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.

Animalize!

It began, of course, with Jaws: the horror of our animal brethren rising against us, their appetite unending, teeth/fangs/mandibles/stingers at the ready, no matter whether they were mammal, reptile, fish, or insect. The bookstore shelves of the '70s and '80s were loaded with these cheap paperbacks, and Signet Books featured some really, really fantastic covers. Feast yourselves!

 

 

Bram Stoker Born Today, 1847

Dracula. You know it, you love it. Perhaps you've even read it.

 

 

 

 

"You play your wits against me, mine, who commanded armies hundreds of years before you were born?"

A Sort of Human Picnic

I don't think the cover artist had a real good grasp of just what a zombie was.

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. (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 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, a tad unsatisfying. Still, The Godsend is a gripping if at times dispiriting read that sloooowly becomes horrific. It's not quite 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.

Where Skeletal Life is Known

The Horror in the Museum by H.P. Lovecraft & Others (1970): Scary Monsters and Super Creeps

Can you believe I'm only getting around to reading The Horror in the Museum this month? It's true. Despite being pretty Lovecraft-obsessed since I was 15, I've always skipped over these stories which he'd ghost-written for people whose names dropped right off even horror/pulp fiction's radar. Figured there was no way they could be as weird, as unsettling, as wonderful as HPL's own. Aaaand... yes, okay, I was right, but still the best stories here, which HPL revised for other pulp writers throughout his career - yes, to detriment of his own original works - are welcome additions to Lovecraft's oeuvre. All the stories in Horror were published through the '20s, '30s and '40s in Weird Tales magazine.

Ballantine Books, 1976, cover art by Murray Tinkelman (thanks Uncle Doug!)

I discovered that many of the stories were only in the barest fragment form when they reached Lovecraft through the mail, and that one served as a sort of dry-run for his own soon-to-come masterpieces "The Shadow out of Time" and At the Mountains of Madness. If that doesn't get you to salivating at the prospect of discovering new untamed vistas of mind-blasting cosmic wonder and fright... you're reading the wrong blog, probably.

 Original Arkham House hardcover with art by Gahan Wilson, 1970

Most of the paperback editions included fewer than a dozen of the 20-odd tales included in the original 1970 Arkham House hardcover. I own the 1989 revised Arkham, but just read a sampling; most of the plots, prose, and characterization started to run together in my imagination, alas. It can get to be a bit much, all those scholarly types of tender disposition, delicate sensibilities, nervous system a hair's-breadth away from total collapse, moonish pallor and solitary habits who, with the aid of the racially-stereotyped, stumble upon ancient subterranean horrors, mind-boggling proof of alien gods with consonants and apostrophes for names (our pal Cthulhu affects the nom de guerre "Tulu" here), living corpses, and that final reveal in the last sentence. You know how it goes.

Revised Arkham House hardcover with art by Raymond Bayless, 1989

But I can recommend some titles you shouldn't miss. There are several tales from one C.M. Eddy, Jr., - a personal friend of Lovecraft's - none impressive save "The Loved Dead" (1923), which reaches purple heights of perversity in prose so ornamental the word "necrophilia" needs never be said (which caused some controversy for Weird Tales upon publication). First-person narrator, of insulated and awkward boyhood which leads to similar adulthood, relates his unholy lust, his obsessive search for his next conquest, literally writing the short tale as he lounges upon gravestones in a midnight graveyard. Dude becomes an assistant at a funeral parlor, of course.

 No case was too gruesome for my impious sensibilities, and I soon became master my chosen vocation. Every fresh corpse brought in to the establishment meant a fulfilled promise of ungodly gladness, of irreverent gratification; a return of that rapturous tumult of the arteries which transformed my grisly task into one of beloved devotion - yet every carnal satiation exacted its toll. I came to dread the days that brought no dead for me to gloat over, and prayed to all the obscene gods of the nethermost abysses to bring swift, sure death upon the residents of the city. 

Lush and pulpy as exotic rotting fruit, "The Loved Dead" is a solid if noxious gem in the collection, somewhere between the poison eroticism of Baudelaire and Gautier and the modern horror decadence of Poppy Z. Brite. And I'm sure Lovecraft wrote the bulk of it!

 

Del Rey trade paperback, 2007

"The Curse of Yig" (1928) and "The Mound" (1929), two of the more well-known stories, are by Zealia Bishop (I didn't read "Medusa's Coil"). Both are good and gruesome. It was a refreshing change-up to find these are set in the American Southwest, amongst its deserted mesas and spare vegetation, not to mention the convoluted mythologies of the Native Americans who've lived there for centuries. The latter features extensive descriptions of an alien race, one so debased and cruel it's clear HPL meant it as a real-life commentary, and in it are the horrific roots for his later, longer classics. The descent into what lies beneath that mound is nightmarishly captivating! The title story, from 1923 and ostensibly written by Hazel Heald, was fine, similar to "Pickman's Model" (which was written after the Heald story). Another Heald, "Out of the Aeons," overplays its hand, although I still liked it:

Even now I cannot begin to suggest it with any words at my command. I might call it gigantic - tentacled - proboscidian - octopus-eyed - semi-amorphous - plastic - partly squamous and partly rugose - ugh! But nothing I could say  could even adumbrate the loathsome, unholy, non-human, extra-galactic horror and hatefulness and unutterable evil of that forbidden spawn of black chaos and illimitable night.

Horror ends with with a whimper and not a bang - but what a whimper. "The Night Ocean," a revision of R.H. Barlow's (with HPL above) story, eschews all mythos blather - nary a shoggoth or a degenerate anywhere - becoming a meditative piece of eerie suggestion. Told by an artist seeking respite oceanside in a rented cabin after a bout of exhausting work, it is a fine and quiet tale rife with gloomy wonder. A series of drownings occur during his stay that get him ruminating on the sea and what hides in its dreadful brooding depths.

The people who died - some of them swimmers of a skill beyond the average - sometimes not found until many days had elapsed, and the hideous vengeance of the deep had scourged their rotten bodies. It was as if the sea had dragged them into a chasm-lair, and had mulled about in the darkness until, satisfied that they were no longer of any use, she had floated them ashore in a ghastly state.

Necronomicon Press chapbook, 1991, art by Jason Eckhardt

There is palpable near-romantic yearning for nothingness in this unassuming work. In its prose-poetry and philosophy of negation, of giving up oneself to powers - perhaps natural, perhaps not - beyond our ability to comprehend, it is a powerful predecessor to Ramsey Campbell and Thomas Ligotti, while also in the grand tradition of Algernon Blackwood's "The Willows."

I felt, in brief agonies of disillusionment, the gigantic blackness of this overwhelming universe, in which my days and the days of my race were as nothing to the shattered stars; a universe in which each action is vain and even the emotion of grief a wasted thing.

Panther Books UK, 1975, cover art by Bob Fowke

As for all these covers, the Panther UK ones are easily my faves (I find Gahan Wilson's work entirely too whimsical for Lovecraft), and the October 1971 edition from Beagle Books at top features a monstrous kaleidoscope by Victor Valla. While I found Horror in the Museum a worthy read, as a dedicated horror-fiction fan I couldn't help but wish old HPL had devoted those countless hours not to other, lesser writers but to giving us even more of his own still-unsurpassed weird tales.

The Gerunding of Horror Fiction

 

In the dark wake of Stephen King's breakthrough horror novel The Shining came countless titles with that same linguistical form; i.e., the gerund: take a verb and turn it into a noun. In the late '70s and on into the '80s virtually every paperback publisher issued their own versions of a title considered one of the seminal texts of its era, if not the entire horror genre. I can't imagine any of them have even a tenth of the power of King's and these types of titles are beyond ripe for parody. I've gathered but a smattering - natch - of those books here. The Changing and The Feeding easily have the best - or the "best" - cover art, although the monstrous fetus of The Reaping has a kind of tasteless charm to it too.