Alan Ryan born today, 1943

Eighties horror scribe Alan Ryan was born May 17, 1943, in the Bronx, and died in 2011. He left behind an under-appreciated legacy of horror fiction, both short stories and novels, and was an editor of some great skill, most notably putting together the Penguin Books of Vampire Stories in 1987. Below you'll see his hardcover-only short-story collections Quadriphobia (Doubleday 1986) and The Bones Wizard (1988), which I haven't read.

I've reviewed two of his Tor horror novels, Dead White (1983) and Cast a Cold Eye (1987), and recommend both to readers looking for quiet, unassuming and atmospheric scares. Panther (Signet 1979) and The Kill (Tor 1982) remain on my find-and-read list; then you'll see a sampling of covers for his holiday-themed Halloween Horrors from '86, and you can read a good review of that one here. You find any Ryan's titles on your used bookstores searches, grab 'em!

 

 

With Just a Touch of Her Burning Hand: The Cover Art of Rowena Morrill

With her very first paperback cover illustration - for Isobel (below, Jove Books, 1977) - artist Rowena Morrill showed an innate talent for depicting the lurid, the fantastical, the unimaginable, with bold eye-catching color and strikingly detailed monsters, heroines, wizards, and other genre-specific characters. Morrill rose to prominence throughout the late 1970s and onward, one of the few female artists to contribute greatly to the SF&F/horror paperback boom. Her cover art is unmistakably of its time, original and painstaking work readers don't often see today - which makes it so wondrously special and worth celebrating.

At top is Burning (Jove, May 1978), and it is easily one of my top 10 paperback horror covers: I love the blood-red title, the terrified women screaming, the house ablaze, all within a half-cube. And add that tagline - "A love that defied the grave"! Man I can't resist. Maybe one day I'll read it!

These two collections of Lovecraft, both Jove 1978, were some of her earliest work, and I must say that besides the famous Michael Whelan covers for Ballantine/Del Rey a few years later, they're simply the best HPL paperback covers. The orange and blue text, sure, but the bizarre creatures could only be painted by an artist who actually read the stories. Same goes for that Frank Belknap Long collection, as it depicts the title tale in all its muck and madness.

It wasn't till just the other day that I came across this Charles L. Grant title, Night Songs (Pocket, June 1984), and it got me started really looking for Morrill covers I hadn't seen before. Haven't read it but I'm gonna assume there's a mermaid involved....

Most of Morrill's covers were for the science fiction and fantasy genres, but we know how that line can blur. Below are just a few examples of her Timescape covers, a 1980s imprint of Pocket Books. Have you read George R.R. Martin's 1979 novella "Sandkings"? Holy shit, it truly is one of the great horror/SF tales of the '80s! The cover is perfect. And of course we all love our Clark Ashton Smith paperbacks, even though personally I have no time for reading about wizards or muscular shirtless heroes.

Perhaps Morrill's most iconic horror paintings were done for Pocket's Robert R. McCammon line. I can't imagine '80s horror without this imagery and vanishing point perspective. Swan Song (June 1987) is a staple of the era, and They Thirst (Oct 1988) is a particular fave cover of mine, Hollywood vampires oh yeah!

Another stunner is this motley crew of bloodthirsty night creatures, folks whose faces we all recognize. Wish I'd seen this when I was a kid, it's from '78 also and I would've killed for it. I was crazy for monsters in castles back then, just crazy.

And then there's The Haunt (Popular Library, April 1990), another book I'd never heard of till researching Morrill's covers. She loves her bats!

So much thanks to you, Ms. Morrill, for some of my favorite horror paperback covers ever.

The artist herself, c. 1970s one presumes

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.

Your Heart Heart Pounds Till It Pumps in Death

Nice n' lurid, just how we like 'em. Love the alien skull, the blood-drippy title font, all the garish colors, and dig on the collapsing Hollywood sign...

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!

Joe R. Lansdale Born Today, 1951

Happy 62nd to the one and only Joe R. Lansdale! As you can see by these paperback covers, Joe can do it all: splatterpunk, thrillers, westerns, crime, dark fantasy, science fiction. If you haven't read Lansdale... what are you waiting for?!