More Tor Horror Paperbacks of the 1980s

I said I'd have more Tor Horror paperbacks! Some of these I'd never seen till beginning my search. Such good stuff! The Devouring, from F.W. Armstrong - pseudonym of regular Tor author T.M. Wright - reveals the sordid yet utterly believable truth behind the Kutcher/Moore marriage. Don't know anything about Seth Pfefferle but you can read a decent review of Stickman at the PorPor Books Blog (source of the cover scan as well).

Abyssos is serious metal, while Kathryn Ptacek's works evoke monstrosities like the Dairy Queen and Twizzlers commercials of yore.

Love these covers for somebody named Lee Killough, got a real "Night Stalker for the '80s" vibe. Who is that guy with the gun, Robert Culp? I sure he's got Bill Cosby or at least William Katt for some midnight backup.

A Manhattan Ghost Story by T.M. Wright (1984): It Was Their Town, and It Always Would Be

For weeks now I've been slowly getting through A Manhattan Ghost Story, the seventh horror novel by T.M. Wright. He's a prolific but rather cultish author whose first book, the oddly poetic and ambiguous Strange Seed, I read and reviewed last year; it left me nonplussed, unsure of how I really felt about it. But Wright had skill, a manner and tone I found intriguing, so I didn't give up on reading another horror novel by him. Then I happily found a copy of MGS, feeling that his talents would lend themselves well to a quiet tale of haunting in the Big Apple. Dared I hope for, I dunno, Woody Allen meets Roman Polanski (to put it in cinematic terms)? Well... yep, kinda I was hoping for that! But now, I'm feeling that same ambivalence about this novel too.

A photographer named Abner Cray visits the city to do a coffee-table book of his work, staying at an old friend's empty apartment. He muses obsessively on the nature of death and the dead but not in any way I found insightful or surprising. A struggle, trudging through "poetic" elegiacal passages such as Yes, definitively, this is what it's all about, this is what Death is all about; sit back now, I'll tell you, my God, they'd swarm all over like angry bees, the dead would, like angry bees which appear again and again throughout the narrative. Then there's flashback chapter sections in which Abner and a delinquent friend break into a mausoleum as young teens in 1965, which contain some really and truly clunky, amateur-hour prose and dialogue (if I read one more conversation in which two characters say one another's names over and over again...).

The present day sees ghosts intermingling with the living in a sort of purgatorial New York City. At least, if you can't figure out that the odd people who speak in repetitive near-riddles to the narrator are merely shades of the dead - well, there, I spoiled it for you. But I didn't really: the book is titled "A Manhattan Ghost Story" - what else is the reader supposed to expect? Just look at the Tor paperback's cover art!

Anyway, I had to give up two-thirds of the way through, and quickly skimmed the final chapters. Don't feel like I missed much. There's an interesting story here, absolutely: Abner's friendship with a man who's abandoned his apartment and left the country because he murdered someone; his burgeoning relationship with that friend's ex-girlfriend; Abner's own past in which he'd slept with an attractive cousin; his misadventures in the dark and gritty city streets and parks and apartment buildings. But there's little atmosphere and, as I said, you pretty much know what's coming. The pacing is stop/start and the editing should have tightened up a lot of the writing. I felt like MGS was an old manuscript Wright had in a desk drawer and turned it in without rewriting it.

I really wanted to like A Manhattan Ghost Story; I haven't read a good ghost story in some time, and I felt the Manhattan setting would work to Wright's advantage. It's just that I don't think he took enough advantage, certainly not enough to convince this reader. He has some real fans, though, as his Wikipedia page reads more like disguised fanboy gushing than impartial biography (who gives a fuck who the movie rights to MSG were bought by and which celebrities were attached to act in it? You don't see that in other Wikipedia novel entries). Not finishing a book is one of my great pet peeves, but it really is the only sensible course: three weeks of reading and I didn't even make it to page 250 (out of 381). My shelves are overstuffed these days; what would you have done?

Strange Seed by T.M. Wright (1978): Strange Eyes Fill Strange Rooms

It's rare that I'm at a loss for words after reading a horror novel of any kind. Usually I can gather an argument somehow, pro or con, or even just wing a review going by gut instinct. But in the case of Strange Seed, a vintage horror paperback that's garnered a fair reputation over several decades as an effective example of "quiet horror," I'm a bit baffled. T.M. Wright's first novel, published by Playboy Press Paperbacks in 1980, is a subtle and even obtuse tale of nature and its effects on the human psyche. Or maybe it's about the disintegration and reintegration of personhood. Or the ineffable and alluring evil of natural perfection. Or perhaps it's just about a couple's crappy misadventure in the country. It's kinda up for grabs, folks.

Original hardcover from Everest House

The setup is simple enough: newlyweds Paul and Rachel Griffin escape from the stress of city life to the countryside, moving into Paul's childhood home in upstate New York. There they meet Hank Lumas, the neighboring handyman who remembers the tragedy of the Schmidts, the family who lived there after Paul's father died. Lumas doesn't think the Griffins will be able to adjust to life so far removed from "civilization," but Paul is determined, grimly so, to prove him wrong.

...the day the Schmidt woman threw herself from the second-floor window, followed soon afterward by her husband - those small deaths proved what Lumas had contended all along: Some folks can learn to accept what happens here, and some can't. Some can't shake what the cities do to them...

1987 Tor reprint

Then the odd, silent child from the forest appears in the Griffins' kitchen, naked, mute, its eyes and face unwholesomely perfect, harmonic, hypnotic. The boy appears from nowhere, and Rachel thinks as she realizes she can't look away, He is some wild creature that's gotten into the house, and the only thing human about him is his form. And there are more of them, and while they don't speak, they are excellent mimics, which makes for some chilling confrontations for those unfortunate enough to run across them in the woods...

One thing I've found while reading '70s horror is that in general it tends to be better written than '80s horror; it's obvious the "horror boom" of the later decade allowed the publication of many lesser authors whose talents were wanting. Wright's style may be enigmatic and oblique but it's definitely literate, allusive, even poetic. He melds scenes of the heartless natural world with the slow-burn collapse of the Griffins' relationship, and the letter Rachel writes to her mother throughout the novel gives insight into her hopes as well as her denial. Why Wright was doing this felt too vague to grasp; the allusive becomes elusive.

However Wright strains credibility when the Griffins accept the weird "earth children" as part of their new world, even when, after death, Paul has to bury them beyond the house. That really threw me off, but just as Wright does that, he also tightens up the narrative and his prose gets sharper as the story begins to close. A decidedly erotic undertone makes its appearance and we do get some sort of ultimate explanation of the eerie events. That was a relief.

Overall, Strange Seed made me feel off-center quite often, as I was not sure what I was reading. The cover art of both editions makes you think of Invasion of the Body Snatchers or Children of the Damned, but that's not really the case. Stephen King included it in his horror fiction appendix in Danse Macabre, and has compared Wright to Ramsey Campbell and Michael McDowell, which I can sorta see. Strange Seed is unlike other horror novels I've read recently, I'm just hesitant to say whether I liked it or not. Well, that'll happen. For a more positive take on Wright's stuff, be sure to check out this Phantom of Pulp post.