Blackwater V: The Fortune by Michael McDowell (1983): A Newborn Baby with Wild Wolves All Around It

The Caskey family saga may be coming to a close but you wouldn't know it by the activity seen in this fifth volume of the Blackwater series, The Fortune (Avon, May 1983). Miriam Caskey is indeed amassing her family's fortune by hiring a Texas oil company to drill into the Perdido swampland on their property, after her estranged mother, the ever-mysterious Elinor, reveals that beneath its inky roiling depths there are pools of crude worth countless riches. How does she know? She just does. Meanwhile Queenie Strickland receives her erstwhile son Malcolm back into the family's bosom after being assumed missing in action, or even dead, after running away four years earlier.  Miriam's sister Frances gives birth to a daughter, and Frances's husband Billy Bronze oversees the accounting books of the Caskey mill, astonishing each family member by declaring just how much money they have during these post-WWII years.

However not everything is going so swimmingly for every Caskey: Elvennia Caskey, known as Sister, is distressed to learn that her husband Early Haskew - who married Sister in The Levee - will soon be home from Germany, after helping the Allies building bridges. She has no interest in seeing him again: "Why in the world did so many people die in the war, and Early's coming back alive!" Sister enlists the help of their longtime black servant, Ivey Sapp, but this results in a humiliating accident (see the broken bottle at the bottom of the steps on the Avon cover, illustrated by Wayne D. Barlowe). Poor Billy Bronze fears Frances is growing apart from him and their newborn baby Lilah, and even though he accompanies his sister-in-law Miriam on the profitable business trips to Texas, he grows insecure about his position in the Caskey brood. Once, he was the golden boy: 

When he set his mind to something, he walked right in at the door and did it. When he had got it into his head to become part of the Caskey family, he had picked out a marriageable daughter, wooed her, won her, married her, and got her pregnant in order to produce more Caskeys. The Family 's admiration for him was unbounded.

1985 Corgi UK edition, cover art by Terry Oakes

But now Frances disappears each afternoon to swim deeply and luxuriously in the Perdido waters, leaving her daughter to the care of Elinor... much as Elinor had given up her first daughter, Miriam, to her own mother-in-law Mary-Love in the first volume. What happens to Frances as she visits those watery depths (illustrated nicely above, for the 1985 Corgi UK paperback cover)? She becomes almost a different person, something different altogether, which Billy notices. Sadly he is to have no part of her rejuvenation, and knows he will soon lose her. The day was chilly, but she was barefooted, bareheaded, and naked beneath her loosely gathered robe, having just come in from her swim. When he first saw her, she was smiling and radiant. But the smile faded the moment she glimpsed him the dimness of the corridor.

Reading The Fortune over several months, putting it down for a couple weeks then picking it up again, I found it middling in the series. As is his wont, Michael McDowell takes his time telling this story, focusing on details that some readers might find irrelevant or overly slight; even in this slim volume - not even 200 pages - the narrative is leisurely, with only a few spikes of real melodrama and mild horror. Tension is lacking in spots but that makes it kind of a cozy, informal historical read. As ever he's good at interpersonal relationships, drawing out the peculiarities of his characters and their insecurities, and he's best at evoking darkness and dread. Which I wish there had been more of... especially this:

Throughout the series, McDowell has whispered hints of a non-human origin for Elinor, a nature which has been passed on to Frances - witness Frances's strange supernatural revenge upon a rapist in The War. Their mythic kinship to one another and to the Perdido River speaks of Jungian shapeshifters, of ancient legends about the dark powers of women and water... and the children they bear. Lilah is not the only offspring Frances bears one night in The Fortune; there is another child too, one that Zaddie, Ivey Sapp's daughter, catches the merest glimpse of when assisting in the childbirth:

Zaddie turned to turn out the light, but as she was turning she glimpsed a second head emerging smoothly from Frances's quietly heaving body. It was greenish-gray, and it seemed to wobble. Zaddie saw two wide-open, perfectly round filmy eyes, and two round black holes where a nose ought to have been...

Two-volume hardcover

Science Fiction Book Club, 1983

Can there be any doubt where this strange creature will find its home, that it shares its mother's and grandmother's inhuman heritage, and that its mother will leave behind all the Caskeys and join it? We know when Elinor places this mewling newborn into Frances's arms for the first time:

"What's wrong with her?" Frances asked. "Why is she crying like this?"

"She's drowning," said Elinor.

"Drowning?!"

"In the air. She needs to be in water..." 

Post Mortem: New Tales of Ghostly Horror, ed. by Olson & Silva (1992): Come and Die with Me Forever

I don't believe in ghosts. And yet... ghostly doings in horror fiction tend to work their chills on me. What I find particularly effective are the emotions and psychological states the ghosts often represent: guilt, unrequited love, vengeance, regret, loneliness, grief, rage, even sexual longing. Becoming the external manifestation of characters' repression is an essential part of any ghost's (albeit fictional) existence. Same goes for haunted houses, which function as geographic representations of the mind and all its tortures. I'm a sucker for that stuff, even if my readings in the classic ghost stories of antiquary is rudimentary; it's those ideas I find satisfyingly creepy. 1989's Post Mortem: New Tales of Ghostly Horror (Dell/Abyss Jan 1992) contains solid examples of these ideas, from generally skillful writers with names both recognized and not.

While its paperback cover resembles nothing so much as classic '80s Slayer album art, Post Mortem doesn't rely on graphic or demonic excesses to frighten readers; there's hardly a broken bone or bloody wound or occult word in these entire 350 pages. None was an outright bomb but there are some ho-hum entries. Not all the stories even attempt horror; they can mostly be divided up between "hopeful" ghosts and "scary" ghosts. Although both Paul F. Olson and David B. Silva were editors of well-regarded '80s horror mags, Horrorstruck and The Horror Show respectively, I wasn't impressed with their metafictional introduction. Ditto Dean Koontz's afterward, which highlights exactly why I find him useless as any kind of horror authority. Koontz prefers, it seems, those "hopeful" ghost stories, the ones that confirm his belief that his spirit "will never die."

The opener "Each Night, Each Year," by Kathryn Ptacek, works well enough, and has some of the creepiest imagery in the book, but she overplays her hand at times by underwriting. When the haunted narrator states "It is my guilt that brings him here," it's already obvious, I think, that that's exactly what's going on, and stating it so baldly snaps the spell. I don't need to have my head grabbed and pointed right at the issue; a gentle handhold can be just as unnerving, no? The recently-late Gary Brandner brings a gruesome little ghost story in the simplistic "Mark of the Loser," solidly in the old-fashioned EC Comics style.

Next, "Timeskip," Charles de Lint's entry, is a modern urban fantasy with 20something protagonists; I know he's considered a pioneer in that subgenre, as his felicity with environs and character is obvious. Romantic ghosts promise meeting again. A similar encounter turns up in James Howard Kunstler's "Nine Gables," about a couple whose marriage is rekindled in the unlikeliest manner when they welcome guests into the titular inn they buy. From horror-writing couple the Tems, Steve Rasnic and Melanie, we get the terrific "Resettling." This is about the finest little haunted-house story I've read recently (after Michael Blumlein's "Keeping House"). It works every which way, a mature, insightful work that confronts family life's innumerable disappointments, with a true and bittersweet finale that oh-so-subtly upends ghost story protocol. The Tems really get - deliver - domestic horror.

Would an '80s horror antho be complete without Ramsey Campbell? Non. Utilizing a rare book of ghost-story author extraordinaire M.R. James, Campbell's "The Guide" is told in his usual slow-to-the-point-of-agony prose, but the payoff is claustrophobic and nightmarish, hinting at horrors scarcely imaginable: Imagine, if you will, a spider in human form with only four limbs, a spider both enraged and made ungainly by the loss, especially since the remaining limbs are by no means evenly distributed.

Visiting ghosts also appear to those whose pasts are unfinished. Sometimes these shades bring closure, as in Silva's "Brothers" or P.W. Sinclair's "Getting Back," but just as often bring a horrific justice. "The Ring of Truth" from Borderlands editor Thomas F. Monteleone is a longish tale of Vietnam survivors and insane murderous machismo. Hate burned like the heart of a star, and not even death can keep that feeling contained. The abused wife of Janet Fox's "The Servitor" escapes to an abandoned house in the country. Surprise: it's not so abandoned, and what's there demands a debt for its services. A finely-tuned depiction of a woman's desperate attempts to save herself, the story's final lines are chillingly pitiless.

Will it surprise regular readers of TMHF that my absolute favorite story in Post Mortem was Thomas Tessier's contribution "Blanca"? Here the ghosts are victims of historical/political tragedies. In Tessier's usual tone of detachment, dry wit, and maybe even resignation, his narrator begins:

When I told a few close friends that I was going to Blanca, their reaction was about what I had expected. "Why?" they asked. "There's nothing to see in Blanca. Nothing to do except disappear." Sly smiles. "Watch out you don't disappear." "Maybe that's why I chose it," I said with a smile of my own. "It might be nice to disappear for a while." 

Can there be any doubt the story will end the same way?

Another terrific story is the sensitive "Whisper of Soft Wings," by Melissa Mia Hall. It is very good but very sad: a little girl comes around to visit an elderly woman in a world that has less and less of a place for the old. With a rare sense of poignancy, Hall draws the two together in an intimate embrace. I will definitely be looking for more from Hall; but nothing new, I'm afraid, as she died several years ago.

Last, the somewhat interesting "Haunted World" - what if all the people who ever lived on earth came back to haunt us - is told in a cliched good ol' boy voice, which completely undermines the premise. The bland, obvious style of Robert McCammon proves to me once again why I have little interest in reading any of his novels, despite their seeming endless popularity with fans of '80s horror.

Final words: Post Mortem is a good but not truly essential horror fiction anthology. Fans of de Lint, Tessier, the Tems, Campbell, or Hall should find a copy, as their stories work in the classic ghost story mold but also are convincing and fresh in their modern settings and concerns. Me, I could've used a few darker tales, a few more nastier, eerie moments that lingered after I put the paperback back on my shelf. But it did reinforce my belief that nothing is so haunted as the human heart, and that the most unsettling ghost of all is the most recognizable, the one we live with every day, long before we die.

Shadows 3, edited by Charles L. Grant (1980): Death is No Dream

I am so glad that I continued to read all of Shadows 3 (Berkley Books Jan 1985), even when some of the stories were pretty underwhelming. Couple times I was about to put it back on the shelf half-read, but I bore on and was treated to "Cabin 33," Chelsea Quinn Yarbro's longish tale that ends the book. It is easily one of the best horror short stories I've read in ages. It's so wecomingly well-told, with a vivid sense of place - resort cabins in the mountains for vacationing folks with a little money to spend - strong, true dialogue, and characters given enough room to live and breathe (and die, of course). As editor Charles L. Grant writes in his little intro, "For those of you familiar with Hotel Transylvania, Blood Games, and The Palace... welcome to Cabin 33; for those who are not... read this first, then go buy the books." I can only hope her novels of the vampire life are as thoughtfully written and just fun to read as "Cabin 33." I think I can trust Grant on that.

Yarbro

I cannot however trust Grant about Bruce Francis, a writer who apparently only ever published two stories: he states Francis has a long career ahead of him. Not with the frustratingly elusive and fractured short-short, "To See You With, My Dear." I felt like something's going on, but I - just -couldn't - grasp - it. Some nice imagery that I think was supposed to link together to imply... Lycanthropy? Dream transference? Psychotic delusion? Grrr. Same thing with Steve Rasnic Tem's "At the Bureau," a sort of eternal-recurrence riff that ends uneasily if vaguely. "Opening a Vein," from crime duo Bill Pronzini and Barry Malberg, is only a page long, jumping off with an I Am Legend-inspired pun to imagine a new genesis by a familiar demiurge. Mostly these were stylistic experiments rather than full short stories.

Onward: "The Partnership," from perennial William F. Nolan, is hokey and silly; next. Peter Pautz's "Ant" is another all-too-quiet, subtle story of an odd young boy's first experience of death, parental strife, and perhaps how the two are entwined. I preferred "Wish Hound," by science-fiction scribe Pat Murphy, which has a nicely nasty ending, and Ray Russell's "Avenging Angel," a black-comic revenge story about a particularly unlikable painter artiste. I really have enjoyed what I've read of Russell's work and really need to get a copy of Sardonicus, his 1961 modern-gothic story. "Tell Mommy What Happened" is Alan Ryan's little gem of dawning revelation, that moment when the seemingly inconsequential trivialities of everyday life open up unexpected vistas of horror. Aw yeah!

A pensive Grant.  

But there is seldom a doubt that the shadow over there, 

the one in the middle of the noonday desert, 

doesn't belong.

Other good stuff: for fans of the politely told and old-fashioned tale of weirdness and mystery (literally Holmesian in one), there are "The Ghost Who Limped" by R. Chetwynd Hayes, "Janey's Smile" by Juleen Brantingham, and "The Brown Recluse," by Night of the Hunter author Davis Grubb. These are, along with "Cabin 33" and "Tell Mommy," the best in this volume, with carefully-chosen language appropriate for the subject matter. Hayes and Grubb are master craftsmen indeed. They also feature that sort of last-line climax so often seen in horror fiction, and I think they really work.

Altogether, Shadows 3 offers entertainments of the "macabre and bizarre," as the 1980 hardcover states. I don't want to say the stories are light-hearted, but they don't often seem to have that gravitas - or is it pretension? - that I see in short horror fiction later in the decade, when younger writers seemed more intent on disturbing and upsetting readers rather than providing them with cozy chills. Then again, I'd say there were more real writers working in the field in the '70s and early '80s, or there were fewer less talented writers being published (of course Grant would disagree with none of what I'm saying, I'm sure). The series is called Shadows, after all, not Wounds or Headshots or Guts. While the good writing is much appreciated, and the solid composition of the stories bespeak experience and skill, sometimes I like my horror fiction to cut closer to the bone, or engage the world at large, or aspire to bigger concerns than the simple formality of tales-well-told. These stories are like a bit of warm milk spiked with a only tiny splash of whiskey to help you get to sleep.

But it would really be unfair to criticize something for being what it is not; rather I should - and did - enjoy Shadows 3 for precisely what it is: mostly mildly satisfying short stories of the weird and the uncanny with occasional touches of excellence. It's not nearly as good as the first volume in the series, but I believe I will be dwelling amidst these Shadows for some time to come...

Cast a Cold Eye by Alan Ryan (1984): Blood Will Follow Blood

The late Alan Ryan really hit a high note with his Irish ghost story Cast a Cold Eye (Tor Books, Jul 1984/cover art by Jill Bauman). Contributing to its success is the vivid sense of place, somber prose, and convincing characterization, as well as a slowly mounting sense of dread reaching out from a horrific past which can never be forgotten. Yes, a ghost story that has its roots in the real-life horrors of the Great Famine. I really appreciate this kind of fact-based historical horror, where unrelenting reality collides with our primitive notions of supernatural agents. The ghosts that haunt are the shameful memories of the diseased and the dead, our guilty conscience manifested in shades and shadows that seem to our hand and eye more real than our very selves.

Writer Jack Quinlan comes to the rocky, sea-lashed coastal Irish village of Doolin, meets a young lovely lass named Grainne at the local bookshop, and begins working on his book about the Famine. The developing relationship between the two is drawn well and truly by Ryan, and he handles their differences - he a well-traveled published New York author, she a Catholic virgin still under the yoke of her parents - with a sensitivity that speaks of experience. It's a relaxed give-and-take between two real people that really grounds the story.

Dark Harvest hardcover, 1984

But as Jack researches the Famine, he soon finds himself face-to-face with people who seem to have stepped whole and starving from that horrible era: a ragged man unconscious in the mud on the side of the road, vomiting green rot; a young girl who was only bone covered in skin in tattered clothes; tortured shapes milling through the cold fog and damp air and mud surrounding his cottage. He puts this all to his readings, an overworked imagination, but still dreams of facing his own corpse. Soon he meets Father Malcolm Henning, the local priest and seanachie, a sort of historian and storyteller in one. Father Henning wields a gentle hand over Doolin, both in church and in the pub: the two most popular places for these provincial people.

But Father Henning's tales in the pub are grim and foreboding, filled with gruesome "Monkey's Paw"-style ironies, although they seem to ease the aging pains of a group of old, old men Jack sees around the town. One in particular is John MacMahon, practically a cadaver now, who is treated with a deference that befits a mortal responsibility nearly impossible to bear. Jack is drawn into this circle when Henning confirms that the visions accosting him aren't simply... visions. Perhaps Jack isn't an interloper; perhaps Jack's Irish heritage means that he was meant to come to Doolin, meant for something greater than just writing a book, meant to be part of a ritual where blood is everywhere.

The whole book is a quiet horror, er, delight, despite its nightmarish source, and will make you seek out Ryan's other work (he published plenty of stories in various '80s horror anthologies like Whispers, Shadows, and Year's Best Horror; I've liked all the ones I've read). It'll also make you lament that Ryan didn't write another novel. It's much more effective than his previous work, 1983's Dead White, and evinces a cozy fireside feel one finds in the classic tales of the weird and uncanny. There are creeps and chills to be sure, but the real power lies in the setting and the characters. And I have to say there's a lovemaking scene - that's truly what it is, I can't phrase it any other way - that is about the best I've ever read in a horror novel.  

Cast a Cold Eye is a chilly, atmospheric read in which one can feel the salt spray of the ocean, the icy air working its way inside your clothes, the sense of real history in every stone building and rotting fence, and grasp the sad, earthbound horrors that lurk in the Doolin graveyard. "Blood is everywhere," Father Henning has said, and we will learn the truth of that all too well.

Thomas Tryon Born Today, 1926

Author-turned-actor Thomas Tryon wrote two of the best of pre-Stephen King horror bestsellers of the early 1970s, The Other (1971) and Harvest Home (1973). Here are the UK paperback editions; you can see the US editions here. If you haven't read 'em, get to it! Such chilling delights.

They were also made into movies, of course, the former title I've seen, while the latter was made for TV but still starred Bette Davis. Creepy kids and malevolent old ladies...

Cold Moon Over Babylon by Michael McDowell (1980): Lot of Water Under the Bridge... Lot of Other Stuff Too

This is one paperback horror novel in which the creepy cover art actually recreates the imagery contained within the story itself. O huzzah! The second of Michael McDowell's many paperback originals published by Avon Books, Cold Moon Over Babylon (Feb 1980) takes its title very seriously: throughout the novel, the moon and its "light" reveal guilt and terror, hiding only temporarily the ghosts - and worse - of innocents slaughtered. This cold moon grows immeasurably large in the eyes and nightmare visions of Babylon's worst denizen, the result of his actions now seen all too clearly in that bleaching, blue-silver, not-quite-blinding light. There is no place to hide from the consequence of misdeed.

(Some spoilers ahead) Cold Moon is a novel I've been waiting to read for a few years now, and read it excitedly over the holidays. Back in my used bookstore days of the late '80s I remember countless copies of it crossing my hands, yet the eye-catching silver-blue of the cover art never quite captivated me enough. Shame, because this is a work that, like most of McDowell's (all out of print) output, I can now recommend without hesitation. Would I have liked Cold Moon back then? Perhaps not; this is horror solidly in the mainstream. Characters, quickly sketched, have believable dialogue and motivation; solid structure keeps you reading. Indeed, McDowell had stated in interviews how he preferred being a writer of paperback originals, books sold monthly on drugstore racks.

His style however is not cheap, cloying or sentimental, and McDowell strikes a welcome tone of moodiness and doom in his prose. His death scenes are some of the most surprising and affecting of the era; there is a prosaic, shocking realism to them that one finds less in horror than one would think. The very first ones appear on the second page and wow, was I not expecting them. McDowell just reels out the words without bothering to create suspense. It works; you know no one is safe in the book, you know any old horrible thing could happen at any time.

UK paperback, 1985 - also with accurate cover art!

Babylon is a tiny town in Florida's panhandle, just scant miles from the Alabama border. Nearby is the River Styx, a slow-moving, rattler-infested river in a sparsely populated part of the town. The crumbling old bridge that spans it is maintained by Jerry Larkin, 20-something son of deceased Jim and JoAnn Larkin. The remaining family -  Jerry's sister, 14-year-old Margaret, and their elderly grandmother Evelyn, Jim's mother - try to maintain the blueberry farm that is their only source of income, but that's a losing proposition. Then Margaret goes missing walking home from school one afternoon. Her grandmother  is terrified of the worst, suspecting immediately foul play, while Jerry takes a more practical approach by explaining Margaret is visiting a friend, and is hesitant at first to call Sheriff Ted Hale. But a storm, a bad one, is coming, and Evelyn can't bear the idea of her beloved caught in the deluge, but as the rains come the news will be dire: the next morning, Margaret is still missing.

But the reader knows just what's happened to Margaret. Without hope or mercy she is dispatched just within sight of her home, her grandmother's window, tossed carelessly from that bridge her brother tends into the shallow muddy waters of the Styx. This is not a mystery novel, and the reader soon learns the murderer's identity as well. It's precisely who Evelyn suspects: a man named Nathan Redfield, the estranged son of Babylon's widowed, wealthy bank owner, a man with a lust for money and high school girls. But there's no evidence, just Evelyn's fear of Nathan because the Larkins owe the bank money, and could lose their farm. Sheriff Hale, however, suspects poor Warren Perry, the school's vice principal; he was the last to have seen Margaret alive. Then Margaret's body is pulled from the Styx by a fisherman's errant hook - a sad and pathetic moment of human tragedy - and Nathan easily supplies Hale with bloody evidence for Perry's guilt when more dead bodies turn up.

Ashen and faintly luminous, the head and the neck rose from the Styx waters, still turning softly in that same unvarying rhythm... 

Nathan's nightmarish visions, hallucinatory and unreal, provide the book's best moments. Margaret Larkin will not rest easily, and in cinema-ready scenes featuring the watery black-haired girl ghosts of classic Japanese horror, Nathan begins to see her form beneath the streetlamps along deserted Babylon roads, at cemetery gates, in the bank he works in, in the restaurant where he makes his crooked deals. She leaks grainy Styx muck and mud from her mouth and her eyes are empty and the moonlight is everywhere, the moon is all wrong, so bright he dare not look directly at it... Damn if McDowell doesn't revel in some classic horror imagery: in corpses crawling out from graves, in the grue of corrupted flesh, and in revenants floating above the Styx and slithering through the forest. These parts are fucking brilliant.

...all without color, a liquid, a phosphorescent grayish-white...

If there's any flaw in CM, it's that ultimately it's only a simple revenge story, and that the final quarter or so of the novel is taken up only with the ghostly pursuit of Nathan and his attempts to elude it. A more expansive and elaborately-plotted story could have included more detective work by Sheriff Hale, or efforts by wrongly-accused Warren Perry to find the killer himself. Something other than the one-dimensional route to the (gruesome, yes) climax, which reveals nothing new about past events. This is not a major failing, but the thinness made it seem like a missed opportunity for McDowell to turn CM into an even more potent, satisfying work of horror.

The eyes opened, but behind the gray lids was a flat infinite blackness, blacker far than the muddy Styx in that shadow of the rotting bridge...

 
Still, why quibble? Cold Moon Over Babylon is a must-read, (and, I'd forgotten, recommended in King's Danse Macabre), filled with bone-cracking moments of haunting dread, despair, and death. Michael McDowell is gone, but let us not forget what horrors he so humbly brought us.

Those terrible eyes were without surface; the lids opened directly onto noisome void and nonentity, and the black holes were fixed on the darkened window...

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 Godsend by Bernard Taylor (1976): She Killed Your Baby Today

The cover of this bestselling paperback boasts the whole gamut of '70s genre cliches, with a slightly menacing child glowering out at prospective book buyers, its vaguely religious-sounding title, and that inescapable triumvirate of previous successes, The Exorcist, The Other, and Rosemary's Baby. I'd read Bernard Taylor's effective ghostly love story Sweetheart, Sweetheart, so was looking forward to The Godsend, his debut novel. I've seen copies of this old Avon paperback (March 1977) for years and years during my bookstore searches, and got it for a buck recently. It is squarely in that early pre-King tradition of unassuming horror novels that go for the creeping chill, the subtle intimation, the growing unease, rather than the full-bore, two-fisted approach we'd see later with, say, The Shining. There's little of the pulp tradition in The Godsend, but that's not to say it doesn't like to boil the pot a little...

Lowering us gently into the cozy ease of family life in the English countryside, Taylor introduces us to the Marlowes: husband and father Alan - our narrator - his wife Kate, and their four young children as they laze a day away lakeside. And so it begins when they see a solitary young pregnant woman relaxing nearby. Kate strikes up a pleasant, mild conversation with her but describes the woman, named Jane, to Alan as funny, strange, odd, sad... stray. But Alan thinks little of it till several days later when, returning from his work as an illustrator, he arrives home and one of his toddler sons, Sam, tells him the lady, that lady, is inside. Driven by a politeness bred in the bone, neither Alan nor Kate can bear to ask Jane to leave, and she stays long into the evening (ah-ha! Crawlspace!). Just as she's finally about to leave... well, of course: Jane goes into labor. Alan runs off to rouse the village doctor from bed, but when they return, Jane is asleep in their spare room while Kate, smiling, holds the newborn babe in her arms. (Some spoilers ahead.)

1991 Leisure Books reprint

But Jane mysteriously disappears into the night leaving her baby behind. No trace of her is found (early '70s in a little British village, you know). Kate is besotted with the infant girl, and efforts begin to not just foster the newly-christened Bonnie, but to adopt her outright, adding even more joy, affection, and love to the Marlowe family life. And then... and then begins the creeping, almost unbelievable descent into the horror of murdered children. You knew that was coming, right? Because it does come, and it comes without surcease. And little Bonnie is always, always, nearby, and each death seems accidental. I inwardly moaned each time I realized Taylor was setting up a death scene for one of the children, because they come in the midst of sun-drenched afternoons in the family bosom.

I can still see Kate as she ran from the house that afternoon, her hair flying, coming at me like a wild woman, crazed, clutching at Sam's body as I held him... I can still see her as she sits there, rocking back and forth, supporting his head on his broken neck, her mouth opening and closing, emitting sounds like that of some mortally wounded animal, eyes staring in disbelief... What is miraculous is that a person can keep such memories and keep on living.

 1977 UK paperback

The years move on and the Marlowes rally, their grief and heartbreak over these "accidents" moving into the past. But it's only Alan who begins to suspect the angelic little Bonnie is anything but that; she is some sort of human cuckoo, a baby left in another's nest to purloin the affections from the biological Marlowe children by the most diabolical means. Alan and Kate's marriage begins to crumble beneath this unimaginable weight; Alan "kidnaps" Lucy away to safety, begging a distraught Kate to abandon her beloved Bonnie, that the child is responsible for the deaths of their own children. Kate simply, in that quiet British way, calls Alan mad. So now it's time for Alan to resort to other methods to save what's left of his family.

And here is where we hit the utter datedness of the novel: Taylor seems not to be much concerned with the legal complexities of adoption and child protective agencies. He touches on it some. There's one brief scene in which Alan tries to convince a social worker that he wants to basically get rid of Bonnie (by telling the woman Bonnie is evil!), and at another point he tells Kate that the police wouldn't want to be "dragged into" their little contretemps and that he's not breaking the law by taking their eldest child Lucy away to hide out. I mean - what? It felt like glib plotting that avoids real-life snares so as to generate suspense. But then again, maybe I'm thinking too much of how this scenario would play out in today's rabidly (over?)protective stance towards children.

1976 hardcover

Nor does Taylor overburden the novel with anything in the way of an explanation for Bonnie; I was awaiting some supernatural reveal of appropriately evil proportions, but got nothing. Once Bonnie's real mother walks out of the Marlowes' home she is literally never seen or heard from again (compare this with the 1980 movie adaptation). Now this may have been Taylor trying to heighten the terror by making it inexplicable, but I found it, in a way, somewhat lazy. Still, The Godsend is a gripping if at times dispiriting read that sloooowly becomes horrific. It's certainly not the best of the creepy-kid books, but I don't think you'll be disappointed reading it; little Bonnie might not be Rosemary's baby, but you'll still dig her style.

Blackwater IV: The War by Michael McDowell (1983): But Nothing Really Matters Much, It's Doom Alone That Counts

Using his considerable storytelling skills in The War, the fourth book (April 1983) in Blackwater, his pop-lit Southern-Gothic-lite paperback-original miniseries, author Michael McDowell tantalizes us with stronger, stranger glimpses of what goes on down there in Perdido, Alabama with that whole Caskey family. McDowell tells much of his grand tale at a far remove, describing the impact of WWII on the townspeople, particularly how this business of war fills the Caskey family coffers; Oscar Caskey signs a lucrative contract with the US government to produce much-needed items such as utility poles, and lord, as Stephen King might put it, how the money do roll in. His daughters, formerly estranged sisters Miriam and Frances, now in their late and young teen years respectively, form a speechless bond over car trips to the beach every morning. There, Frances - truly her mother Elinor's daughter - finds an exhilarating and illuminating connection to the sea. Other Caskey kids beget trouble, or look to the faraway war for a new frontier.

In general the Caskey children are growing up and moving on, falling in love and starting careers and seeking wartime assignments, all which bear hard on the previous generation, who are now facing growing gracelessly, hopelessly old, a losing proposition no matter how much money the family has. Some, like imperturbable Elinor (whose sudden appearance in Perdido during a flood began the tale entire), welcome these changes, and foresee a future of success and happiness never experienced during the reign of late-but-not-lamented matriarch Mary-Love Caskey. But aging Uncle James sees his beloved young nephew Danjo eventually shipped off to Germany, and worries and frets and foresees nothing but his own death...

1985 Corgi UK edition, cover art by Terry Oakes

But then McDowell zooms in close for those intimate revelations so essential to the Blackwater saga. Miriam seems to be turning out like Mary-Love, full of secret plans withheld from the family, impatient, imperious. Servicemen hang around Perdido at a dancehall on the lake, much to Lucille Caskey's delight. James's daughter Grace, once a phys-ed instructor at a girls' school (yes, make of that exactly what you will) returns to Perdido and ends up discovering she loves the country life, using Caskey money to begin a small farm outside of town. A new character is introduced: Billy Bronze, a handsome and intelligent (but of course) North Carolina corporal stationed nearby. His strong character impresses Elinor, who every Sunday invites soldiers to the Caskey home for a hearty after-church meal. Billy, raised by an abusive albeit wealthy father, realizes the unique quality of the Caskeys, and guilelessly plans to marry into them.

But not only were there a great many Caskey women, the women were in control of the family. Billy had never seen anything like it, and the whole notion fascinated him. He loved being around the Caskeys, and had grown very quickly to love them all... Oscar seemed rather put upon, and might have been utterly powerless had he not enjoyed at least superficial control fo the mill. James Caskey had abdicated his rights entirely, and had become a kind of woman himself. Danjo was a strong, masculine boy, but one trained nevertheless to believe that real power and real prestige lay with women and not with men.

I saw lots of these in used bookstores in the early '90s... and never bought 'em.

"But wait!" I hear you saying; "I thought this was a novel of bloodcurdling horror - gimme the goods!" Well, there isn't a lot of horror at all, bloodcurdling or otherwise, in The War; nope, just a scant few moments that bode (un)well for the final forthcoming tomes: an old lunatic man confronts Frances about her mother's origins and the Blackwater river; two teens go missing when they are to report for army duty; a woman is raped and inhuman vengeance doled out. McDowell knows when to underplay and when to lay it all out on the table, sure, but I must report that The War isn't quite up to The Flood or The House in intensity, but neither is it as lackluster as The Levee. It's an easy, entertaining read, comfortable and satisfying. Not everything can be splatterpunk you know.

One last thing, and tell me if I'm crazy: early one morning I was lying in bed, thinking about The War and Blackwater in general, when it hit me: women, water, and the Y-shaped intersection of the rivers, evidenced by this map included in each book. Do you see it? Grove of live oaks? I mean... yeah. I'm not crazy!