A Beautiful Corpse

1973 Curtis Books, artist unknown

1980 Playboy Press reprint, artist unknown

Death Valley of the Dolls

Behold the glory that is the cover and stepback art for a novel I only discovered yesterday, The Transformation, by Canadian thriller writer Joy Fielding. This Playboy Press paperback dates from the distant year of 1976. It's obviously a take on the era-defining Manson murder spree with a Jackie Susann angle and not a supernatural horror novel; I got the photos (art by Rob Sauber) from Groovy Age of Horror, who reviewed it years back. Looks like this edition is going for a few bucks, so alas I won't be buying a copy anytime soon. But it gives me hope that there are still vintage horror-related paperbacks yet to be discovered...

The stench of slaughter

An orgy of Satanism and death

Riveted and Chilled

Lick It Up

Pick One and Die: More Playboy Paperbacks

And here I was thinking I'd already found the best in canine carnage cover art! Foolish me. Playboy Paperbacks went for the throat with The Accursed (Dec '82) and The Haven (1977). Who knew the entrance to the underworld was paved with bathroom tiles?

Standard creepy kids cover with The Banished (Nov '81), while the moody Earthbound (Sep '82) is excellent; Swanson is a Richard Matheson pseudonym.

Another monster?! Oh Hellstone (Jan 1981), you tease.

Then we get the starkly named Hex (May '80), Death (Aug '82), Nightmares (Sep '79), Terrors (Jul '82), and Horrors (Oct '81) all but the first quiet-horror anthologies. I love that they're actual photos! Blood and bone, baby, that's all you need. And a refrigerator magnet alphabet.

Build Me a Woman: The Horror of Playboy Paperbacks

During the early 1980s, the Playboy empire, perhaps unsurprisingly, extended its reach into the paperback pulp fiction market, publishing dozens of horror, occult, fantasy, science fiction, and crime novels under its Playboy Paperbacks imprint. Not all were paperback originals, simply reprints of books sometimes published years before. I've long seen the little icon on various titles I've picked up in the last couple years, on even "respectable" stuff like anthologies edited by Charles L. Grant and Stuart David Schiff. Here however I want to focus here on the tawdrier side of their cover art, that very retro conflation of horror and cheesecake that you know Playboy could do right.

Satyr (1981) hits a couple uncomfortable notes but how could you think such a title wouldn't? This cover is amazing though in its utter tackiness. Linda Crockett Gray wrote half a dozen or so horror novels, some later published by Tor in the 1980s; I've got one or two but haven't read them.

Blood Wrath (June 1981) kinda freaks you out with its Revlon model going all crazy eye killah on you. Whither hast thou gone, Chester Krone?

Darker Places (Dec 1980) features some gender, er, politics I'm not sure I wanna parse. Is the woman clad in a negligee trying to defend herself from a psycho killer, or is the male - veins bulging in his bare forearm, nice obvious allusion! - protecting himself from a desperate, crazed, suicidal woman, prefiguring Fatal Attraction? Parke Godwin has at least written lots of SF/F.

Night Screams (Mar 1981) could trade in some ambiguity with those luscious lips and perfect teeth, engaged in some playful bit of - oh, that tagline... nope. Pronzini and Malzberg collaborated on several crime thrillers which I've yet to read.

On the Eight Day (June 1981) God built a woman? I dunno, I thought He'd already had that covered. Lawrence Okun, no bible scholar he.

The Wanting Factor (1980) makes me wonder where I can get one of those gold t-shaped pendants.

Image of the Beast (1979) Farmer wrote mostly SF but this novel is apparently based on Gilles de Rais, so of course, you know, fuck yeah. Love the vampire lady, don't know what she's got to do with the story though.

The Shaman (Mar 1982) isn't too lurid but back 30 years ago it was probably still fairly scandalous for women to have all-over tats.

I've saved the best for last. This gorgeous cover for Siren (May 1982) - the only good image I could find of the book on all the internets - is captivating (natch). Love the turquoise eyes! Compare this cover to the shit Tor reprint one. Ouch.

More to come...

Megalodon by Robin Brown (1981): The Hungry End is Waiting for Your Life

Finally found this glorious cover art for the paperback of Megalodon (authored by someone named Robin Brown, Playboy Press Dec 1982), a book I immediately bought when it first appeared on bookstore shelves. I was 12 and I did a book report on it for 7th grade English; I can still see the moue of distaste my teacher had when I presented the book to her. Lo these many years later and my copy long gone I can still remember thinking it was pretty crappy even then, replete with a tawdry and totally out of place sex scene and ridiculous scenes of the enormous Carcharodon megalodon eating various deep-sea equipment and hapless marine biologists. I recall nothing else, don't even think I liked it at all despite being a Jaws/shark maniac, but you can read a synopsis from Publisher's Weekly. But still, you gotta love that art (you can see the artist's clever signature in the rocks to the left of the monster's jaws, Les Katz)—so much better than the original hardcover!

The Desecration of Susan Browning by Russell Martin (1981): Lost Her Soul, Doomed and Cold

Featuring the least impressive of cover art of Russell Martin's books from Playboy Press, The Desecration of Susan Browning is a decently agreeable paperback original horror/erotic thriller. With liberal dashes of titillation, a stale if well-handled and mild "satanic" cult angle, painfully dated gender stereotypes, it's written pretty good with a bit of a knowing wink. Nothing too special is going on - it's certainly not "scary as hell!" -  but Martin keeps the storyline hopping with the promise of illicit sex and sacrificial death; me, I liked the sleazy detective playing both sides just so he can get a little girly action. By the time poor hapless Susan Browning finds herself lying on a cot in a freezing room, shaved bare from the neck down, awaiting the unthinkable at the hands of a powerful and mesmerizing occult leader, you'll swear you can't wait to read Martin's other books. Or you'll at least add them to your ever-growing "must-read" list. If you want more Desecration, check out this in-depth review at William Malmborg's blog.

Nightmare in Red (1981): The Strange Case of Jacqueline Marten

Here's a true tale of woe and horror in the publishing world: Playboy Press published dozens of paperbacks throughout the '60s, '70s, and '80s, till its line was bought by Putnam and became part of their Berkley list. Boring behind-the-scenes stuff, yes, but one thing Playboy had done at its height was publish many titles that were basically historical romances with some darker, perhaps supernatural aspects to them, and present them as horror/occult paperbacks. Shameless! Outrageous! Unacceptable!

Well, I just found out about Nightmare in Red, and pity poor Jacqueline Marten: originally her title for this romance novel was Let the Men Stay Home, then it was Bryarly... but Playboy of course wanted to cash in on the occult craze of the day, so they gave the paperback a garish horror-themed cover and retitled it Nightmare in Red. Who could resist such an aggressive cover image?! (Very Alucarda if you ask me). It was such a crude marketing ploy that Marten literally cried when she saw the paperback for the first time. Fortunately for her, Pocket Books reprinted it in 1988 under the title Bryarly with a more accurate romance-y cover.

And that wasn't the first time! In 1979 Playboy had published her novel Visions of the Damned and presented it in the same manner, although this one isn't quite as tacky - but it does name-check the bestselling Reincarnation of Peter Proud. It too was reprinted by in '88 Pocket as Forevermore. Both Nightmare and Visions are considered precursors of that whole "paranormal romance" sub-sub-subgenre. Fortunately these two novels got good reviews in the romance genre, even with their utterly inappropriate cover art, which ensured their republication by more reputable publishers. Oh, Playboy: so very very naughty! And not in the hot way.

Shadows, edited by Charles L. Grant (1978): "Soon You Shall Be As We"

A stark and simple cover image introduces Shadows, first in the long-running quiet horror/dark fantasy anthology series put together by quiet-horror maestro Charles L. Grant. At this period in the 1970s horror fiction had apparently not yet quite found its full and singular identity in the publishing world; Grant solicited tales by fantasy and science fiction writers - and in at least one case, crime writers - to fill out this original volume. The anthology itself won the 1979 World Fantasy Award, as the Bram Stoker Award was still years off; and the lead story, (the maddeningly elusive) "Naples" by SF writer Avram Davidson, won Best Short Fiction as well.

First though - what's up with the refrigerator magnet alphabet cover?! Ew boy. Playboy Press really went all out, no? Berkley Books, who published the reprint a few years later, used the same artwork but subsequent volumes fortunately had more oomph. Like this one, from '88.

Some of the stories in this first Shadows may be so quiet as to have their final import unheard or unrecognizable - common enough in this style of horror; others end with an unexpected shout in a dark silent room. But the caliber of writing, the actual prose, is uniformly good, from the capable strong hands of the known and unknown author alike. Grant writes intros for each, praising the writer for letting the reader's imagination do most of the work, for carefully crafting tales that lull us into dark and dangerous places, for "leaving out" that "final" sentence which might break the delicate spell of quiet horror: stories that are, as he puts it, like a razor that summons pain after the blood has been spilled. Nice.

Charles L. Grant c. late '70s

Overall the stories vary widely and well. Eternal horror anthology staple Ramsey Campbell contributes two stories: one long, "The Little Voice," and one very short, "Dead Letters." I found the latter, about a drunken suburban seance, to be chilling good fun; it would have made a fine, light "Night Gallery" episode. The former is in that classic Campbell style that either sneaks up on you and creeps you out, or bores you to tears as you trudge through his subtle allusions and asides in the pluperfect tense. I appreciated the haunting guilt of the main character but found the execution interminable.

Published 1987 as Shadows II for whatever reason in the UK

Two very little known writers give us two good stories: "Butcher's Thumb," by William Jon Watkins, is a grimly funny EC Comic, and "A Certain Slant of Light" by Raylynn Moore is a sensitively written haunted house story. Mystery writer Bill Pronzini muses longingly upon sex and death in the fractured "Deathlove" (natch). R.A. Lafferty's "Splinters" is odd, quirky, playful; I can't believe I had to Google "eidolon." Cover-noted Stephen King presents his fatalistic tale of a college student and drifter swept up in madness and crime, lust and murder, "Nona." Filled with creepy Freudian psychosexual imagery, it's marred only slightly by a trite final line. He really should have followed Grant's advice and left it out.

A college-age King

But my favorite was about a young Italian-American man who travels to his family's mother country for genealogical research. "Where All the Songs are Sad" by Thomas F. Monteleone is the longest story and very effective, evoking the rustic superstitions of the old country that aren't quite superstitions. With details of Italian villages so real and minute, he may even be writing an autobiographical piece, and uses a setting similar to Bradbury's marvelous "The Next in Line."

...they came upon the somber entrance to a very old cemetery. Pausing, he was arrested by the starkness of the gates, as if the gray stone and rusted ironwork led into a colorless, other dimension - as perhaps they did. He saw an inscription above the gate in the form of a short couplet: "Un tempo fummo come voi, Presto sarete come noi.""What does it say?" he asked Victoria, who stood silently watching him.
A shudder seemed to pass through her, her eyes lost their sparkle for a moment. "It says: 'Once we were as you, Soon you shall be as we.'"

Thomas F. Monteleone

(In the '90s Monteleone would himself edit an anthology series, the ambitious and experimental Borderlands - I can't believe I don't have my copies anymore! Must re-buy and review). Now, is "Ellisonian" a literary adjective? Because it should be. So let's say "Mory" from SF writer Michael Bishop is Ellisonian: a dark fantasy about an older man plagued by what first appears as a robber, yet without a weapon, in the man's liquor store; what he takes from him will be everything, everything and more. Not even Clark Griswold had a worse time at an amusement park. I wasn't too thrilled with Dennis Etchison's "The Nighthawk" when I read it recently in his The Dark Country, but I suppose it does fit the hushed fantastical tone Grant was looking for.

Doubleday hardcover 1978 - note "science fiction" label

"Picture" is Robert Bloch's wryly morbid entry, a Faustian fable of devilish deals gone wrong, so blackly comically wrong. Classic Bloch. And John Crowley is one of those not-so-prolific fantasy writers who has garnered effusive praise from folks who would never read fantasy (his classic Little, Big sits on my shelf in its original hippy-dippy 1981 paperback edition) and for Shadows he presents "Where Spirits Gat Them Home," a Wallace Stevens-titled tale of distant family relations, lost time, and even religious heresy... oh and death that awaits us patiently no matter what our intentions.

John Crowley

And deaths are well-met everywhere in these Shadows stories. Death inescapable, foreordained, a meeting whose arrangements have been made since long before you were you and we were we (No, the Things that live at the bottoms of old wells and the tops of old houses are old themselves, far older than anybody's ghost). Call it what you will: fate, destiny, bad luck, but it will be there for us all, and often and ironically not even in a respectful darkness but in a bright and unclouded noon, shadowless.

Unholy Passion I Feel for You: The Erotic Horror Paperbacks of Russ Martin

Now discovering this kind of horror paperback cover art is why I have this blog! Russ Martin (aka Russell W. Martin) is a name unfamiliar to me; none of my Google-fu turned up anything about him whatsoever (update: when he was a college professor in California, according to the dustjacket of one of his novels). I unknowingly featured his 1981 novel The Desecration of Susan Browning awhile ago here; I simply had no idea Martin had an entire series of erotic-satanic-cult-horror paperbacks back in the day - how wonderful! In all my bookstore jaunts I don't think I've come across one of these. You can bet if I do you'll be hearing all about it...

At top is Rhea, his 1978 novel, published in paperback in 1980 by Playboy Press. Utterly fantastic! Vintage-y lady of many looks draws you in, probably seals your doom but not before draining you of precious bodily fluids. One would hope. Love the reptilian tail trailing from the R...

Hello nurse! I really need to know what happens between The Devil and Lisa Black (1982). The bloody fingers thing has got to be some sort of fetish.

Tor Books started publishing Martin in the early 1980s and reprinted them in '88. You can see how paperback horror cover art changed during that time in the two editions of The Possession of Jessica Young (1982). I'm not crazy about either one, though; is the woman supposed to look threatening, or threatened, or what?

From 1983, The Obsession of Sally Wing. "Vastly evil sensuality"! Well alright. The cover from '88 makes the white liberal in me feel a mite uncomfortable.

1984's The Education of Jennifer Parrish. Now this is some '80s preppy shit. (What was it about the '80s and preppies anyway?) Look at that hair! I get a real "Silver Spoons" meets "The Facts of Life" vibe, maybe some Less Than Zero too. These kids don't really look all that monstrous though once you really look at them; it's all in the lighting.

Martin in 1978

 

Be sure to read this guy's short comments on Martin's books - he loves 'em all. Anybody know these books? Are they really worth tracking down? Please, spill!

13 Paperback Horrors: Where All It Ever Does Is Rain

Down Bound Train (Popular Library 1974) by Bill Garnett. Don't you feel like you're a rider? This cover's got a Bradbury vibe for me; also the obligatory reference to surpassing The Exorcist. Yeahhh... no.

Dark Prism by David Lippincott (Dell 1981) Creepy nuns, not quite as popular as creepy kids or clowns, but still up there. This one's particularly effective.

The Midnight Tree by Charles Higham (Pocket 1979) Despite its feyness I dig the mood.

Deadly Eyes by James Herbert (Signet 1983) Movie tie-in edition for Herbert's pulp '70s classic. Meh.

The Other Child by Michael Hale (Avon 1986) Creepy digitalized kid. Fancy and modern!

Saxon's Ghost by Steve Fisher (Pyramid 1972) Psychedelic, we-are-floating-in-space, Stranger In a Strange Land kinda thing. I grok it.

Unholy Child by Catherine Breslin (Signet 1980) Hmm, a pregnant nun? Or not? Or something. Don't think I need to tell you what better books the publisher was trying to evoke.

The Sibling by Adam Hall (Playboy Press 1979) Truly a "What's in the box?!" moment. Don't know what the image has to do with a sibling, though, do you?

Dark Seeker by K.W. Jeter (Tor 1987) Not really sure what's going on here. Anyone?

Owls' Watch (Crest 1965) Delightfully classic vintage horror paperback cover art!

Shadow Child by Joseph A. Citro (Zebra 1987) Damn, this one's no joke. Nice going Zebra!

The Witches by Francois Mallet-Joris (Paperback Library 1970) Great cover art by the Dillons, whose work I was first introduced to through their classic Harlan Ellison covers.

Desecration of Susan Browning by Russell Martin (Playboy Press 1981) Of course this is a Playboy publication.