a couple times and really really liked it; I recommend it wholeheartedly. The novel's depiction of the easy, satisfying, slightly liberal social lives of smart young professional couples living in the rather upscale suburbs of Atlanta, is spot-on. But when the house in question, a stylish inviting marvel of modernity (unlike the home depicted on the original paperback), built by an aspiring and likable young bohemian architect, begins to affect its inhabitants at their most vulnerable spots, the game is on. The anxieties of trying to fit into predetermined societal strata, even when one is aware of their total bullshit quality, is relentlessly exploited. Colquitt Kennedy, the attractive Vanderbilt graduate in public relations, narrates the story in her calm, rational and perceptive manner:

We like our lives and our possessions to run smoothly. Chaos, violence, disorder, mindlessness all upset us. They don't frighten us, precisely, because we are aware of them. We watch the news, we are active our own brand of rather liberal politics. We know we have built a shell for ourselves, but we have worked hard for the means to do it; we have chosen it. Surely we have the right to do that.

1990 reprint

And it's Colquitt's, and her husband's, calm perception of what's happening that makes the reality so hard to accept or define. It's horror of the suburban kind, a masterful haunted house tale that's rooted in the most polite behavior, people horrified of giving offense or of having bad taste. Jobs could be lost, marriages broken up, ugly family secrets revealed, tennis partner can turn against tennis partner. But The House Next Door don't really give a fuck about your property values or your oh-so-tidy lives, that's for sure.

Siddons, from back of original hardcover dustjacket