The Chill Series by Jory Sherman

Thanks to random Google adventuring, I just discovered this Chill series, published by Pinnacle from 1978 through 1980, all by an author I was previously unfamiliar with named Jory Sherman. Actually I am still pretty unfamiliar with him, although I've learned he's written about a gajillion Westerns over the decades. This psychic investigator stuff looks like sheer pulp fiction cashing in on the pseudoscientific tabloid trends of that wild n' wooly decade known as the 1970s.

 

The series title is the nickname of one Dr. Russell V. Chillders, the aforementioned "psychic investigator" (why do psychics need to "investigate" shit? Wouldn't they already know?) Cover art is by Paul Stinson, save for Chill at top; its more mildly Gothic imagery done by Jack Thurston (for UK cover art and some plot synopses, go here). I can't get over that Cabbage Patch doll head at the bottom! As you peruse the covers, note the wonderfully dated fashions, standard horror tropes, occult fads, and paperbacks that cost merely a buck seventy-five. The '70s indeed.

Please, if anybody out there's read any of 'em, let us know!

Arthur Machen Born Today, 1863

A towering figure in weird fiction, Arthur Machen (who died in 1947) was an influence and an inspiration for many of the writers I've covered here at TMHF: Lovecraft of course, and the whole circle of Weird Tales folks like Clark Ashton Smith and Frank Belknap Long, on up to King, Straub, Campbell, T.E.D. Klein and Karl Edward Wagner. And while Machen's output is out of my self-defined era of "vintage" horror fiction, these wonderful paperback covers most certainly are not! These collections date from the 1960s to the early '80s, American and British editions, with covers highlighting various lurid and sensational aspects of the Welshman's superb tales. They're are all highly collectible paperbacks as well; I've lost one or two over the years and have not yet replaced them.

These top four paperbacks are from Pinnacle in the 1970s, two reprints of two volumes. Robert LoGrippo is responsible for the garish, blood-drippy covers from 1976. The fifth Pinnacle paperback is from 1983 and contains all the stories from the two-volume set. Can't even recall which one(s) I owned, and I haven't reread even "The Great God Pan" in over 15 years. Surely it is one of the seminal tales of classic horror.

In 1972 the highly-regarded Ballantine Adult Fantasy line published The Three Imposters (1895). This novel - with Boschian art again by LoGrippo - in episode form includes two of his most influential stories, "The Novel of the Black Seal" and "The Novel of the White Powder." Below you can see the British paperbacks with those titles, from Corgi in the mid-'60s; love the covers by Josh Kirby.

 

Two more British paperbacks from Panther - a publisher known for putting out lots of horror fiction - dated 1975, with eye-catching occult cover art from Bruce Pennington.

Robert Lory, author of The Dracula Horror Series, born today 1936

Some classics from Robert Lory's nine-volume The Dracula Horror Series, which began April 1973, with the aptly-titled Dracula Returns. The covers for the US editions published by Pinnacle featured at first traditional opera-caped Drac, bats, sexy vampire brides, and full moons. As the series progressed you saw other pulp/horror icons like the zombie and the mummy, and then-hot fads like cults, pyramids, and lost civilizations. Artist Harry Borgman illustrated the first four, a "J. Thompson" did number five, and Victor Valla did the last bunch. All have their groovy charms, but I think my favorites are the first two. Read full, positive reviews of the series here.

Charnel House by Graham Masterton (1978): His Breath, His Heart, His Blood

Another foray into Native American pulp horror from one of its most ardent purveyors, Graham Masterton! His fourth novel Charnel House delivers in the usual Masterton manner: regular guy first-person narration, ancient evil awoken, disbelieving authorities, wizened elder here to help, lady of various charms threatened by said ancient evil. This is pulp in its '70s incarnation, fast and cheap, but fun and almost charming in its steadfast refusal to stop and ponder, take a breath, or avoid engaging in dated gender and race stereotypes (well, they weren't dated then... but maybe). Nope, Masterton races through Charnel House in his patented hell-for-leather, first-draft style, no need for subtlety or an effort to suspend disbelief.

We start off with what seems to simply be a haunted house, on a sloping San Francisco side street, in a tall Gothic-styled home. The elderly owner, Seymour Willis, can hear it breathing, you see, and he's enlisted the aid of San Fran sanitation worker John Hyatt to find out if the breathing is, you know, normal. It's not, of course, so Hyatt calls up some colleagues and pals and an ex-hippie/occult/Age of Aquarius girlfriend to help piece together the mystery of a respirating house. This all ends badly, ends so badly that the artist for the cover of Tor's 1988 edition was able to choose one of those bad moments for illustrating. Accurately. I mean, woah.

As in Masterton's other mythology-themed novels (The Manitou, The Djinn), the protagonist (not much of a skeptic) looks to a wise old man versed in the supernatural charms and curses of mankind's childhood. George Thousand Names identifies the source of the haunting: a demon of peerless malignity known as The First One to Use Words for Force. He sounds pretty awesome to me, as Mr. Thousand Names describes him thus:

"He was wily and cunning and vicious, and his chief enjoyments were causing hatred and confusion, and satisfying his lust on women. The reason we call him the First One to Use Words for Force is because his tricks and his savagery created in the hearts of men their first feelings of fury and revenge... and when he was asked in ancient days to help place the stars, he tossed his own handful of stars up into the night sky at random and created the Milky Way."

The First One, once banished to the underworld, hid away his vital parts - I said, appalled, "His breath, his heart, and his blood?" - so that he could one day return to life at full power. And that, you won't be surprised to learn, is precisely what's going on at "Charnel House:" he's putting himself back together and using the innocent as his vessels. I love that stuff, really I do, and Masterton doesn't stint on these kinds of macabre legends of torture and woe ("the Ordeal of the Three"!?).

At first I thought the novel might be a crude ripoff of Matheson's Hell House, but it's not at all, just more of the Masterton same. Which is cool with me. Despite the one-dimensional storyline, generic characterization, the leaden humor, cliched attempts at atmosphere and mood, and American characters who speak only in British English while drinking copious amounts of booze, Masterton successfully piles horror upon horror, leading to an action-packed climax at - you guessed it - the Golden Gate Bridge. And I was just there myself, so I had no problem imagining the precise location. Good stuff.

But perhaps the best part of Charnel House are its paperback covers! In fact, I bought the original Pinnacle edition at Powell's Books off a display labeled "Judge a Book By Its Cover!" See more covers here.

The Midnight Hour by Donald Bacon (1988): More More More!

Don't know anything about this one but it has one helluva cool stepback cover! Enjoy.
 

Dark Advent by Brian Hodge (1988): Countdown to Extinction

Cursed with an utterly absurd and completely irrelevant cover, the post-apocalyptic horror novel Dark Advent is a passably okay work, Brian Hodge's minor-league version of The Stand (1978), Alas, Babylon (1959), or Swan Song (1987). You got your germ "warfare" gone wrong, the inadvertent regular-guy heroes and opportunistic bad guys, and large-scale horror setpieces as a flawed and violent humanity struggles to rebuild after the unthinkable happens.

The story moves along all right as Hodge introduces his large cast of survivors, but by the halfway mark I just couldn't take it anymore and really skimmed over the rest. Dark Advent is not overly bad; it's actually overly nice, if that makes any sense. Hodge's tone is eager and earnest tinged with an adolescent cynicism. Guilelessness is simply not to my taste at all (perhaps if I'd read it when I was a teenager). Hodge himself noted these "rampant immaturities" in a recent blog post about an upcoming updated reprint.

Hodge still wrote in this manner in Nightlife a couple years later (the second title from the impressive Dell/Abyss line), but that novel is much more original and engaging. The cover (by an uncredited Marvel Comics' Bob Larkin) may promise something satanically cheesy but Dark Advent really isn't - nor does it feature any children lost in a wilderness of flames - but it's not a work of horror fiction that I can say you must read, unless you've just gotta read every post-apocalyptic horror novel ever till the end of the world.

Hodge himself

Satan Whispers "Evil" with The Devil's Breath

See, I told you!

All kidding aside, this is a quick post as I've begun reading a vintage '80s horror saga, a multi-volume series by an unfortunately neglected, and now late, Southern author.... Human forces war against nature's ravages, a dead woman's legacy, and an awesome, blood-curdling dismemberment. That's just the tagline! Hot damn.

Schoolhouse by Lee Duigon (1988): Can't Even Think of a Word That Rhymes

Can't get enough of horror paperbacks adorned with skeletons - who still have all their hair! This one of a creepy skeletal schoolteacher is especially hilarious. I'm doing some Halloween-appropriate reading while getting ready for a big Halloween bash this weekend, so no reviews this week, alas. Enjoy Schoolhouse!

Seductions by Ray Garton (1984): Sweet Lovely Death

Promising a tale of eroticized bloodshed and death, this first novel by proto-splatterpunk Ray Garton boasts a truly lurid and ludicrous cover image (thanks, Steve Kropp, whoever you are!). Sadly it is pretty much a miss for any horror-fiction fan. Not sure if this will surprise anybody. I really had fun with Live Girls (1987), but Crucifax (1988) left me feeling vastly indifferent. True, I like how the title Seductions is rendered in gore and the lady looks to be having a lovely time hanging there, but that's the best thing about the novel.

Once again ancient mythical creatures the succubi and incubi are making trouble for regular folk in a small town populated by horny teenagers and their put-upon high school teachers. Death becomes something like the ultimate orgasm as the creatures seduce, fuck, then somehow... uh, absorb their victims, which makes for some okay icky '80s horror imagery. And while Garton makes several of his characters sympathetic and concerned for others, it's obvious this is an early novel by a writer who would grow more confident both with characterization and horror. YA style and themes jostle around with pretty graphic sex-and-violence scenes - more toothy genitalia! - while shaky dialogue creaks everywhere.

1999 reprint from Subterranean Press

This is a book I remember having when I was a teenager but couldn't really get into it even then, and got rid of my copy. I like having the book now because its cover is a great example of tacky horror paperback cover art, but reading it was a bit embarrassing for me today. I did appreciate the vintage-y scenes taking place in a video rental store and a reference to Val Lewton, and the final page acknowledges that no one can ever make nightmares go away. True that. Still, unless you're a horror or Garton completist - do not pay collector prices for it - I can't honestly recommend Seductions to anyone. 

The Djinn by Graham Masterton (1977): Jean Genie Let Yourself Go!

It's the return of Harry Erskine, Graham Masterton's dry-witted, comic-hardboiled phony "clairvoyant," first seen in the masterful The Manitou. This time Harry's tangling with The Djinn, an Arabian supernatural entity (from which we get the English word "genie"). But this is no lantern-bound wish-granting jokester; it has 40 monstrous manifestations and they're all, well, fatal for humans. A slim and economic 200 pages, you can read it in one night whilst enjoying its vintage-y paperback horror goodness, as seen in its inside cover:

Art by Ed Soyka. Thanks to The Cover Art of Graham Masterton

It begins with the funeral of Harry's godfather, Max Greaves, who committed a horrendous, self-mutilating suicide. Max was a respected amateur scholar and collector of Islamic artifacts who, in his last years, grew increasingly cantankerous and paranoid. Max's widow Marjorie unsettles Harry when she tells him Max wanted their house, a rambling old Cape Cod estate called Winter Sails, burned down, along with all the Arabian artifacts inside, after his death. One item in particular, a very large jar decorated with eyeless horses that Harry remembers from childhood visits, is now locked away at Max's insistence. But with the help of the foxy-eyed woman Anna who shows up at the funeral (whose pants Harry is dead-set on getting into), a Middle East folklore professor, and an old doctor, we get to the very black heart of this Arabian mystery.

Tor reprint 1988

Brimming with pseudo-scholarship and ancient mythology - for which I'm a total and complete sucker when featured in horror fiction - Masterton's novel is simple and fast-moving. Passages about the fearsome djinn and their unholy powers fascinated me. They are also utterly repulsive in that outrageous '70s way:

"The Arabs used to say that Ali Babah had made a pact with a strange and evil sect of necromancers who lived in the hills. These wizards performed extraordinary and quite obscene rites, one of which was said to involve carrying around a young girl on top of a long pole which had been pushed through her vagina. This sect is sometimes known as the N'zwaa or the Unswa, and sometimes by an unpronouncable name which means Those-Who-Adore-The-Terrible."

Star UK edition 1977

Oh hells yes. You can probably guess at some of the mayhem that's coming. Or maybe you can't. Masterton writes without extraneous plot or detail, but with lots of corny/snarky comments from Erskine (Not that I was frightened or anything like that, but I prefer to meet the supernatural on my own terms - in broad daylight, with running shoes on), entertainingly clunky dialogue from everyone else, and a mounting dread that culminates in a graphic and bloody good climax. The Djinn is no Manitou, but it's certainly a fun, though minor, example of '70s horror fiction (comparing it to 'Salem's Lot is of course ridiculous). Thanks again, Graham!

Mr. Masterton

The Vampire: His Kith and Kin in Paperback Covers

This cover for Dracula Began, a 1976 novel by Gail Kimberly, is stunning: you got Vincent Price from Tomb of Ligeia with misplaced eyes, big black bats, a Gothic castle, village people on the hunt, and a totally incongruous lady's head on a platter. Amazing. Artist George Ziel is a master of the vintage horror paperback cover!

A repulsive old-man vampire adorns Karl Alexander's Curse of the Vampire from 1984. That certainly wouldn't work today, since we all know vampires now have perfect pouts and six-pack abs.
Ahh, I love this one! Le Fanu's 1872 classic Carmilla was reprinted in 1970 with this fantastic cover. Love the font, the woodwork, the frightened hippie chick cowering. Excellent!

I've got a couple of the vampire novels by Les Daniels featuring the Spanish vampire Don Sebastian de Villanueva, but I haven't read them yet. The Black Castle from 1978 is simple and to the point.

Traditional opera-cape-and-tux-clad Drac here, part of Fred Saberhagen's long-running Dracula novels. The Holmes-Dracula File, from 1982, is labeled "science fiction," which I find odd, since neither of those dudes fits in the genre.

The first sequel to her Sunglasses After Dark, Nancy Collins's 1992 In the Blood continues the adventures of Sonja Blue, as well as again featuring the art of Mel Odom.

Gothic romance from 1970, with exotic "vampyre" spelling. Ooh!

By-the-numbers rendering of Lugosi for a 1968 reprint of Bram Stoker's lesser-known works.

Groovy vintage Drac and his lady-fiend on the US cover of The Hand of Dracula! from 1977. I especially love the UK edition. Author Robert Lory put out a whole series of these modern Dracula adventures.

1977's Hounds of Dracula. Dracula's dog. I mean really people.

Peter Tremayne also wrote another Dracula novel, called Bloodright, and returned in 1978 with The Revenge of Dracula. Pretty standard, traditional image on this. Not sure about the blow-dried 'do, though.

A murder of crows, a quiver of cobras, a streak of tigers... and A Clutch of Vampires (1974). Nice. I think that's an Edward Gorey illustration, don't you? Raymond T. McNally was the vampire expert of the '70s.

Montague Summers was an eccentric English clergyman-scholar who wrote several books on the occult - from the suspect point of view of a true believer - and his most famous was The Vampire: His Kith and Kin (1928). This is the 2011 edition.