Burning by Jane Chambers (1978): Your Lover's Lover's Alibi

It's as if no paperback horror novel of the '70s was complete without a blurb that referenced The Omen, The Exorcist, Rosemary's Baby, The Other, or 'Salem's Lot. But why shouldn't publishers try to market their books to an audience that was growing unexpectedly large? Anything that got the book into readers' hands even for a few moments was necessary; anything to get them to part with a cool buck-fifty was legit. Same for cover art: my God do I love this Rowena Morrill illustration - that is some intense shit. And while Burning (Jove Books, May 1978), playwright Jane Chambers's first novel, isn't a classic like those other '70s heavyweights, it is something entirely its own: a lesbian love story told by fusing two time periods into one.

A sweltering '70s summer in New York City is beginning, and the Martins have little interest in being around for it. But can they afford a vacation? David is a talent agent who, thanks to his wife's urging, has newly gone into business for himself; Cynthia is a harried mother of two who once had grand dreams of filling canvasses with daring visions but soon after moving to NYC met her now-husband. They seem to be a quite typical couple of the day: not a dream team but one that works hard to overcome difficulties. They get a break when one of David's clients offers to "pay" David with the offer of staying at his family's summer house in the Massachusetts countryside. Along with Angela, the 19-year-old student David hired part-time and now helps Cynthia with Martin kids Peter and Janet, Cynthia loads everyone into a Buick station wagon and makes the drive north, with David to join in several days (I kept seeing Katharine Ross and her family in the early parts of The Stepford Wives here, which was cool).

Everyone is delighted by the farmhouse and its attendant lake and woods, but one thing captures Cynthia's attention more than anything else: a small, unpainted room just off the kitchen, older than the home it's attached to, with hearth, dim windows, and roughly-hewn bedframe and chair. The room reached out to her, impatient, as though it had been waiting for her... She stepped inside and felt no fear. She was at home. Images come to her, of the room as it was, of trees being felled to build it, of planks being pounded together. Cynthia cleans it thoroughly, happy that David cannot disturb her enjoyment of it, wryly noting, A D&C... she'd scraped the womb and it was fresh to start again, building protective layers of lust and love and birth. This room will become integral to the story, the reader will have no doubt.

But Cynthia is also concerned that Angela has a crush on her. Angela herself thinks she does but won't say anything - what would be the point? Unspoken love was safest. There is a bit of tension and distrust at first, but that ebbs away as the women focus on the immediate pleasures and tribulations of caring for two rambunctious children during vacation. Thrown into the mix is Red Richmond, the 20-something neighbor, all masculine muscles and ginger beard, who begins a mild flirtation with Angela. Red fills in some history on the house and the room - built in the 1700s, older than the house itself, a crazy migrant must've built it - but his mannish manner puts Cynthia off: She knew a woman had lived in the old room.

1983 JH Press reprint

The first discordant note is really heard one afternoon when Cynthia skinny dips  after the satisfaction of cleaning out that room. Naked, sunloved, fulfilled; then she heard the cry.Without dressing, Cynthia runs towards the commotion and finds Pete in the rushing creek grasping a boulder, Angela and Janet helpless to save him. Unclothed, Cynthia rescues Pete herself. And now it gets weird. You trusted me with your greatest possession and I failed you, distraught Angela tells Cynthia. The conversation the two women have now is suddenly italicized, formal, archaic even, encoded with a knowledge and intimacy and a spiritual aspect neither woman can fathom. The words are not theirs, but the emotion, the longing, the fear is.

I'll never give you reason to lose faith in me again. That is a covenant between us, Angela said. Trust me. We need compatriots. You and I are destined to fight this world together... Angela laughed. The sin of nakedness. I shall never understand God.

Now a new story is teased out of these italicized thoughts and exchanges, and a history emerges the reveals once in this very spot, in that very room attached to the house, two unlikely women forged an unbreakable bond. Three hundred years have passed, but their passion, their honest yet forbidden love, has wended its way through the ages and finds a kind of release through these two women of the 1970s (note that tagline, A love that defied the grave!). Cynthia and Angela experience near fugue states in which they are - possessed? - by Martha and Abigail, two outcasts who found comfort in one another's arms and caresses... in a time when that could very likely lead to death. There are others involved: Red Richmond has strange reveries of a Squire Richmond, a poetic gentleman who attempts to court Abigail, against his father's wishes. In an agonizing moment, Squire Richmond visits Abigail to propose but finds her and Martha in flagrante delicto:

Squire Richmond did not understand what he had seen; he tried to liken it to the time when he'd caught farm girls bathing naked in the bay, although that was against the rules of every village, and, they said, displeasing to the sight of God.

When they tell him they are married, he is aghast. How is that even possible? And these events are being replayed, relived, in the present, nearly beyond the comprehension of the participants. This is a haunting, a possession, of love, terror, guilt, tumultuous emotions that offer great freedom but also exact a terrific price once the Squire informs his father, a respected town elder, of what he has seen in the two women doing in the dark forest. The devil takes a woman's body to perpetuate his work. The devil is possessed to seize a virgin for his mistress.

T'n'T Press reprint 1995

Now the novel's title becomes agonizingly real. The (literal) witch hunt that ensues is well done by Chambers; she gets across the paranoia of the village, all of which seem ridiculous today but then was a soul-freezing fear. Events reach a hysterical, gut-wrenching pitch - both in the past and in the present (there's a perceptive, angering bit making bigoted male cops akin to the elders of the past). But by story's end, a strange peace has been achieved, a kind of evening out of past "sins" and an acceptance of love's cost. As Cynthia notes, "When love is good, it doesn't matter who the lovers are." It's a hard-won knowledge, a sad, bitter wisdom neither woman would have apprehended without Martha and Abigail.

What really makes Burning work is the quality time Chambers spends with her characters, winding their thoughts through the present-day story: passages about David and Cynthia's oft-fraught marriage and the give-and-take of men and women (Their marriage was ingrown, they fed on one another's weaknesses... bloated with a sense of security, knowing each one depended on the other for survival); of Angela's overprotective, vulgar, drunk widowed father and her ambivalence about the opposite sex (Men puzzled her just as her father puzzled her. They frightened her, just as her father did... she discovered male knowledge was a clever sham); and Red's somewhat old-fashioned history with women (if he enjoyed a liaison, he wanted to romance the girl, protect her from the advances of other men) that doesn't quite jibe with the era, and now seeing young Angela... These are the details that real writers use, drawn from observation and experience of  the real world.

Jane Chambers in 1976

I was drawn to Burning solely for its lurid cover, but I stayed for the story and the writing. This knowing, quiet, yet emotionally-charged story of a lesbian affair exists in that uncomfortable realm of being not horrific enough for a horror audience and too horrific for a non-horror audience. The garish cover may have kept away an audience that might have found in its pages a sensitive, realistic portrayal of the secret relationships gay women were "forced" to have in intolerant, ignorant societies. The analogy of lesbians and witches as creatures of the night performing bizarre rituals that threaten male hegemony is a sadly apt one, and one Chambers infuses with a poignant, romantic, and heartfelt authenticity that rings true still these many, many years later.

Out of the Cellar

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?

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.

A Manhattan Ghost Story by T.M. Wright (1984): It Was Their Town, and It Always Would Be

For weeks now I've been slowly getting through A Manhattan Ghost Story, the seventh horror novel by T.M. Wright. He's a prolific but rather cultish author whose first book, the oddly poetic and ambiguous Strange Seed, I read and reviewed last year; it left me nonplussed, unsure of how I really felt about it. But Wright had skill, a manner and tone I found intriguing, so I didn't give up on reading another horror novel by him. Then I happily found a copy of MGS, feeling that his talents would lend themselves well to a quiet tale of haunting in the Big Apple. Dared I hope for, I dunno, Woody Allen meets Roman Polanski (to put it in cinematic terms)? Well... yep, kinda I was hoping for that! But now, I'm feeling that same ambivalence about this novel too.

A photographer named Abner Cray visits the city to do a coffee-table book of his work, staying at an old friend's empty apartment. He muses obsessively on the nature of death and the dead but not in any way I found insightful or surprising. A struggle, trudging through "poetic" elegiacal passages such as Yes, definitively, this is what it's all about, this is what Death is all about; sit back now, I'll tell you, my God, they'd swarm all over like angry bees, the dead would, like angry bees which appear again and again throughout the narrative. Then there's flashback chapter sections in which Abner and a delinquent friend break into a mausoleum as young teens in 1965, which contain some really and truly clunky, amateur-hour prose and dialogue (if I read one more conversation in which two characters say one another's names over and over again...).

The present day sees ghosts intermingling with the living in a sort of purgatorial New York City. At least, if you can't figure out that the odd people who speak in repetitive near-riddles to the narrator are merely shades of the dead - well, there, I spoiled it for you. But I didn't really: the book is titled "A Manhattan Ghost Story" - what else is the reader supposed to expect? Just look at the Tor paperback's cover art!

Anyway, I had to give up two-thirds of the way through, and quickly skimmed the final chapters. Don't feel like I missed much. There's an interesting story here, absolutely: Abner's friendship with a man who's abandoned his apartment and left the country because he murdered someone; his burgeoning relationship with that friend's ex-girlfriend; Abner's own past in which he'd slept with an attractive cousin; his misadventures in the dark and gritty city streets and parks and apartment buildings. But there's little atmosphere and, as I said, you pretty much know what's coming. The pacing is stop/start and the editing should have tightened up a lot of the writing. I felt like MGS was an old manuscript Wright had in a desk drawer and turned it in without rewriting it.

I really wanted to like A Manhattan Ghost Story; I haven't read a good ghost story in some time, and I felt the Manhattan setting would work to Wright's advantage. It's just that I don't think he took enough advantage, certainly not enough to convince this reader. He has some real fans, though, as his Wikipedia page reads more like disguised fanboy gushing than impartial biography (who gives a fuck who the movie rights to MSG were bought by and which celebrities were attached to act in it? You don't see that in other Wikipedia novel entries). Not finishing a book is one of my great pet peeves, but it really is the only sensible course: three weeks of reading and I didn't even make it to page 250 (out of 381). My shelves are overstuffed these days; what would you have done?

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.

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.

The Manitou by Graham Masterton (1975): He Who Devours...

It was a distinct pleasure to finally read this vintage mid-'70s bestselling horror novel and find it tasteless and outrageous fun, taking elements of contemporaneous famous and popular works of the "occult" like The Exorcist and Rosemary's Baby but then one-upping, or a dozen-upping, them. Graham Masterton has for years been a familiar name to me but I had never read anything by him; I was vaguely aware that there had been a movie version of The Manitou, and that such a thing was some kind of ancient Native American spirit, perhaps like the Wendigo. Expecting little when I sat down to read, I actually finished the book in less than a day - it's a brisk 216 pages in its 1976 Pinnacle Books paperback edition. Masterton, even in this first novel, does a credible job weaving the dated occult aspect of Tarot cards and reincarnation (yawn) together with a Lovecraft-style twist on Native mythology (yay). Damn, I only wish I'd read this years ago!

Behold the inner cover! Artist: Ed Soyka

An attention-getting prelude introduces young Karen Tandy, who's in the hospital baffling doctors with the strange moving tumor on the back of her neck that X-rays reveal to be a developing fetus. A fetus. I know, right? Then Masterton switches to first-person narration by Harry Erskine, a 30-something guy earning his living providing sham psychic readings (are there any other kind?) to little old rich ladies in a wintry New York City. Just before she enters the hospital, Karen Tandy comes to see him about a disturbing dream she's been having.

Her sense of doom and foreboding about it causes Harry to start thinking there might be something to this occult business after all (I don't mind messing around with the occult when it behaves itself, but when it starts acting up, then I start getting a little bit of the creeps). Cue more strange happenings that Masterton makes believably unsettling and convince Harry, and soon comes the big reveal: the fetus developing in Karen's neck is the reborn spirit of the great and powerful Native American medicine man Misquamacus. Of course this being the 1970s and all, that phrase "Native American" is never uttered; instead, we get the charmingly offensive "redskin" or "Indian" or "red man." Ah well.

1977 UK edition

As the tumor grows and the arrival of Misquamacus becomes ever more imminent, Karen's life hangs by a thread. Harry consults the anthropologist Dr. Snow, who tells him about "Red Indian" spirits and how this Misquamacus was able to magically implant himself in Karen's body, to be reborn 300 years after his tribe was exploited, caught disease and run off by Dutch settlers. The "manitou" is his spirit, and we learn everything that exists has its own manitou. Misquamacus now wants vengeance, and his occult powers are virtually unstoppable by modern scientific men. Only another medicine man fully in control of these powers can stop him - and perhaps that is not even possible. Can they even find a modern-day medicine man to fight back?

1982 UK edition - more cover art here

If all this is making you think, what the fuck? you'd be right. But Masterton makes it work. Despite its implausibility, I actually loved how everyone seemed to accept the reality of what was going on: Karen's doctors and parents, Dr. Snow, Harry himself. The only people skeptical are the police, and they come to a very bad and very gruesome - and very awesome - end. Pretty graphic for the era, I thought; a great shock moment.

Tor Books edition, 1987

Masterton's style may sometimes inadvertently belie his Britishness but he really keeps the action going while also touching on broader, more thoughtful concerns. Harry's seeming skepticism about the reality of occult powers is treated with some ambivalence, and at one point Karen's doctor, Jack Hughes, wonders aloud about the inherent guilt the white race must feel about their treatment of Native Americans, and shouldn't they feel at least a little sympathy for Misquamacus? Which, as it turns out, is a terrible idea: as the story races to its climax, Masterton introduces a wonderful Lovecraftian menace as Misquamacus attempts to open the gateway for the Great Old One, aka The Great Devourer or He-Who-Feeds-in-the-Pit. You know that's never good.

But it was not Misquamacus himself that struck the greatest terror in us - it was what we could dimly perceive through the densest clouds of smoke - a boiling turmoil of sinister shadow that seemed to grow and grow through the gloom like a squid or some raw and massive confusion of snakes and beasts and monsters.

The Manitou is a pulpy, funny, gory, and even ridiculous read; like I said, a damn-near perfect example of vintage '70s horror fiction that strikes just the right balance between each of those aspects. Glad I also bought a copy of its sequel, Revenge of the Manitou (1979). So well done Mr. Masterton - I'd say I made my favorites-of-the-year list one book too early!

You were expecting a 1970s horror author to look otherwise?

Wormwood by Poppy Z. Brite (1993): Being Nothingness

Horror's purview is one of good versus evil, obviously, but that's one battle which doesn't interest me much in fiction; I do not think art has to be didactic or proselytize to be effective. In Poppy Z. Brite's first stories, collected in Wormwood, there is no real sense of good or evil, just the aesthete's pose of worldliness and boredom. She was concerned not with morality but with sensuality and brought a sort of fin de siecle decadence to the genre just as its paperback popularity seemed to be fizzling out. This approach was something horror mostly lacked in the era, concerned as it was with middle American families, or children and teenagers.

A teenager herself when her stories were being published in The Horror Show magazine in the mid 1980s, Brite's characters were the misfit kids, part of subcultural movements that I was familiar with and sympathetic to—punk and goth and whatever the mixture of the two beget. They hung out in filthy, ill-lit clubs, wore black rags and had messy hair and crashed in abandoned houses and churches, sleeping on stained mattresses and consorting intimately with a variety of partners, usually all in a New Orleans of perfume and rot. Certainly to an audience used to the familiar comforts of Koontz, King, or Saul this wasn't going to go over well at all, but it didn't need to; Brite's first novel, the highly anticipated Lost Souls (1992), was part of Dell's line of innovative and edgy horror novels not geared towards a mainstream audience. Published in hardcover, Lost Souls made Brite the hot horror commodity of the early 1990s. And it didn't hurt that her two earliest champions were Dan Simmons (who wrote the introduction for this collection) and the mighty Harlan Ellison.

When I first read most of these stories it was late 1993 and the collection was entitled Swamp Foetus, a limited-edition hardcover from Borderlands Press. This paperback edition from Dell did not come out until 1996, and then retitled Wormwood probably because someone took offense at the original. Still, it's a good title, evoking the poison and delirium of absinthe, then still a more or less obscure liqueur beloved of true arty decadent types. But it's also relevant since it refers to "His Mouth Will Taste of Wormwood," which was the first story I ever read by Brite, in 1990's Borderlands. I was hooked immediately. This story always reminded me of Lovecraft's minor tale "The Hound," yet it is undeniably Brite's own. Two young men, jaded and bored beyond belief by their excesses in art, sensuality, drink, and drugs, turn to grave-robbing for ghoulish kicks. Then, in a dank punk rock nightclub, they meet another boy who may offer them their greatest and most final thrill.

Dying: the final shock of pain or nothingness that is the price we pay for everything. Could it not be the sweetest thrill, the only salvation we can attain... the only true moment of self-knowledge? The dark pools of his eyes will open, still and deep enough to drown in. He will hold out his arms to me, inviting me to lie down with him in his rich wormy bed.

Original limited-edition hardcover, 1993

As the above passage might attest, much of Brite's fiction was populated by gay or bisexual young men; homoerotic overtones were the norm for her and definitely gave her work a true "outsider" edge. Her darkly elegant conflation of sex and death, usually so clumsily done in paperback horror, owes more to Baudelaire or Gautier than Barker or Rice (with whom she was often, and erroneously, compared). This is best seen in the later stories, both from 1991, the marvelous "Calcutta, Lord of Nerves" (which I wrote about here) and "The Sixth Sentinel," which show Brite maturing as a stylist. They are poisonous confections, two of my favorites from the time, and ripe with the beauty of putrescence and the stink of sex. In "Sentinel" she lovingly describes a flooded, ancient graveyard:

Some of the things that have floated to the surface are little more than bone. Others are swollen to two or three times their size, gassy mounds of decomposed flesh... silk flower petals stuck to them like obscene decorations... Yawning eyeless faces thrust out of stagnant pools, seem to gasp for breath. Rotting hands unfold like blighted tiger lilies. Every drop of water, every inch of earth in the graveyard is foul with the effluvium of the dead.

1992 hardcover, Delacorte Press

Two friends from her first novel Lost Souls (1992), Ghost and Steve, appear in "How to Get Ahead in New York" and "Angels," adrift and wayward, on their own for the first time. The sleazy environs of 1980s New York comes right to life in the former tale while the latter evokes the circus-freak setting of Katherine Dunn's Geek Love (1989). Unkempt, doomed musicians play large roles in "A Georgia Story" and "Optional Music for Voice and Piano," depicted sympathetically and believably. "The Ash of Memory, the Dust of Desire" is set in the restaurant industry - many years later, all her novels would be - in a brutally modern world that has little need for love or flesh. Certainly the earlier stories, like "The Elder" and "Missing," may be a little slight, but it's obvious they were written with passion and care and intensity.

All in all, I feel Wormwood is a must-read; it's been good, rewarding fun revisiting it. Are the stories scary? Not really, no. This, as well as the brooding teenage characters and sensual depictions of death, might be a turnoff off for some readers. But with their strange and compelling visions of a world populated by the outcast, the marginalized—indeed, by the dead themselves—Poppy Z. Brite's short stories show that true horror, facing it and embracing all its woes, may be bravest, most beautiful, the most rewarding thing of all.

John Skipp Speaks

Crossroads Press has released an ebook edition for the 25th anniversary of Skipp and Spector's 1986 debut novel, The Light at the End. Here are three brand-new interviews with John Skipp to mark the occasion. He's talking about the novel itself, then the rise of splatterpunk fiction in the '80s, and last the zombie anthologies he and Spector edited with George Romero's blessings. Skipp is articulate and engaging, and all are must-sees for fans of horror fiction of the era. Can't believe I've never seen or heard an interview with him before! Thanks to both Brian Keene and Little Miss Zombie, who featured these videos and encouraged other fans to do so.

1992 Bantam reprint

The Vampire Tapestry by Suzy McKee Charnas (1980): Vampire Walks into a Psychiatrist's Office...

Today it's almost tiresome to ponder the mythic fluidity of the vampire throughout history and how it reflects (heh) the fantasies and fears of the culture from which it's sprung. Vampires have been twisted this way and that, rendered fangless and impotent, but when Suzy McKee Charnas wrote The Vampire Tapestry in the late 1970s the field had not yet been taken over by the de- and re-mythologizing character of Anne Rice's work. Less a horror novel than a psychological deconstruction of an outsider, Tapestry has a smart and original tale to tell, thankfully unblighted by the shallow vagaries of popular culture. Indeed, this vampire haunts the halls of academe.

Dr. Edward Lewis Weyland is an anthropology professor of a gentlemanly, iron-haired age as well as a non-supernatural vampire. Drawn as a ruthless and precise predator, he has no kith or kin, walks about in daylight, and needs no earth from his homeland in which to sleep. Beneath his tongue is an unobtrusive stinger with anti-clotting saliva that can penetrate human flesh and draw out fresh blood. His haughty and surly brilliance allows him to pass through the mortal world with few noticing his true self.

Charnas tracks her creation through five different "adventures" in her novel so that we see how Weyland subtly alters his behavior to either escape danger, establish his identity, or to embrace a victim. Actually Tapestry is more like five interrelated long stories than one entire novel. Weyland sometimes missteps and ends up in danger, as in "The Island of Lost Content." He meets a near-worthy foe in "The Last of Dr. Weyland" and reappraises his thoughts of humanity (Not cattle, these; they deserved more from him than disdain). "A Musical Interlude" finds Weyland shaken after he is introduced to Puccini's opera Tosca, the high drama of which causes him to flash back to his own life centuries earlier.

The best is probably "Unicorn Tapestry" in which Weyland is forced to see a psychiatrist in order to keep his job as a professor and thus hide his vampirism. She tries to get him to empathize with his victims, which he refuses to do. Charnas spends a great deal of time detailing the work of this doctor, a middle-aged woman who, in spite of herself, develops serious feelings for Weyland even as she delves deeper into his pathology.

Endurance: huge rich cloak of time flows back from his shoulders like wings of a dark angel. All springs from, elaborates, the single dark primary condition: he is a predator who subsists on human blood. Harmony, strength, clarity, magnificence - all from that basic animal integrity. Of course I long for all that...

We can see the changes in vampire mythology just by tracing the imagery in the paperback covers. The original paperback edition at the top, from Pocket Books in 1981, hearkens back to Lugosi's dinner-party attire, along with a strong, very masculine jaw to suggest the eroticism that was so prevalent in the myth at the time. In 1986, with the Tor Books reprint (labeled oddly as SF/Fantasy), we see now a brooding, more European-looking fellow whose hand seems tensed and rigid; after Rice, the deluge of sensitive vampires mooning over their horrible undeath and blood thirst.

The 1992 trade paperback cover has a figure clad in a cape, apparently about to perform some bit of magic like Barbara Eden in "I Dream of Jeannie," and also is somehow deformed. The most recent edition, from Orb Books in 2008, with its bare tree limbs and shadowy figure, seems more like a Halloween decoration than a real book cover. I can say that not one (maaaybe the one from Tor Books) of these inaccurate covers captures the tone or style of Charnas's book, which is rooted in the psychological realism of a fantastical nonhuman.

Horror fiction has always suffered under a surfeit of bloodsuckers stalking across paperback book covers where they were depicted as aristocrats or lusty dandies, as well as Stoker-approved monsters from the Freudian id. Today, we see them as teenagers, as Fabio-style paranormal lovers, as lonely housewife-friendly boyfriends. It's a cliche to ponder this creature, as I noted, even trite, because isn't it obvious? We have met the vampire over and over and he is us. But Charnas suggests at the end of The Vampire Tapestry that this predator who tries so hard to gain psychological distance from his prey may come to see some of himself there after all.

Rosemary's Baby (1967) and The Stepford Wives (1972) by Ira Levin: Only Women Bleed?

One of the great sequences in horror - literature or film - is when Rosemary Woodhouse, protagonist of Rosemary's Baby, uses the letter tiles from a Scrabble board game to discover the true identity of her kindly old neighbor. Polanski, in his film adaptation, underlines these utterly prosaic and harmless everyday items with portent, but it was author Ira Levin who first created such a richly creepy, and yet playful and knowing, scenario. All of them witches indeed.

Although Levin also wrote traditional suspense novels and popular plays (his Tony-winning Deathtrap from 1978 is still highly regarded and plays continually), and neither Rosemary's Baby (originally published 1967) nor The Stepford Wives (1972) are solely horror novels, he deserves recognition within the field for creating such lasting pop culture horror icons as a mother who gives birth to Satan's child (sorry, that wasn't really a spoiler for anybody, was it?), and especially in the latter's case where simply referring to someone as a "Stepford wife" - or, indeed, a Stepford husband or anybody else - means that person is an unwitting or mindless slave to conformity and empty bourgeois values.

Both books fall into the how-we-live-now style of fiction and address contemporary mores: secular versus spiritual lifestyles and motherhood in Rosemary's Baby, feminism and the role of women in the home in Stepford Wives. Their datedness - not nearly as prevalent as one might think - only enhances their charm. Levin is a master of economical prose, understatement, and sleight-of-hand misdirection as he doles out the clues and plot twists. Paranoia figures largely, out in the suburbs and within the city, and menace can be found anywhere, over idle chat and coffee, sitting in a doctor's waiting room, when your husband goes off to work. They never stop, these Stepford Wives... they work like robots all their lives...

I love that both novels can be read either as totally straight thrillers or as black-comedies-of-manners. And while a superficial interpretation might convince some that Levin disdains women, I think it's rather obvious that he is really condemning men and the fact that they think women with any kind of power will diminish their own. Irony: it's good for the blood, no?

I read Rosemary's Baby in high school, after I watched its masterful movie adaptation (surely the most faithful of all movie adaptations!); Stepford Wives only in the last few years after falling for Katharine Ross and (especially) Paula Prentiss in that bittersweetly vintage 1975 film adaptation. The novels can be undertaken in a couple sittings and offer up numerous pleasures, a few chills and ironic grins, and are easily found in used bookstores everywhere, so why you'd want to pay $14 for a new trade paperback edition of books around 200 pages long is a mystery Levin himself certainly wouldn't deign to write. Especially when you can get that ridiculous Gothic-romance version of Stepford Wives, because what all men secretly desire are women in shapeless gowns colored like M&Ms.