Still Dead: Book of the Dead 2, edited by John Skipp & Craig Spector (1992): Everything that Dies Someday Comes Back

What distinguishes Still Dead: Book of the Dead 2 from its 1989 predecessor? Easy: better stories, better writers, more gore, weirder gore, surreal gore, and women. It really is that simple. In the three years that separate the two John Skipp and Craig Spector-edited zombie-thologies, in which every story is contained within the George Romero universe of zombie hell, several female horror writers had published well-received shorts and debut novels. Kathe Koja, Nancy A. Collins, Elizabeth Massie, Roberta Lannes, and perhaps most well-known of all, Poppy Z. Brite, are all accounted for in Still Dead, and it makes all the difference. Their stories here are original, inventive, risky, and astonishingly well-written. Nobody's trying to self-consciously out-gross anyone else, or prove how splatterpunk they are, or show how flip and casual they can be about brain-eating, dead children, and evisceration. Thank zombie Jebus for that.

Mark V. Ziesing hardcover, 1992

To wit: Massie gets down-home with graphic zombie sex in "Abed," and Collins brings the goth-punk kids to the show in "Necrophile." Koja's "Prince of Nox" imagines the other side: her protagonist becomes a zombie who, sadly, still maintains some semblance of sentience and goes on a quest to rescue his damned brethren. Nancy Holder presents a liberal zombie-theology in "Passion Play," in which an old German town wants to use a zombie as Christ in its traditional performance so it can be truly and literally crucified. Nice little Easter-appropriate twist at the end, too.

The lead-off story, "The Old Man and the Dead" from Mort Castle, by whom I've never read anything else, is one of my favorites in modern horror. Prefiguring the current bestselling craze of melding zombies with classic literature, Castle imagines a man - quite obviously Ernest Hemingway if you paid attention in your first-year literature class - who encounters in Spain the horror not of World War I, but of the walking dead.

"I don't think I like this," Adam Nichols said. "I don't think I like it at all."
"I am sorry, but what you like and what you dislike is not all that important, if you will forgive me for saying so," Miguel said. "What does matter is that you are a good shot. You are one of our best shots. So, if you please, shoot some of these unfortunate dead people."

Love. It. Douglas E. Winter returns with another grim parody of (then-) contemporary hip-lit, "Bright Lights, Big Zombie" (You are not the kind of zombie who would be at a place like this at this time of the morning), and Dan Simmons, a schoolteacher before becoming a full-time writer, takes "This Year's Class Picture" to autobiographical heights (or depths). The surreal gore turns up in Brooks Carruthers' "Moon Towers," to which I still remember the climax 20 years later; famed cartoonist Gahan Wilson has "Come One, Come All," a sort of Bradbury/Sweeney Todd mash-up, and Skipp and Spector themselves present an odd poem, "The Ones You Love."

But really this tome is owned by "Calcutta, Lord of Nerves," Poppy Z. Brite's darkly poetic rumination on the nature of zombiedom and a strangely beautiful city besieged by filth and decay both natural and not. There's no real plot, just a decadent, luxurious, and deliciously gross sensibility:

The dead like pussy too. If they are able to catch a woman and disable her enough so that she cannot resist, you will see the lucky ones burrowing in between her legs as happily as the most avid lover. They do not have to come up for air. I have seen them eat all the way up into the body cavity. The internal female organs seem to be a great delicacy, and why not? They are the caviar of the human body. It is a sobering thing to come across a woman sprawled in the gutter with her intestines sliding from the shredded ruins of her womb, but you do not react. You do not distract the dead from their repast.

It's this sort of acceptance of horror and death that makes the tales of Still Dead believable, makes them linger, makes them sting; despite their visions of the human body in extremis, these stories are still about people, about men and women who matter-of-factly witness the worst the world has to offer, and continue on. It's not just the the dead who come back; it's living people too.

But I'm still not crazy about this cover, either.

The Nameless by Ramsey Campbell (1981): Children in Heat

Now this is a classic cover for vintage horror fiction! Once the creepy-kid aesthetic (or is that cliche?) was set in stone with books and movies like The Bad Seed, Children of the Damned, The Exorcist, and Audrey Rose, it would be a long time before publishers could give it up. The image on this 1985 Tor reprint of Ramsey Campbell's 1981 novel The Nameless is perfectly precise: gaudy, tasteless, macabre. Little girl in her Sunday best! On fire! Staring at you menacingly like she doesn't even care about the flames! Fuck you, mom! I hate you, dad!

1985 UK reprint

Honestly I was pretty underwhelmed by The Nameless when I read it about two years ago. A young girl goes missing, presumed murdered, and her mother grieves until mysterious clues start turning up that the girl might still be alive... somewhere, and is at the mercy of a perhaps mythical, murderous cult (ooh, the best kind!). It's not a bad storyline, but the novel is overly quiet and too understated. While that style works very well in Campbell's short stories, spread out over 300 pages it loses its power. I know this sounds terrible, but as a horror fan, the cult needed to be even more horrible! As I recall, the climax is quite muted and happens pretty much in the last two pages. The book doesn't have nearly the intensity that either of the paperback covers above suggests, and this original, tamer hardcover art (MacMillan, 1981) below is much more accurate.

The Nameless was made into a similarly just-okay Spanish film in 1999, Los sin nombre. I'm working on tracking down more titles in this creepy-kid subgenre, particularly the classics, or "classics," mentioned above.

 Fontana 1981, 1st edition pb

August Derleth's Cthulhu Mythos stories: (Dead) Dreaming is Free

August Derleth, founder of Arkham House Publishers, kept the H.P. Lovecraft legacy alive when it threatened to disappear into pulp obscurity. Now, more than half a century later, Lovecraft's name is venerated the world over. Derleth (along with countless other writers over the decades including Robert Bloch, Robert Howard, Brian Lumley, and Ramsey Campbell) penned his own tales utilizing the Lovecraft mythos, published in hardcover originally by Arkham House as The Mask of Cthulhu (1958) and The Trail of Cthulhu (1962). What you see here are the paperback reprints from Beagle Boxer, July 1971, with surrealist, mind-bending cover art by Victor Valla.

Derleth has been criticized by Lovecraft purists for drastically altering the philosophical underpinning of Lovecraft's original stories into a more balanced, even Christianized, cosmic whole. Lovecraft was a staunch atheist who saw a bleak, cold, and absolutely indifferent universe in which humanity had no special place. Most of Lovecraft's followers, however, adapted the mythos to their own needs and creative visions. Some feel this more humanized viewpoint weakens the impact of Lovecraft's mythos; I tend to that opinion, and have read very few of the Lovecraft followers.

However, Derleth (below) succeeded where Lovecraft (above) often failed: in writing a readable prose. In fact, many of the stories here seem practically  classic Lovecraft stories re-written in actual readable prose. His style is almost hard-boiled, with no affectation of language, no preoccupation with archaic style, no excessive adjectives, and little of the bizarre recreations of rural dialects. The stories strive for an atmosphere of cosmic dread, of fear and loathing, of awe at the vastness of space and the littleness of mankind in its void, often reach it, sometimes are rote exercises.

But there was time for me to to delve into the secrets of my uncle's books, to read further into his notes. So much was clear - he had belief enough to have begun a search for sunken R'lyeh, the city or the kingdom - one could not be sure which it was, or whether indeed it ringed half the earth from the coast of Massachusetts in the Atlantic to the Polynesian Islands on the Pacific - to which Cthulhu had been banished, dead and yet not dead - 'Dead Cthulhu lies dreaming!' - biding his time to rise and rebel again, to strike once more for dominion against the rule of the Elder Gods...

See? Nary an "eldtritch" or "noisome" or "star-flung" to be found. The above passage is found in "The Seal of R'lyeh" from Mask; it is my favorite story here, with a deepening (or perversion, as Lovecraft experts may see it) of the Cthulhu mythos and some really strong, evocative, subtle writing. It is similar to "The Shadow over Innsmouth," but since that's such a wonderful story I don't mind. "The Return of Hastur" and "Something in the Wood" are standouts too, with everything we love about Lovecraft: lonely landscapes, ancient books, strange old locals with funny accents and terrifying tales. Trail is an entire novel by Derleth but I have not read it.

 

Original Arkham House editions, art by Richard Taylor

It's good to see these two works back in print together in Quest for Cthulhu (although boo on that Godzilla-esque cover art). My moldering copies were published by Beagle Books in the early 1970s and have that great old-bookstore smell that reminds me of staying up late on summer nights reading when I was 15. I wouldn't part with them for anything, not even my very own shoggoth. While I obviously prefer the original visions of Lovecraft himself, Derleth's stories are powerfully imagined, clearly told, and come recommended from this (almost) lifelong Lovecraft fan.

The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson (1959): Who Are the Mystery Girls?

No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality; even larks and katydids are supposed, by some, to dream. Hill House, not sane, stood by itself against its hills, holding darkness within; it had stood so for 80 years and might for 80 more. Within, walls continued upright, bricks met neatly, floors were firm, and doors sensibly shut; silence lay steadily against the wood and stone of Hill House, and whatever walked there, walked alone.

Often cited as the greatest opening paragraph in horror fiction, Shirley Jackson's now-classic haunted house ghost story The Haunting of Hill House was a huge popular and critical success upon publication. And what a wonderful cover, by artist William Teason; this edition is dated March 1977 from the Fawcett Popular Library, from the era of Gothic romances: always heroines fleeing across windswept moors or down castle stairs, about them flowing their black hair, in diaphanous nightdresses revealing tasteful decolletage, an imposing house in the background with one single light burning in an upstairs room. Perhaps there is a dominant, darkly-shadowed male nearby as well, with the threat of sex looming. However I don't have much interest in Gothic romance except for the covers; there's a great selection here.

Viking Books hardcover, 1959

But then, all this talk of Gothic romance only applies to the cover of this particular edition of Hill House, as the novel is not really a Gothic romance at all. I suppose a literary historian could argue that all horror fiction is, at bottom, Gothic romance - I recall that argument being made by a professor of mine back in my very early college years - but Jackson's rational approach to her tale doesn't seem "romantic" at all. The "love story" might be between Eleanor Vance and fellow intrepid haunted house investigator, the psychic Theodora. Whose hand is Eleanor holding? Is it not Theodora's? What does Theodora see but won't tell Eleanor? I know this lesbian subtext is discussed as an undercurrent in the 1963 movie version, with its images of the two women embracing each other in bed - out of fear, true. But fear of what, exactly? Ghosts? Or something much more... intimate?

Warner Books paperback, 1982

So perhaps the romance is between Eleanor and, chillingly enough, Hill House itself. Journeys end in lovers meeting, she repeats to herself throughout, this timid, mousy young woman seeking a personality. I confess it's been about 15 years since I read Hill House, my memory might be off, and I'm a bit afraid to read this little old paperback I've got because it might not stand up to the strain. This all reminds me of starting a new job at a used bookstore back in the late '80s, when my boss was showing me how the store was organized. He asked me, "Do you know what Gothic romances are?" I had to admit complete ignorance. What use would a teenage guy have for that? And he described it just the way I have above: a girl in a nightdress beneath a house with one light on upstairs. I think he told me the perhaps apocryphal story of one such Gothic romance title whose cover art had a house with no lights on at all; the book sold miserably. Fans of genre fiction tend to want things their way or no way at all. And there's no mystery about that.

Book of the Dead, edited by John Skipp & Craig Spector (1989): How Far Can Too Far Go?

Everybody knows something about the world of the walking dead.

Long, long before this current mania for everything zombie-related, but well after George Romero had made his mark on the modern horror film—that is, helped invent the modern horror film—a bunch of upstart horror writers decided that a world in which the zombies won would be a great setting for horror short stories. Imagine all of these in one place: an anthology of apocalypse, a collection of cannibalism, a grimoire of gore, even; stories so intensely graphic, relentless, and artistically uncompromising that the tepid, comforting bestselling "horror" novels of Koontz and Saul and Andrews would collectively melt off the shelves next to it. Zombie stories would show us the way, by facing our ugliest fears head-on, to a braver new world. Or so they wished in 1989. Me too.

Editors Skipp & Spector

That's how splatterpunk editors/authors John Skipp and Craig Spector envisioned Book of the Dead (Bantam Books/July 1989), according to their chummy, if a little self-serving, introduction, "On Going Too Far, or, Flesh-Eating Fiction: New Hope for the Future." They link Nagasaki and Hiroshima and the Kennedy assassination and the Manson murders and Vietnam TV carnage with the emergence of Night of the Living Dead, and they might not be wrong. They're right when they say turning a blind eye to such horrors can never prevent them. I can appreciate their lofty goals and certainly think genre fiction can address important and everyday issues; I also think - as does every other horror fan - that this genre gets no respect. Alas, too many of the stories here go too far in the most adolescent way, in the most obvious and tritest manner possible. But that said, many others make a solid, lasting impression, which is why I'm talking about this book decades later. 

Mark V. Ziesing hardcover 1989

Skipp and Spector wanted social relevance comparable to Dawn of the Dead, but most of the authors went with, What's the grossest thing I can think of? Well, you know how Fulci movies all have eye trauma? Book of the Dead revels in penis trauma. "A Sad Last Love at the Diner of the Damned," by Ed Bryant (otherwise a decent piece), "Home Delivery" by Stephen King (has its moments), "Mess Hall," by Richard Laymon (ugh), and opener short "Blossom" by Chan McConnell (pseudonym of David J. Schow), all feature this charming conceit. Probably more, but those were the handful I just reread after about two decades.

The dead deputy reached down and grasped Bertie's penis, fingers wrapping around the thick base and the scrotum. With one powerful yank, he pulled back and up, the flesh giving way, tearing like rotten fabric. The zombie's arm came up and Bertie's abdomen and stomach opened like someone had jerked the seam on a full Ziploc bag of lasagna.

David J. Schow and Joe R. Lansdale (pictured in 2008): two splatterpunk stalwarts who loom large, and whose tales here use apocalyptic religious imagery to make the (now cliched) believers-as-zombies analogy. Schow goes grosser-than-thou in the inventively, outrageously gross and ironic - a fat kid who eats zombies! - "Jerry's Kids Meet Wormboy." His experience as a writer of men's military adventure tales comes in handy in this undead survivalist setting.  Lansdale's overlong but energetic "On the Far Side of the Cadillac Desert with Dead Folk" (yeesh!) has not just zombies but bounty hunters and cowboys and killer nuns. Yep, Lansdale's beloved hand-to-hand combat is in full effect. Neither story is scary but each goes for broke. These guys were the cult punk-kings of mid-to-late '80s horror, definitely two of my fave-rave writers from the day.

Horror critic, biographer, and editor Douglas E. Winter's (above) contributes "Less Than Zombie," which is of course a parody of Bret Easton Ellis's seminal work of disaffected-to-the-point-of-sociopathy '80s youth, Less Than Zero. Here he gets Ellis's tone just right but with a nice twist. Listen:

Summer. There is nothing much to remember about last summer. Nights at clubs like Darklands, Sleepless, Cloud Zero, The End. Waking up at noon and watching MTV. A white Lamborghini parked in front of Tower Records. A prostitute with a broken arm, waving me over on Santa Monica and asking me if I'd like to have a good time. Lunch with my mother at the Beverly Wilshire. Jane's abortion. Hearing the Legendary Pink Dots on AM radio. And, oh yeah, the thing with the zombies.

Ramsey Campbell deports himself well with a thankfully short and simple tale of door-to-door zombivangelists, "It Helps If You Sing." "Eat Me," Robert McCammon's solid contribution that ends the anthology, wonders sadly how zombies love - and went on to win the 1989 Bram Stoker Award for best short story. The lesser-known writers also deliver the ghoulie goods: Les Daniels ("The Good Parts" indeed!), Philip Nutman, Steve Rasnic Tem, Glen Vasey, Steven R. Boyett. Buy Book of the Dead if you find it cheap but don't pay those collectors' prices for it. Despite any faults, this is an essential '80s/'90s horror anthology.

In a way, Book of the Dead - and its almost superior 1992 sequel, Still Dead - paved the way for the current appreciation of zombie fiction and movies and all kinds of pop-cultural references. Watching both Zombieland and Land of the Dead and the like got me thinking, Jeez, I've seen this approach before, in the Skipp & Spector collections. But in a way they didn't; I doubt few if any of the folks buying Max Brooks's World War Z or Pride and Prejudice and Zombies and/or the DVDs of said films, not to mention comics and video games, have any inkling these books even ever existed. They've been out of print since practically the day were published. The '90s? As Bart Simpson said, I never heard of 'em. But zombies? They're scratching at your windows and doors even now. But it's just the neighbor kids on a zombie walk. Oh well, whatever, never mind.

And all I've got to say about the cover is, oh, look, a big ol' typo: George R. Romero.

Blood of the Impaler by Jeffrey Sackett (1989): Legacy of Brutality

Intended to be a sort of sequel to Bram Stoker's original Dracula, Jeffrey Sackett's Blood of the Impaler is much like its title: stilted, awkward, obvious, and tone-deaf, in dialogue, characterization, plotting, and horror. What became of Sackett I don't know but he apparently wrote four or five historical horror novels for Bantam Books that came and went without a trace and are now all out of print. I never ran across one of his books that I can recall back when he was publishing them. A Google search did turn up this interview with him from, oh my god, 1990.

Malcolm Harker, a twenty-something bartender in Queens, NY, is the great-grandson of Jonathan and Mina Harker. Of course you remember them. He learns his family has Dracula's blood literally in its veins, caused by Dracula forcing Mina to drink his blood in the original Dracula. Which really happened. Except Malcolm thinks it was just a book and those crazy movies. But his grandfather Quincey, son of Jonathan and Mina, has all the letters and documents that Stoker based his classic book on. And only being really super-religious can prevent Dracula's blood—the blood of the Impaler, natch —from taking the Harkers over. But Malcolm feels terrible during the day and loves the nightlife, so after reading said documents, he thinks there might be something to all this nonsense.

He decides to hie it on over to England with his friends, bartender-womanizer Jerry and best gal-pal Holly, to track down Lucy Westenra's remains. Fans of the novel will remember her as Mina's best friend and Dracula's early victim, a young Englishwoman who would then feed on children (who called her, chillingly, the "Bloofer lady"). Of course they find her remains with a stake through her heart and her head severed. So - get this - Malcolm bleeds on her to bring her back to undead "life" in her crypt, and quizzes her on her master Dracula. Seriously. They learn if they find Dracula's ashes and distribute them outside his native land they can prevent him from ever returning to seek vengeance on the Harkers.

from the author's Amazon page

Sackett (pictured above), a professor of ancient history and languages, knows his Draculean lore, both the real Vlad the Impaler and Stoker's fictional character. He fills in some gaps in Dracula, invents some reasons for this or that vampire factoid, and inserts scenes of Vlad the Impaler's life throughout. Malcolm starts having terrifying visions, historical visions, of Vlad doing what he did best, which of course start to freak him out. Eventually Jerry meets the woman of his nightmares and Holly meets the only woman who can keep her from Malcolm. Sackett makes the all-important shift from Vlad the Impaler to Count Dracula rather clumsily and much too quickly - one page he's sealed his pact with the Devil to become nosferatu and the very next, he's welcoming Jonathan Harker into his castle. Would've liked to have seen some of the in-between, oh, four centuries.

I have to say, I almost gave up on this one: much of the tale plods along and the dialogue is achingly bad; one mark of an amateur writer is how many times characters refer to one another by their names ("Jerry, listen to me: we have to go to England." "Malcolm, you're crazy." "You may be right, Jer, but please!" "All right, Malc, let's go"). Resolving to speed through the final chapters, I then happily found that the novel wraps up everything satisfactorily. It ties together the disparate plot points with elements from Stoker's novel—such as how Dracula survives to the modern day—which causes a crazy final confrontation between the vampire lord and the Harkers that's bloody and gruesome and unholy.

As far as the cover art, I dig the windswept hair, the bare neckline, the come-hither look... But who's she supposed to be? Lucy Westenra? Holly? One of Dracula's wives? More please. If there's one thing I've learned about vampire stories—and as you can tell from my blog banner image at top—it's never, ever stint on the vampire ladies.

Songs of a Dead Dreamer by Thomas Ligotti (1985): Fascinating to Observe What the Mirror Does

But stories, even very nasty ones, are traditionally considered more satisfying than reality - which, as we all know, is a grossly overrated affair.

The reclusive Thomas Ligotti writes hermetic, maddeningly quiet and exotically bizarre short stories populated by professors, physicians, poets and painters who slowly but surely find that the universe is fractured, unknowable, and ravenous. His 1985 collection Songs of a Dead Dreamer contains rich, dense stories with titles like "Les Fleurs," "Drink to Me Only with Labyrinthine Eyes," "Dr. Locrian's Asylum," and "The Chymist," which reveal a baroque and decadent view of reality twisted and askew just so. Speculates the narrator of "The Sect of the Idiot":

To suffer a solitary madness seems the joy of paradise when compared to the extraordinary condition in which one's own madness merely echoes that of the world outside...

Many of Ligotti's protagonists go almost willingly into this madness, to the edge of the world where an endless ribbon of road continues into space by itself, as the drunken children's book author of "Alice's Last Adventure" puts it while she ponders the identity of her most famous storybook character. Ligotti also displays a charmingly creepy self-referential tendency in "Professor Nobody's Little Lectures on Supernatural Horror" and "Notes on the Writing of Horror." I've always been a sucker for the horror story that is also about horror fiction.

On the one hand, there's the writer who can't face his fate: that the telling of a story has nothing to do with him; on the other hand, there is the one who faces it all too well: that the telling of a story has nothing to do with him.

The cover blurb about shelving this work between Poe and Lovecraft certainly piqued my interest in Ligotti when I found a copy on its first paperback publication (top, Carroll & Graf June 1991). Fellow traveler Ramsey Campbell provides the laudatory introduction: "He belongs to the most honourable tradition in the field, that of subtlety and awesomeness rather than the relentlessly graphic." Ligotti has nothing like Lovecraft's Cthulhu mythos but still hints at awesome powers and entities that flit and gibber just beyond the scope of one's perception. And is the "dead dreamer" of the title an oblique reference to the Great Cthulhu itself? According to the cover illustration... uh, well, no.

Ligotti's worldview is one of pessimism and despair, his philosophy born of the perception that what we see as reality is merely a false mask obscuring an unimaginable, even unfathomable truth. He reveals our own distorted reflection, in a foggy mirror, in a glass of Scotch, in the swirling waters of the bath drain, in the cracked lenses of antique spectacles, where we see our aging faces, our corrupt nature, our final doom (It had dozens of legs and looked all backwards and inside out). But then as Professor Nobody says, Horror is more real than we are; and who are we to disagree?

Richard Matheson's Other Classics: 3 Hits from Hell

"The occult" was what publishers called horror before Stephen King. Ursula Andress will massage your temples if you're feeling psychic. And black widow spiders aren't fuzzy.

That is all.

The Long Walk by Richard Bachman (1979): Teenage Kicks

Have you looked up how much original paperback editions of Stephen King's pseudonym Richard Bachman are going for? Hundreds of dollars. Unfortunately I don't think my copy of The Long Walk is worth nearly that much; it's a discarded book I grabbed at a sale some time ago from my hometown library. I'm sure it's got to be the same one I read as a teenager in the '80s. It's actually coded inside as YA: Young Adult. Guess that kid in bell-bottoms on the cover makes the book look like it should be shelved with the S.E. Hintons and Robert Cormiers and Paul Zindels.

UK paperback

 
It's a grim and unrelenting short novel set in the near future in which there's an actual "long walk," undertaken by teenage boys deemed the fittest and healthiest. There is no finish line, no half-time, no fouls and no timeouts. Military men in tanks follow them to make sure no one walks slower than 4 mph; anyone who does is shot dead on the spot. The winner literally gets anything, everything, he wants. Like another Bachman book, The Running Man (1982), it posits a terrifying world in which games are played to the death while an enraptured populace looks on. The boys themselves succumb to their physical and mental limitations as well as the psychological tensions that arise between the last few Walkers. Its allegorical nature and ambiguous ending align The Long Walk with such maddening young adult fiction as I Am the Cheese and Lord of the Flies.

I was probably 14 or so when I read it, and it was a disturbing read, totally unlike King's horror novels. Probably not even fair to compare it to King's books because at the time, no one knew Bachman was his pseudonym. Now the book I really want to track down is an original copy of Bachman's Rage (1977), which King has let go completely out of print. Anybody got a spare $200 for an old paperback?

Some of Your Blood by Theodore Sturgeon (1961): Somebody Put Something In My Drink

Usually known as a classic science fiction writer, Theodore Sturgeon reworked vampire mythology with his short 1961 novel Some of Your Blood. George Smith is not an undead creature of the night but a young American soldier with a blood thirst. Profiled by a military psychiatrist, Sturgeon presents a sympathetic view of his protagonist pretty much at odds with virtually all vampire fiction to date.

This first printing paperback original from Ballantine Books was a pretty good eBay score recently; in like-new condition, reasonably priced, but the spine is a little off which always kinda bugs me--would it kill booksellers on eBay to photograph their books at an angle so you can see the condition of the spines? I can't be the only one who thinks about stuff like that. But how can you not dig that title font, so jaunty and rakish? The impressionistic man and woman at the bottom of the cover? Love that midnight blue as always. Back in the '90s I bought the reprint from Carroll & Graf, which has kind of a spooky cover but is really nothing on the original:

Pretty sure that's always the case. Somewhere though there has to be an exception, don't you think? I can't be the only one who thinks about stuff like that.