All Fear The Sentinel!

What spectacular and iconic horror paperback cover art of the 1970s! I haven't read Jeffrey Konvitz's bestselling novel The Sentinel (Ballantine, Jan 1976), but I did see its star-studded film adaptation, which featured one of the most vapid of leading ladies as well as actual deformed humans to recreate this stepback art! Heavens.

The paperback revels in then-classic horror imagery: creepy old priest, Charlie Manson-looking demonic hippie - I can totally see how this would appeal to someone scanning the drugstore racks - and then you open up the cover and you're accosted by a hellish vista of even more demonic hippies! That decade wore its fears and phobias pretty much on its sleeves.

Strange Eons by Robert Bloch (1979): Cthulhu Calling to the Faraway Towns...

Good old Robert Bloch probably tossed off this Cthulhu Mythos novel in a couple days, hearkening back to the speedy first draft penny-a-word pulp days of his youth. Published by Pinnacle Books in 1979 with a bizarre monkey-headed (!) creature adorning its cover (by Dan Hada), Strange Eons relies solely on the reader's familiarity with Lovecraft's fiction, and so I recommend it for HPL/Bloch completists only. Much of the novel is Bloch simply rewriting various Lovecraft passages, and the parts that aren't are much like a third-rate Raymond Chandler murder mystery.

Bloch's premise is that what Lovecraft wrote was true, actually true, and he was warning people about those hidden horrors through fiction. Throughout history various personages have tried to bring about the return of the Old Ones but have failed. Till now, when the stars are right, and Cthulhu's tentacles and dead dreaming are reaching out from his R'lyehan depths in the South Pacific to the deserts of Australia, the frigid mountain ranges of Antarctica, the wild woods outside Arkham, the devil's reef off the coast of Innsmouth, the sunny streets of Los Angeles, a lonely graveyard in Maine...

Whispers Press hardcover w/ Richard Powers art, 1978

Mixed in with all that is a desultory hodge-podge of '70s cultural touchstones like political upheavals, assassinations, and charismatic cult leaders along with "In Search of..." BS like the Bermuda Triangle, UFO sightings, and pyramidology in the middle third of the story. Ugh. Bloch makes his anemic puns and wooden dialogue (my god there is even a "lie back and enjoy it" "joke"!) comes from every character's mouth. Sure, Strange Eons passed the time agreeably enough while I was on vacay in Mexico, lazing beneath a blazing sun, but I read it mostly on autopilot - how many times do I need to imagine cyclopean towers, silent sullen seas, endless vistas of time, dark men in hooded robes, mind-blasting cosmic fear, unimaginable horrors, green ichor and piping flutes, etc, etc?

I guess back in '79, before Lovecraft was the near-household name he is today, this kind of near-plagiarism worked much better, but today I find - outside of Lovecraft's own stories - that stuff does little to affect me any longer. I fear these knockoffs, however well-intended and affectionate and respectful, are gonna make me inured to the cosmic chill they're supposed to instill. Now that is a horror I really don't want to imagine!