The Revenant by Hugh Zachary (1988): The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down

Well, this was an unexpected treat. Long on my to-read list after the author's 1974 eco-horror Gwen, in Green become a personal favorite, Hugh Zachary's umpteenth novel The Revenant (Onyx, Aug 1988) is a respectable addition to the haunted house pantheon. The esteemed illustrator Richard Newton provides the stunning skull cover art, which perfectly illustrates the terrors within (while he is not credited on the copyright page, you can spy part of his signature just under "Zachary" on the dead soldier's collar). A top-tier paperback cover, thanks to its fine detail and delicate depiction of teeth and bone and hair. Only his hate and desire for vengeance were strong...

Zachary has written a charming haunted-house tale, readable and engaging, that has more in common with PG-rated horror than adult fare like Hell House (1971) or The House Next Door (1978). I'd say the tone is more akin to something to Eighties movies like Poltergeist or House: there are spooky/scary scenes to be sure, but  tempered by Zachary's good-natured style. And unlike the aforementioned Gwen, in Green, which was rife with sexual exploit, The Revenant is about as spicy as a vintage television commercial, coyly "fading to black" whenever the adults close the bedroom door. Jean got into the shower with Vance and washed his back—among other things—and for about thirty minutes forgot about ghosts...

Our protags are the Whitneys: husband Vance and wife Jean, and their two very young daughters, Ridey and Min. The girls are slightly precocious for their ages, but Zachary keeps them from becoming an annoyance to readers—like myself—who find children in horror fiction poorly depicted, by  verisimilitude. The girls' dialogue has the ring of truth to it, perhaps from Zachary actually listening to his own grandchildren, who are mentioned in the book's dedication. Younger Ridey has something akin to a psychic pipeline to the supernatural shenanigans going on, saying things like "He doesn't like it" or "He broked it" when the adults are discussing amongst themselves what in the world could be causing their unexplained problems. But Ridey has always been a little "off," born as she was with a rare, fortunately treatable, brain condition. The center section of the infant's brain had been a vast, frightening void.

There's more, though, but I don't need to go into it all. Gothic standards like hidden rooms, torture chambers, secret journals, evil secrets, all now exposed to the rational airs of the late 20th century. It got a bit Jebus-y for my taste at the end, with the psychic family friend arriving to provide spiritual assist as an amateur exorcist, well-worn Bible in her hand. Even though he's dealing in basic tropes of pulp haunted house horror, Zachary's prose, honed by decades of writing fiction of all stripes, is fresh, familiar, convincing. He keeps things lively right to the end. And while you'll run into a dated notion more than once—I suppose the marital politics aren't exactly progressive, he's like your granddad, isn't he?—he never devolves into crudity or idiocy, like so many other paperback horror originals.

I've read worse novels by more famous authors. With its tension well-mounted between modern people who just want to live in the now and seemingly still-fresh Civil War wounds from crimes committed long ago, The Revenant might not quite be a Southern Gothic, but it's not far off. Hugh Zachary brings a smooth, professional vibe to all the proceedings, even and especially when you notice the nicely time-worn notes of unease begin to be plucked. "You are not going to do this to us," she said softly, speaking to the night, to the sudden chill, to the feeling of uneasiness that had come over her so suddenly. This was her house, her home...

Manstopper by Douglas Borton (1988): If Dogs Run Free

 

Vintage "animal attack" horror novels run a gamut in quality, from the classic to the why bother, from the pretty good to the not bad, from the so bad-it's-good to I think it's just dumb-bad—not to mention the flat-out WTF! So where does my first read of the new year, a brief novel of killer dogs on the loose called Manstopper, by Douglas Borton, fit on the list? I'm going to say between "pretty good" and "not bad." Unexpectedly tough n’ gnarly, this 1988 paperback original from Onyx/New American Library pulls no punches, and is written with a clear eye for typical suspense/horror scenarios injected with high-test potency for maximum-impact canine carnage. 

"Douglas Borton" is a pseudonym of suspense author Michael Prescott—under which Manstopper has been reprinted today—and used for four other novels, also published by Onyx

Manstopper comes ripping out of the gate, telling us what killers these trained dogs are you're about to meet, the simplest  security system, and the most perfect. These babies cost upwards of two large, but for something that cannot be reasoned with or bribed or befriended or outwitted or evaded, you know these puppies gotta be worth it. And pity poor van driver Mike Tuttle, whose cargo is four of these finely-tuned slobbering attack machines. And if that's not bad enough, Mike has the ill-considered idea to pick up a hitchhiker on this cold October night. Then things go sideways, literally even, for driver Mike as the no-shit surprise of the hitchhiker pulls a knife on him and forces him off the highway down a dirt road... The monsters now are loose: It was the morning of Tuesday, October 21, and though Sea Cove, New Jersey didn't know it yet, Halloween was coming early this year.

 

Borton next introduces our cast of characters, in the usual paperback fashion. Alex Driscoll the small-town reporter; Ben Harper the small-town sheriff; Jessica "everybody calls me Jesse" Blair the small-town love interest; the Gaines family, their headstrong little girl and her beloved little dog Buster; a psycho killer now going by the name "Mike Tuttle"; and the mysterious Karl Masterson, the man with the tragic past who trained these animals to be the finest security available. Borton does a perfectly competent job of linking the characters, describing their lives and their work, and definitely at a bit more convincing level than many other paperback horror writers.

 

Less a horror novel, more a hard-edged thriller, Borton gets into the down-and-dirty with both fists, writing solid, if familiar, dog-attack scenes charged with adrenaline. Various characters are dispatched in stalk-and-kill set-ups that drip with dread. A woman defending her wounded husband and child offers an incredibly tense sequence, as well as a radio DJ working the overnight whose standard delivery order of a pizza-with-everything comes with an unexpected side of enraged, murderous Doberman. Called in to heel the cursed curs he trained, Masterson tells the authorities this won't be a simple task; these animals have been bred to survive at all costs: 

 

"[Razor] places a very high value on self-preservation. He would not fight a losing battle. Against overwhelming odds, he would the first to cut and run. Not out of cowardice, but cunning. And you couldn't stop him. His reflexes are quicker than yours—or mine."

 

Masterson talking about the deadly, finely-honed skills of his charges reminded me of First Blood relationship between Rambo and Colonel Trautman; as I said, most often the novel reads like a thriller with some typical horror moments scattered about. Not a bad thing, but not what I was expecting.

Sure, Manstopper hits bum notes, same as so many other Eighties genre paperbacks—I can do without the thought processes of horny teens, flirty grown-ups, and goggle-eyed children for the rest of my horror-reading life, while the psycho killer subplot is too conveniently slotted in to justify that "horror" tag on the spine—but provides other pleasures that offset those well-worn cliches. Borton excels at depicting animal mayhem, which is why you picked up the book in the first place, right? The chapters devoted to the dogs' point of view offer vivid, chilling glimpses of their bloodthirsty nature:  

 

He had been trained to leap and bark and slash... Cages and walls had no reality for him. The only reality was the throbbing sense of danger and the quiet, maniacal urge to destroy....

ShadowShow by Brad Strickland (1988): Theatre of Pain

If, before I picked up this book, you'd have asked me, "Hey Will, do you wanna read another horror novel about a middle-aged man in the '80s looking back on his '50s childhood in a small town and the immortal evil he confronted, and thus grew up and has not been able to escape its influence over his life?" I would have answered with a resounding "Fuck no." How tired I am of that structure, of reading about boys riding bikes in the soft summer evenings, oh god how syrupy and saccharine, spare me. No, really: spare me.

But I believe originality can be overrated. Striking out into new territory doesn't always guarantee success, while going back over covered ground can yield pleasant, if familiar, surprises. The latter is the case for ShadowShow (Onyx Books, Dec 1988, cover artist unknown), a novel set in small-town 1950s Georgia. Now the name of author Brad Strickland didn't mean anything to me till I looked him up for this review, and it turns out he has written lots of fantasy and YA novels, genres I do not follow. So while I knew nothing about him, it was obvious early on that Strickland's manner of imitation was skillful and not slavish. Ah, in good hands, let's see what you got....

The gist of it: shuttered movie theater in Gaither, Georgia reopens under now ownership by a creepy polite-speaking dude named—not too spooky now!—Athaniel Badon. As local tongues wag, he employs local no-gooder, drunkard and wife-abuser Andy McCrory as his dogsbody to traipse through town on various weird errands that arouse suspicion in any seasoned horror reader: "He had worked, oh, the dark man had made him work like a dog... He had worked harder on that theater harder, probably, than he had worked at anything else in his life. But he had a reward to look forward to..." 

We have young Alan Kirby, whom we met in the novel's opening chapter set in the 1980s, growing up motherless with his widowed father John, a WWII vet, shop owner, and paternal saint. Alan, a sensitive, mature child, wakes up one night with the knowledge of sure death and sees out his window the lighting up of the SHADOWSHOW marquee, which then haunts his dreams...

Other men and women in ShadowShow have origins we've read before: Brother Odum Tate, the preacher with a dark secret trying to make amends; Ann Lewis, a 20-something schoolteacher who's beginning to imagine herself in sultry trysts with John Kirby; Harmon Presley the cop who takes offense at folks calling him "Elvis" because that is a white man who "imitates a n***" (racism plays an integral part in the story) and expects everyone to look on him and despair, that is, except for the cadaverous man driving a pre-war Lincoln who stares on-duty Presley down one night and makes him wet his pants so you know that dude's pissed. Whatever is Sheriff Quarles gonna do with this guy?

There's Bellew Jefferson, the rich bank president, also widowed, also with a secret, whose black maid Mollie Avery will become the first victim of the ancient evil that has arrived in Gaither ("The miserable town is mine"), murdered so foully that even the coroner has to vomit. A few other characters you'll know from other books: Ludie Estes, an old black woman who also works for Jefferson but is out of a job when, spooked by Mollie's unholy death, locks himself in his home. At first I'd hoped Ludie wasn't going to be "magical Negro" but I suppose she is: for it is she who knows what happened at the farmhouse which became the theater which became the ShadowShow. She knows how one of America's greatest evils was perpetrated right on that spot decades before, and how the town "forgot" it, and now exploited by Athaniel Badon, the "man" whose name is a bastardization of scary biblical names.

Strickland has a sure hand in depicting that era of American life and holds back on the nostalgic glow. Sure, a few chapters in you'll find a sentence like "It was the way everyone remembered summer ending, droning lazy days with the cry of July-flies audible even in the center of town, days that moved as slow, sweet, and golden as sorghum syrup." But immediately after that Strickland presents us with the old men of Gaither grumbling about world affairs and biblical prophecy while also complaining about the theater showing movies like I was a Teenage Werewolf, "ungodly trash about things that never were and never would be real" and how they admire Strom Thurmond for at least trying to stand up against the civil rights bill, and "They sat on their benches, the old men on the square, and talked over the news, and waited to die." That's a pretty good turnaround. I mean cranky old white guys, wrong about shit forever.

The most notable thing about ShadowShow is that it is a very competent imitation of Stephen King, Peter Straub, and to a lesser extent, Michael McDowell. Of course I don't need to tell you how many, many works were "inspired" by those authors, so perhaps you think I'm not saying much. What makes this inspiration notable is that Strickland has control over this influence, and knows the byways well on his own. The conversation between Alan and his father when John talks about his war experience is realistically dark yet sincerely touching; the glimpses into human evil are unsparing.

Strickland eschews sentiment and favors the straightforward prose which goes for serious dread in a kind of understatement, that plain affect of King, the hint of unfettered madness that speaks of the chaos hiding behind the facade of daily banality, the shrieking howling madness of nothing, that grabbing onto an electrical current, onto live wire running through everything that is always there no matter that we give it no thought whatsoever until it's too late.

Alan had once turned over a huge rock, the way ten-year-old boys will... beneath it he found squirming, crawling horror, gelid gray brown-spotted eggs of some creature stirring vaguely almost born life (but already looking as if death had laid a rotting hand on them)... Alan had recoiled in horror from the damp black path of earth, revolted by what he had revealed.

Alan felt the same way now, as if he alone were privy to all the darkest secrets of the town, and they were all like the concealed, light-hating life under the rock, all of it cold and stinking already of decomposition...

That said, Strickland underplays the power of his central conceit. What I really wanted here, what was promised on the back cover, was a movie theater that showed films to people of their own personal worst fears, darkest secrets, of fates unavoidable, of a future filled with horror and pain and woe, of twisted desires that play out onscreen and will not be denied, of a past rife with evil that stains the present in unimaginable ways. It happens to Bellew Jefferson, oh yes: "And for the rest of that dreadful midnight show, Mr. Jefferson sat and watched—and learned."

This seemed like a spectacular setup for what was in store for other hapless characters. Later Alan asks fellow kid Diane English to a movie matinee, and he sees not the movie they paid to see—Lon Chaney biopic Man with a Thousand Faces—but a dream-like horror show, and it’s implied Diane does as well, but we only see Alan's. Then the movie becomes sexualized death as Mollie Avery appears to him:

"You can have me," she promised... "All the things you dreamed of doing. He will give me to you." "Who?"

"The master... He gives us freedom. Freedom. To do anything you wanted, to anyone you want. And live forever."
"No."

"It's what you want. It doesn't have to be me. Would you like the little girl? He says he will give you the little girl. Would you like to love her? To hurt her? She will be yours."

Ah, a corpse promising immortality and illicit embraces, while offering up glistening entrails and speaking of Alan's mother in Hell, that's pretty fucking good horror... but I wanted more. I wanted all the characters to have stumbled into the ShadowShow, alone, confused, and then to have their haunted selves reflected on the silver screen. But we get the library research, the vampirism angle, blood-sucking, revenants reminiscent of McDowell, the creepy midnight disinterment, the ragtag band of heroes, a bit of Christian mythos, a sacrifice play, a final confrontation: "You can't give eternal life—you can only work dead bodies like puppets, play the shadows over and over, like your movies—"

ShadowShow is an enjoyable, well-written paperback original, with a fair amount of gruesomeness, believable dialogue, light on hazy nostalgia, a backstory that is truly horrific, and a climax that doesn't overstay its welcome. But in the final pages, set in the 1980s, I wanted some more lingering horror, something inescapable, some looming shadow of doom after all that's happened. It's hinted at but not explicit. Yet this pulled punch doesn't mean the book is not a worthwhile read; I believe it really is. If you're looking for another '80s horror novel set in the '50s that examines the secrets of small-town life and death, ShadowShow (mostly) fits the bill.

Feels Like I'm Going to Lose My Mind

The other day, the 10th, was John Shirley's birthday, so I was perusing his vintage paperback covers and this one jumped out at me. I haven't read In Darkness Waiting (Onyx, Apr 1988) and I've come across this cover before, but damn if it didn't strike me this time as a certain female pop singer c. early-mid 1980s. Does anybody else see it, or am I just crazy?

Evans Light and His Paperback Finds

Horror writer Evans Light has been having some great luck with his book-buying sprees recently, finding lots of books I was unfamiliar with. He has graciously allowed me to share their cover art. The title above, The Craving (Dell 1982), was one a TMHF reader was looking for, who provided a description of the cover which I posted on the Facebook page. Evans came to the rescue, ID-ing the book right away, one he'd just purchased himself! Screaming Whitman's Sampler, totally brilliant. Be sure to check out his (and his brother's) site, www.lightbrothershorror.com.

The Sharing (Avon 1984) shows some folks all going for--what? Moist brownies? An evil lust for moist brownies? Is that it?

The Heirloom (Pocket 1981) is by one of Graham Masterton's pseudonyms. '80s kids had all the fun...

Don't Tell Mommy (Pocket 1985) with more face-melting mayhem.

Masques (Berkley 1981) has a creeptastic voodoo doll and a nice tagline and that font I love, ITC Benguiat. Pronzini is a crime writer but his books were often marketed to horror readers; you can see this title's other covers here.

The Breeze Horror (Onyx 1988) Hungry hungry curtains! I find breezy winds rather foreboding, but will that work for a whole novel?

And a couple creepy kids to wrap up: Children of the Dark (Ballantine 1980) and Satan's Spawn (Avon 1988).

You Best Believe I'm in Love, L-U-V

Headhunter by Michael Slade (1984): I Guarantee You That It Ain't Your Day - Chop Chop!

I got more than I bargained for with Headhunter, the debut novel from Michael Slade (a pseudonym for several Canadian criminal lawyers, mainly one Jay Clarke). It's much more complex and wide-ranging than I'd anticipated, less cheesy, smarter and more ferocious too. The Royal Canadian Mounted Police are after a brutal killer in Vancouver who decapitates women, sometimes sexually assaulting them, then places their heads on spikes... and then takes a picture of that to taunt the law with. The RCMP team is led by the haunted Robert DeClercq, a great and respected detective who retired after a tragedy involving his wife and daughter; he is now back doing what he does best. But at what price?

UK paperback reprint, 1993

What feels like dozens of characters and impressive set pieces of murder and fright are crammed into the 420 pages, as well as lots of detailed forensic and surveillance science. Decades-old events feature into the narrative, some more obviously than others. Great details of Vancouver city life, of New Orleans decadence, of frigid 19th century Canadian wastes are presented in which the reader can get lost. There's a voodoo ceremony and LSD trips and whole lot of graphic S&M and mutilation. The author(s) even throw in '70s British punk rock, using the Clash's tipply classic "Jimmy Jazz" as a clue (the lines "Cut off his ears and chop off his head/Police come looking for Jimmy Jazz...").

Overly-literal 1985 cover, Star Books UK

Slade's novel is a melange of behind-the-scenes police procedural, horror fiction tropes like decapitation and voodoo ceremonies, and true-crime serial killer exposé. But Slade definitely goes for a supernatural mood in several scenes despite writing a an otherwise completely realistic, if overheated, thriller. You won't find that in James Ellroy's works, when he upped the crime-horror ante with novels like The Black Dahlia and L.A. Confidential; I suppose that's why Slade's books were generally found on the horror shelves. The cover of this Onyx paperback from '86 is creepy but not all that eye-catching, although I'd say the quote from the author of Psycho is apt.


Anyway, there was lots to like about Headhunter, it definitely brings the '80s horror goodies, but by about page 300 I was a bit exhausted. I didn't mind the textbook-like pages on voodooism, serial killer psychology, the cannibalism of Native American tribes, even the international drug trade (this is one of those novels that includes a bibliography). But the scale, the twists, the complexity started to wear on me. Characterization is rich in some places and quite thin in others, and that narrative that skips about had me flipping back through pages, trying to remember someone's name or some plot point I might've only skimmed. Slade has continued in cult popularity, still writing, still publishing gruesome crime thrillers, and I remember seeing lots of his books around back in the day (Ghoul from 1987 seems to be a particular favorite of horror fans). Headhunter is pretty cool indeed but be prepared for some iffy acrobatics as Slade tries to keep you guessing to the very... last... sentence.

Fear by R. Patrick Gates (1988): This Book's Alright If You Like Crap

Somewhere I'd seen this unlauded - and seemingly unloved - horror paperback (it features no critical blurbs whatsoever) on a list of forgotten-but-good horror novels of the 1980s. But I beg to differ, whoever composed said list: R. Patrick Gates's first novel Fear should be forgotten for good. With its ridiculously generic title, clunky pacing, boring plot, inept characterization of kids and their abusive parents, idiot dope-smoking teens, elementary-school level intro to psychic phenomena, pretentious prologue and epilogue which reference Adam, Eve, and the serpent... where do I stop? Along with the author's rudimentary attempts, and wholly successful failures, at engendering said fear in its readers, it is horror fiction at ebb tide, where you can see all the wreckage that better writers rejected.

And last but not least, its most egregious failure is the always-unwelcome '80s trope of sibling incest (He turned and walked out of the bathroom, but not before he stole one more glance at his sister's tight buttocks). Fear not, fair reader, I read this stuff - or skim, to save eyeballs and brain - so you don't have to. Fear is an utter travesty. Avoid at all costs. Blue-black skulls ain't so bad, though.

Lost Angels by David J. Schow (1990): See the City's Ripped Insides

Despite David J. Schow's reputation in the late 1980s as a young horror writer who could gross out readers and critics at 10 paces with tales of pustular zombies redolent of rot and gore, the longish stories of Lost Angels (Onyx/Mar 1990) are anything but. The five stories in this collection are filled with true-to-life details about relationships romantic and platonic, fables about city life and industry careers and urban societal pressures. But in slips just a touch, just a bare breath of the weird or the satanic, something arcane yet organic that butts up against all that steel and glass and marble and silk and black leather of Los Angeles near the end of the century.

Yep, though Schow himself jokingly coined the term "splatterpunk" which defined a whole subgenre of horror from about 1986 to 1995, he is actually most adept at thoughtful works, maybe verbally manic and overwrought and a bit too self-consciously hip (well, '80s hip anyway, which is kind of awkward), but more concerned with basic human conflict rather than supernatural doings. Any such goings-on tend to be abstract metaphors for the elusive qualities of friendship, loyalty, honor, betrayal, identity, sex, and love - very much in the style of Harlan Ellison circa Strange Wine (1978) or Shatterday (1980), I realized upon this rereading: modern guys, often broken, often clueless for all their state-of-the-art status trappings, dodging the landmines of contemporary sexual politics. You wouldn't know it from the weird neon biker imagery on the 1990 cover, however.

The lead-off story, "Red Light," is, as you can see from the cover above, an 1987 award-winning tale set San Francisco and not originally intended to be part of this LA-based collection. The central conceit - that fame devours - is certainly timeworn by today's paparazzi-dazzled media, but the carefully detailed setting and relationship between the photographer narrator and his long-lost love win out. I believe the story it's referencing is Robert Bloch's "The Model," or maybe Fritz Lieber's "The Girl with Hungry Eyes."

Babbage Press revised edition, 2000

The grim sexual underbelly of Hollywood and fellows like Aleister Crowley form "Brass." It's always awkward learning about your parents' sex life. When you find out your father was part of a sybaritic cult then consorted with demons and now one may be after you in the form of a brilliant and gorgeous soulmate? Chilling. "Falling Man," despite its director main character and behind-the-scenes glimpses of TV production, which I usually like, unfortunately overstays its welcome at over 60 pages. "Pamela's Get" was just a little too oblique for me but has a nicely realistic depiction of female friendship at its core. "Monster Movies" sweetly finishes the collection and pays reverence to the child in the man, the one who worshiped at the late-night TV altar of The Mummy and The Creature but who may have lost his faith as an adult in the corporate world and happy-hour martini bars.

While it hits some false notes - particularly in its hyper-verbal dialogue, which is sometimes cringeworthy in its affectedness - and seems at times like it's perhaps just playing grown-up, Lost Angels is a worthy collection from the era; Schow's got a knack for realism as well as fantasy. Nothing really scary here, except for dreams deferred and hopes lost and loves betrayed. Nah, those things aren't scary at all.

Resurrection Dreams by Richard Laymon (1989): Rockin' Bones

Now we get into the realm of the truly ridiculous horror fiction cover art. Let's parse this one a sec, shall we? Where do we begin? There is a skeleton driving a car. Not a rotting, pustulant, zombified corpse driving a vintage badass hot rod, but a simple, goofy, grinning Halloween-y skeleton, bared phalanxes at a sharp 10 and 2, careering off in a late-model sedan from what looks like a bordello of fellow active skeletons. And one of those skeletons has hair, quite feminine hair. Do you see the woman in the window? Second floor, middle. Ooh-la-la! Also, a skeleton pondering a noose and one swinging an ax. Huh. Skeletons are not scary; they're silly. And what about ol' mom jeans giving our skeletal pal the once-over twice? I do believe the fates have something in store for these two, putting them on a cover of a fairly lame '80s horror novel like Resurrection Dreams, Richard Laymon's agreeable but ultimately underwhelming and underwritten 1989 novel.

Laymon, who died in 2001, has had most if not all of his old novels republished in mass market paperback editions due to his growing posthumous cult status in the field. I do not belong to this cult. He was the type of author I avoided in my horror-reading heyday of the late '80s and early '90s and this book confirms my suspicions: I was seriously judging his books by their covers and the only story I'd read of his, "Mess Hall" in Book of the Dead, seemed to me an artless mess of sexual violence and gore.

Evoking the film version of Lovecraft's Re-Animator, with a madman trying to resurrect dead bodies, Dreams is hackwork of the most inoffensive kind. Melvin Dodds is the high school nerd (you can tell that by his name) who, in a completely unbelievable moment just a few pages in, shocks the town with a horrifying experiment he displays at the school's science fair: trying to resurrect the body (with jumper cables!) of a popular female classmate, recently killed in a drunk driving accident. He ends up locked away in a mental hospital for 20 years; after he's released he heads back into town and operates a gas station. One of his former classmates, now Dr. Vicki Chandler, returns, and Melvin realizes he's loved her all along. The resurrection techniques he began in high school are now perfected, and if Vicki won't love him willingly, well....

I am certainly a fan of ladies resurrected from the dead and the unholy passion that will thus occur, but Laymon really misses out on a chance to explore this taboo. There are a couple rom-com moments when Melvin realizes he's in a relationship with a zombie woman, Patricia, his first victim, rather than the woman of his dreams; Laymon is too poor of a writer and scenarist to make something out of this. Resurrection Dreams is ham-fisted and obvious, gory in the dullest manner, lacking the wit or passion or intensity that could have made his somewhat intriguing premise memorable. Let's just turn off the lights and close the door, shall we, and never speak of this again.

Sunglasses After Dark by Nancy A. Collins (1989): They're So Sharp

I don't remember a thing about the vampire novel Sunglasses After Dark except that at one point, Jim Morrison comes back as a vampire for a chapter, or something like that, which I thought was pretty cool back in the day. Nancy Collins wrote some sequels to this featuring her character Sonja Blue, a vampire hunter, but I never read them. This was part of the post-Anne Rice generation when authors were reimagining vampires for the modern age. I guess that's better than reimagining them teenage and glittery. These days I'd just as soon put on an old Siouxsie Sioux album and be done with it. I've heard Collins was not too keen on the Underworld movies since they seemed too similar to her Sonja Blue series and sued the producers. But you can't deny the striking artistry (courtesy of Mel Odom) of this cover, which is the sole reason I kept my copy for 20 years in pretty nice condition. I love that the title and author are only on the back cover; later printings added them to the front which is far less effective.