'Salem's Lot by Stephen King (1975): Because The Night Belongs to Us

To this day, Stephen King's second novel, 'Salem's Lot, is one of only two or three works of horror fiction that, upon first read, instilled in me a palpable sense of fear and trembling not simply for the characters but for myself as well. Over a quarter of a century later I can still feel the chilling vice that clamped around my scalp, recall how my stomach flared hot and sick and how the goose-flesh quickened along my arms, neck and shoulders, as if someone were behind me. I was up way too late on a school night, alone in my teenage room and I was afraid to look outside. But why would I want to look outside that late at night? In that I know I am not alone.

But I wonder, is that feeling even possible today? Is it because I was a not-so-experienced horror fiction reader at the time I read 'Salem's Lot? That I had yet to experience Lovecraft and Straub and Machen and Blackwood and Jackson and Leiber? Or was it that King so effortlessly wrote about simple fears of wrongness and malevolence in a common world that is perhaps inured to such things that I couldn't help but respond as if I myself were in danger? Honestly I don't even read horror (or watch horror films) to be scared anymore. Sometimes I wish I could recapture that feeling.

King has said this novel was his attempt at bringing Dracula - one of the few other books to physically frighten me, in the middle of 8th grade study hall - to the modern age, at imagining how this Old World villain would fit into a New World environment. Would the master vampire, in all his darkest wisdom, choose to arrive in New York City or Boston, or would he perhaps choose a quiet, near-forgotten rural town far from any outsider's concern? King felt the latter would provide the best cover and placed upon 'Salem's Lot the curse of the undead through cultivated Mr. Straker (I cannot see anyone else but James Mason in my head) who prepares the way (where have I heard that before?) for the dread Kurt Barlow, vampire king.

Their locus is the black and shuttered Marsten House, which overlooks (where have I heard that before?) the Lot; the distasteful and perhaps satanic owner of said house Mr. Barlow had illicit communications with decades before the novel begins. The town has its secrets, King informs us, but it keeps secrets even from itself:

They know that Hubie Marsten killed his wife, but they don't know what he made her do first, or how it was with them in that sun-sticky kitchen in the moments before he blew her head in, with the smell of honeysuckle hanging in the hot air like the gagging sweetness of an uncovered charnel pit. They don't know that she begged him to do it.

No sexy vamps or victims here

This was the first novel of King's in which he employed a rich panoply of everyday men and women, giving them believable backgrounds, interior lives, conflicting desires, and fears that finally make themselves manifest just past midnight. While no one would mistake King's depictions of such for those of an Updike, a Cheever, a Carver, his characters don't have the preciousness of those who populate more, ahem, lit'ry fiction. Ben Mears, the protagonist, is the first in a long line of King stand-ins, young writers obsessed with childhood fears who struggle to move past them. Mears grew up in the Lot, left it, and now after the accidental death of his wife and the nightmare of what happened to him inside the abandoned Marsten House have drawn him back again, he wonders aloud if it could be anything like Hill House in that famous book by Shirley Jackson. Oh it is, it is that and more. And worse.

First edition Signet paperback August 1976 - without King's name on cover
Art by James Plumeri

Although I've owned the hardcover of the book since high school, I found this '70s Signet paperback recently (at very top); I'd forgotten how simple it was. I like that you can barely see King's name on the cover (didn't even appear on the first Signet paperback printing), so obviously this edition was published before he was a name-brand author. The androgynous, angelic face looks like it's carved from stone, or maybe forged in iron; it reminds me of the Jacob Marley doorknocker from "A Christmas Carol." And blood so subtle, just a drop, just a drop to hint at the immortal terrors within, those terrors that millions know and have never forgotten, but they are terrors that sound strangely like a child laughing, laughing right outside your upstairs bedroom window, long after the sun has gone down on the final night of your life... or on the first night of your new one.

"And all around them, 

the bestiality of the night rises on tenebrous wings. 

The vampire's time has come."

Cold Print by Ramsey Campbell (1985): Down on the Beach

I believe Cold Print was the first Ramsey Campbell book I bought, and I recall thinking it was a novel but it turned out it was a short story collection. No mention of this was made on the book itself because, as I've pointed out before, short story collections don't sell as well as novels even if it can be argued the genre is at its best in the short form. And Campbell truly shines (usually) as a short-story writer, and I feel I appreciate his style even more today. There does not seem to be a whole lot going on on the cover of this November 1987 edition from Tor Books, however, so I'm not sure just what drew me to the book. But I did, and do, like the J.K. Potter cover art; there is something faintly... crustacean about that face, is there not? Potter's weird collages graced many a horror paperback and limited-press hardcover in the 1980s. The first edition of Cold Print came from Scream/Press in 1985:

The book turned out to be mostly satisfying, as I recall; all the stories included are Campbell's (mostly) Lovecraftian tales. There are efforts from the '60s with the requisite "Noun preposition Place" ("The Church in High Street," "The Insects from Shaggai," "The Inhabitant of the Lake") and then later pieces from the '70s and '80s such as "The Face at Pine Dunes" (see? it's addicting), "The Tugging," and the masterful "The Voice of the Beach." In these we are treated to Campbell's penchant for intertwining intimate stories of drab workaday British life with his own style of cosmic horror. A few stories did leave me a little bewildered due to his sometimes well-known vague prose stylings. He also wrote a must-read intro about the incalculable influence Lovecraft had, and has, on him since he was 14 years old: "I read [Lovecraft's] book in a single malingering day off school; for a year or more I thought H.P. Lovecraft was not merely the greatest horror writer of all time, but was the greatest writer I had ever read."

But don't expect more octopoid gods with gibberish for names, strange batrachian races of semi-humans, or ancient tomes of unknown binding; what Campbell does in these dense, carefully-wrought stories is create an overwhelming mood of dis-ease and fetid decay, of perception widened and skewed just so, so that one suddenly and for only a moment becomes aware of that chitinous skittering of something like claws at the cosmic rim.

I dozed gratefully, for I felt more delirious, my head felt packed with grains of sand that gritted together; in fact the whole of me was made of sand. Of course it was true that I was was composed of particles, and I thought my delirium had found a metaphor for that. But the grains that floated through my vision were neither sand nor atoms. A member, dark and vague, was reaching for them. I struggled to awaken; I didn't want to distinguish its shape... for as the member sucked them into itself, engulfing them in a way that I refused to perceive, I saw that the grains were worlds and stars.

Perchance to Dream: The Short Fiction of Charles Beaumont

Another writer sadly lost to time, Charles Beaumont (1929-1967) helped cement one of the most distinctive pop-culture totems of the 20th century, TV's The Twilight Zone, bringing speculative fiction, whether horror, fantasy, or science fiction, to the mainstream. He wrote around two dozen of that show's episodes, third only to Richard Matheson and creator Rod Serling himself. He also wrote screenplays for Roger Corman, The Masque of the Red Death and The Haunted Palace, Poe and Lovecraft adaptations, respectively.

Beaumont's one of those "writer's writers" who are so fondly recalled as a major influence by the likes of Matheson, Stephen King, Ray Bradbury, Harlan Ellison, Dan Simmons, Dean Koontz, John Shirley, et. al., but little-read among genre fans today. He died tragically young and there are no widely-available, mass-produced editions of any of his works readily available.

I found these editions of Night Ride (1960) and The Hunger (1959) on eBay recently, and was fortunate enough to get them cheap, maybe $5 apiece and in very good shape for paperbacks five decades old. Haven't read nearly all the stories contained as there are three dozen between the two collections; many were originally published in Playboy or Esquire and some Beaumont adapted himself for Twilight Zone episodes, classics like "Perchance to Dream," "Shadow Play," and "The Howling Man." The last story is one of his most famous; the Tor collection The Howling Man from 1992 is very highly sought after these days... would that I had picked it up when I used to see it on used bookstore shelves in the mid 1990s.

His technical skill and humanity, conciseness and clever imagination shine forth in the handful I have read, reminding me a bit of Bradbury's works from the same era. But Beaumont has a cool sophistication too; not for nothing did many of his tales appear in Playboy - particularly the stunning story of love and jazz "The Black Country," as well as "The Crooked Man," a positive depiction of homosexuality - in the '50s. Beaumont's influence on the horror genre is undeniable; although the tales might not quite be the "violent entertainments" that The Hunger promises - a charming conceit back then, now rather tame today - and they might not really appeal to many modern horror fiction readers, their concerns and conflicts, and of course twist climaxes, are still effective and surprising. Charles Beaumont is simply a must-read writer for the true horror fiction fan.

The Cipher by Kathe Koja (1991): Your Place in Oblivion is Secure

I still don't think there's been anything in horror quite like Kathe Koja's debut novel, The Cipher (Feb 1991, Dell/Abyss). These days she writes only young-adult fiction, but close to 20 years ago she was, as far as I was concerned at the time, the absolute cutting edge of horror. The Cipher won the Bram Stoker Award for Best First Novel (shared with Melanie Tem's excellent Prodigal), and it also launched Dell Publishing's Abyss line of innovative horror fiction. As their mission statement went, printed on the inner flap of each of its titles, Dell/Abyss dispensed with "haunted houses, evil children and Indian burial grounds." They wanted to present a new breed of horror novel, one that tried to get at a more real, more human, more, if you will, illuminating darkness. Very much a reaction against the bestseller coziness of King, Koontz, Saul, and V.C. Andrews, Abyss published (mostly) unknown young writers who were literate, underground, cool, and defiantly horror.

Well, Dell/Abyss couldn't have picked a more perfect work to kick off a new darker, artier style of horror fiction than The Cipher. The cover image (by illustrator Marshall Arisman) is reminiscent of Francis Bacon, and Koja's clipped, unpolished, impressionistic prose evokes surrealist, avant-garde icons like William S. Burroughs or J.G. Ballard. All of this sets a jittery, jagged tone of bleakness and rot. Her 20-something characters are poverty-gagged "artists" who exist in that demimonde of shitty jobs, squalid art galleries, and thrift stores; her settings are run-down studios, flat-beer bars, and dingy urban streets choked with black snow. Long way from Castle Rock, Dunwich, or Stepford, that's for sure.

The Cipher is about literally that. Nicholas and Nakota, an unloving, dysfunctional young couple, find, in a disused storage closet of Nicholas's decrepit apartment building, a hole in the floor. A hole. Into nothing. And maybe it is nothing.

Black. Not darkness, not the absence of light but living black. Maybe a foot in diameter, maybe a little more. Pure black and the sense of pulsation, especially when you looked at it too closely, the sense of something not living but alive, not even something but some - process. Rabbithole, some strange motherfucking wonderland, you bet...

They dub it "the Funhole" (Koja's original title for the novel) but it is anything but fun; it is a locus of obsession and transformation. Nakota, conniving, manipulative, angular, and demanding, constantly pressures Nicholas to fuck with the Funhole, to test their limits. First, a jar of insects goes down into it; then a mouse. All come back monstrously deformed and mostly dead. Finally they lower down a camcorder (a funny dated bit is how difficult it is for them to actually get a camcorder) and when they watch the recording they see something like bloody stalks, caressing the screen like hands behind the glass, a figure carving itself...

And this home movie that Nakota can't stop watching, and Nicholas accidentally gets his hand in there, and now there's a weeping seeping cipher in his hand, and his empty, aimless life is going down, down, down... Until the local art-world poseurs get wind of something strange going on through Nakota, and start haranguing Nicholas to show them what he's doing, what's he got in there, can we see too? They all find out, because the Funhole is calling him from its deeps, not music but the elegant drone of bodily organs...

If anything the only real flaw in Koja's book is that it is too relentlessly bleak, too scummy, too hopeless; characters bicker and bite, sex is a joyless spasm, Nicholas an alienated, near-unsympathetic loser and Nakota a bitch without the goddess. But the cipher hungers for lives, no matter how derelict, and in a way the ending is foretold. What if somehow I'm crawling blind and headfirst into my own sick heart, the void made manifest?

Dell reprint 1996

I loved this kind of existentialism 101 when I was 20 but now, with a larger literary emotional palette, rereading it (a third time!) I found it somewhat one-note. Maybe that's the point; it's oddly like a movie that was adapted from a one-set play in its insularity. No matter. There is a powerful originality in The Cipher that one usually doesn't find in paperback horror fiction; a fearlessness too as the novel operates, single-mindedly, in that metaphoric realm in which the monster always and only represents ourselves.

Slugs by Shaun Hutson (1982): It's Not Good Bad, It's Just Stupid

I can't imagine a blog devoted to horror fiction paperbacks not featuring the ludicrously gory and tasteless novels of Shaun Hutson, a notorious figure in British horror since the early 1980s. Slugs, his first, is still probably his most infamous "work," as it operates in the lowest common denominator hell of cheesy, grossout horror. Exploiting our revulsion at certain members of the animal kingdom - always a safe bet in the genre with a long and illustrious history (particularly in film) going back to Them!, Jaws, and even Alien. And once James Herbert published The Rats in 1974, we would never again be free from the horrors of nature, no matter how poorly written or conceived.

Leisure Books' 1987 edition cover art, by John "Not That John Holmes" Holmes, at top is gloriously idiotic: somehow this poor fella has been stripped of everything but his skeleton - skeletons again - even his central nervous system, even his brain by the looks of one slug creeping out his skull - and yet he's still grimacing in what looks like gut-wrenching pain. I guess I shouldn't be looking for CSI-level of accuracy on horror paperbacks; I mean, the last book I posted on had a skeleton driving a car, for God's sake. Skulls are one thing, I suppose, but any more than that risks absurdity. And it's from Leisure Books, surely the bottom of the barrel for horror fiction.

Honestly, Hutson's is the kind of low-rent horror writing that I've learned to avoid over the years. "Tell, don't show" is his maxim; anything that isn't 100% obvious to a remedial reader is jettisoned. Slugs "enjoy the taste of warm blood" over and over again. Sometimes Hutson writes "gastropod" instead of "slug." Dialogue between a husband and wife sounds like a coffee commercial. Characters are introduced, given a quick back-story, and then dispatched with martial efficiency and maximum grossness. The novel's last sentence is a rote twist that lacks imagination or care and can be guessed before you finish reading the books title. Oh, there is a teenage couple who get et listening to Iron Maiden, so that's something, at least.

Certainly people can mindlessly enjoy Hutson's energy and glee, understanding it's bad when they begin reading, approaching it like a big-bug movie from the 1950s or a SyFy one today except a whole lot grosser (I will give Hutson a couple pulp points for his boundless enthusiasm in coming up with unique scenarios of disgust), but this kind of horror is just not for me. That's why I'm only reading this now, over 20 years since I first started seeing copies of Slugs turn up in that used bookstore I worked at. I found it last week at a local bookstore and buying it made me recall those days when you had to buy porno mags in an actual shop. Ugh, the embarrassment! And it probably won't be the last time--I've still got a couple Hutsons on my shelf.

Resurrection Dreams by Richard Laymon (1989): Rockin' Bones

Now we get into the realm of the truly ridiculous horror fiction cover art. Let's parse this one a sec, shall we? Where do we begin? There is a skeleton driving a car. Not a rotting, pustulant, zombified corpse driving a vintage badass hot rod, but a simple, goofy, grinning Halloween-y skeleton, bared phalanxes at a sharp 10 and 2, careering off in a late-model sedan from what looks like a bordello of fellow active skeletons. And one of those skeletons has hair, quite feminine hair. Do you see the woman in the window? Second floor, middle. Ooh-la-la! Also, a skeleton pondering a noose and one swinging an ax. Huh. Skeletons are not scary; they're silly. And what about ol' mom jeans giving our skeletal pal the once-over twice? I do believe the fates have something in store for these two, putting them on a cover of a fairly lame '80s horror novel like Resurrection Dreams, Richard Laymon's agreeable but ultimately underwhelming and underwritten 1989 novel.

Laymon, who died in 2001, has had most if not all of his old novels republished in mass market paperback editions due to his growing posthumous cult status in the field. I do not belong to this cult. He was the type of author I avoided in my horror-reading heyday of the late '80s and early '90s and this book confirms my suspicions: I was seriously judging his books by their covers and the only story I'd read of his, "Mess Hall" in Book of the Dead, seemed to me an artless mess of sexual violence and gore.

Evoking the film version of Lovecraft's Re-Animator, with a madman trying to resurrect dead bodies, Dreams is hackwork of the most inoffensive kind. Melvin Dodds is the high school nerd (you can tell that by his name) who, in a completely unbelievable moment just a few pages in, shocks the town with a horrifying experiment he displays at the school's science fair: trying to resurrect the body (with jumper cables!) of a popular female classmate, recently killed in a drunk driving accident. He ends up locked away in a mental hospital for 20 years; after he's released he heads back into town and operates a gas station. One of his former classmates, now Dr. Vicki Chandler, returns, and Melvin realizes he's loved her all along. The resurrection techniques he began in high school are now perfected, and if Vicki won't love him willingly, well....

I am certainly a fan of ladies resurrected from the dead and the unholy passion that will thus occur, but Laymon really misses out on a chance to explore this taboo. There are a couple rom-com moments when Melvin realizes he's in a relationship with a zombie woman, Patricia, his first victim, rather than the woman of his dreams; Laymon is too poor of a writer and scenarist to make something out of this. Resurrection Dreams is ham-fisted and obvious, gory in the dullest manner, lacking the wit or passion or intensity that could have made his somewhat intriguing premise memorable. Let's just turn off the lights and close the door, shall we, and never speak of this again.

Living for the Screen: The Bastard "Art" of Horror Movie Novelizations

You won't find me collecting too many horror movie novelizations. While horror movie fans might find them exciting, I think novelizations are a strange and thankless art for the reader. I suppose they're not even art, they're simply commercial artifacts designed to sneak more money out of a film fan's pocket. Initially as disposable as a movie-theater popcorn bag, they have, like so much other pop culture detritus, turned into kinda cool collectibles. I read many as a kid before moving on to, well, actual books. I certainly don't think I'm alone in that, and I remember devouring the Star Wars, Indiana Jones, Alien and Superman novelizations of the late '70s/early '80s.

Most novelizations probably aren't worth much, but some have turned into decent collectibles thanks to, of course, covers that either reproduce the awesome poster art - as in Nosferatu (1979) - or features more characterization - as in The Wicker Man (1978). And I must say, I was pretty jazzed to snag that copy of Night of the Living Dead (1981), even though the guy peeking out from - well, whatever it is he's peeking out from - looks nothing like a zombie.

Novelizations are different from movie tie-in editions, which are when novels written first are then repackaged later with the movie adaptation poster on the cover. A good example is Stephen King's 1982 collection of four short novels, Different Seasons. This baby got re-released half a dozen times as a total of three of the novellas were adapted into popular movies. It's not just double-tripping; it's quadruple dipping, and more, in some cases. Check them all out here.

The literary merits of the novelization are next to nil, probably even closer, but often they are based on early or discarded drafts of screenplays and can therefore offer different or more in-depth details not in the finished film (see Jaws 2 for a great example). Often the books have pseudonyms or ghost-writers, and in the case of Nosferatu, have authors who became rather well-known in the literary world. Paychecks were pretty much guaranteed for this type of work, so many burgeoning young authors put aside notions of artistic purity and cranked 'em out on the side.

Even the estimable Ramsey Campbell, under the incredible and incomparable pen name of Carl Dreadstone, had a payday with 1970s novelizations of 1930s Universal monster classics, which actually go for a fair penny on eBay and such. I have so far been unable to track these down for a price I'm willing to pay. Which is like a buck.

Others who turned to novelizations include Dennis Etchison - actually, a major editor/short-story writer of the 1980s who I've not yet written about on this blog - who, as Jack Martin, penned Videodrome, David Cronenberg's bizarre cult masterpiece from 1983. Etchison worked from an early screenplay of the director's and therefore some of the alien quality of the movie is alleviated. John Skipp and Craig Spector, just before the height of their popularity, wrote one for Fright Night, the charming 1985 homage to horror movie hosts of the 1970s.

While I have here and there picked up some of the above novelizations, they're not really my collecting focus; I won't be filling my shelves with all the Friday the 13th novelizations, for example (an exception would be made for the novelizations of George Romero's Dawn of the Dead and Martin). But for anyone really interested in this aspect of horror fiction, I mean really and sincerely, you have to go here; this guy has an astonishing thread going, albeit from four or five years ago. The covers are mostly amazing. Imagine that!

Conjure Wife (1943) and Our Lady of Darkness (1977) by Fritz Leiber: Under Her Black Wings

Two good novels from classic fantasy writer Fritz Leiber: Conjure Wife and Our Lady of Darkness. The former is a tale of witchcraft set at a New England college university, while the latter explores the occult theory of Thibaud de Castries known as "megapolisomancy" (invented solely by Leiber himself in a Lovecraft-inspired bit of mythmaking) and posits the city of San Francisco itself as a haunted - and haunting - entity. It also weaves authors like Jack London and Clark Ashton Smith into its storyline, as well as the pulp fiction background of Leiber himself, and won the 1978 World Fantasy Award. Both novels feature modern men, thoughtful and literate, modern men of skepticism and rationality, who find that the dark superstitions of the past have a horrifying way of wending their way into the light of the contemporary world. Count me in!

I don't think either of these covers captures the feel of the books themselves: Conjure Wife is another example of an older book republished during the height of the Gothic romance fad (this edition is from '68, art by Jeff Jones). Its current edition has a pretty foxy Goth chick on its cover, reminiscent of the loverly Eva Green. Berkley's Our Lady of Darkness has an odd psychedelic tinge to it, dated even by 1977 standards; fortunately Amazon has it listed as being back in print this fall.

...sometimes it wasn't clear whether it was a real woman, or a goddess, or some sort of metaphorical entity that de Castries was talking about. "She is all merciless night animal," he would say... "She knows the cities' secrets and their secret weaknesses, their ponderous rhythms and dark songs. And she herself is secret as their shadows. She is my Queen of Night, Our Lady of Darkness."

The Weird Tales of Clark Ashton Smith: Nightmares Forever Calling Me

Unless you are diehard fan of horror or dark fantasy stories of the early 20th century, the name Clark Ashton Smith probably means little or nothing to you. But for those of us who are such fans, his name conjures up worlds of exotic darkness, of the purplest prose describing the strangest entities of eons past. Along with Lovecraft and Conan creator Robert E. Howard, Smith ruled those long-ago days of the 1930s and Weird Tales magazine. But unlike the other two, whose works have long been readily available, Smith sank, along with most of their Weird Tales brethren, into obscurity. Despite vocal champions like Harlan Ellison, Ray Bradbury, and Lovecraft himself, Smith is a household name only to those folks, like myself, whose homes suffer under a surfeit of paperback horror fiction. And not even always then.

Fortunately in recent years much of his work has come back into print thanks to, you guessed it, the rise of the internet. A Google search turns up plenty on him. But, as always here at Too Much Horror Fiction, what is the fun of simply ordering a $20 book off Amazon? The real collecting fun is had scouring bookstores and library sales and even eBay to find these gloriously-covered and colored paperbacks which smell of dust and bear the worn creases of hours of much-loved reading. I've luckily found all of these paperback editions over the years; they're treasured parts of my collection, you can be sure. The Ballantine Adult Fantasy editions from the early 1970s are particularly awesome.

For me, Smith conjures up memories of hours lost in musty crooked bookstores, trying to find any of his elusive paperbacks published throughout the 1970s by Ballantine. In the 1930s and '40s much of his output was published in small hardcover editions by Arkham House and these are now collectors' items. For those not so inclined at collecting there is The Eldritch Dark site, devoted to everything Klarkash-Ton (as Lovecraft dubbed him). You'll miss out on some distinctive cover art, replete with demonic sorcerers, underground caverns, and bizarre nightlife, however.

A poet and a sculptor in addition to being an author, Smith published dozens of stories throughout the 1930s with delightfully odd and evocative titles like "The Charnel God," "The Dark Eidolon," "The Beast of Averoigne," "The Weird of Avoosl Wuthoqquan," "The Desolation of Soom" and "The Isle of the Torturers." I mean, awesome! Smith invented prehistoric, arctic lands like Hyperborea, or Averoigne, or Zothique, peopled with primitives and shamans and wizards and priests and all manner of horrific creatures. With a prose style charmingly antiquated, a vocabulary that would put any logophile to shame, and an imagination that knew the darkness of a hundred ancient worlds, Smith's stories embrace myth, magic, and horror with equal fervor. Any true horror fan should avail themselves of his malevolent and decadent visions at once.

Original Arkham House hardcovers, 1942 and 1944; latter features CAS's sculptures

As all men know, the advent of the Beast was coeval with the coming of that red comet which rose behind the Dragon in the early summer of 1369. Like Satan's rutilant hair, trailing on the wind of Gehenna as he hastens worldward, the comet streamed nightly above Avergoigne, bringing the fear of bale and pestilence in its train. And soon the rumor of a strange evil, a foulness unheard of in any legend, passed among the people...