The House Next Door by Anne Rivers Siddons (1978): The Dinner Party Horror

I simply love that glow-in-the-dark X, remember X was a big naughty letter in the '70s, exotic and spooky and enticing all at once: you had The Exorcist phenomenon and the rise of X-rated movies. Why, who knows what goes on in that house neXt door? Wife swapping, demon possession, adultery, Satan worship, stag films, key parties, or, perhaps, someone is wearing white after Labor Day! Serving bottom-shelf liquor at dinner parties! Hanging a velvet print of dogs playing poker in the den! Quelle horreur!

1993 reprint

Indeed, that's just the kind of faux-pas that Anne Rivers Siddons, in The House Next Door, realizes terrifies up-and-coming, well-to-do folk in the New South in the modern age. They don't believe in boogeymen or poltergeists or their ilk, but an untended lawn in the dog days of August, or a family with too many kids' toys on the lawn, or a car in the drive that wasn't traded in this year, those are the types of things that make the neighborhood collectively shudder. Siddons, known today for genteel mainstream fiction, wrote her early bestseller in 1978. Stephen King himself championed it over several in-depth pages in his masterful study of horror Danse Macabre (1981), which is where I first heard of it.

Polite 1995 reprint

I've read this a couple times and really really liked it; I recommend it wholeheartedly. The novel's depiction of the easy, satisfying, slightly liberal social lives of smart young professional couples living in the rather upscale suburbs of Atlanta, is spot-on. But when the house in question, a stylish inviting marvel of modernity (unlike the home depicted on the original paperback), built by an aspiring and likable young bohemian architect, begins to affect its inhabitants at their most vulnerable spots, the game is on. The anxieties of trying to fit into predetermined societal strata, even when one is aware of their total bullshit quality, is relentlessly exploited. Colquitt Kennedy, the attractive Vanderbilt graduate in public relations, narrates the story in her calm, rational and perceptive manner:

We like our lives and our possessions to run smoothly. Chaos, violence, disorder, mindlessness all upset us. They don't frighten us, precisely, because we are aware of them. We watch the news, we are active our own brand of rather liberal politics. We know we have built a shell for ourselves, but we have worked hard for the means to do it; we have chosen it. Surely we have the right to do that.

1990 reprint

And it's Colquitt's, and her husband's, calm perception of what's happening that makes the reality so hard to accept or define. It's horror of the suburban kind, a masterful haunted house tale that's rooted in the most polite behavior, people horrified of giving offense or of having bad taste. Jobs could be lost, marriages broken up, ugly family secrets revealed, tennis partner can turn against tennis partner. But The House Next Door don't really give a fuck about your property values or your oh-so-tidy lives, that's for sure.

Siddons, from back of original hardcover dustjacket

Dark Companions by Ramsey Campbell (1985): Something's Gone Wrong Again

Can't help but love this Tor Horror paperback cover for Dark Companions: creepy kid and creepy clown all in one (thanks to artist Jill Bauman)! Well-known to fans of horror literature but not to readers outside the field, Liverpudlian Ramsey Campbell has been writing award-winning short stories and novels since the 1960s. Starting out with an Arkham House collection of Lovecraft-inspired terrors, The Inhabitant of the Lake, Campbell then moved on to a more mature style, oblique, chilly, precise, and vaguely unsettling. Many tales are set in his native Liverpool, where characters are dissociated from others, caught in a landscape they can't quite grasp, something's amiss, something's just out of joint. Are the ocean's waves calling my name? What flitted through the debris in the abandoned amusement park? Is that a strangled cry in the dial tone? Why does that decrepit storefront look like a fanged mouth? That child in the park, isn't that the murdered one I saw in all the newspapers? Or am I just imagining - no.

Dark Companions collects 21 of Campbell's stories. However, nowhere on the book is there any indication this is a short-story collection; story titles could just be chapter titles, right? Short story collections have always sold more poorly than novels, although it's quite arguable that horror is best as a short, sharp shock. The award-winners are "Mackintosh Willy," "In the Bag," and "The Chimney." Other must-reads: "Napier Court," "The Companion" (which Stephen King praises unreservedly in his Danse Macabre), and "The Pattern." This 1982 UK paperback cover is not quite as lurid as its American counterpart.

I've got a nice handful of classic Campbell paperbacks published by Tor Books, so more are coming: Incarnate, The Nameless, Cold Print, The Doll Who Ate His Mother...

"Every body is a book of blood..."

Here you can see a good chunk of the Clive Barker collection I've been making happen since January 1987, when I bought my first Barker book ever, Books of Blood Vol. III. Barker was fortunate to get (eventually) some of the very best covers in the genre, and a handful he did himself (at least in the UK). The framed photo is me meeting Barker at the Fangoria Weekend of Horrors convention in NYC, circa 1990. What an enthusiastic, sincere, and charming master of horror. Paperback covers and reviews to come!

The Light at the End by John Skipp & Craig Spector (1986): Midnight Graffiti

Horror writing duo - yes, duo - John Skipp and Craig Spector stormed the horror fiction field in 1986 with this paperback original about vampires in the New York subway system, The Light at the End. "Unique, funky, masterful," states the back cover, always the place to go for truth in advertising, "It's a guitar riff fingered by Satan, bizarre graffiti splashed in blood." Uh, what? This is the kind of novel that wants to impress you with its attitude, casual and swaggering, and it might work if you were a teenager (like me) when you first read it.

But it's still kind of a fast fun read today, even if it tries too hard to be cool with lots of smart-ass, ironic knowing humor, its bike-messenger protagonist and tough cops and gothy streetwise ladies - so, maybe Taxi Driver meets Quicksilver meets The Craft meets Fright Night (woah, S&S wrote the novelization for that)? Yeah, cool. Silvery-red cover with graffiti-style font, but who's that vampire dude think he is? Dean Stockwell?!

Skipp and Spector put out a handful of pretty cool collaborations and edited the essential zombie anthology Book of the Dead in 1989 before splitting up to pursue solo projects. They spear-headed that whole splatterpunk movement which ruled horror for a red-hot minute (the "splat pack"), pissed off the old guard like Robert Bloch and Charles L. Grant, and then disappeared for quite a few years (although I'd swear someone like Chuck Palahnuik owes a debt to it, and definitely Bret Easton Ellis's American Psycho). I've still got a fondness for these guys, obviously, so more on 'em is coming, particularly Book of the Dead and its sequel, 1992's Still Dead. Irony-free, I promise.

Sunglasses After Dark by Nancy A. Collins (1989): They're So Sharp

I don't remember a thing about the vampire novel Sunglasses After Dark except that at one point, Jim Morrison comes back as a vampire for a chapter, or something like that, which I thought was pretty cool back in the day. Nancy Collins wrote some sequels to this featuring her character Sonja Blue, a vampire hunter, but I never read them. This was part of the post-Anne Rice generation when authors were reimagining vampires for the modern age. I guess that's better than reimagining them teenage and glittery. These days I'd just as soon put on an old Siouxsie Sioux album and be done with it. I've heard Collins was not too keen on the Underworld movies since they seemed too similar to her Sonja Blue series and sued the producers. But you can't deny the striking artistry (courtesy of Mel Odom) of this cover, which is the sole reason I kept my copy for 20 years in pretty nice condition. I love that the title and author are only on the back cover; later printings added them to the front which is far less effective.

We Have Always Lived in the Castle by Shirley Jackson (1962): Everybody Has a Poison Heart

Shirley Jackson is one of the best "horror" writers ever and We Have Always Lived in the Castle (1962) is one of the best covers ever (thanks to artist William Teason). Something about the midnight blue and the girl's hands, her one staring eye and windswept hair, the kitty-cat ears and the title font (so reminiscent of Rorschach's journal) captivate me. Two young sisters, Merricat and Constance Blackwood, and their ill uncle live alone in an old house after the rest of the family had been poisoned years before. Slowly the real story of what happened to the family is revealed and why the townspeople view the Blackwoods with anger and suspicion. I love these kind of subtle chillers with creepy, maybe even murderous, young women as unreliable narrators.

See the black-and-white art of the current paperback edition with a more literal cover. Again, give me the strange evocative painting from the original paperback. "The Lottery" and The Haunting of Hill House are Jackson's more famous works, but We Have Always Lived in the Castle ranks right up there with them. A must-read!

Silver Scream, edited by David J. Schow (1988): Hooray for Horrorwood

How can any horror paperback fan resist spooky drippy letters scrawled in Crayola-red blood? I'm not really sure what the Chinese dragon shadow has to do with a movie-themed collection of horror stories, though (thanks again to Tor's horror line). Silver Scream is a thick anthology that I read off and on for ages during my later high school years. Honestly, I still have not read everything in it. The authors included were the top of the line of the genre for the day: Clive Barker, Ramsey Campbell, Robert McCammon, Joe R. Lansdale, Karl Edward Wagner, John Skipp, Craig Spector, and noted horror critic and biographer Douglas E. Winter. The editor, David J. Schow (pictured below), was known as the writer who jokingly, perhaps cringingly, coined the term "splatterpunk" a few years earlier in response to the William Gibson/Bruce Sterling/John Shirley-powered "cyberpunk" movement over there on the science fiction shelves.

And the stories contained herein? Mostly terrific. There's the very first Barker short story I ever read, "Son of Celluloid," about a cancerous demon that infests a flea-bitten old cinema and causes poor doomed patrons to hallucinate eyeballs popping out of Norma Jean's nethers; "Night They Missed the Horror Show," a knock-your-dick-in-the-dirt tale of racist hillbilly snuff-film connoisseurs from Lansdale his ownself; Winter's oblique alphabet of gore movies in the always not-so-distant future where censorship reigns, "Splatter: A Cautionary Tale."

Also included are Ray Garton's "Sinema," which is one of my faves of the era, standing up to the hypocrisy of religious mania; "More Sinned Against," from Wagner, a wicked whip-snap of Hollywood comeuppance; then there is Mick Garris, F. Paul Wilson, Robert Bloch, Richard Christian Matheson, and others lesser-known. But all are defiantly horror, passionately written and filled with enough perversity, bodily effluvia, and viscera - as well as dorky attempts at splatterpunky bad-assery - to embarrass the man who was once the boy who loved this stuff, and (usually) still does. Then there's an intro by director Tobe Hooper, and a rambling and overly chummy final end-note, "End-Sticks," from editor Schow. This was pretty standard for the day. I can't imagine what kind of trouble these dudes got up to at the horror conventions back then. If Wagner was around, you can bet it was a raging all-nighter.

Babbage Press reprint

But my favorite story in Silver Scream is Steven R. Boyett's "The Answer Tree." Wow. A skeevy film professor attends the secret showing of a deranged and legendary filmmaker's final movie, a mix of the midnight movies of Jodorowsky with the confrontation of Artaud and the surrealist imagery of Buñuel (who said horror fiction fans were cultural dullards? Or perhaps I'm compensating). In recent years lots of people loved John Carpenter's episode "Cigarette Burns" for Showtime's Masters of Horror, and I liked it too, but it was really already covered by Boyett's story: a film that will drive its viewers to madness and murder and beyond.

The hardcover was first published, also in 1988, by the now-defunct (as far as I can tell) Dark Harvest Publishers, who put out cool hardcover editions of mostly anthologies. But as usual, I prefer my original vintage paperback copy, which went for a cool $3.95 in 1988. That's okay with me. Hooray indeed.

Live Girls by Ray Garton (1987): Leave You with a Lethal Dose

After about 20 years, I recently reread Ray Garton's infamous paperback original from the heyday of splatterpunk, Live Girls (Pocket Books, Jan 1987). And man, is it one delightfully sleazy read that holds up. You got Times Square in all its squalid neon-soaked glory, vampire ladies who haunt strip-club glory holes, even some ravenous creepy-crawlies squirming in the basement of said strip club, and a poor shlub of a regular workaday guy who gets swept up in it all. Can't really blame him, I suppose. I remember reading it as a teenager with my jaw hanging at about the neck of my Ramones t-shirt back in '88 or '89 (was probably wearing the same Ramones shirt this read too).

Garton garnered a bit of reputation as a horror author who pushed boundaries but in a less artful way than, say, Clive Barker. But that's okay with me; Live Girls has energy and spirit and daring to spare.  It was out of print for ages but came back in 2006 (thanks to Leisure Books) due to popular word of mouth, and with this rather more accurate - yet clip-arty - cover imagery:

I prefer the understatement of the original because the reader doesn't really know what's in store, and that's just great. There are sequels and an upcoming movie adaptation, apparently, but one Live Girls is plenty enough; I just don't have that much jam.

In a Lonely Place (1983) and Why Not You and I? (1987) by Karl Edward Wagner: I Need Your Skulls

Skulls are muy importante when it comes to horror paperback covers, perhaps the most essential icon of all. Karl Edward Wagner was primarily known as an editor of Year's Best Horror Stories for years, as well as for his Conan-esque character Kane. He died in 1994 in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, apparently after years of wild drugs and drinking, but his stories display a real sensitivity and maturity. These two collections from the 1980s are essential reads for the serious horror-fiction fan. The dancing phantom woman in the skull's eye on In a Lonely Place (Mar 1983, Warner, cover art by Barclay Shaw) appears in "In the Pines." Wagner's most well-known horror tale, "Sticks," originally published in 1974 in Whispers magazine, is a stunning predecessor to The Blair Witch Project (1999), and is also an effective, doom-heavy tale of Lovecraftian menace. A pulp horror artist (based on Lee Brown Coyne) comes across a strange collection of bundled lattices of sticks in the lonely woods of upstate New York.

It should have been ridiculous. It wasn't. Instead it seemed somehow sinister - these utterly inexplicable, meticulously constructed stick lattices spread through a wilderness where only a tree-grown embankment or a forgotten stone wall gave evidence that man had ever passed through.

What I like most about Wagner’s style is that he writes like a person who's lived a varied and interesting life. His depictions of romantic relationships have an honest, albeit sometimes bitter quality to them. He’s good at showing male friendship and bonding, making me think he’s drawing from his own experience. "Where the Summer Ends" at first seems like the tale of a broke college student who’s trying to fix up his shitty apartment by buying interesting pieces from an old drunk’s junkyard collection, his yard entangled by impenetrable kudzu. Then you get to the last part and you realize you’ve been reading a horror story all along.

Readers may not know Wagner trained as a psychiatrist but left the field to pursue writing, which lends a trenchant psychological insight to his works. Stories like "Old Loves," "The Last Wolf," "Neither Brute Nor Human," and "More Sinned Against" from Why Not You and I? (Sept 1987, Tor, cover art by J.K. Potter) display a knowledge of the world of writers and horror fandom and some attendant dangers of real-life love (hence the kissing skulls). The latter tale, about the horrifying fate of a Tom Selleck-style action TV star, was my first introduction to Wagner when I read it in the rollicking splatterpunky collection Silver Scream (1988), edited by David J. Schow. It took me a couple years to track down affordable used copies of these old paperbacks; they're well-worn but comfortably well-loved and hold a position of some renown in my collection.

Well-worn but comfortably well-loved.

Psycho (1959) by Robert Bloch: A Boy's Best Friend...

Sneaky old Hitch bought the film rights to Psycho for a couple grand back in the day but made sure Robert Bloch didn't know who was signing the check. Oh well, things turned out great for everyone involved. I've tried finding a paperback edition of this that came out before the movie but to no avail; I'm assuming there wasn't one. You can see on the first edition hardcover (which I don't own) the classic font of the title.