William W. Johnstone: The Paperback Covers

Another author I really couldn't care less about, but whose books are perfect examples of the hilarious depths to which 1980s mass-market paperback horror novels could descend to, is William W. Johnstone. A handful of his titles were published in the early 1980s, and resemble the more "artistic" imagery of 1970s bestsellers, but as the decade of excess rolled on, publishers had to come up with more eye-catching tactics, so we get silvery reflective foil-stamped titles, capering skeletons (in slippers!), and even holograms.

Wolfsbane (1982) The cover art at the top is nicely reminiscent of then-current An American Werewolf in London, of course, and still looks like a '70s paperback. The 1987 reprint - by the one and only William Teason - that at least acknowledges wolfsbane is a plant - but bet you didn't know it's given to you by a tri-headed skeleton!

The Nursery (1983) This one is all classic medical thriller, a genre in which I've read precisely nothing. But damn if they weren't once the rage. There's a missing question mark, however, that's driving me crazy.

Sandman (1988) I freaking told you about the skeleton in slippers! You didn't believe me, did you?! Isn't he supposed to be sprinkling dust on the baby? You know, to make it sleep?

Devil's Cat (1987) I remember this one the best from my used bookstore stint, with its freaky hologram Anton LaVey cackling at me. So the devil has a cat. Is that a surprise? What the hell else would he have? Everybody knows a three-headed dog got nothing on a pissed-off cat.

Rockinghorse (1987) This one isn't so outrageous, but someone should've reminded the artist that it's little girls who have skeletons, not little pretend horses.

Jack-in-the-Box (1986) More effin' skulls with bulging eyeballs! Truly a Zebra Books stock-in-trade.

The Uninvited (1982) Two covers for your delectation: the cliched eyeball widened in fright and revulsion, or the cliched skeletal hand showing off its mani in the '87 reprint. Which one would embarrass you more to be caught reading?

Toy Cemetery (1987) Yeah, yeah, we all know which horror novel this is referring to, but at least that one makes sense. I also like that the "evil comes to life" in a toy cemetery. Where else, right?

Cat's Eye (1989) Good God! As they say on the internets, kill it with fire! Or, don't, and let it grow up to attend furry conventions, it'll be a real hit.

Baby Grand (1987) Couldn't be worse than William Joel. Have you listened to any of his non-Greatest Hits records lately? I have. Ain't pretty.

Sweet Dreams (1985) Oft-used design of innocent blonde girl and creepy skull-faced toy.

And let's finish up with two so-so covers from the early '80s that are not egregiously trying to rape your eyeballs from the drugstore racks; a cleansing of the palate, if that's not mixing my metaphors too much.

Zebra Books really went all out, didn't they? And these tactics worked - my old bookstore's horror section was filled with this kind of crap, every copy creased and crinkled, obviously read and reread like readers were searching for the secrets of fucking life. Now I realize people just read this stuff as rotten brain candy and passed it on or traded it in, but damn if it didn't irritate my self-righteous 19-year-old ass. I mean, Clive Barker's stuff was right there. Come on people.

Of course I doubt Johnstone had anything to do with choosing any of these covers, but if anyone's read any of his books, can you let me know if he's as bad a writer as I imagine? I'd like to be proven wrong... and add yet more to my to-be-read list.

Stephen King Born Today, September 21, 1947

I can't believe I almost missed this, the 63rd birthday of the preeminent horror writer of the latter half of the 20th century, Stephen King! No one will be surprised to learn that I despise the current paperback covers of King's work. Sure, his books have been reprinted countless times over the past 30-odd years, but nothing stacks up against that awesome first edition cover art from the 1970s and '80s.

Take this paperback of Misery (Signet 1988): it's the same cover as the hardcover edition. But what sets it apart is the image at top, just inside on the second page; a faux-cover, if you will (it's actually called a step-back). It's a mock-up of the bestselling historical romances that protagonist Paul Sheldon writes which so obsess Annie Wilkes - except that's King himself in the place of, say, Fabio. Heh. Nice touch, no? Of course, Misery's Return is the book Annie forces him to write because she is, like many of us, his number one fan.

I love this classic-era "logo"

All Heads Turn When the Hunt Goes By by John Farris (1977): At Play in the Fields of Freud

I originally read All Heads Turn When the Hunt Goes By in the summer of 1989-- fresh out of high school, working at a used bookstore!--but recalled virtually nothing of it, so it was one of the first vintage horror paperbacks I bought again for this blog. Even though I was thoroughly unimpressed with John Farris's 1976 bestseller The Fury, I was keen on revisiting All Heads Turn. Good decision; I could hardly put it down this past weekend. This is mainstream bestselling horror at its finest: wholly entertaining and gripping, a horror fiction melange of classic adventure tales, multi-generational family sagas, Southern Gothics, and even those horribly dated plantation novels, all to great effect. Even more astounding, perhaps, is that this Popular Library 1977 paperback cover is actually representative of events in the novel. The 1986 reprint from the Tor horror line, however, is one big spoiler. So do not Google it (but do check out this encomium from David J. Schow, who chose it as his entry in Horror: 100 Best Books).

Farris settles in and moves his story along, writing smoothly and professionally, always a welcome surprise in what looks to be another junky horror paperback - albeit one with an oddly poetic and tantalizingly obscure title. Farris's prose is even impressionistic at times, once the delirium of horror and bloodshed begin. Which is, thankfully enough, just a few pages in, careening out of the gate with a blood-drenched military wedding ceremony in Virginia. Hot damn!

Set during World War II, Farris has threaded together the fates of two great families, one from the States and one from England. The Bradwins are one of those wealthy Southern families made by generations of virile military men - and their servants barely more than slaves - plagued by arrogance, entitlement, brilliance, lechery, and charm in maddeningly equal measures. The Holleys are a British family who travel to Africa to administer health care to the remotest regions of that continent. Their unbelievably tragic back-stories are the most richly imagined parts of the book.

Playboy Press hardcover 1977

They are linked by the beautiful Nhora, a woman who, as a child, was kidnapped by a cannibalistic African tribe beholden to the superstitions of voodoo, that twining tight of the Christianity of the west and the native beliefs of Africa. So cultural imperialism figures large, the privilege and entitlement that people can feel when dealing with others they think may be beneath them, even when the others are members of one's own family. But all people are weakened by fear and greed and superstition - especially when that superstition turns out to be the truth.

1977 Popular Lib. back cover copy: 

Gibbering horror! Gelatin!

All Heads Turn When the Hunt Goes By just might fit that oft-sought category of a forgotten classic; Farris is that successful both in concept and execution. From the endless tormenting rains in the wilds of Africa to the sultry evenings on a Southern plantation, from a near-madhouse in the English countryside to the hideous visions of symbolic dementia, Farris never falters in bringing it all to palpable life. Characters, even minor ones (the fingernail-less bomb expert Luxton; self-regarding patriarch Boss Bradwin; Boss's illegitimate half-black highly educated son Tyrone), arrive fully-formed even if flawed or broken. Especially if flawed or broken.

1987 French edition: Scales

Farris's evocation of the supernatural, a sort of Freudian/voodoo stew of myth, monsters, and magic, is wonderfully tasteless, primeval, and exotic; his depiction of fathers and sons beleaguered by ego and ignorance, believable. The attentive reader will notice an aside to several writers and poets (Haggard, Keats, Ovid) that explains much. And if some think this all gets wrapped up a mite quickly, then I have to say I prefer that to an ending that goes on for 50, 75, 100 pages and exhausts the reader's patience. Farris bring the story to a screeching shuddering sudden halt at the climax, a climax that speaks of the truly venomous nature of obsession, desire, and fear. Oh, and snakes. Why'd it have to be snakes? You'll see.

Karl Edward Wagner and The Year's Best Horror Stories Series

Just found an oh-so-worthwhile personal remembrance of the late Karl Edward Wagner, by one of his oldest friends, entitled "The Dark Muse of Karl Edward Wagner." Turned up on one of my periodic Google searches for new info on older horror writers. I love this kind of behind-the-scenes look at the life and struggles of a modern pulp/horror/fantasy writer, and I think a lot of you will dig it too. Guy was a powerhouse at whatever he did.

Known for both his medical expertise (he very nearly became a doctor) as well as for lighting up 1970s horror conventions with his Viking-biker appearance and appetite for drugs and booze - not to mention his own considerable fiction - Wagner took over the editorial reins of The Year's Best Horror Stories for DAW Books in 1980, and continued until his unfortunately early death at age 49 in North Carolina in 1994. He lived in nearby Chapel Hill for awhile. In fact, I recall years ago finding books from his own personal library in a used bookstore here in Raleigh. According to Amazon, none of his dozens of books are currently in print.

Interview with the Vampire by Anne Rice (1976): Whining for Centuries

Anne Rice gets blamed for the whole "emo"-ing of the vampire in the horror genre today but you'd never know it from the cover art of this amazing 1979 reprint of the Ballantine paperback edition of Interview with the Vampire. That is some classic Gothic Dracula-style action going on. I've got too many new books piling up these days to reread it, but damn if I don't love this cover! I didn't even know this edition existed until a couple months ago.

It's been 20 years since I read Interview but I can still recall the self-absorption, the self-dramatization, the self-victimization, of Louis, the titular vampire, as he recounts his "life" story. No wonder young adults love this stuff; I once heard it described as "Catcher in the Rye for the Goth crowd." Yet the art has virtually nothing - and I mean nothing - to do with the book itself; in fact, one of the points of Interview was that it shed the whole opera-cape-and-tuxedo look of Lugosi and Lee. Rice's vampires didn't go after swooning ladies in nightgowns; they fed on criminals and even family members, as I recall. However it's certainly a striking piece of Gothic horror art, by recently deceased artist H. Tom Hall (uncredited).

And on the back cover we see, what? Ejaculatory blurbs, and two vampires in Dracula capes (Louis and Lestat, one presumes), one semaphoring like he's signaling in an airplane. Claudia is there, so maybe somebody told the artist about the poor little girl who's damned to be a vampire. Truthfully I only liked the first few Vampire Chronicles, as they were unlike anything else in the horror fiction field; however in the intervening years I've glanced back at parts of them and found her prose overheated, overwrought, and in some places, just plain bad. When Tale of the Body Thief came out in '92 I bought it straightaway but only got about a chapter or two in when I simply said, "Done. This is just awful." Never looked back either, until now.

There are other '70s paperbacks of Rice's first novel with cool cover art that I need to track down. I've seen this edition going for some fair cash on eBay but I was able to buy it recently for $2. It has that comforting old-book smell that hints of age and imagination and escape, and it's not too beaten up. Another vintage paperback coup for Too Much Horror Fiction!

Fevre Dream by George R.R. Martin (1982): His Weapon is Teeth

Set aboard an Ohio River steamship in 1857, George R. R. Martin's only horror novel Fevre Dream may have an original setting but it's squarely in the traditional vampire sub-genre. Regal creatures of the night dressed in the finest dark velvet and flowing pirate shirts pontificate upon the nature of master and slave, life and death, good and evil, when not gulping down steaming freshets of blood. Or reading a volume of Byron poetry, natch. Look upon my works, ye Mighty, etc.

Since the period is pre-Civil War America, we see some of the grim literal actuality of the vampires' metaphor of master and slave. It's an interesting dynamic Martin's created. All humans are unwitting slaves to the vampire - a name the creatures reject - and the vampires are slaves to the "red thirst," while privileged whites make other races into subhumans. Horrified to learn that the all-too-real vampires refer to the human race as "cattle," Abner Marsh, the ugly, cantankerous yet still likable owner of the Fevre Dream steamboat, slowly makes the connection with that other plague upon humanity.

Martin's characters are colorfully drawn, from the various men - some former slaves, many seasoned rivermen - who run Marsh's ship to the mysterious Joshua York who enlists Marsh to build Fevre Dream for some unspoken reason, to the mad vampire "bloodmaster" Damon Julian and his cruel and cowardly human dogsbody Sour Billy Tipton; truly an impressive supporting cast. With a gift of pure storytelling and and historic detail, Martin spices his tale with time- and character-appropriate grammar and slang. And in its own gruesome and believable way, this story is ultimately about friendship.

However, it resembles Anne Rice's Vampire Chronicles in its New Orleans and Revolutionary-era France portions. I don't know when Martin first conceived of this novel, so perhaps his predates hers; perhaps not. And its rich setting and descriptions of the river-boating working life also seem, after awhile, to bog it down so that about three-quarters of the way through, it rather runs out of, er, steam, despite an impending climax between Marsh and the "night people." I liked Martin's origin myth for his vampires - shades of Clark Ashton Smith...

From all lips I had heard a legend of a city we had built, a great city of the night, wrought in iron and black marble in some dark caverns in the heart of Asia, by the shores of an underground river a sea never touched by the sun... we had been expelled from our city for some crime, had wandered forgetful and lost for thousands of years... some day a king would be born to our people, a bloodmaster who would gather our scattered race together and lead us back to the city of the night beside its sunless sea.

Overall Fevre Dream is a good read; if not particularly scary, it is vividly imagined, quite violent, and mostly engaging; Martin is a solid writer and I can see why so many people devoured his later novels of heroic fantasy. Vampire fiction fans should pick it up for its unique setting, but it's not the kind of paperback horror novel I'd tell fans that they must drop everything for so they can scour old stores for a vintage copy. In fact, I somehow missed it on the shelf while browsing a warehouse-sized bookstore here in town; my girlfriend spotted it quickly and snatched it up. I had to promise not to wear it out any more than it already was if I wanted to read it first. I'm not sure what's up with that ketchup-letter font on the 1983 Pocket Books paperback edition; I much prefer that paperback's inner flap (below), which was the original hardcover art.

Books of Blood, Vol. 3 by Clive Barker (1984): "Fictions are Fuckable"

More glorious short-story mayhem from the best. Clive Barker continued his revolutionizing of the horror genre with Books of Blood, Vol. 3, which was the first thing I ever read by him way, way back in January 1987. I bought it based on the Berkley 1986 edition cover alone, and can still recall sitting in a mall courtyard reading the first story, "Son of Celluloid," and being a tad put off because Barker's measured, careful prose was so very British. His style was unique and took a bit of warming up to. There was little of the neighborly chumminess of Stephen King's work, or the weighty obliquity of Ramsey Campbell's. Nothing of Lovecraft or Matheson, either, I daresay. Barker was sui generis.

Instead, there is a polite informality, a deft and dry wit in his writing, as if to make the horrors more palatable, the deformities less alien, the grotesqueries a welcome respite from reality. A large part of Barker's horror philosophy, if we can call it that, was that horror should subvert our (often wrong) notions of normality and beauty. From "Scapegoats," which evokes the zombie-island nightmares of Italian exploitation film but is laced with an unexpectedly poetic tone:

And I, losing my life with every second, succumbing to the sea absolutely, couldn't take pleasure in the intimacy I'd longed for. Too late for love; the sunlight was already a memory. Was it that the world was going out - darkening toward the edges as I died - or that we were now so deep the sun couldn't penetrate so far? Panic and terror had left me - my heart seemed not to beat at all. A kind of peace was on me.

True, in a story like the infamous "Rawhead Rex" - made into a dismal film in 1986 that Barker disowned at once - there is a ravenous creature that has an enormous head like a skinned penis and a mouth like a vagina dentata. No holding back from the terrors of viscera and humiliation here. In "Son of Celluloid," another well-known story, a criminal's cancer, his literal cancer tumor, infests a fleabag second-run movie theater and brings to horrible life the ghosts on the screen that fascinate us so, but which need our eyes to exist. This incredible cover for the UK paperback edition from Sphere (below), with Barker's own art, presents one of that story's more memorable moments: our Norma Jean (the fuckable fiction, her hapless victim notes), teasing us with the fur divide that had been the dream of millions.

"Confessions of a (Pornographer's) Shroud" is a revenge tale of mobsters and meek accountants that would have not been out of place in the old EC horror comics that the generation prior to Barker grew up on; it contains one of his most inventive deaths, which my friends and I in junior high used to marvel over. A man takes possession of the linen placed over him in wrongful death; a wraith, an actual ghost that appears to be a person wearing a sheet as a Halloween costume, he seeks out the men who framed, tortured, and killed him.

His flesh and blood body was utterly deserted now; an icy bulk fit for nothing but the flames. Ronnie Glass existed in a new world: a white linen world like no state he had lived or dreamed before. Ronnie Glass was his shroud.

Why, that makes think of Barker's wonderful second novel, Weaveworld, in which an entire world is taken up inside an intricately woven carpet. Nicely done, sir. "Human Remains" ends this volume, a fine and sensitive work about Gavin, a gay hustler, and his doppelganger, come to steal his face, the only possession Gavin has worth anything. They meet when it rescues Gavin from sure death at the hands of a pimp:

"I am a thing without a proper name," it pronounced. "I am a wound in the flank of the world. But I am also that perfect stranger you always prayed for as a child, to come and take you, call you beauty, lift you naked out of the street and through Heaven's window. Aren't I? Aren't I?" 

How did it know the dreams of his childhood?

..."Because I am yourself, made perfectable."

Gavin gestured towards the corpses. "You can't be me. I'd never have done this."

"Wouldn't you?" said the other.

"Human Remains" showcases Barker's penchant for marginalized characters that lurk in darkness and giving them a voice. A story that rather puzzled me when I was a teenager but rewarded a rereading as an adult, it's a highlight of the entire six-volume series, I believe.

Now, I wouldn't necessarily recommend Volume 3 as the best place to start if one has not read Books of Blood - one really should start at the beginning, go through to the end, and then stop, and begin again - but I am still thankful that it was the place I started with Barker and his brand new world of horror for the future. And I haven't stopped yet.

Barker c. 1987. Future's so bright, etc.