Let Fury Have the Hour

Apropos of nothing, simply some cover art I really dig for a novel I couldn't get into (although the movie version is something of a psychic '70s pleasure). All are pretty striking: above, the '80s reprint with feathered 'do art by John Melo, a couple UK editions complete with King references, then the terrific stepback from the original 1977 US paperback, and at bottom the de rigueur movie tie-in edition. Enjoy!

 

 

The Frankenstein Horror Series, 1972 - 1973

Beginning sometime in that impossibly long-ago year of 1972, Popular Library published the first volume in its paperback Frankenstein Horror Series, with the somewhat non-Frankensteinian title The Curse of Quintana Roo. Eight more slim volumes followed, featuring more primary-color artwork and scenes of vintage comic-book horror than you can shake a pitchfork at. This series predates the Dracula Horror Series, but where that series had one author - Mr. Robert Lory - the Frankenstein series has multiple, mostly nobodies, except one large somebody, HPL's ol' buddy Frank Belknap Long. All cover art is by comix artist Gray Morrow, except for one by the esteemed Jeff Jones - betcha can't guess which.

What's that late '80s Iggy song? "I ain't gonna be no squarehead!" Uh, too late lady, sorry.

Look out Jackie O! Some things might be worse than Texas.

Dare we think this night belongs to the Hounds of Tindalos?

Zombie ladies in diaphanous gowns? More please.

Ha ha ha, I love how the late '60s spy couple has been added in as an afterthought.

Get away from her Marty Feldman!

Haunting horror imagery, just spectacular. No snark here!

Is he pulling her head off or putting it back on?

You can buy these paperbacks separately at around $5 to $15 on eBay, Amazon, and everywhere in between. I haven't read the series actually, it's more of a Groovy Age of Horror kinda thing than what I'm personally into, but that's just, if this blog is any indication, me.

Devil's Playthings

Who can resist 'em?

J.G. Ballard Born Today, 1930

While he isn't usually associated with horror fiction, British author J.G. Ballard, born on this day, November 15, in 1930, his dystopian, quasi-science fiction novels and short stories from the 1960s and '70s have countless moments of deeply disturbing shit that I think will appeal to horror readers looking for new thrills. God knows throughout the 1990s I spent hours with his books, underlining passages that spiked deep and found purchase into some unknown region of my brain.

The collision of our two cars, and the death of her husband, had become the key to a new sexuality.

I visualized her lying on a metal bed in the emergency ward, her bloodied face and shattered nasal bridge like the mask worn at an obscene halloween, the initiation rite into one's own death...

Ballard fused sex and death like a duet. Crash (1973), High-Rise (1975), and The Atrocity Exhibition (1970) are famous works of modern fiction, offering challenging ideas and even experimental structures, all in prose as shining, precise and unsettling as a table of surgical instruments. Peering into the deepest structures of society, he extrapolated into the future - not a future of spaceships and other fictional technologies, but of the human mind.

In the future, violence would clearly become a valuable form of social cement.

Their real opponent was not the hierarchy of residents in the heights far above them, but the image of the building in their own minds...

At first, you might be baffled by Ballard's obsession with celebrities, with automobiles and highways and tower blocks and the JFK assassination, with clinical sex and our deteriorating bodies. But the more closely you read, a pattern seems to emerge, perhaps a new mythology born not of our interaction with natural elements as our prehistoric forefathers, but of those very things we've caused and created.

However, you must understand that... science is the ultimate pornography, analytic activity whose main aim is to isolate objects or events from their contexts in time and space. This obsession with the specific activity of quantified functions is what science shares with pornography.

James Graham Ballard, 1930 - 2009

I highly recommend the three titles you see above. Also, Ballard is the only writer to have two novels - Empire of the Sun and Crash - adapted into films directed by both Steven Spielberg and David Cronenberg, respectively. I mean, there you go - that gives you some idea of his breadth and depth as an artist. And I am quite happy that we share a birthday!

Jeff Jones: The Paperback Covers

These stunning covers illustrations by the late Jeff Jones help confirm that 1960s and 1970s horror-fantasy paperbacks were a world unto themselves. Like his comrade-in-ink Frank Frazetta, Jones reveled in the mythical past, but it was one perhaps darker, more Gothic, less heroic. Rather than hulking loincloth primitives and armor-clad villains, though, Jones's covers here showcase a misty nighttime world of sorcerers and shadowy cults, of masters of occult powers and animal familiars, the hungry undead and their victims. My faves? Definitely The Vampire Women (Popular Library, 1970) and The Curse of the Undead (Fawcett Gold Medal, 1970). But could the books themselves deliver as well as their covers...?

Cat Power

Elizabeth by Jessica Hamilton (1976): She'll Reflect What You Are In Case You Don't Know

"It doesn't follow, Elizabeth, 

that because you are old enough to be evil, 

you are an adult."

So says Grandmother. And so will any reader say upon finishing Elizabeth, the debut novel from Ken Greenhall, writing under the pseudonym Jessica Hamilton. At just 14 years old, Elizabeth Cuttner is a startling little sociopath with powers natural and not (A Novel of the Unnatural states its tagline). She tells her story in a voice quite distinctive, yes, but also as cool and unforgiving as a marble tombstone. With dispassionate precision, she grasps the motivations of those around her, fathoms their subconscious desires; Elizabeth has psychological insights that people thrice her age never attain. She amazes, charms, bewilders, and ultimately horrifies. When I was younger, she tells us on the very first page, I saw James, my father's brother, look from our dog to me without changing his expression. I soon taught him to look at me in a way he looked at nothing else. And oh that's just a hint of what's to come.

Elizabeth lives in lower Manhattan, in a very old building not far from the once-bustling harbor. Her grandmother appears each evening in a full black dress and tells ever-changing stories about the family's ancestry at dinners to the remaining members of the Cuttners: the aforementioned James, her son, his wife Katherine, and their son Keith. Their live-in servants are the Taylors, who reside in the basement but have little interaction with the family (I suppose there is no need to speak to those whose dirt and appetites you know intimately). Grandmother's husband left her years before, but his office building is next door. Oh, Elizabeth's parents? You can probably guess why they're not around, can't you?

1988 Bart Books reprint

The supernatural slips in very early but oh-so-quietly. In the second chapter, Elizabeth and her parents vacation in a cabin at Lake George, and while on a nature walk she finds an unlikely-looking toad the color of decaying meat and takes it home, then she is compelled to hold it between her breasts. As she does this, a visage swims into view in the antique mirror in her room. "Do not fear me, Elizabeth. I have come to help you." She has a fearsome beauty and speaks in an antique language; her name is Frances, a distant Cuttner relative; indeed, we learn she is an English witch from centuries past. Elizabeth seems to fall in some kind of love or obsession with Frances, who wants to reveal and guide all of Elizabeth's familial powers... and warns Elizabeth of the new tutor from England that James has hired for her, Miss Barton. Young Miss Barton, who strangely resembles the woman in the mirror...

1978 Sphere UK paperback

There's all that, as it's said, and more. There is barely a whisper of actual violence or overt sex, yet the novel seethes with these powers, and the tone throughout is cool, almost affectless. Affairs that speak more of desperation and opportunity than real human feeling spring up in the home. Elizabeth is no Lolita-esque coquette; she is a young woman who accepts impassively the male sexual appetite - especially when it serves her own needs and ends. Her knowledge of male vanity, and flattery of such, is complete. Elizabeth notes that James feels about the Don Juan legend the same way a priest feels about the New Testament. Something seems to be going on between Katherine and Miss Barton too, but that's only par for the course:

James had never been happier. He accused Katherine of being in love with Miss Barton and pretended to be outraged. Actually, the thought of his wife being involved with another woman excited him... he became much more open about his relationship with me and on afternoons when Katherine and Miss Barton were uptown shopping together he would take me to his wife's bed. "You be Katherine," he'd say, "and I'll be Miss Barton."

Elizabeth is one of the most intriguingly written novels I've read in some time; it is deceptively rich and rewarding. Hamilton's style is one of allusion, of casual reference, an author in full command of the writing craft, knowing what to tell, what to show, and most especially what to conceal. And ironically in that concealment revealing all. Elizabeth herself is an amazingly complex character, her voice so confident, so ageless, so wise, as she begins to use her unnatural talents to harm others, such as Grandmother...

"Martha," I found myself saying, "with my gift and  power I bid thee desist. Martha Cuttner, I bid thee vanish. Thrice, Martha Cuttner, my gift and power bid thee desist and vanish." 

And then there was silence. Behind me stood the city and its people. Some of those people had passed me on the street and admired me, thinking I had never done unmentionable things in the night, as they had done or wanted to do.

1979 Sphere UK reprint

I really cannot recommend Elizabeth highly enough. This unheralded, forgotten work deserves rediscovery by fans of weird fiction. Copies are easily found online and I urge you to purchase one. If you enjoy the literary chill of calculating children, the frosty tales of du Maurier and Jackson, the quiet horrors of witchery and those it dooms, the foolishness of men in the thrall of women, do yourself a favor and become acquainted with Elizabeth.

For a little more on Greenhall, check out the Phantom of Pulp's blog.

The Dreams That Tear You Apart

Children of the Night by Margaret Bingley (1989): "Shut Up!"

Another skull sporting a full head of luxurious locks! I do so love it. And the title too!

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.