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

Saucy Jack

Guv'nor fancy a squeeze?

RIP Frank De Felitta (1921 - 2016)

Bestselling author and filmmaker Frank De Felitta has died at age 94. Please enjoy these terrific vintage paperback covers!

Riveted and Chilled

Unholy Trinity by Ray Russell (1967): The Grandest Guignol of All

This little Bantam paperback from 1967 seems slight and cheap—the Halloween-costumed models beyond silly, although making specific reference to the three novellas within—but it packs a solid wallop of historical horror. Unholy Trinity collects Ray Russell's three greatest tales of the neo-Gothic, "Sagittarius," "Sanguinarius," and of course the much more well-known "Sardonicus," which was made into a 1961 film by notorious showman William Castle. Long a TMHF favorite, Russell was fiction editor at Playboy magazine during its height of 1960s influence, publishing Vonnegut, Bradbury, and others, so, you know, class (quite unlike the sleazy delights of his 1976 novel, the infamous Incubus). And class is what Russell brings to the proceedings, a triumvirate of history's most monstrous: Countess Bathory, Gilles de Rais, and Jack the Ripper (what, you say, no Vlad III? Nope) all appear. These monsters may be garbed in the finest raiment, but beneath they are as ghoulish, as diabolic, as unspeakable, as ever they have been.

As one can surmise from a 1985 dust-jacket photo of the author, his style is at once saturnine, urbane, regal even, with a wicked vein of dark humor and irony winding through. His work suggests a sophisticate's interest in pain and debasement, mitigated by the mists of history but also given weight by the fact these the events described actually happened (for the most part; "Sardonicus" is Russell's own literary conceit). Therefore it can be stated that one's sadism is sated while using the cloak of respectable historical detail as disguise... if you even care about that.

We begin with "Sanguinarius"—actually no, wait, we begin with an intro essay by Mr. Russell, "The Haunted Castle: A Confession." He recounts a taxing day as an editor in a modern office and upon returning home, exhausted by the existence of television, telephone, Dictaphone, typewriter, etc., and reading "smart, savvy stuff full of bright slang and hip allusion," he wants to relax with "one of those good old aromatic baroque tales, told in an unhurried, leisurely, painstakingly structured way, with plenty of unashamedly elaborate language." Of course Russell's read everything like that on his shelves (giving credence to Harlan Ellison's cry, "Who the hell wants a library full of books they've already read?"), so what's he do? He begins writing one himself! "Fevered with compulsion, totally absorbed," he produces first "Sardonicus," and within a short time the other two works within. Huzzah!

And so: "Sanguinarius" is a fictionalized first-person account of Countess Elizabeth Bathory, written in faux-16th century hand, detailing her descent into blood lust. From her entombment in a high Castle Csejthe room she writes this memoir, beseeching her Lord to hear her now that she's being punished for unimaginable deeds. In the village below, she writes, "no soul will dare display a thing of crimson." The marriage of the Bathory and Nadasdy lines brought together Hungarian royalty; she is expertly wooed by Count Ferencz Nadasdy (although it was probably an arranged marriage). Imprisoned Elizabeth writes of her and Ferencz's lovemaking, which gets Russell's pen flowing:

...for indeed to peaks of pleasure Ferencz led me, slowly to start with, step by timorous step, then setting out with more audacity, striving together, each succouring the other, climbing, first to one ledge, then to a higher, and then to yet a higher more dizzying ridge, finally to soar as if on wings to attain, both in the same heart-bursting moment, that cloud-capp'd ultimate point.

When Ferencz is called off to battle, Elizabeth mopes and mourns, unconsoled by "faithful old servant" Ilona, till one day Dorottya arrives. A beautiful young "woman of the wood" with the knowledge of healing herbs and ointments, she offers her services to the lonesome Countess. Things turn... heady. Ilona hears illicit cries in the night. You know how it goes. When Dorottya asks Elizabeth if she might bring others to cheer her, the Countess agrees, although slightly hesitant. What follows when of course Ferencz's sudden arrival home interrupts proceedings. Will it surprise the reader to learn that Dorottya is Ferencz's long-time mistress in unholy arts, that he sent her to Elizabeth at her time of weakness, and she was to be his wife's teacher in torture?

"And let us lead thee onward," added Dorottya, "to keen delights far stranger and more bold than those thou  has already savour'd..."

"Ay, wife" said Ferencz, "and be thou Bathory not but in name, but in hot deed, as well!"

"And let us seal this compact with a solemn pledge," Dorottya said, "a ceremonial bath to signalize our fealty to sin."

I think you know what kind of ceremonial bath is to follow. Russell doesn't attempt to make her a sympathetic character. Self-serving, oblivious, even if at times regretful, Bathory blames her husband  and Dorottya for developing her taste for blood and torture (even if such traits ran in her family). The little twist at the end is welcome, however; welcome, appropriate, refreshing even.

 "For who would be disposed to smile under the same roof with him who must smile forever?"

Sandwiched in the middle of the book is Russell's most famous work, "Sardonicus." In 18— (I've never been able to ascertain why that dash was used in dates in pre-20th century literature...) one Dr. Robert Cargrave, an esteemed English physician, is called to a mountainous region of Bohemia by an old friend, Maude Randall. She is now married to a man who calls himself Sardonicus and together they live in a castle, a "vast edifice of stone... cold and repellent... of medieval dankness and decay" which "strike[s] the physical and the mental eye as would the sight of a giant skull." Of course they do! Once there, Cargrave and Maude strike up their old friendship (never consummated) and then she introduces her husband, Mr. Sardonicus.

"The gentleman before me was the victim of some terrible affliction that had caused his lips to be pulled perpetually apart from each other, baring his teeth in a continuous ghastly smile. It was the same humourless grin I had seen once before: on the face of a person in the last throes of lockjaw. We physicians have a name for that chilling grimace, a Latin name... risus sardonicus."

 German edition, 1971

Sardonicus's backstory is a clever one, reaching back to creepy Eastern European folklore. He then reveals himself to be a diabolic mastermind, enlisting Cargrave's medical prowess to cure his wretched face while dangling a promise of bliss with Maude—or, failing in this, Sardonicus threatens the tortures of the damned for his platonic wife:

"Perhaps now you will better understand the necessity for this cure. And perhaps also you will understand the full extent of Maude's suffering should you fail to effect the cure. For, mark me well: if you fail, my wife will be made to become a true wife to me—by main force, and not for one fleeting hour, but every day and every night of her life, whensoever I say, in whatsoever manner I choose to express my conjugal privilege!" As an afterthought he added, "I am by nature imaginative."

It may not surprise you to find that Russell's attitude is one firmly set in the 1960s it was written in; the subtext of "Sardonicus" is like a recasting of the Playboy philosophy, that libertine stew of sex, sophistication, and rationality, in terms of the Gothic. In the end modern urban bachelor Cargrave outwits the violent, boorish cad and wins the woman. Sardonicus's comeuppance is utterly terrible and unutterably fitting. As I said: Playboy! Philosophy! No, really: whether you agree with my reading or not, "Sardonicus" is superb.

Playboy Press, 1971

The final piece, "Sagittarius," is a tale-within-a-tale, two men in an upper-class club exchanging bon-mots over cigars and Scotch. You know the scene. Elderly Lord Terrence and young Rolfe Hunt converse of "the series of mutilation-killings that were currently shocking the city, and then upon such classic mutilators as Bluebeard and Jack the Ripper, and then upon murder and evil in general..." You know, the yoozh. Lord Terry then launches into speculation: what if Mr. Hyde, of Stevenson fame, were real? And supposing that, what if he had sired a son? Then that conversation, about the twists and turns of good and evil in one soul, turns into Lord Terry's reminiscences about his younger days in turn-of-the-century Paris, when he knew a famous actor of Le Théâtre du Grand-Guignol named Sebastien Sellig.

Ah, the Grand-Guignol! Theatrical performances of death and dismemberment, madness and the macabre, that drew standing-room-only crowds to witness buckets of stage blood spurting about. A terrific setting for a horror tale, and for Russell to show off his erudition. Into this brew he mixes Hyde, Jack the Ripper, and as a pièce de résistance, Gilles de Laval, Baron de Rais, that 15th century butcher of children and occult dabbler, compatriot of Joan of Arc and a man of—but of course—wealth and taste. Mystery piles upon mystery, and young Rolfe Hunt has, in the story's final sentence, a mind-freezing realization...

In the street, I felt I had to make some utterance. "To think, I said, "that her last evening was spent at the Guignol!"

Sellig smiled sympathetically. "My friend," he said, "the Grand Guignol is not only a shabby little theatre in a Montmartre alley. This—" his gesture took in the world "—is the Grandest Guignol of all."

I spent several days entranced by Russell's imagination, the twists and insights, the decadence of an aesthete's intelligence, enchanted by his delicate yet precise prose used to describe the indescribable. Russell's affection for the wormy tropes of Gothic literature is clear; his facility with them dexterous; his ironic repositioning of them enlightening. Thus I can recommend Unholy Trinity without hesitation (in print as Haunted Castles). High-minded, cultivated, blackly ironic and delighting in the debauched and the deranged from the vantage point of the mighty, Russell is a trustworthy guide through this netherworld populated by crumbling castles, dank dungeons, torture chambers, bleak landscapes, and most terrifying of all, the unfathomable cruelties of the human mind.

Not from God above or Fiend below, 

but from within his own breast, his own brain, his own soul.

Dark Dance by Tanith Lee (1992): Going to the Darklands

Oh my Goth is this a lovely cover! Taken right from the back of a Siouxsie Sioux record or ripped from the pages of Propaganda magazine, it's a perfect image to appeal to the reader who wants romance tinged with a hint of death and black nail polish: Let her taste the forbidden, the erotic, the evil... Yeah, potential readers of 1992's Dark Dance know who they are. The bats have left the belfry...

Tanith Lee is a writer I've been meaning to read for over 20 years. A prolific British author whose many, many paperback novels combined elements of fantasy, horror, science fiction, myth, and fairy tales, it was her recent death, alas, that made me realize I needed to do that now, and so I picked up Dark Dance, the only book of hers I own, published by Dell as a title in their ground-breaking Abyss line. Like many novels from Dell/Abyss, it isn't only/just/quite a horror novel. Nothing is scary, or even meant to scare, but there is foreboding and threat, a gloomy old house near a cliff-side overlooking the sea, a secret family made of members of indeterminable age clad in black, and the promise of illicit pleasures. We are in Gothic romance territory here, as will become clear early on.

The dance begins on a foggy London day as 29-year-old Rachaela Day arrives at her paltry job in a dingy dank bookshop (She hated computers, they frightened her. She liked old things... she was happy only with printed words). Her mother, a bitter and resentful woman, has been dead several years, and Rachaela's found herself utterly thankful for the release. She knows little about her father, who pretty much disappeared before she was born, although her mother complained about him and his ne'er-do-well family, the Scarabae (a weird name to go with a weird fly-by-night man). Into the bookshop then comes a man with a letter for Rachaela, from a law firm representing her father's family: as the back cover of Dark Dance tells us, the Scarabae beckon to Rachaela, inviting her to their family estate by the sea. And all travel expenses included!

Desiring something more in her life but unsure what, she accepts the summons to the Scarabae home after her apartment building goes up for sale, quitting her bookseller job in a fit of pique (I was a bit disappointed when this segment concluded; I do love tales set in dusty old bookstores!) and is driven up the seaside coast. In the house, faceless and black but for its one lit window (I told you we were in Gothic romance land!), she is met by Miss Anna and Mr. Stephan, very old, thin as twine, one female and oen masculine,and at that borderline of age where the sexes blend, these two had sustained their genders. At dinner she meets the  rest of the Scarabae, more than a dozen, each with their own role save the oldest, Uncle Camillo, who labors under some kind of juvenile dementia, galloping about the endless halls and rooms as if on a horse only he can see. One of them at least was insane.

Warner Books UK, Feb 1993

Removed from the world at large, the family's only contact a hired driver, with rare trips into a desultory village some miles' walk away for supplies, Rachaela spends malingering days and nights in the home. The reader feels the claustrophobia of the Scarabae estate, its bizarre stained glass windows and winding halls, locked doors and silent inhabitants. She hears snippets of the family history: superstition, outcast, pogroms, escape, told in hundreds of years. Vampires? Perhaps. She learns her father is called Adamus and he lives in the tower (of course!) but he comes and goes as he pleases, a mystery almost even to the others. He seems to spy on her in the night, accompanied by an enormous black cat. When she finally confronts Adamus, it goes about as well as expected:

"You dropped me like a lost coin. Less than that."

"I meant to make you. I tried with many women. The Scarabae seed is reluctant. It inbreeds better. But your stupid and soulless mother had, surprisingly, the correct ingredients to accommodate me..."

"All her life she hated you and what you'd done. She made me pay for you."

Rachaela resents Adamus, certainly, and comes to resent her captivity, which she's told again and again is a freedom. But just as I was beginning to feel a little worn out by the constancy of Rachaela's entrapment in the house, she makes her escape, back to the village she'd visited earlier for supplies. Rachaela misses the infrequent train to London, sits in a church to pity herself, and then turns round to see... Adamus. Who's come for her, who seduces her there in the church pew:

"Yes, I want to fuck you. Come back and be fucked by me."

"Now you're speaking the truth, you bastard."

"Now I'm speaking the truth. What's the problem? The family will be thrilled. They'll revel in it. It's happened over and over, mother with son, father with daughter. Brother and sister. Two-thirds of them are inbreedings of one kind or another, several twice over. A charming little intimate orgy has been going on for centuries. Secret pleasures of the house. And what other values hold you back? The criterion of the church, of morality and the world? It's nothing to you. Come to me and let me give you what you want."

It works. In an erotic trance, she lets Adamus sweep her back to the house Scarabae. What follows is a night of torrid sex, imagined with stylish high-minded eroticism by Lee (A harp string plucked in her loins... glissandi of fires. He kneeled in prayer between her thighs, his face cruel as an angel's... Her own tongue moved on him in sympathetic sorcery) till the next morning, when Rachaela is disgusted and angered by what's transpired. Once again she escapes, and this time, she will not return. In a way she will not need to return, for now she has brought a bit of the Scarabae with her: Rachaela learns she is pregnant with her own father's child. Like her own mother, she is merely a vessel for this immortal family, nothing more than an incubator. The plan all along. It's all too clear why Rachaela's mother was so horrible to her. Will Rachaela be like that to her own child? There's an unsettling scene when she visits a doctor to try to get an abortion but he patronizes her ("Children are wonderful things. Special... Think of all those women who long to bear a child and are unable..."). Ugh. The patriarchy!

The narrative moves up over a chapter and little Ruth is now seven, mostly cared for by motherly neighbor Emma, whose adult children are grown and gone. Rachaela regards Ruth with distaste, unsurprisingly, but Ruth is no abused or put-upon child; she's secretive, weird, self-possessed, and actually rather ugly (that strange white face of an elf). When Emma moves away, Rachaela and Ruth are wary of one another, estranged in the same flat, till a few years pass and Ruth begins to learn of the Scarabae, and a strange man is lurking about, and Ruth herself will escape to that darkened house by the sea, clad in black, searching for the man who fathered her. It is Rachaela's worst fear realized: for Ruth to be the child-bride of Adamus: Just before midnight Scarabae's betrothed came downstairs. She looked like a bride in Hell, in her dress of blood...

I found Lee to be a lovely and melodic writer, with prose that sings (to a Yank like me) in that British lilt, reminding me at times of Ramsey Campbell or Clive Barker. Language must serve the story, and so Lee can use "maenad" and "bacchanant" in the same paragraph and get away with it. More than get away with it; she escorts you through a hazily-lit twilight world of ambiguous vampirism and motherhood, her protagonist a young woman who abhors her mother and has never known her father. When this dark dance is over, she will know her father in ways which will make her abhor herself. Rather than creeping you out, Lee's approach to events seem removed from the real world, occurring in some demimonde where myth and fable entwine.

If you're in the mood for a kinda slow, moody, insular novel with sharp tinges of the Gothic but no horror to speak of, told in a style that's perceptive and sensual, I wouldn't hesitate to recommend Dark Dance. Vampires? One never knows for certain. But one thing is: I will definitely be reading more Tanith Lee.

Queen of Hell by J.N. Williamson (1981): Queen Nothing Approximately

I swear I bought this one only for the cover! And it's a good thing too, because while Queen of Hell (Leisure Books, 1981) boasts a breast-baring beauty with forked tongue beckoning us to our doom, the novel itself offers little but boredom. Despite a few thoughtful nods to what J.N. Willamson probably thought of as "women's lib," the descriptions of female characters are all hair color and body types (so I guess the cover is at least accurate in that respect). Willamson seems hell-bent on shoving in all the history, biography, and mythology he's read but his own style is square and stuffy, with awkward dialogue crammed into characters' mouths like wooden blocks, and a grating pall of pretension over everything.

Williamson seems a perfect example of the prolific over- and self-educated pulp writer, eager to show off his erudition, but unable to work it into his writing seamlessly. Check out the full page of quotes that introduce each section: he employs the likes of Homer, Milton, Byron, Freud, Algernon Swinburne, et. al. The author's belief that these great minds are somehow relevant to his piece of pulp dreck is silly. Williamson might be a reader and appreciator of great literature, but he can hardly write it.

So: there's a prologue set in turn of the century, one that mentions Hecate, this horrific bloody dark goddess of ancient Greece, and hints at her returning in the new century. Okay, my curiosity's piqued some. Then we're in the new century, and there's a teenage girl who was raped--of course, of course--so she's convalescing in a Catholic hospital, writing down weird visions she has of the past that are freaking out nuns and priests left and right. They think she's possessed--of course, of course--but her mother, a modern lady, is skeptical. Mom is a college prof, wants to teach a course on goddess mythology to empower female students, walking in the footsteps of her father, a great and respected scholar. She argues with a priest about the origins of her daughter's visions and takes her daughter home. Daughter wonders if Hecate is living in the modern world. End Part One.

In the second half of the novel we meet three of those female students and trudge through their shenanigans--I'm skimming, more like flipping pages at this point--and there's graphic violent sex, gross old lady corpses, mythic rituals with naked people--of course, of course--and an apocalyptic climax featuring Satan himself. The novel's final lines are literally "THE END, ALMOST..." I mean, just ugh. Nothing in Queen of Hell clicked with me, and Williamson's tendency to overwrite and have characters over-speak was exhausting.

J.N. Williamson (1932 - 2005)

But wait, there's more! For whatever reason, Williamson adds an author's note, titled--not too pretentiously now--"A Necessary Adieu from the Author." It's completely nonsensical, a cranky rant from an old white man upset about uppity women who don't believe in God but follow all that hippy-dippy goddess stuff. He tries to be funny with it but man it's just.. odd. And another odd thing is that Williamson is totally wrong about Hecate. In Greek myth she has nothing to do with darkness, death, destruction, lust, violence, etc., at all, so I don't know what sources Williamson was reading. Probably Aleister Crowley, who turns up a couple times in Queen of Hell.

I don't want to get all down on Williamson, because in his interview in Dark Dreamers (1990) he seems like a nice enough old fella, ready and willing to help young writers get published. An editor of some renown, he put together the well-regarded, all-star, multi-volume Masques series. But he actually was aware that his speedy skill at the typewriter produced less-than-stellar horror fiction, and lots of it. It's fine that he's honest about that, but honestly for me, I doubt I'll be reading any more of it.

Oh It Feels Like Dying

Can't find any information about Oh, It Feels Like Dying, a novel by someone called J.J. Madison. It was reprinted several times through the 1970s under the wildly imaginative title The Thing, with requisite references to The Exorcist and The Other on the covers. In 1978, the publisher simply copped an image of actress Anouska Hempel from Hammer's Scars of Dracula (1970), subbing a lurid tagline for the "glittering world" one of the first two paperbacks. According to Vault of Evil, whatever the title it is essentially only a (terrible, at that) porno novel dressed up as horror. Alas, what could have been!

Cat Sound!

Another cover lovely from the untouchable George Ziel (born on this date in 1914). Cat sound indeed.

Enter to the Realm of Satan!

Compare, if you will, the covers for these erotic occult novels from the late 1970s by Brian McNaughton. The first three are from Carlyle Books, easily  some of the dullest covers ever (by Ed Soyka, perhaps?); then you'll find the early '80s UK editions from Star Books. Oh, land of Aleister Crowley and Hammer Horror, we'd expect nothing less!

Spirit in the Night

Snakes... Why'd It Have to Be Snakes?