The Case Against Satan by Ray Russell (1962): Hell is for Children

There was a rattling, gagging sound from the girl, and they turned to watch in pity and loathing as she retched violently, her body curling in spasms, her fingers and toes clenched, her gaping mouth spewing jet after jet of reeking substance that covered her and splattered the wall and ran sluggishly in long viscous tendrils down to the floor.

 

A young teenage girl in unbearable torment of unknown origin. Her beleaguered parent. Two priests with competing ideas about their belief in God and Satan. A harrowing test of wills against a force the modern world has forgotten...

 

Modern horror would be a poorer thing were it not for the book and film The Exorcist—that's not an overstatement. William Peter Blatty's thrilling, chilling tale of innocence soiled and faith tested, of doubt, guilt, and ultimately of sacrifice, has touched the popular horror imagination at that same primal archetypal level as Dracula and Frankenstein. But as it was with those two monstrous icons, The Exorcist also had its own forgotten precursor. I'm talking about the 1962 novel The Case Against Satan, by the late great Ray Russell (1924-1999, seen below in an undated photo, but probably late Sixties or so).

You may recall I've written positive reviews of several of Russell's works over the years, I'm absolutely a fan, happy to see all his horror Gothics back in print today. His adeptness at combining a dark, literate sophistication with "distasteful" genre elements, which might seem beneath his skill set, is admirable. Grand Guignol bloodiness in works like "Sardonicus" and Incubus is polished by his steady pen in prose both accessible and lively, often delivered with an ironic tone, a devilish wink. As editor for Playboy magazine in its early days, he no doubt sharpened that pen and that penchant for macabre philosophy when working with writers like Ray Bradbury, Charles Beaumont, Kurt Vonnegut, and others of that sensibility.

 

Russell's dialectic in his genre fiction, and first seen in this novel, is one of superstition versus rationality, of tradition versus modernity, of enlightenment versus religion, as one reviewer of Case Against Satan notes. Indeed, this kind of against-the-grain approach was also part and parcel of the Playboy "philosophy," if you will: unshackling our minds (and bodies!) from the strictures of the past, strictures too often rooted in myth and superstition (i.e., religion). From such conflict does Russell approach demonic possession in the modern world. And no surprise that sex is suspected at the root of the "possessed" girl's problem: repressed sex, of course, a great raw force that seethed and snarled for release.

 

As tête-à-têtes go, here Russell is in the "both sides" camp, a final answer which Russell leaves open-ended. The first chapter is titled "The Two Sides of Midnight"—indeed, all the chapter titles seem to predict black metal songs!—and that gets right at Russell's views about the difficulty we have perceiving even what we see right in front of us. "The Hand of God is quicker than the eye," as one character quotes.

 

Russell combs through history and literature to find some delicious, torturous horrors, as is his wont, easy enough to do with the Catholic Church. Intellectual talk between the two conflicting priests, Father Halloran and Father Sargent, when they're not actually exorcising poor young Susan Garth is stimulating; the cranky teetotaling anti-Catholic John Talbot was a hoot, with his scandalous insight that the Church and communism are opposed to one another solely because they are both totalitarian... Total power, total control. Control over everything—over the body, over the mind.

 

Compact and tightly-wound at around 150 pages, Case is deceptively simple, but still dramatic and lurid at times; like The Exorcist it is not necessarily a novel of horror but one about belief, doubt, conviction, redemption, but are these antiquated ideas in the 20th century? The concept of God and Diabolous struggling for the human soul is accepted only if it is translated into Freudian jargon—the superego and the id struggling for human reason.

 

I can’t say for sure but it seems like, for all the similarities, that Blatty took Russell's book and blew it up to bestselling mass-appeal status. Case does not have the scorching vulgarisms, the relentless throb, that all-hell-breaks-loose energy that kept millions upon millions of Exorcist readers turning pages and unable to sleep. Its dry-as-dust title perhaps an inkling to what's inside, Case didn't wow me like Russell's other works; he always has his characters talk a lot but the theological discourses here can wear on the reader. 

Yet the author's intelligence, subtlety, and psychological astuteness can make up for some of the drier sections, as he uses a sensational topic to illuminate the darker regions of the human mind. Ray Russell is the kind of just-maybe-smarter-than you pal you enjoy talking with over a bottle of good booze late into the darkening night... but just maybe you've heard this particular story before.

But have any of you ever heard and wondered at strange sounds in Catholic rectories? In the Unholy Hours, past the witching time of night, have you ever heard sounds that seem like the screams of poor girls in mortal agony? Have you ignored them? How long will your conscience let you ignore them?

Raw Pain Max by Dean Andersson (1988): Nothing's Shocking

One of the most famous literary putdowns of all time is what Truman Capote said of Jack Kerouac's iconic Fifties beat novel On the Road: "That's not writing, that's just typing." Ouch. Reading Raw Pain Max (Pinnacle Books, Oct 1988), that quote came immediately to mind, not least because the two protagonists here are constantly in a car driving hither and yon. Author Dean Andersson, who I have not read before, spends pages and pages padding out a practically non-existent narrative about torture goddess Countess Bathory in the modern day; his "writing" seems like he's making up his travelogue of terror as he goes. What we have here, then, is one of those horror paperbacks that sports a gloriously lurid cover, thanks to J.K. Potter, that it can never live up to. The clumsy title, invoking one of Clive Barker's most ferocious tales, helps not at all.

 

Andersson makes all the mistakes of an inexperienced writer. Filled with non-horror-ific details like characters' "bad-ass" clothing style of motorcycle boots and rock t-shirts, heavy metal on the radio, various highway routes from Texas to Kansas, numerous detailed fast food repasts, and tin-eared dialogue in which the main characters say each other's names on an endless loop (for me, the A-number-one indicator of an amateur author) Raw Pain grated on my nerves like, well, torture itself. There is no attempt at pacing, plot, suspense, scares, or insight; it is all just so much typing.

 

Now I don't know anything about Andersson, maybe he's gotten better, but I have seen his later horror paperbacks around over the years, published in the Eighties through the Nineties: two Avon paperbacks, 1981 and '82 under the pseudonym Asa Drake, then Torture Tomb in 1987 and Max the following year, with some Zebra titles later. They pretty succinctly show the variety of horror paperback covers, from historical romance vibe to more generic images like grasping hands and widened eyeballs, then the more photo-realistic style of the Nineties, which you can see at bottom. Love these two Avon covers, totally new to me. Honestly they sound pretty cool, but after reading Raw Pain, man, I dunno.

 

Back to the task at hand: Raw Pain Max is about "whip-toting Amazon" Trudy, a twenty-something bodybuilder, who, along with friends-with-benefits young metalhead Phil, performs a torture act in a sex club, called, improbably enough, the Safe Sex Club (look, don't @ me if there is actually a club with that name; it's a terrible name whether it's a real place or not). On-stage she goes by the nomme de S&M—wait for it—"Raw Pain Max," or "RPM" for short. Clever. Here, have a taste:

Raw ripped away [Phil's] rip-away clothes, leaving him all but naked in his black sequined G-string. As always the moment of humiliation, even though fake, excited Phil... Raw's whip came down across his stomach. The soft material only barely stung, but he convulsed as if in agony... the music changed to a gear-grinding heavy metal rock number, in response to which RPM removed her cape and began a hip-thrusting, breast-shaking dance around her chained victim... Then she produced a fake knife with a hollow blade that discharged prop blood (washable)... used it to pretend-carve R-P-M on Phil's heaving chest. Crimson dribbles slide down his torso toward his G-string...

 

Still here? There's a little more:

 

Raw leaned forward and pantomimed lapping up some of the blood with her tongue... gave the audience a wink, and started to insert the blade beneath Philip's sequins just a moment before the lights went out and the music suddenly stopped. In the silence and darkness, Phil bellowed a long, tortured scream, Raw laughed maniacally, and the act was over.

 

That wink and maniacal laughter reach across three decades to bring the deep, unsettling cringe. Later, when the Lady Bathory appears, she will also jest and chuckle and grin and do everything else to undercut the gravity of every situation. I find that type of thing—sarcasm, mockery, giggling, laughing evilly—unbearable, utterly unbearable, and it never stops in this book: The Countess chuckled at the jest she had made, then leaned forward, kissed the peasant's mutilated lips, and touched the blood-soaked stitches with the tip of her tongue. "Chuckled." Jesus wept, is this a Bazooka Joe comic.

 

Ok, ok, and they also make fetish videos for polyester-clad sleazeball Marv, who runs the joint (yes, he chomps on a cigar). Phil's backstory is porno-obsessed kid; Trudy's is addict getting better through health food and weightlifting, and getting in touch with the darker impulses. This is how Andersson writes their sex scenes: They got undressed, Phil put on his condom, they made love, and went to sleep. Oof. This is an odd contrast with the hyper-described sex show.

 

Then Phil's cousin Donna turns up with sleazy girlfriend "Liz" who is pretty obviously Countess Bathory doing some time- and spirit-traveling. Donna's in a weird catatonic state while Liz is an old-school lech, hitting on Trudy right in front of Phil ("Great abs. Great ass. Great everything. Yum"), then later plays mind tricks on them to show her supernatural powers and force them into a deadly sex orgy. Torturing to death a young woman she's brought back to Trudy's home S&M dungeon, Liz then makes all bloody evidence of the horror disappear by the next morning... and the game is afoot! Be ready for all that driving.

The convoluted metaphysics explaining how Bathory's spirit comes to visit the excessive Eighties seems like they were invented in the moment. Reincarnation? Mind-melding? There are also demonic "pain eaters" lurking in a dream netherworld who have a history of fucking things up royally for everyone, up to and including Christianity. Ironically, the novel's depiction of torture falls flat, amounting to tying victims up with baling wire and sticking fishhooks in their lips, all the while "teasing" punishments that are dead on arrival thanks to Andersson's inexpert approach.

 

An instant later, the strands of barbed wire began glowing with purple fire, sizzling Trudy's flesh while they also tightening around her breasts, between her legs... "Your breasts will probably be next," Liz told her, "or maybe your head." With a sickening jerk Trudy felt something give way between her legs. Barbed wire ripped upward into her intestines as blood poured down her thighs. 

"And just think, darling, this can go on as long as I want. Isn't it just absolutely wonderful?"

This modern-day Countess Bathory sounds more like Sally Bowles than a queen of pain. The culmination of all this blather is scenes of mind-numbing gore, lip-sewing and ball-busting, but nothing an experienced reader hasn't encountered before (I'm considering the book both now and as if I'd read at the time it was first published), and I haven't even mentioned the mind-possession angle. It's all just padded paper depicting juvenile sadism in the most immature, inane manner; there's nothing real or true or honest in Raw Pain. I never felt anyone's pain as I read except for my own.

 

I can't be the only person to think it's odd that nobody had much utilized Bathory and her crimes in horror fiction up to this point. Ray Russell did it in over 50 years ago in Unholy Trinity; Andrei Codrescu wrote The Bloody Countess as a mainstream thriller in 1995. Andersson was onto something with the basic concept of a reincarnated Bathory, has done his homework, including in the story itself the actual books he used for research, as well as the Eighties metal bands inspired by her misdeeds. Which, you know, great, I too enjoy classic heavy metal and books about history's notorious serial killers. But, as Johnny Thunders and the Heartbreakers once sang, it's not enough.

 

And how I wanted to enjoy this novel! How I wanted a sleazy, no-holds-barred, bad-taste extravaganza of pain and pleasure, lust and fear, blood and other bodily fluids. Sure, all that stuff is here, but Andersson's penchant for filling up the page with mundane irrelevancies, and amateur execution of actual scenes of horror—or of any kind of real life—negate their presence. Nothing is scary, nothing is sexy, nothing's shocking. Like many a paperback original with a striking cover before and after it, Raw Pain Max over-promises and under-delivers. And so I am reminded of another famous putdown, a paraphrase of Seinfeld's words about his neighbor nemesis Newman: there's not more than meets the eye here—there's less.

Won't Forget to Put Roses on Your Grave: The Gloomy Gothics of Victor Banis

The esteemed Jeffrey Catherine Jones painted this, one of my favorite-ever covers, of a delightfully ghoulish lass writhing upon a coffin attended to by fluttering batwings. I mean, I think it is just spectacular. My expectations weren't high for the actual novel, but even so they were dashed as I began to read, for The Vampire Women (Popular Library, 1973) is a dreary rip-off of the original opening chapters of Dracula, right down to its epistolary narrative. Victor Samuels—or should I say "Victor Samuels" for reasons that will become clear in a moment—has produced a work of pure pulp hackery. Updated to 1969, it's the tale of a man, a woman, and her younger sister traveling to Castle Drakula. Yes, Drakula, so see, as their guide through the Carpathians informs them, it's not the same Dracula as from the books and movies! Whew, glad we cleared that up.

I tried to approach the story as a cheap Dracula flick, a lesser Hammer or a Naschy or something, but even that didn't work thanks to "Samuels"'s simplistic prose and bone-headed journal entries:

What was the name of the castle again?
Drakula. Do you know of it?
I recognize that name. It's been used in books and movies. Not very pleasant ones.... He was a werewolf or something like that.

It is those silly legends about that Wallachian—Drakula, I think the name was. I gather he was the subject of some books and movies. I never had time for things like that.

We can't afford to get mixed up with Count Drakula and his government or his politics.

Carolyn giggled. "I'm going to marry Count Drakula," she chirped. She looked cocky and defiant.

1976 German edition

Of course I trudged and skimmed most of the way through to the obvious climax—"Get back, Drakula!" I warned as I snatched up the stake at my feet—groaning the whole way. Then I looked up the author and quickly found it is the pseudonym of a writer named Victor J. Banis, and o my friends, lots of fun stuff came my way. Born in 1937 in Pennsylvania, Banis is considered the father of gay pulp fiction. That's a pretty big deal, and as I read about Banis and his illustrious history in the pulp trade, I learned he also wrote many Gothic romances of the late '60s and early '70s under other various pen names (he even wrote some of the perennial Executioner men's adventure series!). In interviews Banis has no illusions about the quality of some of his output—he was simply a working writer, but his subject matter had never been explored in mass market before. Fascinating! I live for these jaunts down forgotten paperback history...

Banis, 1973

I've found a handful of glorious paperback covers for his books from that long-ago era; I think you'll recognize a Hector Garrido cover down there too...

And Never Really Die

 

Cover art by Mark & Stephanie Gerber

What I Don't Know Can't Hurt Me As Much As What's Behind the Mask

Can't You Hear Her Knocking

Spirit in the Night

That's Unpossible!

 

 

When the Dying Calls: The Cover Art of Tom Hallman

Recently a TMHF reader hipped me to Tom Hallman, an artist I was unfamiliar with by name but several of whose books I've featured here before. Really effective artwork on a lot of these - the old lady's blank orbs and jutting cheekbones on The Dying (1987), ginormous Gila on, well, Gila!, a two-faced head-phoned horror on Beyond (1980), superb serpent shock on Fangs (1980),a vintage James Herbert Shrine...

Blood Child, Judgment Day (both 1982), and Limbo (1988), not much to say about 'em except they're '80s through and through, scary baby carriage, boobs, creepy kid, and... uh, menacing music box?

A Personal Demon (1985): dark fantasy dorkery? Maybe so, but I kinda dig the flaming pentagram.

Winter Wolves (1989): Hmm... reminds of that Twilight Zone rabbit.

Paperback perennial Robert McCammon's first Pocket Books hardcover was Mine (1990); Hallman's art was used for this 1991 mass market edition as well. Hallman has been very prolific and still produces book covers today, both in and out of genre fiction.