The Possession of Joel Delaney by Ramona Stewart (1970): Supernatural City

Published a year prior to epoch-making The Exorcist, this slim 1970 novel by Ramona Stewart (1922 - 2006) features a young man in thrall not to a demonic power of the netherworld but to a dead serial killer. I don't think The Possession of Joel Delaney (Bantam paperback/Oct 1971) is much talked-about these days in the small subset of people who talk about vintage horror novels; I can find little about Stewart herself online. She seems like a mainstream novelist who produced some other derivative minor thrillers (The Sixth Sense; The Nightmare Candidate; see below) that got some middling reviews and more middling cover art. None sound all that interesting to me.

1980 Dell reprint, Paul Caras cover art?

Happily for me, Possession is interesting: it's set in the Manhattan of the late '60s and early '70s, and is quite convincing at what it does. Stewart's depiction of the city, from the Upper West Side enclave in which our narrator Norah Benson lives to the rough-and-tumble neighborhoods of immigrants, is vivid, lived-in, and sympathetic but not overwrought or sanitized. Akin to Blatty's iconic novel, Stewart lays down a bedrock of normalcy and realism as Norah describes her life in plain terms in the opening pages:  It's when I'm skating along on smooth ice that the dark crack splits open at my feet.

Back cover gives you the low-down, 

good so I don't have to waste time rehashing it

The voice she provides for the story is refreshingly confident. Norah is self-aware, intelligent, and self-possessed, without an ounce of self-pity for her past. Our family hadn't been the cheery thing of children's books: her youth was made difficult by her wayward, somewhat grifter of a father and a mother who committed suicide leaving Norah to mostly raise her decade-younger brother Joel. She married a professor and left for the University of California, and feels lingering guilt about abandoning her brother. Now divorced, she maintains a civil relationship with her ex, raising two citified children with the help of Veronica, her Puerto Rican maid (this detail will become important).

 Dell Books 1980; Kirkus review here

Certainly, the night the trouble began with Joel, I had no prickling sense of the extraordinary. When Joel doesn't show up for dinner, she calls him but when the phone is answered no one is there, just music and a stranger's strangled voice. Concerned, she rushes to his downtown apartment, in an unsavory neighborhood ("Sure this is the place you want?" inquires the cabbie) and finds Joel on the floor, his face contorted like a man in a nightmare. He's off to the hospital, then Bellevue, you know it's the late '60s, maybe he's taking LSD. Norah speaks to the building manager, glimpses into his apartment: she recognizes an Espiritismo shrine, a religion invoking water and air spirits.

This will play a large part in the "possession" angle of the novel, as Norah investigates Joel's increasingly bizarre behavior with the help of a psychiatrist friend and a couple of professors. Together she and the reader learn about Tonio Perez, who lived in Joel's apartment before him, an immigrant teenager with a terrible childhood and a murderous hand, who suffers a ruthless death and who has struggled back from the other side... "There's a supernatural city all around you," Dr. Reichman said. "Belief working on thousands of psyches."

Okay: I have to note the ethnic tensions in the book. This is an indelicate matter. Thing is, Norah is the one who notices them; she is well aware of being an interloper into the minority community and its esoteric belief system (which may or may not be a sham/scam). Is Stewart/Norah evincing a fear of ethnic taint, of "white American culture" being far too influenced by a dangerous foreign one (literally possessed by it here)? If so, author/narrator seem ambivalent about their feelings, knowing that that's a secret fear one should keep bottled up; an irrational, unwarranted fear with no place in polite society. This could be taken the other way: that's what oblivious white people get for moving unwelcome into minority neighborhoods: taken possession of by murderers. The fear of the other, so often invoked in cultural horror criticism, isn't so high-minded or abstract: to each individual, everything is other/foreign/potentially dangerous, no? Anyway.

Dell Books 1981; Kirkus review here

There are several comparative religion lectures as a couple scholars talk about the long history of religion, possession, exorcism, and the occult in general dating back to ancient days. I'm always up for that!

Dr. Reichman seemed embarrassed. "My dear Mrs. Benson, it is not so simple. The history of exorcism is largely one of failure. Not only does it often increase the state of possession but the exorcising priests risk falling victims to the state themselves.... Even the spectators are liable to it. All over the world, in every culture, this is considered dangerous."

Stewart's narrative pace is snappy and her characters, intelligent and modern, believably drawn, although at times her descriptions of domestic detail borders on boring readers when they should be tingling with suspense. At its core its a novel of its era, showing the incursion of the supernatural into the everyday that broke from the ghetto genres onto the bestseller lists. The film version a few years later, with a perfectly-cast Shirley MacLaine as Norah, amps up the Fire Island climax to an unbelievable, uncomfortable degree but also offers some authentic scares. As a novel, Possession of Joel Delaney is an enjoyable minor work of mild occult thrills and a lovely window into vintage NYC city life. It is in no way better than Rosemary's Baby, nor The Exorcist, but as I said, Stewart's writing is clear and captivating and the backstory of the serial killer is heartbreakingly horrifying. Those readers who appreciate the quieter vibe of pre-Stephen King horror might dig it.

The Inquisitor Series, 1974-1975

Proof that there are still horror-related paperbacks of the 1970s I have never heard of before! Thanks to critic Andrew Nette of Pulp Curry, I've been introduced to this six-volume series The Inquisitor, by Simon Quinn. Published by Dell Books throughout 1974 and '75, the covers feature incredible imagery of their day, conflating spy and occult tropes with a steely-jawed hairdo dude depicting one Francis Xavier Killy, "an Irish American lay brother of the Militia Christi, a tertiary branch of the Dominicans, working for the Holy Office of the Inquisition in Rome."

I don't know what any of that means, but I do know that "Simon Quinn" is the pseudonym of bestselling author Martin Cruz Smith, best known for Gorky Park and Nightwing. You can read more about the books here, here, and here. A search of Abebooks shows most of these paperbacks in the $10-$45 range.

The Legacy by Jere Cunningham (1977): That Demon Life Got Me in Its Sway

You might or might not be familiar with the name Jere Cunningham, a writer who published several horror paperbacks during the classic vintage era but who moved on to Hollywood screenplays later in his career (couldn't turn up a photo of him anywhere, only an illuminating interview, and I'm never sure if the name "Jere" is pronounced "Jare" or like the standard spelling "Jerry"). Not to be confused with that other late 1970s horror paperback of the same title—a novelization of the Katharine Ross/Sam Elliott/uh Roger Daltry movie—Fawcett Gold Medal's The Legacy, with art-student nude-model cover art and a cawing raven 'cause ravens are always spooky, is a 1977 paperback original. Cunningham's not a complete unknown, as other books of his have been rediscovered, but I haven't read any. That could change, since I found The Legacy to be an effective horror read, with all the hallmarks of its day and few of the faults.

A prologue of mysterious import on a stormy night, death, madness, and despair, sets the stage (and not in italics, thank the gods!). Then switch the scene to Dr. David Rawlings, wife Sandra, daughter Melanie, and her Doberman Streak; he's a successful Memphis doctor but as the novel begins he has an upsetting dream about his estranged father one night. Chester Rawlings has died, suicide by gunshot—a-ha, that prologue! Father's lawyer calls David to break the news, maybe they could come to the small Mississippi town of Bickford in which David grew up in but left for med school against Chester's wishes, to where his father met his untimely doom.

You've got the wrong Legacy

He reacquaints himself with the old family estate, Whitewood, and its attendant memories, including old Sam, his father's stalwart friend, who in many ways raised David himself. Sam gets off one of the creepiest lines in the novel, one night when they're trying not to talk about the weirdness going on as they watch the Mississippi beneath a bright moon: "They says if you sleep under the moon without a rag over your face you go moon-crazy. That the moon got blood on it and it'll come down and get in your head." Uh, yeah, thanks for the advice, Sam.

Lots of pages are spent on the Rawlings marriage, of Melanie and Streak playing in the fields surrounding the estate, of David tooling around Bickford and realizing what a shithole it is and seeing old faces again. Other characters come into David's orbit: Dewey Pounds, with whom David had played football in high school, now Bickford sheriff well aware if he doesn't solve this issue of a missing body he'll be working in a gas station. There's sketchy teenager Woody, long-haired and resentful, son of Ruth, the local soothsayer living in a trailer and another old friend of Chester's. She drops mysterious hints and warnings, inscrutably vague (basically "You should get the fuck outta Dodge"). Then there is blind Philip Sprague, a man of perhaps 70 who looks younger (uh-oh), who arrived in town some years before and rebuilt a nearby old DeBois manor into a grand new edifice.

The first true note of oddness comes when dad's lawyer Barksdale reads the will and its requirements of David: "I ask that you stay on at Whitewood for seven weeks, never leaving for a single night. Check the seal on the crypt daily. Tend the ivy around the manor and my crypt. I am sure that Sam will stay on with you"—hold up hold up! Did he say check the seal on the crypt?! The fuck? Except Sandy seems to think it an unreasonable burden on David's burgeoning medical practice, but David knows he must do it. Unlike other sons in horror novels, in which family secrets metamorphose into supernatural elements, David loved and respected his father, even if they had grown estranged over his decision to leave.

Exploring his father's library one afternoon, David seemed to feel the hours and hours of his father's presence here. As if the man and years had soaked into the books and walls and floors. Chester Rawlings was a closet intellectual, reading ancient history and philosophy in Latin and Greek. But David is taken aback when he finds a new shelf of books on sorcery and witchcraft and whatnot. There's even a locked door with more spooky shit behind it. Wizard and sorcerer spooky to be precise:

Daddy, he thought, my poor daddy... is that what happened in your mind? Did fantasies kill you? Don't you know that one real cigarette is more evil than all that silly occult shit put together?... A foulness clung to his hands from the cloying leather. in the light the stretched hide looked almost like human epidermis... He left the room with a sadness tainted by revulsion. Never would he have dreamed his father—of all people—would have sought solace or refuge in an area so degrading in its vulgar absurdity. The foulness of the iron-bound book felt ugly on his hands.

Sphere Books UK paperback, 1980

I don't have to tell you, dedicated reader of horror fiction, how important this is. This kind of exploration and discovery is one of my favorite genre devices. And Cunningham deploys it well; a foreshadowing that hovers even though it will be quite awhile before the payoff. Slowly but surely all kinds of horrible things will happen: a missing corpse, a vandalized crypt, a dead friend, Sandra sleepwalking, a figure following Melanie and Streak through the nearby woods. Add in a backstory of the recent suicide of a Bickford banker, the institutionalization of his wife, and the disappearance of their young daughter, and you've got a sweet potboiler recipe.

Eventually David finds his father's journal and learns Chester knew Sprague, also dined with him, was taken on a tour of the manor's foundation, and there saw something that drove him to near madness, breaking his heart and setting Chester into a morass of despair.

Now I am considering the murder of Sprague. Or the end of myself. No night of rest.... I spoke with Ruth. She is more afraid than I am, if that is possible, and she knows nothing we can do. What can we say about the little girl? What would the authorities believe? That we are mad?

Cunningham's 1982 novel, UK paperback

One of the best scenes in the novel is a dinner party, of course. Sprague invites the family to dinner, unerringly pouring them drinks and serving them an elaborate European meal. He is a continental sort and his blindness poses no real problems; in fact it seems to give him a preternatural sense for anyone around him. Après dinner Sprague entices Sandra—whose pretensions to culture and wealth he appeals to—to play for them on his luxurious piano, even joining in with her on his violin. What beautiful music they make ("That was really wonderful," she beamed, hardly able to retain modesty)! And you can be sure David isn't too happy about it. This sequence sets up the finale in high style.

I must admit though that early on, The Legacy had me iffy on continuing; there is a lot of build-up. The narrative tightens up considerably as the book nears conclusion, with occult horror and mayhem rampant, elevating this unassuming-looking paperback original beyond others of its ilk. Cunningham is adept at writing dialogue and character, mood and suspense: aspects horror writers much more famous and wealthy often suck at. Plentiful sex scenes are warm, believable, titillating but restrained. There are touches of early King in the depiction of modern family life while some gruesome set-pieces—David and the dog, David and the corpse fingers, Sandra sleepwalking with Melanie in tow—which reminded me of the work Michael McDowell would soon publish. Despite the leisure taken with setting the story in motion, once it kicks into gear, The Legacy delivers the demonic goods.

Cernunnos, Lord of my Fathers, Lord of Ages, I summon thee. Lord of Agonies, of Carthage and Hiroshima and Doomed Great Ones, I summon thee to wed and to sup. Rise from thy eternal legions and I shall perform thy shapely introduction as ages ago I vowed in time upon time upon time to fulfill...

Blood of Nostradamus Trilogy by Andrew Laurance (1991): Eye of the Prophet

Consisting of three occult horror novels originally published a decade prior in the UK under different titles, Blood of Nostradamus (Diamond Books/1991) is the work of one Andrew Laurance, the pen name of a French-British author André Launay. Not sure if the original novels, the titles of which you see on the paperback covers, were related; seems like that "Blood of Nostradamus" titling (and I suspect the trilogy-izing) was an after-the-fact creation by the publisher. Speculation on my part; I had never heard of any of this till this very day.

Nostradamus and his supposed prophesying is a topic that bores me to tears. Going by the back-cover copy, these don't sound too terrible, but I really have no idea and probably won't find out. In my research I see that Diamond Books reprinted several other of his early '80s horror novels, including Ouija, The Black Hotel, and Catacomb. Haven't seen any of these out in the wild at all, and I wonder if any horror fiction readers have any familiarity with them. Let me know!

A Beautiful Corpse

1973 Curtis Books, artist unknown

1980 Playboy Press reprint, artist unknown

Effigies by William K. Wells (1980): Don't Shake Me Lucifer

First things first: this might be the most soused horror novel I've ever read. Everybody's always topping off their drink, or sneaking one, or suggesting they grab one together and talk, or exclaiming they need one. They're drinking while they're frantic with worry and dread over the horrible things happening to their town of Holland County and to their family members. One guy's drinking during a seance! It's like Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf up in here. This is all okay with me. Effigies (Dell Books, Nov 1980) with its astounding Peter Caras cover of a leering visage and its lurid stepback, looks like just another creepy satanic kid paperback original of its day, with a no-name author (sorry, William K. Wells!) and lacking even the most rudimentary of relevant blurbs (what, no "Scarier than The Exorcist!", no "More shocking than The Other!", no "Makes Rosemary's Baby look like Love Story!"?). Seems like a real, well, loser. Yet I totes dug it and I did not expect to totes dig it.

The story proper: a young suburban mother, Nicole Bannister, a children's book author and illustrator, receives a terrible shock when she finds a package delivered to her contains a child's amputated finger. While police chief Frank Liscomb and medical examiner Thomas Blauvelt begin their investigation looking for a dead body, rumors start to fly in this upscale artist community that there's witchy satanic coven up in the woods, a spot called Job's Camp, occupied by young itinerants who a few years before would've been called hippies. Now they're seen—well, one of them, a crude, abusive yet charismatic 20-something named Freddie Loftus, is seen as a Charles Manson follower, perhaps eager to start his own murderous cult...

Lots of characters, get ready: Nicole's husband Jonathan, a commercial artist working in the (dangerous) city; his colleague Henry Dixon, a bitter drunk whose tipple is Boodles gin (crime readers may note this was Travis McGee's drink as well); Dixon's wife Estelle, who feels intellectually inferior in this environments of creatives, has been digging pseudoscience as of late and has discovered the Ouija board; Father Daniel Conant, a darkly handsome yet friendly, thoughtful young priest who wishes to help Nicole deal with her shock; Maria Braithwaite, a worldly European sophisticate who eyes Americans as shallow and impulsive; Judge Oliver Marquith, expansive and greedy, eager to purchase the plot of land called Job's Camp; and more. Also: little Leslie Bannister, the girl on the cover, whose invisible playmates bode unwell for her and well everyone; babysitter Susan Dixon, who straddles the line between dutiful daughter and drug and sex experimenter up in the woods; Ken Brady, maybe her boyfriend, maybe not, he hangs around too much with that creep Freddie Loftus.

Also, weird natural stuff is happening in town: the oppressive heat, the appearance of giant beetles and rattlesnakes, darkening skies, your general gloom and doom ("There seemed to be a giant pall over Holland County, like a tarpaulin covering an open grave"). To get Nicole's mind off all the unpleasantness, Jonathan throws her a birthday party and everybody's there having a high old time. One guy talks about the book he's gonna write, another declares Wertmuller can't compare to Herzog, another simply must get this recipe, and what about the "sex orgies" and LSD up in Job's Camp? Estelle and Maria and Father Conant talk about seances. Dixon gets drunk. Presents for Nicole are opened: lots of booze to ensure the party continues. And then one present in particular that no one recognizes and you can probably guess what's coming. 

Still reeling from that one present that turned a great party into a bummer one, the people who attended are encouraged by Estelle to attend a seance in which she will be the medium. Oh man you know that's not gonna turn out well. And it doesn't. Roaring tornado winds invade the house, lots of screaming in Latin, a spirit named Elvida makes contact ("I am young but old, I am alive but dead, I am flesh but not flesh") and not everyone makes it out alive. A grand set-piece of terrific mayhem, it was great sequence for this horror fan.

Meanwhile Freddie is holding his stoned gang up in the woods spellbound with his "sermons" on the illusory constructs of good and evil. Soon they're gonna have a special night where all boundaries are crossed (wait till you get a load of "the pentagon"!). This night of Rites ends in a climax of sacrifice, violent sex, and whatnot. But of course! It sends Blauvelt and Liscomb into more frantic efforts to find out who Freddie Loftus really is, and if he's behind the gruesome packages sent to Nicole Bannister. Wells takes his time drawing it all together—Effigies is not quite 500 pages—and there are ugly, guilty revelations a-plenty about Freddie, about Nicole, about Father Conant to come. The title too will become clear. Disgustingly, bizarrely, satanically so.

While it's not a great horror novel by any means, Effigies provided me with some solid hours of reading enjoyment, probably because I was expecting so little. I never once went "Oh come on!" or "Are you kidding me?" or rolled my eyes at a clunky descriptive phrase, an amateur analogy, or a wooden exclamation like one too often finds in horror paperbacks—Wells, whoever he is, is a serviceable writer. The death and degradation of the '60s revolutionary spirit is part of the novel's setup, and Wells does a nice background sketch of the era, how the '70s came on and slowly laid waste to those ideals. I did not get a sense of "You kids get off my lawn!" from the author's stance; seemed fairly judgment-free to me. Everybody felt this way after Manson, no? Maybe the author was saying something about how those lofty ideals, once corrupted by time and age and carnal pleasures and the lure of society at large, opened up a place for evil to slip in. But the Church also has its faultlines ripe for exploitation. What difference is there between Freddie Loftus and Father Conant? 

And while satanic/occult horror is one of my least favorite styles of horror, here, for me, it just seemed to work. Many sequences would have lent themselves well to a sleazy '70s or '80s horror flick, especially the seance(s) and the climax(es); shame nobody got on that. One problem is that the cast of characters remain somewhat vague; Wells could've filled in some more detailed specifics about each one, some apt note of behavior or thought or motivation that differentiated them. Sometimes I had trouble identifying some of the minor players. The ending satisfies but just maybe could've hit a note of horror I was imagining. But there's also lots of vintage goodies to enjoy, a mood of fatalism, plenty of post-Exorcist foulness (the passages from "The Journal of a Satanist" are metal as fuck) and even a couple scenes of straight-up hippie/demonic porno! Yee-ikes. Yep, Effigies kinda brings it. If you'll pardon the pun, I enjoyed the hell out of it.

As jaded Maria Braithwaite muses perceptively:

How little Americans know about spiritualism, mystery, the inexplicable, the unforeseen... Astrology, yoga, Buddhism, meditation, all become fads, something to "do"... to show off like a new possession. Psychiatry had been twisted, warped, torn asunder and completely reshaped into a meaningless mass of pseudoscience... And now the American masses had lately discovered the occult. As though it had never been there in the first place! 

Satan, Lucifer, Beelzebub were new characters in the American drama... 

What will these Americans do with their new fad?

The Guardian by Jeffrey Konvitz (1979): Blinded Eyes to See

It was a few years back that I tried reading The Guardian (Bantam Books, Jan 1979), well before I knew it was actually Jeffrey Konvitz's sequel to his 1974 religious horror novel The Sentinel. I gave up pretty early on, after being bored to tears by the various involved and detailed church-y goings-on. Not my scene, man. The cover should've told me all I needed to know, I mean a creepy old nun with blank orbs for eyes. Dig the '70s hair on these folks, though. Did I miss anything by skipping this one?

The Sentinel by Jeffrey Konvitz (1974): Call for the Priest

A mainstream horror bestseller in the wake of the far better novels The Exorcist, Rosemary's Baby, and The Other, 1974's The Sentinel (Ballantine paperback, January 1976) offers similar ominous occult/religious horror trappings but brings nothing new to the proceedings. I don't know what Jeffrey Konvitz did before he wrote this, his first novel, but afterwards he produced B-movies and wrote a couple more shlocky novels (one, a sequel to The Sentinel called The Guardian, was similarly unimpressive). Today it's less remembered than the also-shlocky yet star-studded 1977 movie adaptation.

Allison Parker is a fashion model returning to New York City after her father's funeral in Indiana, a place she'd fled years before due to some icky stuff going on at home. Now she's struggling with some guilt issues due to the fact that her boyfriend, big-shot lawyer Michael Farmer, was the husband of her friend Karen, who killed herself because he was having an affair... with Allison, unbeknownst to her. This soap-opera set-up is slowly parceled out to the reader, and later the "icky stuff" with her father is revealed. The Sentinel begins with Allison moving into an apartment building on the Upper West Side to get her life back in order, but the other residents she meets prevent that.

Back cover copy gives you the inside skinny.

Also featuring is a grizzled city cop chomping on a cigar who's convinced that Michael actually killed Karen for her family's money and is setting Allison up the same way. Boring and predictable, neither scary nor suspenseful (unless under-pacing and ending sections with characters' faces bearing looks of terror count as suspense), The Sentinel stands not with the aforementioned classics of early '70s horror fiction but with dullards like The Searing. This is pretty much hackwork that utilizes TV cop-show tropes and the Latinate mysteries of the Catholic church liberally dosed with Dante's Inferno. Konvitz's prose is literate but not illuminating, and I can see why it was a bestseller. The climax mixes violence with otherworldly demonic forces in the guise of people from Allison's past. Not terrible, mind, but nothing really special either.

Kinda cool stepback art, nothing so dramatic inside
Requisite note of better novels 

I read The Sentinel with indifference mixed with impatience over several weeks, meandering through it without really caring. This is not horror fiction as we fans know it and love it. It is solely marketing fodder branded by its betters, a hash cobbled together from commercials, soap operas, and several other pieces of extremely popular culture; it's a work of mainstream dullness that will bore and frustrate long-time readers of the horror genre thanks to its crass origins. The Sentinel's unique image is for me not even the blind priest that so unimaginatively adorns the cover. For me it's that tasteless yet effectively creepy moment of two women fondling themselves and then one another in front of Allison, a bit of unexpected shock-value that works as it transgresses social norms. It's the only moment of unsettling frisson (no pun intended) in the entire work (and yes, it's in the movie). Utterly missable and inessential despite the implied menace of the title (which really isn't that menacing when you think about it), The Sentinel will make a nonbeliever out of you.

1976 Star Books UK paperback

The Book of Life Opens Before Me

Be sure to read about this literary gem here!

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!