Night, Winter, and Death by Lee Hawks (1990): Of Wolf and Man

One of the most popular subgenres of crime fiction is what's known as the "cozy mystery." Authors like Lilian Jackson Braun, Diane Mott Davidson, and even good old Agatha Christie with her Miss Marple series, as well as a television show like "Murder, She Wrote," are prime examples of this style, in which graphic sex and murder are "off-stage," the setting is an inviting village, and the cast of characters is a likeable, friendly lot. I have never read any, but I can see the appeal.

Lately I've been thinking that there are horror novels that provide the same sort of vibe: well-known tropes and characters in a story that isn't trying to reinvent the genre or expand its parameters. Violence is plentiful but not off-putting. The writing is well-crafted, not arch or ironic; no self-referential winking at the reader. Homey, satisfying, you've had this meal plenty of times before and that's the point: it is a dish served with care and love, hot and ready for eager consumption. Familiar frights that delight the long-time horror reader, well-worn, but freshly presented anew.

That's what Night, Winter, and Death (Ballantine, May 1990) seemed to offer up when I first began reading it. Lee Hawks is a pseudonym of Dave Pedneau (1947-1990), who also wrote crime fiction. A journalist before he began publishing books, he's a capable, engaging writer, at ease depicting a small town and its inhabitants; he draws you in with a practiced eye and notes the right details that makes you feel right at home. His evocative title is drawn from a 1933 bestseller, Guy Endore's The Werewolf of Paris (a book I own but haven't read). A blog reader brought Night to my attention some years back when I reviewed Pedneau's How Dear the Dawn, also a comfort-food style horror novel, which he wrote under another pseudonym, Marc Eliot.   

 

So my hopes were up... but were dashed maybe halfway through. The set-up in the first few chapters was perfectly cromulent: a cranky old lady talking nonsense about a local curse; a plucky but not obnoxious high school kid who's fascinated by said curse; some surprisingly explicit sex scenes. You can read this back-cover copy for the whole story-line, I won't rehash it here. But the tale began to meander, the tension went slack, everyone argues for no good reason, more interesting characters (like a writer obviously a Pedneau stand-in) are relegated to the background, and the promised horrors are rote, uninspired scenes of gore had me almost skimming pages. Even one of my favorite kinds of horror setting, the winter storm that the title makes palpable, doesn't sink into your bones the way you need it to (for a good example of how to do that, check out Earle Westcott's Winter Wolves). Man, this book was bumming me out.

I don't understand when horror writers skimp on the horror. Pedneau doesn't seem to be following the quiet horror less-is-more school; he doesn't shy from sex and gore, yet he refrains from describing the shapeshifter/werewolf (it's a wolf-man yes, but the curse refers to a shapeshifter) any more than necessary, or in the most banal manner possible. I kept waiting, in vain, for a great monstrous reveal. In a movie, I get it, making movies costs money, so crappy effects to cut corners at least makes sense. But writing is free, so give with the goods!

Also: I've been done with cops in my horror fiction for ages, long before our current sociopolitical climate. If I wanna read about cops I'll read a crime novel, but in horror I feel like they never add anything to the proceedings. Graham Masterton in The Manitou and Clive Barker in Cabal feature the police in the correct way: as being completely, utterly useless in dealing with the supernatural and getting wiped out in the process. Thematically I think that's perfect, but in practice I don't even want them as characters. Whooo cares.

The teenage boy at the center of the story, Zach, didn't bother me at all, but schoolteacher Mona is always smiling at people even in the midst of terror and doesn't know what "metamorphosis" is and when someone says "Oh no, the power is out!" she is confused as she's never heard someone say "power" for "electricity." It's the kind of tiny note of oddness that makes me think Pedneau knew someone like that in real life! But rather than charming, it's annoying; does anyone really want to read a book with a person dumber than they are as the protagonist?

Scattered throughout Night there are decent enough moments—one man's painful descent into lycanthropy was handled well—but eventually that "coziness" becomes the curse itself, a smothering folksiness that defangs, if you will, the general proceedings. I couldn't wait to be done. Despite its terrific title, Night, Winter, and Death offers little more than a good writer working beneath his skill set, an uncomfortable fact quite the opposite indeed of coziness.

Wilding by Melanie Tem (1992): Ladies of the Canyon

"Horror is a woman's genre," says my Paperbacks from Hell pal Grady Hendrix, and he is so right. Horror is often seen as a boys' club, and that is true to an extent, yet there is a feminine power flowing through the genre that is not always acknowledged. The genre features many novels, minor and major, from a beleaguered woman's point of view: "The Yellow Wallpaper," We Have Always Lived in the Castle, The Haunting of Hill House, Flowers in the Attic, The Possession of Joel Delaney, The House Next Door, and others lesser-known, such as Burning, Nest of Nightmares, The Landlady. The female experience is not one unfamiliar with fear, pain, and betrayal of the body itself. So much of this kind of horror is entwined with the emotional weight that home and family bear on the feminine psyche since time immemorial. Horror offers a perfect opportunity to turn these anxieties into monstrous metaphor... and fiendish entertainment.

Such is the case with Melanie Tem's second novel for the fabled Dell/Abyss publishing line, Wilding (Nov 1992, cover artist unknown). Taking her title for the suspect term of marauding youth (then probably more recognized as such, being only a few years after the initial crime), Tem reclaims the word as a notion of subversion. You want wilding? She'll give you wilding: these wilding women are werewolves, wouldn't you know, and engage in just the right kind of wild werewolf behavior. And then some. In this thoughtful, temperate novel of lupine dark fantasy, Tem doesn't shy away from the tenderest, most elemental hurts (and this was family: ultimate alliance and danger more intimate, more knowing than any other). She goes further into these unsettling places and with more confidence than in her debut, another woeful tale of familial dysfunction, 1991's Prodigal.

The sisters had come most recently from wooded, green, and rainy Pennsylvania. Before that they'd lived in the Everglades, on an island off the Carolina coast, on the English moors, at the northern edge of the Black Forest, high and deep in the Carpathian Mountains (a-ha!)

There's a city-wolf/country-wolf dynamic at play: the family has split into two distinct factions, with distrust, suspicion, disagreement, and power plays at base. Should the women be away in the hills, so to speak, or should they be tested by city life and its pressures? This is the family riff, and a confrontation is coming. The heads of these clans, the murderers and devourers of their sisters, are Hannah, the country-wolf (the stench of the city poisoned her), and Mary, the city-wolf; Mary lives in one of four houses forming a square enclosed city block in Denver, a joining of them together against all the world that was not family.

The two clans have somewhat reluctantly come together at the novel's beginning on a full-moon night for the initiation of teenage Deborah, Mary's great-granddaughter. You might, as you begin reading, want to sketch a quick family tree of who's-who on a handy bookmark, for the litany of names can be numbing in its biblical simplicity: Mary, mother of Ruth, Ruth mother of Lydia, Lydia mother of Deborah. Then there are siblings and cousins. And teenage Deborah, pregnant and stubborn, rejects the initiation of wolf skin and escapes the house, leaving her relatives in a state of snipping, snapping frustration. The ancient grandmothers Mary and Hannah will not sit for it.

Teenage Deborah escapes into the city (the rest of the night she walked and ran, sometimes upright and sometimes on all fours—the women can transform at will) and various misadventures ensue: a diner pickup that leads to date rape; an encounter on a bus with a harasser that is quite satisfying for every woman who's been in the same sitch; then a ragged street person named Julian offers understanding, a place to stay, food, a sympathetic ear: This is to be a sanctuary relationship. For both of us. A place of peace and trust, Julian tells Deborah, even when she doesn't want to hear it. Tem's experience as a social worker dealing with the abused, the forgotten, the houseless, the addicted, was front and center in Prodigal and it is even more developed here; she well understands how the marginalized can create their own family dynamic. This moral dimension girds the novel into something uncomfortably real.

Anger. Wildness. Anger in the streets. Anger in the veins... anger pooling in the bedrooms, kitchens, hallways, stairways, cellars, attics, closets where people lived and loved and where they died... never enough anger. Never enough blood. Even though the world reeked of it... Little girls choked with chocolate cake they'd tasted without permission... little boys held in scalding bathwater for messing their pants again. 

Wilding, the ravening for transformation...

Finnish edition, 1994

Meanwhile, Lydia is beside herself with concern over her runaway daughter, even though her feelings towards Deborah are deeply ambivalent: She had never known how to take care of her. Lydia still mourns the death of her other children, in infancy, and the fate of newborn boys to any member of this wolf clan is absolute. She works in a drab office and a coworker, Pam, like Julian, offers sympathy and friendship, yet unlike Julian, perhaps something more. Yes, something more. The fate of this good coworker is... absolute, in one of the most heartbreaking scenes of horror I've yet read.

There is more, much more to Wilding. Emotional rawness, memories of beloved men and boys and normal lives thwarted, of unbearable tension between generations of powerful women who can barely fathom their own minds much less their relatives'. The final chapter reveals the dim history of this werewolf clan (The man stopped screaming when he heard the werewolf speak). Tem is unconcerned with presenting a traditional novel of horror: there are no wolf-hunters armed with silver bullets on the women's trail, no grizzled Kolchak investigating mauled remains found in a city park, no despair by a woman who wants to rid herself of the wolf curse. Why, it wouldn't be an Abyss book if there were! In all these ways Wilding is the quintessential Abyss title.

Current ebook

Wilding is often a state of mind rather than a exact rendering of the real and the true. Using a minimum of dialogue, Tem offers dense paragraphs of inner turmoil, anxiety, and doubt: in going after psychological truths, the story can slow to a crawl. But it's an illuminating crawl: Tem's perceptive insights into the characters' human nature are the real draw here. Don't worry, there's plenty of gory werewolf action—it's threaded through a curtain of heartfelt humanity, but it's there. Hearts are eaten, hearts are broken, hearts survive. Werewolves or no, family is family.

She could still feel the breath, still taste fresh kill, still hear the sounds of her grandmother saying her name. Blood instead of breath. Rage instead of love. Love.

Creatures of the Night: The Universal Horrors of Charles L. Grant

Moonlight over a lonely town. Swirling fog. Whispering shadows. Footsteps in the forest. A voice from the darkness. A movement seen from the corner of your eye. A slowly spreading stain of red.

New Jersey-born writer and editor Charles L. Grant (1942–2006) championed these hallmark details of old-fashioned horror tales, even in spite of their simplicity, their overuse, indeed, their corniness, because he knew in the right hands such subtle details would build up to an overall mood of dis-ease and weirdness. Evoking fear of the unknown, not the graphic revelation of a psychopath with a gore-flecked axe or an unimaginable, insane Lovecraftian nightmare, is what a truly successful horror writer (or, for that matter, filmmaker) should do. And especially during the 1980s, when he published dozens of titles through the Tor Books horror line, Grant did precisely that.

Grant was a prolific, well-respected, and award-winning horror novelist, short story writer, lecturer, and editor throughout the late 1970s until his death in 2006. He was perhaps the most vocal progenitor of what came to be known as “quiet horror.” In cinematic terms, Grant had more in common with the horror film classics of Val Lewton and Roman Polanski than he did with the writings of Stephen King or Clive Barker: suggestion, suggestion, suggestion, that was Grant's motto.

Algernon Blackwood, Arthur Machen, Richard Aickman, and Shirley Jackson were forebears; Ramsey Campbell, T.E.D. Klein, T.M. Wright, and Dennis Etchison fellow travelers. Many of the writers that appeared in Grant’s long-running horror anthology series Shadows (1978—1991) also belonged to this sub-subgenre. These were tales, like Grant’s own, of subtle chills, crafted prose, and (sometimes overly) hushed climaxes that might leave readers looking for stronger stuff a bit perplexed. But when quiet horror worked (which was quite often) you felt a satisfactory bit of frisson knowing you were in the hands of a master teller of terror tales.

Shhhh... Lewton's The Seventh Victim (1943), w/ Kim Hunter

Like many horror writers of the ’70s and ’80s, Grant had grown up in the 1940s and ’50s and therefore was a great lover of the classic monster movies from Universal Studios, whose stars have become legend. The (then) lesser-known works of producer Val Lewton also made a huge impression on Grant, and in an 1990 interview with Stanley Wiater in the book Dark Dreamers, he expressed his admiration for Lewton’s style of light and dark, sound and shadow, with only mere hints of madness and violence... and all the more frightening for that.

In 1981 Grant spoke with specialty publisher Donald M. Grant (no relation), ruefully noting that the classic monsters like Dracula, the Mummy, and the Wolfman had become objects of fun and affection (and breakfast cereal) rather than the figures of terror they had been intended. As a lark, the two Grants decided to produce new novels featuring the iconic creatures, although still in a 19th century setting.

Original Donald M. Grant hardcover editions

All three take place in Grant’s own fictional Connecticut town of Oxrun Station—the setting for about a dozen of his novels and many of his short stories—these books “would be blatantly old-fashioned. No so-called new ground would be broken. No new insights. No new creatures,” according to Grant. Setting out to recreate the moonlit mood, graveyard ambience, and cinematic stylings of those old monster movies, Grant delivered three short (all around 150 pages) novels for those hardcore fans of black-and-white horror.

The first title, issued in hardcover in 1982, was The Soft Whisper of the Dead. In the late '80s they were republished in mass-market paperback editions from Berkley Books. Here you see the October 1987 reprint featuring a kinda-sorta Dracula (one presumes Universal wouldn’t allow the use of Lugosi’s image) in classic pose. In the intro Grant also expresses a fondness for Hammer horror, so I threw on a mix of James Bernard’s Dracula scores as I began reading (I often read with background music playing; soundtracks for films like Silence of the Lambs, Cat People, Sorcerer, The Thing, and Crash make for uber-creepy ambience).

Like lots of Hammer horrors, you get upper-crust polite society and regular folks and then the help, and does Count Brastov like the help! Pity the poor. Anyway this night creature wants Oxrun Station all to himself, along with the help of Goth gal-pal Saundra Chambers, who can get him invited into all the best parties. Lots of description of weather and damp stone and a black wolf prowling about, some bloody fang-action, couple drained bodies turning up, lots of Brastov’s speaking imperiously and a chilly climax make Soft Whisper more a novel of “classic terror” than the other way ’round.

The next volume followed only a month or two later. Although we see Chaney’s Wolf Man about to pounce on the cover of The Dark Cry of the Moon, the werewolf that appears in the novel is actually a white-furred creature of much greater viciousness than we remember from the 1944 movie. I’m not a great fan of werewolf fiction (I prefer something like Whitley Strieber’s wonderful Wolfen) because the appeal of them lies in seeing the transformation. The emerging snout and sprouting hair and teeth becoming fangs simply don’t have the same gasp-inducing awe in cold print, but Grant does a nice brief bit of attempting it:

A baying while the figure began to writhe without moving, began to shimmer without reflecting, began to transform itself from shadow black to a deadly flat white. The baying, the howling, a frenzied call of demonic triumph.

Last is The Long Dark Night of the Grave, and here we get the Mummy. Mummy fiction, huh, I dunno. The Mummy was never really all that scary, was he? Perhaps it’s his implacable sense of vengeance and not his speed that’s supposed to terrify; he won’t stop, not ever, like an undead Anton Chigurh, I suppose. There’s no reasoning, there’s nothing behind those shadowed sunken eye sockets (remember the ancient Egyptians took out the brain through the nasal cavity). This mummy goes after unscrupulous Oxrun Station fellows dealing in Egyptian artifacts, creeping up on them and then when they turn around he’s got ’em by the throat. Never saw it coming. Well, maybe a shadow and a scent of sawdust and spice...

Overall, these three novels are very light, very minor entries in Grant’s Oxrun Station series; maybe imagine scary 1940s flicks never made. I think it’s obvious he wrote them more to satisfy his own nostalgia than anything else, a vanity project. His other fiction is more astute and focuses on modern fears than these simple, sincere, cobwebby tales. They certainly won’t appeal to readers who like their horror cheap and nasty; I felt they were quieter even than "quiet horror," and there's lots of meandering in plot, dialogue, and action. Grant should have concentrated more on the beloved Universal monsters rather than the relationships between people you can hardly keep track of. The scattered moments of goosebumps are rare, all too few and far between.

Those looking for Grant in top form would be best served by his Shadows anthologies and his own short fiction—collected in A Glow of Candles and Tales from the Nightside (both 1981). While nicely written and offering some mild, Halloween-y spookiness and old-timey charm, Charles L. Grant’s Universal novels are probably more collectible for their illustrated covers (artist unknown, alas) than for what’s between them.

(This post originally appeared in slightly altered form as part of "The Summer of Sleaze" on the Tor.com website)
 

Summer of Sleaze in Oxrun Station

Today my latest post in the Summer of Sleaze series is up at Tor.com! This week I write about three novels by Charles L. Grant that feature the classic Universal monsters, all terrorizing Grant's own fictional town, Oxrun Station. Hope you like it!

Snarling and Snapping at Air

Running Nightly Lightly Through the Jungle

The Howling by Gary Brandner (1977): Don't Scratch At No Doors

Mostly by-the-numbers horror tale featuring vaguely described werewolves, The Howling at least revived the long-dormant lycanthrope trope and let it loose into the modern world via its unfaithful yet awesomely fun 1981 film adaptation. And while Gary Brandner's paperback original (Fawcett World Library, 1977) isn't as blood-and-guts gory as one might think, it doesn't stint on graphic sex. Its opening rape scene is tawdry in the extreme but at least Brandner can write okay, nothing special but not terrible either. Appreciate the fact that The Howling is not overly long, moves quickly, is lean and sometimes mean.

1978 UK paperback

One bothersome trait: he kept referring to the werewolves as simply wolves - like Benchley in Jaws, repeatedly referring to his monstrous Carcharodon carcharias as simply a fish - which I found distinctly underwhelming (I have always thought of werewolves as having both human and wolf physical characteristics). The transformation sequence doesn't shock or surprise, gets the job done, and simply underlines the point that werewolf stories are best told in images and not in prose. I mean we all remember Cycle of the Werewolf, right?

What the novel does have going for it is a powerful vein of erotic abandonment (which fortunately did make it into the movie), something I don't think had been seen much in werewolf stories prior. There are several sequels too. And check out Brandner's interview in Dark Dreamers, in which he relates the sad, frustrating, rewardless travails of trying to write werewolf stories for Hollywood. But I must mention Whitley Strieber's Wolfen  or Thomas Tessier's The Nightwalker for those interested in really provocative, well-written, thoughtful wolf tales. The Howling is pulp horror through and through - and it's not, I probably don't have to tell you, in any way, shapeshift or form, in the tradition of 'Salem's Lot whatsoever.

And the Night When the Wolves Cry Out

Here's some moody werewolf cover art for you, thanks to good old George Ziel. I've been remiss in my posting, but I finished a '90s horror antho last week and have slooowly been working up my review. Till then...

Wolfsblood

THE WINNING SEASON: Dominic Lombardi remembers the summer of '63. It was the year he managed the Wolves to the league championship. It was the year they won it all.

THE DEADLY SEASON: The summer of '88 is the season it all might happen again. "Bunny" Bunsen has inherited the team, and with a sharp business sense, has rebuilt the organization. For the first time in 25 years, the Wolves have it together.
Yet it soon becomes clear that something evil is stalking the stadium: An unexplained series of gruesome attacks is launched. The more victories gained, the more heinous the crimes become. As ex-coach Lombardi looks on, a hidden and horrifying past begins to piece itself together.

THE SEASON OF THE WEREWOLF: All the evidence suggests that there is something out there that doesn't care if the team wins or loses ... only if they survive.

Fawcett Horror Paperbacks of the 1980s

 

By the early 1980s, Fawcett seemed to have moved on from the moody, studied paperback cover art they used in the 1970s. Perhaps the growing horror field of the new decade gave them more competition and those books didn't sell as well any longer. Perhaps talented artists who worked in paints and canvases and good old-fashioned suggestive spookiness were too expensive. These covers are simpler, more direct, not as impressive, and in a couple cases just corny, tasteless without being quite ridiculous enough for a laugh. The three volumes in The Howling series, Gary Brandner's werewolf saga, (1977/1981/1985 respectively) utilize the same monstery font and stylization; I do kinda like the "one fang/two fangs/three fangs" motif.

 

When Paul Schrader remade the 1940s classic B&W Val Lewton horror film Cat People in 1982, Brandner wrote the novelization. Sure, this cover has the same image as the movie poster, but what an image! Truly one of my favorite horror ladies of all time.

Vampire Notes (1989) and The Keeper (1986), Robert Arthur Smith. No idea who Smith is, but he got some of the better '80s covers from Fawcett. 

Killing Eyes, John Miglis (1983) Yikes. I mean, look away! Those eyes are so unsettling, I missed the bullet hole first time I saw this cover.

 

The Boogeyman, B.W. Battin (1983) This kind of simplicity actually works: the child's scawl, the bloody fingerprint that looks almost real...

 

The Beast, Walter J. Sheldon (1980) Move along, nothing to see here folks.

 

Death Sleep, Jerry Sohl (1983) He sure sounds like Freddy Krueger...

Falling Angel, William Hjortsberg (1978) - Yeah, it's from '78, but I'm throwing this in as a freebie. I've featured this cover before, in my review; it's absolutely one of my favorite books that I've read for this site! I even sent an effusive fan email to Hjortsberg a month or two ago (drinking and the internets don't mix), but luckily received an appreciative reply. Whew.

The Wolfen by Whitley Strieber (1978): Werewolf? There Wolf!

How does it feel to be ripped to pieces: will there be desperate agony or will some mechanism of the brain provide relief?

Total coincidence, but here's yet another novel that works in both the crime and the horror genres. Less well-known than its loose 1981 film adaptation with Albert Finney, Whitley Strieber's The Wolfen is a mainstream thriller through and through but with a strong evocation of, and rational explanation for, vampire and werewolf myths throughout history. The Wolfen are a superior species of wolf-like creatures who have till now hidden themselves from civilization. While certainly not evil by any means, the ferocity and intelligence with which they dispatch of their human victims lends them a malevolent yet fascinating nobility and grace.

Avon 1988 reprint

The police procedural aspects are in full effect from the start: detective partners George Wilson and Becky Neff are total opposites, a veritable Felix and Oscar of the police force who are much resented by their superiors; Wilson is an aging lazy slob with a real attitude problem, and Becky - well, Becky's a woman. And for mid-1970s New York City cops, that's practically a crime itself. Even Wilson seems to resent her, when he's not falling for her. The novel begins with two hapless police officers finding themselves face-to-face with the terrifying Wolfen in a city impound lot, and then torn apart before they can barely reach their weapons. The grisly attack baffles and sickens the police force, and Wilson and Neff get down to the exhausting business of tracking the killer. Of course they have no idea what they're up against.

Strieber

At a loss, Wilson and Neff enlist Ferguson, a zoologist from the Museum of Natural History; he does some serious research based on the clues they've given him and realizes these creatures were the impetus for the werewolf legend. More primitive people, coming into contact with the Wolfen, couldn't believe that animals so smart weren't part human... Ferguson begins to respect the Wolfen, and thinks he can communicate with them peacefully. You know how that's gonna go.

Now, if you can believe that these super-wolves can exist alongside mankind and yet not leave behind any trace of themselves, you're probably really gonna love The Wolfen. In fact I had a bit of a hard time suspending disbelief at first, but Strieber is skilled and convincing in presenting a fairly believable pack of intelligent and cooperative creatures and their thought processes. What makes the novel unique is this depiction of their furtive lives on the fringes of human society. There are some terrifically suspenseful moments when Wilson and Neff inadvertently come close to the Wolfen's lair in an abandoned building. Lots of police department and city politics may detract from the eerie fact that the two cops are now being stalked through the city by these "monsters," and high-rise apartment buildings are no protection. These animals know that the two humans are aware of them and it angers them. When the Wolfen ambush on Neff and Wilson fails, they go after Dr. Evans, the medical examiner to whom the cops revealed their suspicions:

Then they were on him, pulling and tearing, ripping full of rage, spitting the bloody bits out , angry that the two important ones had been missed, angry that this one also dared confront them with his evil knowledge. They had cracked open the head and plunged their claws into the brains, plunged and torn to utterly and completely destroy the filthy knowledge.

The paperback at the top (Bantam 1981) seems like the movie tie-in edition, while this bland and amateurish cover, the first-edition paperback (my copy, Bantam July 1979) basically meant the publisher was trying to appeal to the widest possible audience, people who wouldn't buy one of those down-market trashy-looking horror novels with their lurid paperback cover art. The Wolfen simply don't go after screaming blonde ladies as the pupils of those stupid cut-out eyes insist. That said, the book should still find a pretty wide audience because it is definitely a gripping, suspenseful, scary read; I found it compulsively readable. Strieber's first novel has a good balance between pulpy creature horror and investigative police procedural, between awe and wonder at the predatory perfection of the Wolfen and the stark inescapable fear their kind will always engender in that weaker and stupider species, mankind.

Stephen R. George: The Paperback Covers

More tacky, foil-stamped, overwrought horror paperback cover art from the esteemed publisher Zebra Books. This time it's an author I only recently heard of, Stephen R. George, and about whom I can find virtually nothing online, other than that he's a Canadian author who wrote under several pseudonyms. Well, whoop-de-damn-do. At least he left behind a couple howlers of paperback covers—the artist of several is Richard Newton.

When I first came across the ludicrously grotesque cover for Nightscape (1992), thanks to The Mighty Blowhole, I was gobsmacked. It really is one of the most dumbfounding covers I've ever seen, more reminiscent of a cheap 1980s VHS box cover for some ghastly shot-on-video atrocity than an actual book. At least the kid still has all his hair.

Like Near Dead (1992) above, Dark Miracle (1989) appeals to the psychologically healthy among us who dig corruption of little girls.

Beasts (1989) I much prefer canine teeth as fangs than the current "True Blood" style that use incisors as fangs; those kind look truly ridiculous to me.

The Forgotten (1991) I think my best friend in junior high drew this during study hall and passed it to me after class.

Grandma's Little Darling (1990) Sure, why not use the tagline from Cronenberg's version of The Fly? Nobody remembers where it came from anyway.

Dark Reunion (1990) Masked a legacy of cliche is more like it.

I really can't believe these covers were still popular in the early '90s; I associate this type of pulpy tastelessness with the 1980s. Doesn't look like George wrote anything after the mid-'90s, either. Is he much missed? You tell me.