Robert R. McCammon: The Early Paperback Covers

I read recently that bestselling '80s horror-fiction scribe Robert R. McCammon refuses to allow his first four novels to be republished today as he feels they're lacking in quality. That may be; I've never read them. It's true! Despite his overwhelming popularity in the late 1980s, I was never much interested in his work, for whatever reason. Every time I mentioned that I liked horror fiction back then, someone would invariably bring him up (or Koontz or John Saul, two other writers I had very little to no time for). I think I read the first few pages of his oft-acclaimed epic Stand-like novel Swan Song (1987) but remained unmoved; then perhaps a short story or two from Blue World (1990) or Book of the Dead (1989). Ah well.

These first four novels, Avon paperback originals all, are varying in terms of cover art quality; I think we can agree that Night Boat (1980), above, is the coolest of the lot. I've heard it's a pretty decent Nazi-zombie read.

They Thirst (1981) Pretty pedestrian but there's at least a kindertrauma associated with it.

Bethany's Sin (1980) Ladies and wild stallions. 'Nuff said.

Baal (1978) Wow, did they give the design job to the night janitor, or the new artist on their first day? Terrible.

McCammon's next two novels, Usher's Passing (1983) and Mystery Walk (1984), were published in hardcover by Holt, Rinehart, & Winston, while the first paperback editions were from Ballantine. The pumpkin house-mouth is kinda interesting.

These older paperback covers aren't nearly as well-known as the Pocket Books reprints of later years, after Swan Song became a NYT bestseller in '87. They all followed the template that book set with the creepy same font, half circle moon, and vanishing point perspective, thanks to artist Rowena Morrill. All out of print today, these later editions were staples of many a horror fiction bookshelf. Just not mine, however.

Other Horror Biz

I've been a bit busier than usual, as well as waiting on the snail mail delivery of a whole new stack of horror novels, so I haven't been able to post here as much as I'd like this past week. However there are several blogs of note I've been reading which I believe all horror fiction fans should be aware of. The Mighty Blowhole has a new post on outrageously tasteless and ridiculously silly horror paperback covers, some of which I've posted here but most which I have not run across myself. The amazing image above, of Stephen George's Nightscape, is but a taste...

Bill R. at The Kind of Face You Hate - this season known as The Kind of Face You Slash!!! - has been delving into contemporary horror writers, something I don't do too often. This is of course to my own detriment. This Brian Evenson sounds like the real deal, apparently an awesome amalgam of J.G. Ballard, Thomas Ligotti, Poe, and Jim Thompson.

And the always-awesome Retrospace has a collage of Dracula paperback covers and a look back at cinema's greatest vampires.

This weekend I started a cool '80s horror novel that has some stellar Amazon (and elsewhere) reviews, and have just gotten about halfway in; I expect the review to be up tomorrow or Wednesday. But again, busy: apparently there's some sort of horror-related holiday on the horizon.

Horror: 100 Best Books (1988), edited by Stephen Jones & Kim Newman

When I first read Horror: 100 Best Books it was a revelation, and caused me to search out and read Leiber's Our Lady of Darkness, Wagner's In a Lonely Place, Marasco's Burnt Offerings, Klein's The Ceremonies, as well as a handful of others that have sat on my shelf unread in the many years since. That'll happen. Although it's a bit disconcertingly diverse, it is still an indispensable guide for the horror fiction fan as a reference book. It may be over 20 years old - yes, there is a second volume - but you still need it. I finally actually bought a used copy and it fits my parameters here well.

Jones and Newman are both are well-known horror scribes and editors, Jones for his Best New Horror anthology series and Newman for my personal favorite book on horror film, Nightmare Movies. It may have been better had they themselves chosen the 100 best books, rather than enlisting various horror fiction authors, present and past, to choose their favorites. Authors contribute an essay on their choice. Joe Lansdale goes for Ray Bradbury's The October Country - honestly, I would have never guessed. Harlan Ellison on Clark Ashton Smith! T.E.D. Klein on Machen! Poe on Hawthorne! Uh, Guy N. Smith on Charles L. Grant? Don't think I'm going to delve into Marlowe's Dr. Faustus any time soon, but thanks anyway, Clive Barker. The Gothic moldy-oldies of the 19th century are are present and accounted for: The Monk, The Mysteries of Udolpho, Melmoth the Wanderer.

It's a bit UK-heavy, and features a Lovecraft collection you won't find Stateside, Cry Horror, nor will you easily find Ramsey Campbell's Dark Feasts, Michael Bishop's Who Made Stevie Crye?, or Nigel Kneale's Quatermas series that I've been looking for since I first read Best Books in the early '90s. My major quibble is that many of the specific titles chosen are unavailable anywhere, except as expensive collector's editions.

As for the essays themselves, I found David J. Schow's piece on All Heads Turn When the Hunt Goes By particularly insightful; Peter Straub's words on The Shining particularly ass-kissy; Al Sarrantonio's insights into 'Salem's Lot virtually absent; Stephen King's into Burnt Offerings, debatable. Then Craig Spector on Deathbird Stories correctly and acppropriately notes both its power and its dated "hipness" while Edward Bryant nails Song of Kali's nightmare precision.

Non-disputable classics like Dracula, Frankenstein, Jekyll and Hyde, Island of Dr. Moreau, Ghost Stories of Antiquary, Haunting of Hill House, etc., are duly included. More surprising are modern fiction titles like John Gardner's Grendel and Jerzy Kosinski's The Painted Bird, or literary classics like Macbeth, Heart of Darkness, Northanger Abbey, and The Trial, as well as dystopian 1960s SF novels like John Brunner's The Sheep Look Up and J.G. Ballard's The Crystal World.

There are plenty of spoilers in these essays, so tread carefully. The Recommended Reading list included at the end is amazing and overwhelming and, ultimately, kind of disheartening. I am never, never, ever, ever, gonna be able to read all them books. Damn and damn again.

The Search for Joseph Tully by William H. Hallahan (1974): Trapped Under Ice

Another bestselling title unknown and forgotten to the general public today but which gets spoken of with much awe and respect by genre fans is The Search for Joseph Tully. Creating an inescapable mood of wintry dread hanging over a soon-to-be-demolished historical apartment building in a disused part of Brooklyn, author William H. Hallahan skillfully brings together two disparate stories in a frigid climax of suggestive '70s horror. Its use of seances, hypnosis, medieval occult thought, and Catholic heresy dates it enjoyably, its genealogical-research angle is more effective than anyone would think, and Hallahan's smooth spare style gives you just enough detail to let your imagination do some work. Sure, modern horror fiction fans might find it too spare and too tame, might find that it doesn't give the goods except in tiny measured doses at too-distant intervals; they might find it that, true, but I found it highly readable and satisfying.

Basically, I raced through Tully (perhaps a bit too quickly; there's some of that, whatchacallit, symbolism here I fear I missed) and its story of Pete Richardson, an editor who is plagued by night terrors, waking each night to a strange whooshing sound, convinced someone is about trying to murder him. His rather eccentric apartment co-dwellers don't do much to disabuse him of this notion. In fact, they alternately insist on holding a seance, or hypnotizing him, or regaling him with ancient Church heresies and the burning at the stake of Giordano Bruno. As their apartment building is threatened with being torn down by the wrecking balls getting closer daily, each neighbor moves away, leaving Richardson horribly alone, cold, frightened, perhaps paranoid or even mad.

1974 hardcover

The other story is of Matthew Willow, a young man on the titular search. Hallahan wrings solid suspense from the tricky, painstaking work of genealogical research that in other hands could become dry and boring. Joseph Tully was an 18th century wine merchant from England who with his sons tried to set up a vast wine company in the mid-Atlantic States, but tragedy and war prevent success. Hallahan gives quick, detailed sketches of the harrowing frontier lives of Tully's descendants in pre-Revolutionary New Jersey and New York, then as wild and unsettled as the West, and as wild and unsettling as any scene of violent supernatural horror. We get caught up in the little victories and distressing dead-ends of Willow's seemingly endless trips to city archives in libraries, churches, basements and bookstores. Why is Willow searching for Joseph Tully? Just know that he is, that's all. Being quite a research nerd myself, and with my copy of the 1977 Avon paperback (with a relevant if uninspired cover) giving off that wonderful old bookstore smell, I was quite charmed - and sometimes chilled - by this aspect of the novel.

1976 UK paperback

Honestly, I reveled in Tully's lonely, despairing, fatalistic tone. Chapters are short, enigmatic, vaguely existential - indeed we get several references to the idea that the birth of existential man was in the death camps of WWII. There are lots of people looking forlornly out of windows onto landscapes of frozen fields and streets and rundown cities trapped in snowy desolation, while the apartment building slowly empties out beneath swirling winds and high clouds moving out towards the black waters of the North Atlantic. Everywhere there is palpable cold and frost and snow and slush, and all the while terrors whisper across generations, mysterious terrors of vengeance and lost souls unmoored from justice and eternal rest, which only man can render unto man, no matter what.

Animals by John Skipp and Craig Spector (1993): A Bloody Disgrace

John Skipp and Craig Spector's sixth and final horror novel together, Animals (Bantam Nov 1993, cover art by Joe DeVito), is rife with the type of emotional as well as physical pain and humiliation that they explored in all their works. Despite their reputation as splatterpunks - or maybe because of - they always tried to depict realistic human relationships. Here, they delve into the psychic turmoil of 35-year-old blue-collar Syd Jarrett's divorce and its aftermath. In an out-of-the-way rundown blues bar in rural Pennsylvania, Syd meets the improbably hot and sexually ravenous Nora and his life is torn asunder. Nora is, of course, a werewolf. She wants to make him one too. But she is on the run from her ex, a sort of alpha-werewolf named Vic. What will happen when these night-time worlds collide? Surely you can guess.

But the thin, over-worn metaphor of werewolves who represent the dark, repressed nature of ourselves is expressed in tone-deaf, hey-buddy-check-this-out "prose" that seems less like writing than like two guys yelling a story at you in tandem. I don't know if Skipp and Spector had simply run their creative streak dry, were under a tight deadline, or had personal issues, or were simply bored, but virtually everything about Animals is lousy. Nora wants Syd to confront his psychological wounds caused by his ex-wife's adultery and the rage he felt to the man who cuckolded him, because that's what werewolves do: make you confront the beast within. I know horror likes to literalize its metaphors but this one is so obvious and trite and anemic it hardly registers.

The relentlessly graphic sex and violence is approached like sniggering 13-year-old boys who've just discovered Hustler magazine and Faces of Death videotapes. Every character comes across as an utter dated dork, straight from central casting circa 1987: women wear leather bustiers and fishnet stockings; men have one earring and stubble and drink from cans of Budweiser and bottles of Wild Turkey (Nora drinks copious amounts of Southern Comfort - barf) while driving muscle cars; a bartender is a world-weary sort who's seen it all; Syd's boss is a corrupt, crooked weakling. I know these characters are working-class Pennsylvania types, maybe Skipp and Spector did some research, but it makes for underwhelming fictional companions, more The Onion's Jim Anchower than flesh-and-blood human beings.

The cliches pop up thick and fast and the puns would make Robert Bloch groan. He was hell with names, but he never forgot a face. And even if he did, hers was in the trunk. A car moves through the night like a shark through dark waters. Kisses are deep and soul-searching. Sex is the raging bone dance. Well, that last one isn't a cliche; it's a ridiculous and juvenile original. The bad guy laughs wickedly, the moment of truth arrives, and werewolf survivors lick their wounds. See what they did there?

Animals was published in 1993, which was a distinct end of an era for me. I was still reading horror, but I was moving backwards toward classic writers like Machen, Jackson, le Fanu, Blackwood; modern horror was pretty much over as far as I was concerned. Bookstore shelves were more and more taken up with Koontz and King and Dell/Abyss had folded. Sure, there were a few titles I picked up here and there over the next couple years: Kathe Koja's Strange Angels and Poppy Z. Brite's Exquisite Corpse (both of which I liked) and The 37th Mandala by Marc Laidlaw (which I didn't ) but overall this was the end of keeping up with new publications.

And so I distinctly recall the publication of Animals and how I thought, "Yeah, no, I'm kinda over this stuff; besides, a werewolf novel about 'the animal in all of us'? No thanks." Even Clive Barker's encomium on the cover did little to assuage my suspicions. After I began this blog and saw that copies of the novel were going for up to $15 or $20 online, I wanted to see just what I'd missed (no, I didn't pay that much; found an oddly pristine copy in a local used bookstore). And I see that I was exactly and precisely right in my impression that the book was one long, grim, cringe-inducing horror-fiction cliche.

Guess you won't see that as a cover blurb. Sorry, guys!

Interview with the Blogger: My Halloween!

Zombos Closet of Horror, that weird and wonderful blog of the macabre, has interviewed me on the true meaning of Halloween! He's published several others with fellow horror bloggers, all of which are worth checking out if you like to get some personal insight into why we all love October 31, and the entire month that leads up to it...

The Taint by Patricia Wallace (1983): Say It Taint So

There are no words.

Burnt Offerings by Robert Marasco (1973): Burning Down the House

Part of the recommended reading list in Stephen King's Danse Macabre, this slim first novel Burnt Offerings occupies part of that territory of early '70s horror bestsellers mostly forgotten today, ironically because of King's own impact on the field (comparisons to other then-current classics The Other, The Exorcist, and Rosemary's Baby on paperback cover: check). Robert Marasco's lifelong output was very small, although his only play, Child's Play, was a big Tony Award-winning Broadway hit in 1970, and it sounds pretty appropriately macabre. He wrote only one other novel, Parlor Games. If you think I'm setting up a forgotten classic... I'm not. Alas.


Burnt Offerings concerns the Rolfe family after they rent a lovely big house in Long Island to escape the summer in Queens, and all the muted, allusive horrors they face after. I suppose they should have been clued in when the mansion rents for a measly $900 for the entire season. As a bonus, the renters, brother and sister Allardyce, reveal that their elderly mother will reside, unseen, in an upstairs room the whole time the Rolfes are there and all they have to do is provide her meals; another warning bell. So soon come the subtle terrors, the ambiguous chills, the inexplicable accidents, as the atmosphere darkens and the house - or is it Mrs. Allardyce? - begins to wield some unearthly power over the family. You know how that goes, dedicated follower of horror fiction. Caretakers in this type of work never seem to make out well, do they? And they don't.

King has stated its influence on The Shining, which is probably clear from that simple description. I read it in 1994 during what was my last real heavy-duty jag of horror-fiction reading until I began this blog. So I dug out an old notebook from then in which I wrote about various books and movies and lo and behold, while I'd written down that I'd actually read Burnt Offerings, it seems I didn't write anything about it. Not a good sign. But I can recall my impression pretty well, and that is, despite some glowing reviews on Amazon, where it gets called a "seminal horror novel," I was underwhelmed by its subtlety and felt it promised more than delivered, that its final reveal simply wasn't that scary or effective (I kinda dig the movie version though, with the quite astonishing cast of Karen Black, Oliver Reed, Burgess Meredith, and Bette Davis). Probably I was spoiled because around the same time I was reading Ligotti's Grimscribe, Leiber's Our Lady of Darkness, Machen's "The Great God Pan," and Jackson's Haunting of Hill House; what mostly-forgotten novel could hold up to that classic line-up?

Robert Marasco (1936 - 1998)

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.