Get the Glory Like Charles Manson

Hell Hound by Ken Greenhall (1977): I Wanna Be Your Dog

By appearances, Hell Hound (Zebra Books, Oct 1977) seems to be a cheap, tawdry knockoff thriller, just another nature-gone-amok horror novel in the wake of Jaws, except this one is exploiting an animal near and dear to the human heart. The name Ken Greenhall is familiar to no one, there are no blurbs from famous authors or reviewers, and those eyes, those demonically crimson canine eyes, oh man, that is just the cheesiest, just the worst, appearing stuck in lazily as the cover went to print. So you can't be blamed for thinking Hell Hound is bottom-of-the-barrell Zebra garbage. You'd be wrong though. Hell Hound is a revelation: dog as sociopath (that tagline A thriller of the surreal and the supernatural is just an irrelevant Zebra add-on). In fewer than 200 pages, we get a thoughtful, chilling, penetrating glimpse into the mind of man's so-called best friend. Baxter the bull terrier makes Cujo seem like a clumsy amateur.

First, a behind-the-scenes note: the book was published in the US under Greenhall's name with the title Hell Hound, while in the UK, it was titled Baxter and credited to his pseudonym Jessica Hamilton, under which he'd written the utterly marvelous Elizabeth, out the previous year. I believe both editions were pub'd in Oct '77. Also in the UK it was published in actual hardcover with the subtitle A Novel of Inhuman Evil, and a dustjacket that looks more like a mainstream pop thriller (I don't get the can image - dog food?) than its tacky American drugstore rack paperback. The book is not easy to come by for cheap. However last summer I finally found a used copy on Abebooks, for $3.95 and free shipping, even. It was pure random blind luck, I know that, so don't lose heart, horror fiction fans - be diligent in your book searches!

Now onto the book itself. Greenhall tells this story with the utmost conviction, and that's why you won't be able to put Hell Hound down, even though you'll want it to last and last. What is it about Greenhall’s style that I find irresistible? That I find so true and authentic? Beneath the cadence of Baxter’s thoughts there is the insistent rhythm of madness, the madness of pure unfettered rationality, unencumbered by the human emotional palette. Baxter regards humans with an almost contemptuous wonder:

Pity is not something I want to encourage in myself. It is something for humans to feel, one of the jumble of odd sentiments they burden themselves with. Their emotions are like diseases, I think; diseases that can spread among those who try to understand them. Let their feelings be a mystery, like the dozens of other strange traits they have... The ways in which they deceive themselves are endless.

Fright.com's review - I recommend Z7's review as well, the only reviews I found online - perceptively notes that Hell Hound is akin to such powerful unique novels as JG Ballard's Crash (1973) and Iain Banks's The Wasp Factory (1984). Like those works, the narrative voice is detached but brilliant, its psychological insights deft and razor-sharp, its originality startling.

*spoilers ahead so skip to the bottom* 

One of my favorite things about Hell Hound is how the worst scenarios play out: there are no surprises, only a sense of fate predetermined. In a way the story is tragedy, the seeds sewn within our very natures, beast and man alike. Baxter’s interior monologues gird the novel; every eight or 10 or 12 pages we have one or two pages of his italicized ruminations on the inscrutability of humans and how his life interacts with theirs, among other things. So when we meet Baxter, he is lamenting his exhausted and uninteresting and unbearable first owner, the widow Mrs. Prescott, and showing a keen interest in the young, vibrant, almost erotically-charged couple across the street, and wondering this passage we find on the back cover:

What if...? What if...? The dispassion in Baxter's voice is electrifying. Life in Mrs. Prescott’s perhaps lower middle-class home is a dreary affair. A widow whose daughter’s husband breeds dogs, of which Baxter is one and given to her after her husbands dies, Prescott is distrustful and uptight, withholding of affection, and feels neither one way or the other about the bull terrier: She had never been able to decipher his expressions. He had always looked either impassive or malevolent to her. Baxter is intrigued by his own conflicting feelings about her; the first time he pushes her at the head of the staircase he pulls her back in time using his powerful jaws. He tries to escape to the couple across the street - I need their joy - but of course he is brought right back. Baxter has no choice, and her death seems foretold for her: She had given her affection to another creature: an act she had all her life been convinced was dangerous. Now she knew she had not been wrong to mistrust affection... and as her head hits the floor at the bottom of the stairs: There was a faint aroma of floor polish. She smiled. "I was not wrong," she whispered.

Now Baxter is taken up by the Graftons across the street, after Florence, Mrs. Prescott's bitter, alcoholic daughter with repressed lesbian tendencies (many a character is repressed or a failure or a fool), offers them the creature. Greenhall's economic, precision-point insight into even the human psyche cuts deep and true, as Florence regards the upwardly-mobile John and Nancy as something probably like liberal do-gooders (there is a mildly discernible undercurrent of class satire throughout the novel). Those familiar bitter disappointments that rise from our lives and poison us:
 

Take the beast, she thought, take the people, the houses, the trees. Have as many pregnancies and ideals as you can manage; you won't save any of it. Something or someone will defeat you.

My pleasure increases endlessly... She has learned to feed me fresh, raw meat. She brings me large, mysterious bones, which I crack fiercely, feeling pride and pleasure in the strength of my teeth and jaws.

Once ensconced in the Grafton home, Baxter feels satisfaction and control, and knows the man and woman rely on him. There is order, a place for everyone. And then the inevitable: the woman is changing. Her body is becoming thicker and thicker, and there is an added scent about her that I find unpleasant. It is almost as if she had the scent of two people. Uh-oh. And it all plays out precisely as you think, which makes it all the scarier. The newborn’s mindlessness and many stupidities offend Baxter’s notions of power and weakness, and he resents the parents’ dotage on the offspring, and he now waits for an opportunity to - well, you know. And after Baxter realizes too late, their love has turned to fear.

Baxter is next given to another neighbor family. The son is Carl Fine, a 13-year-old loner who spends time in a bunker-like hideaway he's built in the junkyard. Carl is fond of - wait for it! - Hitler, as well as Eva Braun, their dogs and their final days in a bunker of their own. His idea of flirting with a neighbor girl, Veronica Bartnik, who shows interest in him is to tell her about ol' Adolf and his dog Blondie:

"He had these cyanide capsules he was going to use to kill himself and Eva. But he wasn't sure they would work - he didn't rust the people that gave them to him. So he gave one to Blondie. He watched her die. Then he had her puppies shot."

What a charmer! It's no surprise Baxter and Carl hit it off, and their relationship is a push and pull of authority and understanding. Baxter mates with Veronica's father's hunting spaniel (Mr. Bartnik has his own set of special problems); Carl starts staging junkyard dogfights with Baxter; Carl begins having an intimate relationship with Veronica. When Carl tries to sic Baxter on a 10-year-old boy - which Baxter refuses to do - Baxter sees treachery, a misunderstanding of their relationship, and wonders if the day will come when the respect will no longer be there. I wonder whether he could ever be so foolish. That day will come, spurred by the death of Baxter's offspring and Carl's own growing sociopathy... The final chapters are a masterwork of unmitigated malice, of spiraling doom, of existential purity, even. Greenhall comes full circle with his story and ends it the only honest way: I have a strength and knowledge that they have never known...

This long review doesn't even touch on everything I loved about Hell Hound. Definitely one of the best novels I've read for TMHF, and one that deserves to be much more well-known and not simply as a "cult classic." It's obvious: I cannot recommend it highly enough! It is the kind of “horror” novel that makes you look askance at the genre’s hallmarks - at the flamboyant excesses of blood and gore streaked across the pages and the faces of psychotic killers, of the bizarre monstrosities conjured up, of the contrivances of plot and circumstance, character and dialogue, the elaborate fantasies of evil and demons and gods beyond space and time. Who needs 'em? Not Greenhall; he dispenses with all that and gives us the dispassion of a creature which beggars our belief in good and in compassion. This is horror found in one of our most recognized and beloved animals, one with which countless millions have bonded daily for millennia, one which seems to exist in our world but is more like an utter alien, staying its power till that moment in which we innocently bare our hairless throats to its ivoried jaws, and then revealing what its instinct has been since birth.

A Nest of Nightmares by Lisa Tuttle (1986): Bodies in the Bosom of Hell

So often the horror genre is an adolescent male fantasy land, obsessed with the extremities of life and limb, madness and fear, sex and death. How far can the writer go? How much can the reader take? While I like a good splatterpunker as much as the next reader, it's also a distinct pleasure to find authors who use restraint and throughtfulness as their tools of the horror trade, writers who can portray the finer points of the human experience. Someone like Lisa Tuttle is probably not much appreciated by a fanbase that wants gore, stark terror, degradation, and perversity. With her clear sensitivity to the delicate threads that bind friends and lovers, mothers and children, the stories collected in Nest of Nightmares (Sphere Books, March 1986, creeeeepy baby bird cover art by Nick Bantock) exist in a homey, cozy world... until, of course, those threads begin to unwind and fray and snap, launching the (always) female protagonist into a stratosphere of pain, guilt, loss, death.

After reading her three impressive contributions to the third volume of the Night Visions anthology series, I realized Tuttle was a writer I needed to read more by. Nest had already been on my to-find list, and as it was only published in the UK, I knew finding it wouldn't be easy. But last month I lucked into a copy in a used bookstore, and didn't put off reading it. Tuttle is a master of the formula horror story, but not in a way that makes them obvious, creaky, or cliched. Her style is clean and quiet, not obtrusive and able to convey subtle horrors that sneak up on both the character as well as the reader. An astute chronicler of the female psyche, it's a mainstream contemporary writer vibe I get from Tuttle - until, as I noted, the horror starts. Then she wraps them right up in a hellish embrace without hesitation.

There is the set up, which she introduces with a light, modern touch, bespeaking more of a woman's experience than, say, a male pulp writer. Her flawed female characters appealed to me greatly, as did the scenarios they populated, and their final horrors sealed the deal for me. Tuttle was a practitioner of a kind of horror tale I find quite satisfying: the "punishments" her characters face are born and bred of daily weakness and insecurity, feelings suppressed and sublimated. Often the horror is all too recognizable: sadness, alienation, a not-belongness, modern anxieties and disappointments. But she is doubly cruel, for her characters suffer not just these pains but also the ineffable and unpredictable slings and arrows of the supernatural, the unexplainable, the uncanny.

But then I guess all I just did here was expand upon that simple tagline at the top of the cover: Into the worlds of loneliness, anxiety and fear...  Yes, these women are lonely, even heartbroken people, scarred by the past and uncertain of the future. At times I was reminded of Ramsey Campbell's unfulfilled protagonists going about their dreary, workaday lives; even Clive Barker's early Books of Blood tales, when the lost find meaning only in their sudden doom (so not for nothing did editor George R. R. Martin team them all up for that Night Visions antho). These things to me are all good things, and Nest of Nightmares is an unassuming collection of modern, female-centric psychological horror. Now on to the baker's dozen of tales, mostly published throughout the 1980s in either Twilight Zone mag or the Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction...

"Bug House" begins the book, and it's a nice simple creepy-crawler reminiscent of Campbell's stories of urban blight. Aunt May lives in a crumbling ocean-side home and niece Ellen hopes to help. But we know better: ...A spider, pale as the sand, danced warily on pipe-cleaner legs. Circling it, chitinous body gleaming darkly in the sunlight, was a deadly black dart of a wasp... Although she liked neither spiders nor wasps, Ellen hoped that the spider would win. I think you can guess what's going on, and what waits for Ellen at story's end. Next are a couple brief, nasty episodes, “Doll Burger” and “Community Property,” which pack a not altogether surprising punch in their final lines.

I've said before one of my favorite types of horror tale are those that explore writers' lives, and in "Flying to Byzantium," we see that can be its own particular kind of hell. A realistic story of Sheila Stoller, author of a successful fantasy novel, flying from LA back to her tiny titular hometown in Texas to appear at a science fiction convention. But she no longer feels the need to write, having escaped home: Writing… took her out of herself, away from loneliness, dull school classes, and the tedium of working… when she was writing she could forget she wasn’t pretty, didn’t have a boyfriend, had no talents and no future. Girls her age thought she was a boring, stuck-up bookworm.

Illustration for "Flying to Byzantium," from Twilight Zone mag, June 1985

Her mother always said, Don’t think you’re different, don’t think you’re special. After being picked up at the airport by two women who organized and invited her to the convention, she sees they are the unwanted... the sort of people she had been lumped in with at school... women like the ones she shunned rather than admit that she was like them. Slowly, unavoidably, indignity piles upon indignity, and Sheila doesn’t have the will power to resist. Will her fantasy heroine be enough inspiration to escape Byzantium? The awkwardness throughout could be a comedy of errors were it not so pitiless about Sheila's delusions and refusal to assert herself... just as her mother never stopped reminding her.

A ghostly premonition of grief haunts "Treading the Maze," in which a husband and wife witness a seemingly harmless pagan ritual, and she will come to realize it wasn't so harmless. So, so good, and so sad, as Tuttle couches an unthinkable reality in terms of the unknown. In "Horse Lord," "The Memory of Wood," and "The Other Mother," children are a woman's undoing (ancient myths and possessed equines don't help either). Can one be a mother and a full individual person at the same time? I don't know if I can manage it, not even with all the good examples of other women, or all the babysitters in the world, says Sara in the latter story. These are words mothers must not say aloud, for once spoken those forces will manifest themselves in otherworldly ways. Tuttle unleashes them, those inchoate fears at the bottom of women's minds, and lets them do their worst. Definitely some of my faves here, each with chilling moments of helpless creeping terror.

Tuttle's first novel, 1983

The similarly titled "Need" and "A Friend in Need" feature the longing for companionship and understanding and the contradictory compulsion in us to separate, to isolate, to define ourselves at the expense of others. Another favorite, "Sun City" - a story originally chosen by Ramsey Campbell to be included in his New Terrors (1980) anthology -  is pure grotesque horror, as Nora, working a hotel desk night shift, deals with leaving her husband, as well as a horrific event she witnessed on their honeymoon in Mexico - about which she did nothing. She begins to notice a rotting stench in her apartment, then an apparition at the foot of her bed, which she sees clearly since she sleeps during the day:

The strange cloak ended in blackened tatters that hung over his hands and feet, and the hood had ragged holes torn in it for eyes and mouth - with a rush of horror, Nora realized what she was seeing. The figure was dressed in a human skin.

A perfect '80s horror tale! The collection ends with, of course, a story titled "The Nest," in which two adult sisters buy a home together, the roof of which has a large, poorly covered hole in it, which younger sister Sylvia discovers when she climbs - head-first, to her sister's dismay - into the attic. Older sister Pam wonders at what debris and vermin could have gotten into the house, but hopes the two of them can make a cozy home there. One day out for a walk, Sylvia notices something large and black in one of the trees; something that reminded me horribly of a man crouching there, spying on the house... Could something still get in through that hole in the roof? We're never sure what Sylvia sees, but the careful reader will understand, from an incident in their adolescence that Sylvia relays, remembering Pam talking to a black-leather-jacketed boy... What Sylvia finds later in the attic will utterly distress her; what she doesn't find will break her heart. Brilliant.

Will I read one of Lisa Tuttle's novels? I'm not sure yet - will her facility with the short story format translate to longer works? One can only hope. Chosen by Robert Holdstock for Jones & Newman's Horror: 100 Best Books, I can say I enjoyed every one of the stories included in Nest of Nightmares (unfortunately, copies of Nest are going for rarely less than $50 online - buy the old copies of TZ and F&SF magazines with these stories instead). Yes, some tales are minor and some more effective than others, but Tuttle, a lifelong fan of ghost stories and weird tales, gives them all a solid horror payoff, and their sometimes predictable nature to me works not against them but in their favor: no matter how cozy we are in our rooms and solid homes we are still most naked and vulnerable, and we cannot hide from the waiting world; no matter how well we tend our nests for ourselves and our offspring, certain doom awaits within and without. All that is uncertain is when.

Like a Pigeon from Hell: The Horror Stories of Robert E. Howard

This week saw the 108th anniversary of the birth of the pulp king of sword and sorcery  and the creator of Conan the Barbarian, Robert E. Howard. You probably already know this, but along with Lovecraft and Clark Ashton Smith, he was a titan of the pulp era and his books have long been available in countless and now collectible paperback editions. Time was kind to the art of a man who committed suicide when he was 30 years old, unable to face a future without his beloved mother, who lie comatose and near death when he put a pistol to his temple and pulled the trigger. 

When it comes to Howard's fiction, I have been mostly unfamiliar with it, preferring the horror/dark fantasy tales from HPL and CAS. These two paperbacks - Cthulhu: The Mythos and Kindred Horrors (Baen Books, May 1987, cover by Steve Hickman) and Pigeons from Hell and Other Weird and Fantastic Adventures (Zebra Books, June 1976, cover by Jeffrey Catherine Jones) - feature mostly Howard's own brand of HPL-tinged horror/sword-and-sorcery/dark fantasy tales, all published in Weird Tales throughout the 1930s. You probably already knew this too, but there is some fantastic stuff here.

Sadly, both covers feature misleading - albeit spectacular - imagery: neither Cthulhu nor dinosaurs truly appear in the stories. They are however threaded with the fictional forbidden tomes, esoteric knowledge, and dark gods that are familiar to readers of horror; they're also purely Howard's own. His heroes aren't pasty scholars and recluses, no, they are men of muscle, bone, and sinew - which he won't often let you forget - while locales are often misty craggy lands from a deep and forgotten ancient age rather than the wilds of Arkham or the historic university environs of Providence. Howard even goes for the one-up on HPL when a character from "Pigeons from Hell" states, "Witchcraft always meant the old towns of New England, to me - but all this is more terrible." Zing!

I kinda skimmed through stories that contained vast passages about pure races, tribal honor, bravery, vengeance, that sort of thing (sword and sorcery - not my sort of thing), even when mixed with vague Lovecraftian darkness. Still, Howard's tales of grue work well and work often, and a few - "Pigeons from Hell," of course, "The Black Stone," "The Fires of Asshurbanipal" - I consider classics of their era. The famous and intriguingly titled "Pigeons from Hell" is a virtually perfect example of pulp horror. From its haunted house opening to its voodoo revenge turn all the way to its lurid, heart-palpitating climax, Howard never falters in his ability to propel a story forward (modern readers could probably do without the consistent use of the N-word, period-appropriate as it may be). I've read this tale a few times over the decades, read one comic book version, and recently saw its very well-done adaptation on the old "Thriller" show. Listen:

"A zuvembie is no longer human. It knows neither relatives nor friends. It is one with the people of the Black World. It commands the natural demons - owls, bats, snakes and werewolves, and can fetch darkness to blot out light... It dwells like a bat in a cave or a house... It can hypnotize the living by the sound of its voice, and when it slays a man, it can command his lifeless body until the flesh is cold. As long the blood flows, the corpse is its slave. Its pleasure lies in the slaughter of human beings."

Eclipse Books, 1988

It works like gangbusters, and if you haven't read "Pigeons," step away from your computer or smartphone or whatever and get to it! "The Black Stone" showcases Howard's main contribution to the Cthulhu mythos, the Unaussprechlichen Kulten, or Nameless Cults, by Friedrich Wilhelm von Junzt, an adventurer-scholar who of course discovers something he shouldn't have and is murdered - only after he finishes his book. This is the most overtly Lovecraftian story, with its academic narrator finally learning the horrors hinted at in a forbidden book are - gasp! - all too real. Howard whips himself into a frenzy of outlandish pulp prose  when he sets out to describe those "nameless rites" our old pal HPL was too squeamish to depict forthrightly. In a brooding forest beneath the moonlight, the narrator has found the titular object, but watches from afar:

...the worshipers, howling and foaming at the mouths, turned on each other with tooth and nail, rendering one another's garments and flesh in a blind passion of bestiality. The priest swept up an infant with a long arm, and shouting again that Name, whirled the wailing babe high in the air and dashed its brains out against the monolith, leaving a ghastly stain on the black surface. Cold with horror I saw him rip the tiny body open...

Ballantine 1979, Paul Lehr cover art 

I mean what! So, so good, really. The Ballantine paperback cover above captures the mood perfectly. "The Fire of Asshurbanipal" was also excellent, successfully mixing men's adventure in the exotic land of Arabia with mind-blasting cosmic horror. The back-story from Howard, about a green jewel, an ancient desert land of black stone, and a vengeful sorcerer, reads a bit like "The Shadow out of Time," and the two protagonists' entrance to this lost, deserted city evokes At the Mountains of Madness.They're looking for that fabled jewel, but they've been followed across the burning desert sands:

The shrieks had faded into a more horrific silence. Holding their breath, they heard suddenly a sound that froze the blood in their veins - the soft sliding of metal or stone in a groove. At the same time the hidden door began to open, and Steve caught a glimmer in the blackness that might have been the glitter of monstrous eyes. He closed his own; he dared not look upon whatever horror slunk from the hideous black well. He knew that there are strains the human brain cannot stand, and every primitive instinct in his soul cried out to him this thing was nightmare and lunacy.

Well, duh. Howard had a long obsession with obscure history, languages, and peoples, and enriched his pulp writing with it; "The People of the Dark," "The Children of the Night," "The Garden Fear," and "The Valley of the Worm" are the best examples of this proclivity. While not necessarily to my taste, I can see how young Weird Tales readers found their minds stimulated and expanded on such fare - which made Howard the success he was, and why he's still read today. Other tales like "Old Garfield's Heart," "The Thing on the Roof," and "Dig Me No Grave," are pure enjoyable gruesomeness with twist endings but retain a charm and readability for all that. Robert E. Howard's muscular prose, vivid action scenes, moody horrors, and ability to conjure in writing precisely what he imagined, can hijack your mind to a place in a past in which men are made of iron, honor is king, pigeons are from hell and dark and hungry gods demand nothing less than our very blood.

I'm Warning You, I'll Put a Knife Right in You

The snarling ferocity on display, while awesome in its paperback pulp horror perfection, perplexes me: why on earth would a creature with such fanged and frightening jaws ever feel a need to pick up a butcher knife?! Is he unaware of his supernatured gift? Perhaps he likes his humans fileted? Reminds me of this idiot creature.

Is That You Baby or Just a Brilliant Disguise?

Do Unto Strangers

Have I got crazies! The 1970s, what were they thinking?

You're Only Young But You're Gonna Die

Tryin' to Anesthetize the Way That You Feel

The Keep by F. Paul Wilson (1981): Just One Deathless Night

Nazism will forever be the benchmark by which all other human evil is measured (well, until something worse comes along). So what do you get when you pit the SS against an unimaginably malevolent supernatural force that, with their stubborn reliance on "rationality," they can scarcely comprehend? You get The Keep, the first horror novel from New Jersey physician/author F. Paul Wilson, who spent the 1970s writing science fiction tales when not practicing medicine (and apparently has spent the decades since writing a series that began with The Keep). There is nothing resembling science fiction in this highly-regarded (going by reviews on Goodreads and Amazon) "novel of deep horror," and it's dedicated to pulp horror/fantasy icons Lovecraft, Clark Ashton Smith, and Robert E. Howard. This is no surprise - The Keep's fictional grimoires, subterranean lairs, manly adventuring, and even some sword-and-sorcerering, find Wilson emulating those classic writers but not slavishly imitating them. After finishing the novel, and at various moments throughout, I wished he had emulated those guys more. Much, much more.

A few words to preface this review: I read Wilson's short story collection Soft and Others couple years back and mostly hated it because his writing was so one-dimensional, dull, and tone deaf. Honestly, I think Wilson can be a downright terrible writer, so I was relieved to find when I began reading The Keep he'd seemingly improved (how could he not?). What keeps the reader glued to the pages is the sheer power of the story. I mean it's Nazis, in a keep - a type of fortified tower built within castles during the Middle Ages by European nobility, Wikipedia tells me - battling an evil entity who slaughters Nazis handily. I'm in!

Or... am I?

 Original 1981 hardcover

So we've got a German army, led by Captain Klaus Woermann, stationed in a keep high in the Alps of Romania, to protect precious oil fields needed for the Nazi war effort. But when two grunts dig into the fortification trying to find out if the oddly-shaped metal crosses embedded in the stone walls everywhere in the keep are made of real gold and silver, they find behind those stones an opening that leads to... Well, evil and darkness and decapitation. And unsolvable impossible deaths follow after, each night for a week, till an exhausted, reluctant Woermann sends for help from the Nazis, whom he regards with skepticism and distrust, himself too old to have been seduced by the charismatic Hitler (I found this detail quite satisfying). He words his missive carefully: Request immediate relocation. Something is murdering my men... That ought to get their attention!

Enter SS Major Erich Kaempffer, an honest-to-God Nazi, and his einsatzkommandos, reinforcements for the beleaguered soldiers, to find out what the hell that something is that's killing Woermann's men. Kaempffer is eager to begin his post as commandant of a coming-soon death camp in Ploiesti, and feels this assignment is almost beneath him, but must impress his superiors. If he succeeds in discovering the murderer, he knows he will make Woermann look like an ineffective fool - something he's longed to do since Woermann witnessed an unfortunate incident of cowardice on Kaempffer's part in the Great War. The two men barely tolerate one another, and their conflict, well-done by Wilson in the first third of the novel, propels much of the story.

But Kaempffer has no luck sniffing out the killer even though he scoffs at notions that it might be a supernatural agent of some kind - surely it's just local guerrillas. Then his men start turning up dead, two of them even walk right into his room from their post, their throats torn out, and collapse before him (all kinda cool). Reluctantly he accepts the advice of the local innkeeper - after terrorizing him and threatening to kill the nearby villagers he's taken into the keep - and brings in Theodore Cuza, an old sick man who lost his position as an esteemed professor because of his Judaism. Cuza is an expert on the history and folklore of the region. Along with Cuza comes his 30-ish daughter Magda, his caretaker, beautiful and untouched. Meanwhile, a strange scarred unnamed red-headed man is doggedly traveling miles across land and sea, avoiding wartime danger zones, for some unknown reason to meet an evil in Romania he thought had been vanquished ages before...

And now The Keep begins to crumble. One prominent weakness is the thoughtless, cliched romance that grows between Magda and that redheaded man - Glenn, at first - a relationship practically clipped with scissors out of a cheap historical or Harlequin romance novel, seemingly inserted to make the novel fit the bestseller mold: She had found the man unattractive in the extreme; in addition to his odor and grimy appearance, there was a trace of arrogance and condescension that she found equally offensive. Ugh! There is no originality, no human insight, just gross lazy simplifications about men and women and sex. Would that Wilson had just left this part out completely, or rewrote the passages another time or two to tone down the rank sexism, or at least evince a sort of detached or ironic attitude about it. Or something to make it palatable, anything!

And the depiction of Nazis and their reign of terror - an easily exploitable topic, a hack writer's dream! I like tasteless exploitation/horror when done right, but Wilson doesn't rise - or sink - to the occasion. The Nazis are barely cardboard - as the novel goes on, all the characters become cardboard pieces. When we first meet the god-like evil denizen of the keep, a baddie named Molasar, there are the de rigueur horror moments, such as his "friendship" with Ol' Vlad Tepes back in the day and talk about feeding off the evils of humanity. But Molasar is dressed like a comic-book villain and speaks like one too: "I have my own means of moving about which does not require doors or secret passages. A method quite beyond your comprehension."  My God, who knew evil was so dorky?

 Map of the Keep itself

(Some spoilers) Other faults: Wilson makes an interesting observation about vampire lore when Cuza, a devout Jew, sees Molasar's fear of the Christian cross - does that mean that faith is the true one, and not Cuza's Judaism? He agonizes over his own potential loss of belief, but for Wilson, it's only a dead end. Later Cuza gets Molasar all riled up when he informs him what "death camps" are and that the Nazis are planning on rounding up Molasar's Wallachian "people" and exterminating them. So Malasar decides he's going to kill Hitler and his crew, with Cuza helping out as daytime dogsbody, getting out of the keep and up into Hitler's shit. Yep, that hoariest of tropes, KILL HITLER, seems too convenient a turnabout (to be fair this novel is over 30 years old so I guess the trope wasn't as hoary then). Molasar's gonna gain power from all that Nazi badness, don't you know, then take over the world...

1983 Dutch edition - creepier than any scene in the book

I haven't even mentioned the thudding dialogue, unimaginative scenes of violent mayhem, the climax of ageless good v. evil, and the sappy, unearned epilogue, all of which have been seen a hundred, a thousand times before. It all adds up to the reader never feeling that tingle, that can't-turn-pages-fast-enough vibe that makes this kind of mainstream bestseller work. There's a notable lack of atmosphere too, which makes The Keep deadly dull in places: I mean, the setting is a fucking castle in the mountains of Romania occupied by terrified Nazis because a mysterious monstrous vampire is trying kill them all! You gotta work it hard in the opposite direction to suck the creepy out of that set-up. And Wilson, unfortunately, is up to the task.

Yes, even as the bodies piled up and the mystery deepened, I struggled with this one. You'd think a horror novel like this would be pretty bad-ass and the ever-popular "unputdownable," but it's not at all. I'd put it down for a few days, a week, and almost forget I'd been reading it. I'd pick it up and start yawning after a couple pages, since Wilson's prose style overall is vapid. That dedication to HPL, Howard, and Smith becomes ludicrous - this is some of the lamest "pulp" I've read, and trying to excuse its lameness by calling it pulp doesn't help. If Wilson weren't such a trite, banal writer - Never had the supernatural been so real to him. Never would he be able to view the world or existence itself as he had before -  he could've produced a richly detailed novel of historical horror and eternal evil. But neither his handling of the supernatural nor of the natural has enough conviction or weight; the story is there, and like the proverbial sculptor who knows his subject is hiding in that hunk of marble, all F. Paul Wilson has to do is find it. But most often he doesn't, or he can't; The Keep is a boring blank surface that, while sometimes interesting in and of itself, refuses to reveal the true horror novel that resides within.