The Devil’s Heart (Devil’s series #2)

The Devil's Heart, by William W. Johnstone

No month stated, 1983  Zebra Books

I actually loved the book. Even though the missed spelled words but what author don’t and the grammar was ok. 

 

-- From an actual Goodreads review 

Eleven years ago I read The Devil’s Kiss, the first volume in the Devil’s series by William W. Johnstone, and at the end of my review I promised that I’d move on to this second volume once I’d sufficiently recovered. Well, it didn’t take me that long, and it’s mostly because I read other Johnstone novels in the interim, but I’m finally now recovered enough to read this second volume of the series. 

And boy, I could’ve just as easily read The Devil’s Kiss again, because William Johnstone writes the exact same story! In fact, he even uses the same character names throughout, even though these characters are the children of the protagonists in the previous book! What’s more frustrating and confusing is that Johnstone bides his – and the reader’s – time for 300+ pages, not picking up the pace until around pg 228…and the novel is only 382 pages long. 

Actually, I shouldn’t say “only.” As with any other Zebra horror novel from the ‘80s, The Devil’s Heart is way too long; as I’ve speculated before, there had to have been some sort of requirement authors had to follow for this publisher. I mean it becomes painfully clear that Johnstone has an ending in mind, but has to waste nearly 300 pages until he can get there. If over a hundred pages were cut out, this would be a much better novel; I kid you not when I say that so many pages are repetitive, with characters worrying how or when something will happen, and some divine or evil force telling them to wait, and they wait, and then it’s the next day, and they wonder “when will it happen?” again, and the divine or evil force tells them to wait…I mean over and over, throughout the entire book! 

To get it out of the way posthaste, I read Johnstone’s horror novels mainly to see how perverted they are, and I’ll say up front that The Devil’s Heart, while sleazy and lurid, is nowhere in the league of The Nursery. And it’s also not as action-packed. The Devil’s Heart is seriously let down by the aforementioned stalling, which goes on, literally, for the entire book. From page one we know that Whitfield, the small town that factored in the first book of this loose “series,” The Devil’s Kiss, will be destroyed…and we’re reminded throughout the book that its destruction is imminent…and 300+ pages later we’re still waiting for it…and then it finally happens like on the very final pages. 

In the interim, we’re treated to a lot of sleaze and filth, but it’s muted when compared to The Nursery. This one is more along the lines of its predecessor, but even The Devil’s Kiss had more going on than The Devil’s Heart, mainly because this one retreads a lot of stuff from the previous book. It’s really as much a rewrite as it is a sequel. That said, I was happy to see that Johnstone slightly whittled back on the “Satanists stink because they don’t bathe, but forget about that while I tell you how hot their women are” schtick. Then again, we are told that they “reek” at points, so it’s still there…just not as OTT as it was in the previous book. 

So what’s it about? Well, it’s a little over twenty years after The Devil’s Kiss, which as we’ll recall took place in the late 1950s. Don’t worry if you didn’t read that book, though, as Johnstone essentially refers to it throughout the entirety of this book and tells us what happened. And the characters from that book are back – even hero Sam Balon, who died in the denouement of the previous book, is back in this one, as a deus ex machina force who shows up to voice vague warnings, suggestions, and other such stuff, appearing as a “ghostly mist” and basically telling all of his old pals they’re going to die in nine days. 

This includes Jane Ann, the young woman Sam fell in love with in the previous book, who now is in her 40s, married to a doctor named Tony King (a Satanist, like everyone else in town), and mother to a 24 year old named Sam, who is the hero of this book, and also of course the son of Sam Balon – so, yes, “Sam” is the star of this book, but it’s not the same Sam as the previous book. 

Warming to his theme, Johnstone has another progeny of Sam Balon, Nydia…who is named after her mother, the Nydia of the previous book…who also appears in this book, but as “Roma!” So the Nydia of this book is not the same Nydia as the previous one…but the old Nydia is here, but has a different name. Not sure why Johnstone didn’t just name the new Nydia “Roma,” but whatever. I’d say he was going for some sort of thematic content, but if so he didn’t execute it very well. 

For reasons of laziness, the “Sam” I refer to in this review is the new Sam, who presumably will be the hero of the next two books in the series (The Devil’s Touch and The Devil’s Cat). He’s basically the same as the previous version, with the exception that this one, obviously, is too young to have fought in Korea. But he’s a former Ranger and saw a lot of action around the globe; unlike his dad, he’s not a minister, but he’s plumb curious about Christianity. 

Then there’s Nydia, a raven-haired beauty like her mom…who, we’ll recall, is an ancient witch who has been granted immortal beauty by the devil and who spent the entire previous book trying (and succeeding) to bed Sam Balon. Well for the past 20 some years she’s hooked up with another immortal black magician, Falcon (who replaces the previous book’s character Black – but don’t worry, there’s another Black in this one), and they have a big estate up in the wilds of French Canada. Unlike her mom, this Nydia is not only a sort of good two-shoes, but a virgin to boot. 

Sam and Nydia meet each other in the first pages; Sam is visiting French Canada with his army pal, Black…yep, same name as the character in the previous book, but this Black is Nydia’s brother, and also the son of Sam Balon and Roma (ie the old Nydia). These characters all basically repeat the scenarios the previous versions of the characters experienced in The Devil’s Kiss. And meanwhile the survivors from the previous book, still living in Whitfield, also encounter the same tribulations as in the previous book, to a lesser extent – for the most part, the Whitfield characters only appear infrequently, and, you guessed it, their appearances are relegated to, “How much longer until the town is wiped out and we die?” 

The Satanists here are typical of those in Johnstone’s other novels; only in the Whitfield scenes do we see a few of the cultists, and they lack the sodomitic fervor of the Satanic reprobates in The Nursery. But despite which the cult members are worse than Satan himself – for, whether unintentionally or not, Johnstone gives us a Lucifer who is prone to yell in frustration, “Can’t I make a joke?” before huffing and puffing about the Almighty. 

Curiously, Satan and God are supporting characters in The Devil’s Heart, and there are several scenes where they will argue with each other. But the thing is, both figures are reduced in their appearances; Satan, as mentioned, comes off like a pompous blowhard, and God comes off as vague and absent-minded. It’s very bizarre, because Johnstone’s depictions of the figures do not correllate with the figures as they appear to their followers – the vague-minded God demands unwilling obedience from his flock, and Satan demands torture and vile acts from his (though, despite us often being reminded that it’s “acceptable to Satan,” the devil isn’t very crazy about homosexuality). 

The God-Satan arguments are just another way for Johstone to pad the pages. Satan insists that God made a promise back in the first volume that Whitfield could become Satan’s one day, but here God tells the devil that the place will be wiped out in nine days. “My team against yours,” Satan challenges, which should be all the indication you need that this isn’t Milton. And yet it seems evident given the goofiness of these exchanges that William Johnstone is not taking the book or himself seriously – he pulled the same trick in Wolfsbane. 

If you look at The Devil’s Heart as an intentional comedy, it’s a great success. For one, despite being a ghost, Sam Balon is able to interract with people and even write them letters; there’s a hilarious bit where he sends his son a handrwitten note from beyond, in which Sam Balon states that “it’s difficult for me to write,” and then goes on to write a four-page letter! 

This extends to the prose style, which trades off between actual quality writing and clunkers like, “Her ears had been listening” and “The feeling of foreboding suddenly became much more intense.” Or even, “Utilizing a hand-held handy-talky.” What’s weird is that there are flashes of actual introspection amid the banality, but Johnstone never sees it all the way through, either due to lack of awareness or lack of ability. Or, perhaps, lack of care – it’s debatable how much he cared for the horror genre. 

And you know how in horror novels where people take forever to realize they’re in a horror novel? Johnstone takes that conceit and runs with it for the entire friggin’ book…folks, from the get-go Sam and Nydia are having encounters with the beyond, from Sam receiving ghostly visits and messages from his father (and even the archangel Michael), and Nydia coming to grips with both her mental powers and the fact that her mom is an ancient witch…and despite this, the two continue wondering “How did that happen??” throughout the damn book!! Or worse yet, each of them will get divine flashes of knowledge – which is to say deus ex machina exposition – and then they’ll be like, “I won’t even ask how I knew that.” 

Really, it’s laughable given how stupid it is. And given the sophomoric nature of God and the devil, one wonders what these two are even fighting for! To his credit, Johnstone has the Satanic figureheads Roma and Falcon asking these very same things…but any profundities are glossed over quickly as soon thereafter we’ll have Falcon ramming his “inhumanly large” dick into some unwilling female, or Roma will be conspiring to bed Sam so she can sire a demon child through him, even though Roma knows the birthing of the demon will kill her. Hey, maybe this is where Danzig got the idea for the Samhain song “The Birthing!” 

Another Johnstone schtick is to have characters act polite and normal to each other, while secretly hating each other or knowing they are divinely-opposed enemies…yet pretending that nothing amiss is going on. This happens a lot in The Devil’s Heart, particularly with Sam being cordial with Roma while thinking “evil bitch!” to himself and the like. And Roma being nice and friendly while wondering, “I wonder if he has his father’s cock?” (Of course she eventually discovers that he does!) This is all well and good, but Johnstone does it for like the entire novel – people pretending everything’s normal to one another and questioning how and why all these strange things are happening, even though they know they’re in the middle of a war between God and the devil and are on opposite sides. 

Oh, and not content with Roma and Falcon being immortal black magicians, they’re also vampires! This isn’t even followed through on, other than either of them randomly displaying their fangs and drinking some blood. This also raises the question of how Roma could give birth to Black and Nydia – and, indeed, why Nydia is of a different age than Sam if she was also conceived by Sam Balon – but Johnstone as ever doesn’t concern himself with the partticulars. 

There are periodic sequences that recall the wildness of The Nursery, which by the way is probably my favorite horror novel, if only due to how wild and depraved it is. Especially a bit where Sam and Nydia with her “full breasts” get it on, in full-on sleaze detail, Sam taking his half-sister’s virginity…but then after they’re constantly plagued with doubt, that they’ve sinned in some way…leading to a crazy bit where Satan intervenes as a test and makes ‘em super horny for each other, complete with Nydia fondling herself as she pleads for Sam to take her, and Sam screaming, “Fight it!” 

But then there is grimness as well, and out of the blue stuff at that – like when Falcon rapes Nydia (off-page), after which Sam makes love to her but has to be gentle because she “hurts.” This is understandable, given that we’re often informed of how inhumanly large Falcon’s dick is. There’s also a lot of grimness in the finale, in which Jane Ann endures the fate she’s been awaiting the entire novel – frequent, constant scenes of the ghostly Sam Balon telling her that her end will be violent – and she’s raped by all and sundry in the town, multiple times, and then crucified. Again, absolutely no reason is given for why Jane Ann has to so suffer for her own (and Sam Balon’s) salvation, given how goofy and unserious God is. Imagine a soldier going off to die in a war that Kamala Harris started, and one might understand the pointlessness of the sacrifice.  

We get that recurring bit of “God’s Warrior” kicking ass on full-auto, but it’s muted compared to The Devil’s Kiss; though Sam uses his dad’s gun, a Tommy subgun, which is “mysteriously” left for him in his room. Cue another of those “How did that get there?” conversations between the constantly-befuddled Sam and Nydia. 

Speaking of our heroes, the novel ends with Sam acting as their minister, just as his father married himself to Jane Ann (again, the book basically retreads its predescessor throughout), and also Nydia is pregnant – but the question is whether it will be Sam’s child or a demon child from Falcon. After stalling for the entire novel, Johnstone brings in a ticking clock finale where Sam’s seed must beat Falcon’s seed, before it’s too late. 

Humorously, Johnstone has stalled for so long that he rushes through the stuff he’s been promising for the entire friggin’ book; he so runs out of time that the old folks from The Devil’s Kiss, the ones who stayed in Whitfield and are told in the opening of this book that they’ll die in nine days…well, their entire fate is summarily rushed through, and Jane Ann’s happens off-page, though we see her in the afterlife with Sam. A scene which, despite it all, actually succeeded in bringing a tear to my eye, as did the off-hand comment that God, after Jane Ann has suffered and still demands to forgive her torturers, knows that “He had chosen well.”

Johnstone ends on a cliffhanger, with a normal baby born to Sam and Nydia, but meanwhile an eleven year-old girl they’ve saved from Satanic sodomy (Janet) is an undercover demon or somesuch, and who knows what might happen next. The story continues in The Devil’s Touch, which I’ll read a lot sooner than it took me to read this one. 

Overall, The Devil’s Heart moved fairly well for its near 400 pages, despite its constant stalling…like a Pavlov’s Dog, I kept reading for another dose of sleaze and perversion, and while the book never reached the heights (or depths) of The Nursery, or even The Devil’s Kiss, it kept me entertained, and it made me want to read the following installment.

Rest In Agony

Rest In Agony, by Paul W. Fairman

No month stated, 1967  Lancer Books

(Original Monarch Books edition 1963)

A few years before he gave us the sleazy masterpiece that was the Coffy novelization (also published by Lancer Books), prolific author Paul W. Fairman turned out this novella-length horror yarn…which, per the copyright page, was first published in shorter form in 1963 by Monarch Books, under the pseudonym “Ivar Jorgensen.” Featuring a ridiculously naïve narrator, an evil Satanic cult, and a cameo by none other than Jesus Christ Himself, Rest In Agony couldn’t be better suited for this Very Special Glorious Trash Christmas Day Post. 

That original Monarch edition must’ve been real short, as this Lancer version is only 230 pages long, with some big ol’ print. Sorry, “Easy Eye” print. The novel is essentially a novella, featuring only a handful of characters and a basic plot that features good against evil. The only curious thing is when it takes place; narrator Hal buries a few clues here and there that the events he is about to tell us occurred a long time ago (“I still remember it clearly to this day,” etc), so either Hal’s in some fictional future and telling us about something that happened way back in 1967 (or 1963, if you’re going with the original Monarch edition), or the events of Rest In Agony occur much earlier in the Twentieth Century. 

To make this even more curious, Fairman gives us no topical details in the novel; it takes place in a bland “Smalltown, USA” setting with zero mentions of popular culture. About the most we learn is that people can take buses to a nearby city, and there are department stores to shop in, so the idea I got was that the novel occurred somewhere in the 1930s. But then, given the lack of any details, it could really take place at just about any time – this is not the Paul Fairman who gave us the no-sleazy-stone-unturned masterwork that was Coffy, unfortunately. This version of Fairman is a barebones, meat-and-potatoes writer at best. And whereas his Coffy was X rated, Rest In Agony would be rated PG at most. 

Further giving the impression that this takes place in a more innocent time than the swinging ‘60s, Rest In Agony is narrated by the most impossibly naïve and pearl-clutching protagonist, Hal, who is 21 in the story but acts more like he’s even younger…or perhaps even older, as he’s a total fusspot, morally outraged, and altogether prudish wuss. Worse yet, the dude’s in love with his sister, 18 year-old Lisa, and Hal informs us that he’s lately been trying to subdue the dawning realization that his feelings for Lisa are a little more than sibling-based. 

“My uncle died in agony.” So Hal opens his tale, dropping a few of those vague clues that all this was so long ago, and we learn that the uncle is Amby, a wealthy gaddabout who is screaming and dying on his deathbed as the novel begins, all while Hal and Lisa sit down below and listen, waiting for the agony to end. But on the day of the funeral, Hal is home alone and the phone rings – and it’s the voice of Uncle Amby, begging Hal for help. 

The supernatural aspect does not return for some time, and per the horror template Hal tries to shrug this off as a hallucination or whatnot – at least, no one will believe him. Then there’s this business about “The Book of Ambrose,” a book Uncle Amby supposedly wrote, at least according to a local sports reporter named Hugh Payson who keeps bugging Hal and telling him he’s doing a paper on the wealthy and famous Ambrose Sampson, and this book of his would sure be a big help for his research. 

There’s also a lot of stuff about dreams; folks, Hal sets a precendent for a narrator who sleeps the most in a book that I’ve yet read on here. No joke, practically ever chapter ends with Hal telling us he’s going to bed, or just about to fall asleep, or even being dosed into unconsciousness and voyaging again into the Satanic palace of pain (where pain is pleasure)…I mean the guy certainly gets his rest in the book. 

The dreams are also fueled by the wanton carnality to be found in the Book of Ambrose; Hal finds this handrwitten journal in Uncle Amby’s room, and reads it in a daze – it’s “filth,” is all our prudish narrator tells us, and it serves to make him realize that there was a wholly different side to the kindly, wealthy uncle Hal knew: in reality, Ambrose Sampson was a thrall of Satan, taking part in a host of vile and horrific rituals (none of which are described at all). 

Hal eventually lets Lisa read the diary, and she too is shocked by it, but she’s more understanding than Hal and suspects there might be more to the story than Hal thinks, and also Hal can’t help but noting how hot and beautiful she is and stuff. Just when the hints of incest become too much to bear, Hal and Lisa are informed that Lisa isn’t really Hal’s sister; she was really the unwanted child of some chick Uncle Amby knew, and Hal’s folks took the baby girl in and raised her as their own, never telling her or Hal…until now! 

Well, all that taken care of, Hal and Lisa are free to go at it…though, again, this is not the author who just a few years later would give us Coffy. There’s some kissing and heavy petting and zero description, and zero sex, but Hal and Lisa sure are hankering for it. All told, this entire revelation that Lisa isn’t really Hal’s sister is wonky at best, and given the brevity of the novel you wonder why the whole “I thought Lisa was my sister” scenario was even included. I mean it only serves to make the narrator look like a prudish wuss who has incestual designs on his sister. 

He’s also stupid; it wouldn’t take a genius to figure that this sports reporter guy might not be totally on the level. Anyway, Hal and his friend (who happens to be Lisa’s boyfriend, but the character is so laughably immaterial to the plot that you wonder why he was even included) hop on a bus to go to a neighboring town to check out a store that Uncle Amby did business with…a store where one of Satan’s minions works, a hotstuff babe who runs the cosmetics stand! 

I did appreciate how Fairman made it clear that Satan’s throngs aren’t always like bigwigs or famous people or whatnot, but come on! A sports reporter and a perfume sales lady; surely we are on the lower rungs of Satanic evil. It gets even lower than that; Fairman works in a “rats” angle, where red-eyed rats with keen intelligence begin to populate Hal’s nightmares and show up at odd times…this hit on a personal note because I’ve been drafted into part-time, unpaid rat catching this past year, thanks to my wife’s friggin’ garden. I catch them in a live bait cage, and they’ve ranged from “you’d be a cute little thing if it wasn’t for that damn long tail” to “Oh my living God I had no idea rats could get that big!” 

Well anyway, the way these things go, Lisa is captured, held as bait (perhaps in a live bait cage) until Hal turns over that damn Book of Amrbose. Oh, and the sports reporter reveals himself to be Satan’s Representative…sounds like an episode of Everybody Loves Raymond that never was. For once Hal shows some insight when he asks Hugh why he had to take Lisa, given that Hal had already agreed to hand over the damn book…well, it’s because ol’ Satan’s Representative got a look at young Lisa, and now has the hellish hots for her. 

Hal spends the final quarter either sleeping, being knocked out, or experiencing things is a drugged daze. And also, apparently, getting laid – courtesy hotstuff Margo Danning, Hugh Payson’s sort-of Satanic commander in chief. She lures the addle-headed Hal to the ways of the “Prince,” entailing slightly risque parts where Hal witnesses Satanists having orgies and whatnot…all of it written in a very vague, obsfucated style. 

Meanwhile Lisa is there, but to her this opulent place of decadence is really a tacky dump, with white walls and no furniture; the implication is that all Hal sees is only in his mind, and his mind has been subverted by the devil. And also Hal, we are incessantly informed, is too “weak” to fight back – and we’re told this by the friggin ghost of his uncle, who pops up infrequently to gab with Lisa about how pathetic and weak Hal is…all while Hal is lying right there and listening to them! Soon it becomes clear that Lisa is the true hero of the tale, but Hal is the one telling the story. It is Lisa who has the power of pure spirit that cannot be touched by Satan, as memorably demonstrated when Hugh Payson tries to tempt her during a Satanic orgy…and then the heavens open…and Jesus Himself comes down to announce to Lisa how proud He is of her! (And yes, Fairman follows tradition and capitalizes the “He,” and I’ve followed suit.) 

Now I was of course reminded of that part in The Mind Masters #3 where God answered the hero’s prayer…but, as it turns out, Fairman has more up his sleeve. (No spoilers, but Hal for once gets smart and realizes it’s all Satan’s last, most desperate trick.) There’s no action finale; indeed, the finale is pretty lame, with the villains vanishing and also a few of them turning into rats…because meanwhile we’ve learned those red-eyed rats are in reality Satanists who have displeased the Prince and thus have been turned into rodents. But otherwise it’s a great cult to join, I’m sure, with lots of fringe benefits. 

Here in the finale we get one, uh, final reminder that all this was long ago; Hal tells us that “in future” he would always see Lisa this way, as the proud young woman who literally stood up to Satan. Oh, and as for Lisa’s dimwitted boyfriend, the stooge is so immaterial to the plot that the book ends with him still not finding out that Hal and Lisa aren’t really siblings; indeed, the guy spends the entire final quarter off-page, and is only mentioned again because Fairman presumably remembers him at the last moment. 

All told, Rest In Agony is a somewhat fun if overly stilted and melodramatic bit of ‘60s Satanic Panic, not nearly as sleazy or lurid as it would have been if it had been published a decade later. I have no idea how this edition differs from the original 1963 printing, but overall I’d say the novel was passable if ultimately forgettable. And the cover art reminds me of the Berkley editions of Clive Barker’s Books Of Blood! 

Merry Christmas!

The Nature Of The Beast

The Nature Of The Beast, by Peter Menegas

December, 1975  Bantam Books

This horror PBO was clearly intended to be the next big thing – cue back cover comparisons to The Exorcist and whatnot – but The Nature Of The Beast was clearly a dud, going on to obscurity; I only learned about it when randomly coming across the cover online. 

Will at Too Much Horror Fiction reviewed this one many years ago, and he did not like it at all, but in one of my contrary moods I decided to seek the book out anyway and give it a shot. “Surely it can’t be that bad,” I foolishly thought…and then just as foolishly I attempted to read the book. 

No; it’s bad. It is very bad. Author Peter Menegas makes one poor decision after another, and The Nature Of The Beast soon becomes a tiring and trying chore of a read, and I can only agree with Will that the best thing about the book is, by far, the cover. 

However, unlike Will I was actually foolish enough to read the entire book! He wisely gave it up midway through. Like I said, I was in a contrary mood, even if it was my own best interests I was, uh, contrarying. At least the book was fairly short, coming in at 240 pages. 

If you are a cat lover in particular I would advise you steer clear of The Nature Of The Beast. The novel opens with the protagonist, Dee Dee Burke, discovering a crucified cat corpse in her NYC penthouse, and as the novel progresses more of the poor critters will be gutted and nailed to a cross. 

And yes, that’s the name of the book’s hero: Dee Dee. Clue number one that this book’s going to suck. Self-described as a “Vogue mother,” Dee Dee is insufferable, a decades-early version of an AWFL. But then unlikable protagonists seems to be common in horror fiction, so maybe author Peneter Menegas did not intend for us to root for her. He does however expect our imaginations to do all the heavy lifting, as the most description we get about Dee Dee is that she is, apparently, pretty, and that she has “dark and straight hair.” There is zero in the way of exploitation in the novel, and in fact I think the word “breasts” doesn’t even appear once – resulting of course in a heaping helping of demerits. 

At any rate, Dee Dee has two punk kids: Alun, 8, and Terry, 6. And yes, it’s “Alun” with a “u,” but anyway the two kids talk like they’re decades older (or maybe my own 8-year-old is just WAY underdeveloped in the speech department), and weird enough they’ve lately taken to talking about weird visions and whatnot, and sticking to themselves. 

New York City isn’t much brought to life, as Dee Dee is a “going to the salon for the afternoon” type of wealthy mother and about the most we get are vague mentions of “Puerto Rican kids” who have come from uptown and are stirring up trouble. But we aren’t in New York for long; Dee Dee’s husband, a disaffected business bigwig who is so immaterial to the plot that I didn’t even bother to write his name down in my notes, announces that the family is moving to England for his job. 

Menegas slowly plays up the “horror stuff” with the gradual revelation that Alun and Terry’s prophecies are coming true…for example, in New York they say something about seeing animals from their bedroom window, and then that night Dee Dee finds out the family is moving to England, and then they go to England and have to get a temporary house in London, and it just so happens that Alun’s and Terry’s bedroom happens to face a public park that has a zoo in it. Hence, they’re seeing animals from their bedroom, just like they said they would in New York. 

Only, all this is so slowly developed that it lacks any impact or urgency. Dee Dee has to explain it all to her dimwitted husband, and even she can barely grasp the import. Oh, and meanwhile the sitter they hire claims that the two kids killed and crucified a cat right before her terrified eyes, and she’ll no longer be working for the Burkes, thank you very much. Even here Dee Dee refuses to believe it’s true…I mean just on and on with the lameness. 

It gets even lamer with Mr. Tregeagle, the portly and prancing (if you get my drift) owner of a local antiques store. Yes, friends, many scenes of Dee Dee going to the antique store: the horror! Of course it eventually becomes clear that there is an evil luring behind the portly shop owner’s smile, particularly when he learns that Dee Dee’s mother was a minor poet of cult fame who turned out epics based on Celtic myth. I mean first he names his heroine “Dee Dee,” and then he makes the main villain a fat gay guy who owns an antique store – either Peter Menegas had no idea what he was doing, or maybe he intended it all as a spoof, who knows. 

More cats are killed, more antiques are bought. The knives come out when Tregeagle invites Dee Dee to a country manor where his fellow cultists congregate for the weekend, featuring portly Brits in robes trying to sacrifice animals and whatnot. I should mention here that these cultists are Celts, not Satanists, so again Menegas was attempting something different. Unfortunately, different doesn’t always equal good. 

And I mean “the knives come out” only in the figurative sense, as really Tregeagle just gets incredibly bitchy with Dee Dee, who goes back home to her disaffected husband and wonders if her two brat kids really are mutilating and crucifying cats. But having wasted so many pages, Menegas finally decides to get far out on the horror front in the final quarter. 

In what could be a delirium or a descent into madness or even a real, actual meeting of the supernatural, Dee Dee finds her punk kids missing and goes running for them, out to the beach (at this point they’ve moved to some estate in Cornwall, which per the annoying English tradition is given its own pretentious name), and as she runs her teeth start falling out and she looks like a hag(!?). 

As if that weren’t enough, she has an encounter with a deer-headed man, presumably a god of some sort, and he has his way with Dee Dee on the beach, but Dee Dee slowly begins to enjoy it; Menegas never gets outright sleazy, but the sequence isn’t fade to black, either. After it’s all over the deer-man leaves and Dee Dee comes back to reality, no longer a hag, and with all of her teeth back in her mouth – and her kids are there, too. 

There follows a laugh-out-loud bit where Dee Dee meets with a swami, who explains that the deer-man was likely the Celtic god Cerunnos…but then was it all a dream? Who knows, and who cares. The Nature Of The Beast ends with Dee Dee apparently just as Celtic-attuned as her two sons are (apparently they’ve been chosen by the Celtic gods or some shit due to their linneage, or something)….and the husband’s still as disaffected…and thankfully the novel is over. 

Sometimes it is clear why books are obscure, and why they stay that way. I cannot recommend The Nature Of The Beast, as Peter Menegas makes one poor choice after another – the work of an author trying to write a “horror novel,” but not having any idea how to go about it.

Satan’s Child

Satan’s Child, by Peter Saxon

No month stated, 1968  Magnum/Lancer Books

Peter Saxon was a house name used by several British authors; the name is most associated with The Guardians, a swinging ‘60s horror-action series that was much loved by Curt Purcell of The Groovy Age Of Horror. Twenty years ago when I was a regular reader of Curt’s site, I went out and picked up a few of those Guardians books, but boy it appears they have become quite scarce and pricey these days; the same goes for the non-series Peter Saxon books, of which Satan’s Child is one. 

According to the Vault of Evil forum, this version of Peter Saxon was an author named William McNeilly, who turned out a few horror paperbacks, all of which are well-regarded by the Vaulters, with this one in particular seeming to be their favorite. Now that I’ve read this fast-moving horror pulp, I can agree with them; Satan’s Child is a very entertaining read, hitting a lot of high points in its 200-page runtime. 

Seemingly taking place in the 1700s, Satan’s Child is a supernatural-themed revenge thriller, like a Hammer take on Death Wish. But this isn’t a simple “kill my enemies” type of revenge yarn; it’s a “I’ll turn myself into a bull and sodomize my enemy’s wife with my two-foot-long dick” type of yarn. So yeah, this one’s really out there – and seems even more so, given the formal, almost omniscient tone McNeilly tells the story in. 

The novel takes place in rural Scotland, for the most part, and one must be prepared to wade through a lot of painful “Scots” dialog that would even give Irvine Welsh pause. When I see stuff like this, I’m reminded why my ancestors came to America. (Or maybe it was Ireland they left; no one seems to know or care.) This is a Scotland just barely out of the Middle Ages, of backwards villagers and deep-rooted superstitions, the type of people who would eagerly burn a woman for being a “witch.” 

This is how the novel begins, with an attractive young woman named Elspet Malcolm being dragged naked to the fire pit, her husband Magnus dutifully whipping her as women watch from the windows of their homes, commenting on the young woman’s “diddies.” Also watching are Elspet’s children: Iain, 13, and Morag, 11. The man whipping Elspet is not their father; Magnus Malcolm is the bastard’s name, a local who has brought Elspet and her two children from a neighboring town, and now he’s about to burn her for being a witch. 

We are given vague detail that Elspet might have been a little “friendly” with some of the men in the village, and this has put her in the cross hairs of Magnus and the village women, who have used the handy ruse of accusing her of witchcraft to get rid of her. McNeilly does not shy in the gruesome details here, complete with the TMI note that Elspet soils herself in her fear, and the horrors continue when the shell-shocked children go home and decide to run away…only for Magnus to come home and stop them, attempting to rape young Morag…before Iain comes along to defend his little sister with an axe. 

A curious note is that Magnus calls Morag a “spawn of Satan,” but Morag soon drops out of the narrative and it is Iain who grows up to be an adept of the Left Hand Path. Presumably Iain is the titular Satan’s Child, not Morag, but methinks McNeilly knew what he was doing here. At any rate we flash forward some unspecified time – it’s many years later and Iain is now an adult, but he still is treated like a young man, so I’m assuming we’re like 15 years or so out. When we meet Iain again he’s in the Himalayas, in the presence of the Masters of the Cult, where he is about to become an Adept of the Eleventh Degree. 

After a druggy initiation ritual, in which Iain is to have sex with a girl and slice her throat during the act – a scene played more for shock than sleaze – Iain finds himself magically transported back to Scotland, where he now is a powerful mage. Whether Iain actually killed the girl – or even had sex with her – is something our hero debates for a hot second before getting on to the business at hand: doling out supernatural vengeance to the townspeople who killed his mother, “so many years ago.” 

From here Satan’s Child follows what the Vault of Evilers refer to as a “vignette approach,” which is in fact a great description of how McNeilly tells his tale. As I’ve found is common with horror fiction, Satan’s Child doesn’t so much follow a protagonist as he or she goes about his or her business, but instead goes from one character to another – more accurately, one victim to another – as he or she suffers his or her horrific fate. 

The problem is that McNeilly has not properly set up any of the townspeople in the opening sequence. We only meet a few of them – Magnus, of course, and the “pricker” (aka the witchfinder), and a few of the women – but none of them are really brought to life so that we may hate them as much as Iain Malcolm does, so that we may lust for their violent demise as much as he does. This I felt was the ultimate problem with Satan’s Child. 

Another thing is that the characters are fairly boring, because they’re all simple townsfolk living in backwards 1700s Scotland. Regardless, Mcneilly displays a vicious imagination that goes in really bizarre places; in the first “vignette,” Iain turns himself into a woman (how very modern!) so as to sow a jealous riff between a husband and wife, leading to an almost EC Comics denouement. 

Even crazier is next; as mentioned above, Iain turns himself into a bull, and allows himself to be “found” by one of his targets, a man who sells and breeds cows and whatnot. There’s a crazy bit of cow-sex-exploitation here that goes into the realms of bestiality because the reader knows the bull is really Iain, and he literally fucks a cow to death, first chasing the poor girl around the pen and then slamming his two-and-a-half-foot dick into her, to the extent that it ruptures the poor animal’s heart! 

As one will note, Iain’s goal isn’t just to kill his victims, but to make them suffer psychologically as well. And spiritually, too; the pricker suffers in this regard, as he’s moved on to Paris and has left behind his rural backwoods witchfinder days. This sequence is masterfully written because it’s another indication that our hero is a bit too driven; essentially Iain works with a lower-level left hand pather, and the two run a caper on the pricker, posing as government agents who need the man’s old skills to get a witch to confess – and of course, after the pricker has crushed the poor girl’s fingers and whatnot, he finds out who she really is. A nice twisting of the blade on Iain’s part, but again it lacks much kick because we weren’t given sufficient time to hate the pricker’s guts at the start of the book. 

But this “vignette approach” continues through the breezily-written book…breezily, that is, save for the painful “Scots” dialog we are occasionally assailed with, not to mention the author’s occasional tendency to lecture us from his high horse. But I guess that’s to be expected from a British pulp writer of yore; they just couldn’t help themselves. 

There’s a more elaborate setup where Iain returns to the village and starts up an actual coven, leading to a crazy bit of one guy wearing the skin of another, gradually being crushed to death by the drying skin, Iain killing two of his prey for the price of one. Here McNeilly brings in a new character, a woman who has also come to the village and stays to herself, but employs several of the locals. 

Meanwhile Iain shows off his occult mastery, transforming himself into various animals and killing off more targets, before ultimately setting his sights on his main goal: his stepfather, Magnus Malcolm, who is still alive – and who has remarried, his new wife about to have a child. Here the author leaves no question that Iain Malcolm has gone too far to the dark side, as he plots to kill the baby – only to find himself in a war of magic with a white witch who is determined to save the child’s life. 

As the Vaulters noted in the link above, the climax is somewhat expected, but nonetheless well delivered, and even touching in a way. I also felt certain that McNeilly knew what he was doing with Iain not being the person referred to as “spawn of Satan” by Magnus, but Iain’s sister, Morag, which nicely sets up the finale; Magnus turns out to be wrong in many ways. 

Overall Satan’s Child was a lot more entertaining than I expected it to be, and certainly went in wild directions – perhaps made even more wild given the overal staid approach of McNeilly’s narrative. Supernatural things happen without much fuss, giving the impression of a world much closer to the power of the occult than our own. Now it looks like one of these days I’ll need to check out the other “Peter Saxon” books I have.

The Thing! (aka Ohhhhh, It Feels Like Dying)

The Thing!, by J.J. Madison

No month stated, 1971  Belmont Tower

(Originally published by Midwood Books as Ohhhhh, It Feels Like Dying)

The copyright page makes no mention that this grungy little paperback original was originally published by sleaze purveyors Midwood Books, but the title page does somewhat confusingly inform us that The Thing! was “first published as Ohhhhh, It Feels Like Dying.” At any rate, the re-titling of this Belmont Tower edition bears no relation to the contents of the novel; The Thing! is not a monsterama creature feature, but is instead what Grandma would’ve called a “stroke book,” with the horror stuff only a secondary concern to the sleaze. 

Which is to say, I loved the hell out of the book. I loved it! But then, I’m a sucker for Belmont Tower at its most grungy. What made this most surprising was the authorship of the book. According to The Vault Of Evil, “J. J. Madison” was in reality British author James Moffat – from all accounts a notoriously “prolific” author whose books are often considered subpar. And yet, I have only read and reviewed one other Moffat novel, the Nazi She-Devil yarn Jackboot Girls, which I really enjoyed, so admitedly I am judging the guy based off of two of his (apparently) three-hundred published novels(!). 

I say this British authorship is surprising because, if you’ve spent any time here, you know I’m not the biggest fan of British pulp. I find it fussy, stuffy, and stodgy. (I just copyrighted that as the title for a new animated series for kids, fyi.) And yet if I had not known a British author wrote The Thing!, I would’ve guessed it had been written by any of the American authors in Belmont Tower’s or Leisure Books’s stable. There is absolutely nothing “British” about the novel, absolutely nothing to give this away, and indeed there is a familiarity with New York City (another commonality with many Belmont and Leisure publications) that gives the impression “J.J. Madison” is a native New Yorker. 

I know zero about James Moffat, but I do see he was born in Canada, so perhaps this explains why his pulp comes off, at least in the two books of his that I’ve read, as more American than British. Then again, a pair of British pulpsters also turned in the decidely “American” Cut around the same time, so who’s to say – these pulp writers were so prolific they could probably mimic a tone when they wanted to, and maybe Moffat’s direction from his editors at Midwood Books was to “sound American.” 

Anyway, I digress, as usual. The Thing! is awesome, truly so, coming in at the usual brief Belmont Tower length (186 pages of big print) and offering all one could want in a sleazy vampire yarn. But those looking for straight horror might come away dissatisfied. To be sure, James Moffat follows a “sleaze first, horror second” approach throughout The Thing!, and folks that’s just fine with me. In fact the sexual material was so frequent and explicitly described, with copious detail on anatomical functions, that I almost started taking notes for future reference. 

But then, there’s just as much time spent on photography, and camera lenses, and how to properly pose models for perfect photos, something the Vault of Evil forum-goers also noted. Moffat adheres to the time-honored method of pulp writers everywhere in how he meets his word count by writing about stuff he’s interested in, even if it has no bearing on the plot. Thus one must be prepared for a lot of detail about photography and proper light and shadow and developing prints and all this other stuff you might not want to read in a novel about a sex-starved vampire babe. 

This, apparently, is the titular “Thing” of the Belmont reprint: Myra Manning, a stacked blonde movie goddess of yore who has gotten a second life in a mega-successful daytime soap opera titled “Deadly Love” which is clearly modelled after Dark Shadows. In the soap Myra plays a vampire, and we readers already know from the back cover that Myra herself is a vampire. Now as as I’ve said before, hot vampire babes are at the very top of the “hot evil women” heap, even higher up than Nazi She-Devils, but friends everyone knows that a hot vampire babe should have black hair, not blonde hair!! 

However, given the zeal with with James Moffat indulges in utter sleaze, filth, and depravity throughout the novel, I was willing to let this one slide. And yes of course, there are exceptions to this rule – I mean good grief, just consider Ingrid Pitt in the 1970 Hammer Films production The Vampire Lovers – but still. It’s a time-worn pulp conceit that good girls have blonde hair and bad girls have black hair, and it’s interesting that Moffat decided to overlook that. 

The book moves fast and Moffat does a great job of making it horror, yet at the same time never explicitly states that there is anything supernatural about it; again, this could be disappointing for someone looking for a standard type of horror novel, but there is absolutely nothing standard about The Thing!. It’s a dirty, smutty, yet undeniably fun little book, mostly because I got the strong mental impression of Moffat drunkenly chortling to himself as he pounded at his typewriter. 

We know what we are getting from the start, as Moffat opens the novel on the set of “Deadly Love,” as an episode of the soap is filming, with Myra as a vampire biting a man – and, when the cameras are turned off, the man complains that Myra has really bitten him. Moffat also shows a Hollywood that is long gone, with hardbitten, foul-mouthed veterans of the studio age who bitch at each other with no concerns over the “inclusion” of today; Myra’s poor co-star is raked over the coals for being gay, and Myra likes to strip in front of the director, displaying her “heavy breasts,” and taunting the gawking director: “You’re about to come in your pants.” 

Next we are introduced to the hero of the tale: Ken Painter, a ‘Nam vet who has no qualms with hitting dogs and roughing up women – another reminder of how “unsafe” 1970s pulp is in our modern era. Our intro to Ken is a harbinger of the type of book The Thing! will be: a several-page sex scene that leaves no sleazy stone unturned as Ken explicity boinks a woman he’s shacked up with in the Midwest…a woman who runs a gas station her dead husband left her, and who came across a stash of cocaine that spilled on the highway after a pharmaceutical truck crashed(!?), and who now spends her days in a dark room with the TV running, in a cocaine daze…and Ken has blissfully joined her for a few days of rampant coke-fueled sex. 

Friends, this is how you introduce your protagonist. 

Ken (as Moffat refers to him throughout the novel) was a combat photographer in Vietnam, and now he wants to make his living as a professional photographer, but he’s a penniless vagabond. He leaves the coke-sex girl and heads for New York, where we have another protracted sequence where Ken jury-rigs some pay phones in the Port Authority, and then runs afoul of the mobsters who run the payphones. Again, none of this has anything to do with the horror genre, but it does bring to life the grungy, crime-ridden New York of the early ‘70s. 

But after running into Myra Manning in Central Park – where Ken mauls the woman’s guard dog and nearly drowns the poor animal, all because it ruined his shot and got water on his camera – Ken is given a new opportunity: to be the personal assistant for famous actress Myra, who promises she’ll get a publisher who will do a book of photos of Myra, photos taken by Ken. 

First, though, the two enjoy an exuberant sex scene that is only a precursor of the wild sleaze we will encounter as the novel progresses: 

Moffat foreshadows that there is more to Myra Manning than there seems: she’s a beauty with a perfect body, but Ken was a “kid” when she was a Hollywood queen and also there’s that pale-faced former assistant of hers with a bandage on his throat who slinks out of Myra’s penthouse apartment on Ken’s first day, trying to throw Ken a meaningful look… 

But really, at this point it’s a Hollywood novel, with a lot of stuff about the filming of Myra’s soap opera and the squabbling that goes on behind the scenes. That is, with a lot of material about photography…and a lot more explicit sex, as Myra begins to “initiate” Ken into something unstated, first by secretly dosing him with strychnine and then engaging him in yet more super-explicit shenanigans: 

But it’s not all drug-fueled super sex with the beautiful Myra who has almost superhuman control of her womanhood (cue those anatomincal notes I mentioned): in between the memories of sexual bliss Ken is haunted by scenes from “a nightmare,” with Myra wearing a “half-mask” with “canines,” and the feeling of blood flowing down Ken’s side as she feeds from his neck, but Ken is sure none of this could be real. Still, there’s this band-aid on his throat, and Myra’s insistence that he not remove it so that it can heal properly…claiming that Ken was so drunk he cut himself shaving… 

Then there’s Noire, Myra’s professor friend who is a mountain of muscle with a shaved head…the impression is he’s an Anton LeVay type after a few visits to the gym. He’s a specialist in all things vampire, and has been teaching Myra about it, and there’s a lot of stuff about historical vampires, and Noire’s insistence that such creatures existed…but, again, there’s nothing here that they are supernatural creatures, ie the living dead as you’d encounter in traditional vampire fiction. Instead, the impression Moffat gives is that these “vampires” are humans who drink blood to stay young. Moffat leaves it vague enough that the reader could take it either way, but the fact that Myra is a famous TV actress who often admires herself in the mirror should tell you right away that the traditional vampire lore is not being followed here. 

The “nightmare” stuff becomes more extreme as Myra continues dosing Ken with strychnine – which leaves him fuzzy-minded but super-aroused, capable of all-night action – and also throwing orgies where Ken witnesses such craziness as a young girl being ravaged by Noire’s massive “phallus.” As I said, the depravity is just off the charts. 

Only gradually does Ken realize what’s really going on: Myra is a vampire and she’s using him as a meal on legs. Ken finds salvation in another group who works on the soap opera, and with their help he escapes Myra’s clutches…and also he also helps a guy with some pointers on photography; even in the climax Moffat still indulges in page-filling, but it’s so well-written and quick-moving that I didn’t mind. 

More importantly, here Ken finds true love, courtesy brunette hottie Carol, an up-and-coming starlet on the soap who initially gave Ken the cold shoulder. Moffatt again displays his penchant for sizzling shenanigans when Carol gets Ken to do a nude photo session of her – for a play she’s interested in, naturally – and then she essentially throws herself on him, leading to a sex scene just as explicit as those with cougar Myra: 

SPOILER ALERT: Skip this and the next four paragraphs if you don’t want to know the finale, but given the obscurity and scarcity of The Thing!, I thought I’d note what happens for posterity. Basically Myra and Noire go the expected route and take Carol prisoner, so like a true Belmont Tower hero Ken goes out for revenge. Yes, I know Midwood originally published the book, but Midwood was a Belmont Tower imprint, so it still works. 

So Ken goes after Myra and, having seen how she “ages ten years” in just a few minutes without her amphetimines (again, the connotation is that Myra is not a traditional vampire, but just a human who has vastly elongated her life by drinking blood and taking uppers), Ken strips Myra and ties her to a chair in the empty studio and then he essentially broils her with high-watt studio lights placed directly on her nude body. Curiously Moffat does not have Myra break, even as her body shrivels in the intense heat, and Ken at length even begins to respect her strength. 

From there to a brief confrontation with Noire, who is about to rape Carol with that massive phallus of his; a fight which sees Ken nearly get ripped apart, and features a finale that seems like a rip-off until you think about it and realize Moffat has pulled off a neat trick with proper setup. Essentially, Noire is about to escape with Carol in his car and he puts Ken’s face up against the exhaust, trying to smother him. Then Noire gets in his car, thinking Ken is dead – but Ken opens the door and pulls Carol out. We recall then the opening setup, in which we were informed that Ken was drummed out of ‘Nam because he’d developed a tendency to hyperventilate when nervous. Thus, when Noire was “smothering” Ken with the exhaust fumes, the carbon monixide was actually helping Ken control his hyperventilation! I’m not sure if the science is legit, but Moffat certainly writes it with confidence. 

That said, Noire’s sendoff is laughable – in his haste he barrells out of the parking lot and runs into a truck, killed by the steering wheel slamming into his chest! And at novel’s end we learn that the withered hag that was Myra Manning has “disappeared” from the world, and, safely knowing that her legend will live forever, she plans to dose herself with strychnine, rip out her teeth and cut off her fingertips, and then douse herself with gasoline and immolate herself “before the tremors” make muscle movement impossible! 

And meanwhile Ken and Carol head off for a happily ever after… 

End spoilers. Yes, the finale is rushed, but hell, what Belmont Tower doesn’t have a rushed finale? I was satisfied that James Moffatt even told us what happened to all of the characters. All told, I loved the hell out of The Thing!, but I will be the first to acknowledge that your own mileage will vary. 

Here is the cover of the original Midwood edition, from 1971, which does a better job than any of the reprints of depicting the actual contents of the book...though note the artist at least also agreed that hot and evil vampire babes should have black hair: 

And here is a link to Too Much Horror Fiction, where you can see a few other covers Belmont Tower graced this book with over the years; according to a comment Andy Decker made at the Vault Of Evil forum, the copy I read, the cover for which is shown at the top of the review, might actually have been from 1978. If so, the copyright page itself only states 1971. My assumption is Belmont Tower just took the actual Midwood Books printing from 1971 and affixed different covers to it over the years.

The Werewolf vs The Vampire Woman

The Werewolf vs Vampire Woman, by Arthur N. Scarm

No month stated, 1972  G-H Books

Ramble House trade paperback reprint (As The Werewolf vs The Vampire Woman), 2007

I’m certain I have a copy of this obscure paperback tie-in somewhere, but I’m unable to find it – thankfully, Ramble House has reprinted The Werewolf vs The Vampire Woman, and their reprint might be even superior to the original, as it contains cool interior illustrations by Alan Hutchinson. 

This novelization of an equally-obscure Spanish horror film is probably more well-known today than it was in 1972. In fact it’s interesting that this movie, part of the cycle of werewolf movies starring Paul Naschy, was even slated for a novelization in America; too bad more drive-in fare wasn’t novelized at the time, but at least we’ll always have Coffy. 

I have not seen all twelve (or thirteen, if you count the rumored “lost” film) of the Naschy werewolf movies, but I have seen a few of them, The Werewolf vs The Vampire Woman among them, and that’s more than can be said for tie-in author “Arthur M. Scarm,” who clearly has not seen the movie, and here turns in a wholly original novel that is like nothing I have read before…and given the amount of trashy, bizarre stuff I’ve reviewed on here since 2010, that’s really saying something. 

Instead of the Gothic yarn lensed by director Leon Kilmovsky, with Naschy’s werewolf character in rural France and trying to save a pair of cute co-eds from a resurrected black magic sorceress of a vampire, Scarm’s “novelization” is a dark comic epic in comparison, a nasty, mean-tempered, but nonetheless humorous story about a werewolf and a vampire queen, and the havoc they wreak together. 

It’s also insane, and seems to be a booze and/or coke-fueled first draft, jumping wily-nily from one atrocity to another, Scarm laughing madly at the typewriter as he pounds the keys. And yet for all that, there is something to The Werewolf vs The Vampire Woman that ascends the nasty nature of the book and instead comes off like the morbid tale of two doomed characters. 

Scarm isn’t content to just make up his own story instead of following the film; he also comes up with a new approach to werewolves and vampires. For the former – well, despite those cool interior illustrations I mentioned in the Ramble House edition, which show “hero” Waldo the Werwolf (presumably Scarm’s version of Waldemar Danisnsky, which is the name of Naschy’s character in the films) as a full-blown wolf man, complete with fur and fangs, Scarm specificies in the novel that Waldo looks for the most part like a normal man…save for a curious “band of hair around his middle,” which is the sign that he is a werewolf. 

As if this wasn’t WTF? enough, we also learn that once a year all werewolves become actual werewolves, ie with the fur and fangs, and Waldo’s night happens to be New Year’s Eve. This is the night the werewolves go really wild and murder with a total bloodlust…not that they don’t kill the same way every other night of the year. Even more strangely, Scarm has it that the werewolves don’t kill by tearing people apart, or by strangling them like Larry Talbot in the old Wolf Man movie; no, Waldo uses stakes, which he carries around in his back pocket and hammers into the hearts of his prey: men, women, and children. 

Vampires in Scarm’s world are also different: they can go out in daylight and they can be photographed and filmed. Actually, Scarm doesn’t mention that this is even notable, giving the impression that he’s not aware that vampires traditionally are supposed to shun daylight and cast no reflection. There are parts where Wandessa, the vampire queen – the same name the character has in the film, though she isn’t referred to as a vampire queen there – looks at her reflection in the mirror, admiring her beauty…not to mention the part toward the end where she becomes a movie superstar. 

I also forgot to mention, but in addition to being “daywalkers” and having reflections/images that can be captured on film, vampires also have “hollow teeth” for fangs, and drink blood direclty through these teeth, like straws. They also don’t seem to be very averse to religious iconography; at least, nothing of the sort is used against Wandessa in the book. 

I’ll refrain from comparing the novelization to the actual film, as there is no comparison. Other than the very beginning, which sees “Waldo” being brought back to life by a foolish coroner who takes the silver bullet out of the dead man’s chest, not believing there’s any such thing as werewolves. As with the film, Waldo kills the man and escapes, and also as with the film, we have a pair of coeds – Genevieve and Elvira – who are interested in the legendary Wandessa, and want to find her for a class project or something. 

It’s here that the novelization deviates, and wildly so, but for posterity, the movie proceeds on an altogether level-headed narrative, at least when compared to Scarm’s story: young Genevieve (hotstuff German actress Barbara Capell) accidentally brings Wandessa to life, and the sexy vampire babe (as played by Patty Shepard) is out for blood – and meanwhile Waldemar and Elivra (big-haired Gaby Fuchs) fall in love. Overall it’s a pretty cool movie, and I’m sure it was a blast to see at the drive-in. 

Scarm says to hell with all that. Genevieve and Elvira are college students who want to find Wandessa, the queen of the vampires, and somehow Waldo the Werewolf hears about this and decides to tag along – that is, when he isn’t banging them, usually both at the same time. Now let me tell you right here and now, while you will often see Arthur Scarm’s The Werewolf vs The Vampire Woman described as sleazy, or filled with sex, I want to specify that all of the sex either occurs off-page or is not even described at all. 

Indeed, there is an almost “storytelling” vibe to the tale, a half-assed omniscient tone that gives the impression that Scarm has pulled up a chair and is telling you a tall tale; there is no real attempt at conveying a proper story, and the entire thing comes off more like the booze-fueled recounting of a legend or myth. It also occurred to me that Scarm’s story is like a ‘50s pre-code horror comic, operating as it does in a non-reality, almost fairy tale-like atmosphere, with a vibe that is both vicious and humorous. 

Waldo is certainly a hard character to relate to, and it’s clear Scarm doesn’t intend him to be a hero. Waldo is a murderer, killing hundreds of men, women, and children in the course of the book, if not by a stake to the heart then by other ways. Wandessa is equally as sadistic, though there are several parts where she tries to break free of her vampire ways, “drinking just enough blood” to keep her satiated, but ensuring that her victims don’t die. 

Actually another interpretation of Scarm’s The Werewolf vs The Vampire Woman is that it’s a thinly-veiled account of two alcoholics getting on and off the wagon. Waldo is the driver, comfortable with his murderous ways and constantly pushing Wandessa to embrace her bloodlust, and Wandessa will put up a struggle but ultimately fall off the wagon and start killing again. But soon enough they both want to be free of their addictions, leading to crazy parts where they go to a therapist. 

There’s no attempt whatsoever at conveying realism; I don’t expect that from a horror novel, but Scarm sets the novel in an entirely different reality. This is apparent from the beginning, in which a pair of college co-eds want to wake up a vampire queen for their college thesis. Scarm doesn’t even bother much with background material; Wandessa has been “dead” in a coffin since the late 1800s, but cannot remember how she got there, and Scarm never bothers to fill in the blanks. As for Waldo, we have no idea how he became a werewolf, but we know he certainly wasn’t born one, because, in another curious tidbit Scarm relays to us, werewolves are made, not born, because werewolves cannot have orgasms. 

Crazily enough, Scarm sticks to his bizarre supernatural theologisms through the book as if they were holy writ; after reading this novel, I thought maybe I’d missed something and maybe werewolves really did look just like normal people, only with a band of hair around their “middle.” And hell, maybe they do stake their prey instead of strangling them or eating them. Hell, who’s to really say?? 

The first chapter alone is nuts. Waldo comes back to life, hooks up with the coeds, and they go looking for Wandessa’s grave. And as mentioned Waldo has his sexual way with both gals, and while the stuff isn’t explicit we do learn that Waldo has a giant “wang,” which is another indication he’s a werewolf. Oh and there’s a third girl, Ruth, who didn’t even exist in the film, a nurse who fell in love with Waldo when he was brought back to life by the coroner (after which Waldo promptly took advantage of her there in the operating room – but she liked it, of course), and who is now in love with Waldo and wants to go wherever he goes. 

Waldo is a bad guy for sure, and to his credit he tells the girls – and us readers – this from the get-go: “Only expect evil from a werewolf.” He treats the girls roughly (though again, they enjoy it), kills to slake his bloodlust, and secretly plots to drive a stake into Wandessa’s heart when they find her because he hates all vampires. “And yet, I was in love with a vampire once,” Waldo ruminates, but this hint of actual backstory is so quickly cast aside that I actually laughed aloud. 

Scarm is like that throughout; he trades between total lurid vileness and soul-plumbing introspection. To be honest, if I hadn’t known better I would’ve suspected The Werewolf vs The Vampire Woman might have been an early novel by Len Levinson, as Scarm’s style is not totally dissimilar. Then again, I might be just as inclined to suspect Russell Smith, given the breathless narrative tone and the overall deranged vibe. But as it turns out, according to the sleuthing of Paul Collins, “Arthur Scarm” was really a writer named Leo Guild…who it turns out I’ve reviewed on here in the past, at least a short piece he wrote about Hollywood for a men's magazine. 

Oh and I forgot to mention, but Scarm (I just prefer to refer to him by his goofy pseudonym) gives werewolves all kinds of bizarre powers…like, Waldo can enter the dreams of people, turning the dream into a nightmare, and also he can…shrink a woman’s breasts, which he promptly does to one of the girls, leading to the unforgettable line, “My wonderful breasts!” Not to worry, as Waldo later grows them back, all via black magic…this scene alone is very Len Levinson-esque and would’ve had me emailing Len asap to see if he wrote the book. 

The novel goes from one atrocity to another as Waldo kills all and sundry – even, suprisingly enough, characters we thought were going to be important to the plot. In one instance Waldo gets so mad that one of the three girls tricked him into having sex with her that he bashes her to pieces…then, in one of Scarm’s frequent bizarre interludes, Waldo runs away and disguises himself as a clown, apropos of nothing, and starts following the two remaining girls as they hunt for Wandessa’s hidden grave. He even buys the circus so he can follow them around “without drawing attention.” 

Unlike the film, Wandessa is the co-protagonist of this novelization; upon her resurrection in a graveyard, she hangs out with the group, fighting against or alongside Waldo for the rest of the book. Waldo plans to kill her, but due to comic reasons is unable to put his silver knife in her heart, but after thinking of it a bit he’s happy because the two can team up and kill people together – the first pairing of a werewolf and a vampire, we’re told. 

Eventually, Wandessa is the only recurring character outside of Waldo who remains in the book, and this only furthers the fairy tale nature of Scarm’s narrative; these two are like the center of the universe, despite being impossible to track down by the police. They rove across the country, killing with abandon – and even here it’s not traditional horror novel stuff, with bizarre, darkly comic stuff like the two of them fixing the switches at an intersection, causing a horrific pile-up of cars, and then Waldo and Wandessa going into the wreckage to kill the maimed survivors. 

Scarm shows no limitations with how far he will go, with an especially repugnant scene where Waldo puts his murderous eye on a group of kids, even luring them back to his apartment so he can kill them. Even Wandessa is sickened when Waldo murders a young boy by smashing his head; for her part, Wandessa “only drinks a small amount” of a little girl’s blood, just enough to satiate herself but to not kill the girl. 

Waldo is even more crazed on his “werewolf night,” ie New Year’s Eve, where he turns into your traditional-looking furry werewolf and goes on a kill spree. Even here Scarm follows his own path; on his special night, Waldo is granted additional powers, and indeed can will himself anywhere he wants just by thinking about it(!). So we have crazy horror movie stuff where he’ll just appear on a train and start staking people in the heart, travelers who find themselves confronted by a werewolf that has come out of nowhere. 

Scarm shows a definite talent for keeping the madcap, vicious plot moving, but it seems clear that he writes himself into a corner, as the second half of the novel goes into freefall. First, Wandessa, who like a recovering alcoholic keeps trying to reform, only to be dragged back down by Waldo, sets her “friend” up with the cops and then takes off to hide in Hollywood…and here we go in an entirely different direction, as a naïve Wandessa somehow lands herself a contract with a movie studio. 

Now it’s essentially a Hollywood novel, only our aspiring starlet is a vampire. Of course Scarm has it that she’s starring in a horror movie, as a vampire no less, and soon Wandessa is using her true vampire nature to become a bigger and bigger star – “actually” biting her co-stars and whatnot. Things get progressively goofier when Wandessa tells the director she knows a “real werewolf” and Waldo gets hired onto the picture! 

Now the narrative has changed entirely, and instead of murderers on a killspree, Waldo and Wandessa are big Hollywood celebrities. They’ve also found true love – though Scarm toys with the idea, he never has Waldo and Wandessa become an item – and are about to get married(!), Wandessa to a black actor and Waldo to a butch sort of stunt woman. Meanwhile the cops are closing in…which is itself goofy, as these two commit atrocities throughout the novel, yet are always “hiding” from the cops…cops who can never seem to catch them. 

Not to make this sound like War and Peace or anything – though to be sure, I’d rather read The Werewolf vs The Vampire Woman than War And Peace – but Scarm does a good job working in the “doomed couple” nature of Waldo and Wandessa, particularly when it comes to their (super)natural hatred for one another. This plays out in a rushed but memorable climax which sees Wandessa having some hot lesbian lovin’ with Waldo’s fiance…much to Waldo’s fury. 

I do appreciate that Leo Guild/Arthur Scarm took the opportunity to write an entirely new story, yet at the same time it would’ve been just as cool if he’d novelized the actual film. I haven’t seen all the Naschy vampire movies, just the ones from the ‘70s, and The Werewolf vs The Vampire Woman is one of the better ones, and a book that actually told its tale would have been welcome. I’m going to bet Naschy himself was unaware that this novelization told a completely different tale than his movie. 

Thanks again to Ramble House for making this bizarre novel available for the masses – head over to their website for your copy today! Guaranteed to be the strangest book you will read this year…or any other year! To be honest, I feel that I’ve barely even described how whacky and disturbed this novel is. 

Here’s the cover for their edition, with artwork by Gavin L. O’Keefe:

Mummies

Mummies, edited by Steve Banes

December, 2017  IDW Publishing

This super-cool trade paperback collects several mummy-centric yarns from the pre-code horror comics of the early 1950s, and boy I had a lot of fun reading it. As a kid in the ‘80s I was a devoted comic reader, but even then I was interested in older stuff, so I knew about the horror comics of the ‘50s, particularly those by EC. As a Stephen King-obsessed teen in the early ‘90s I was really into EC, and I recall having several black-and-white hardcover collections of Tales From The Crypt and Vault Of Horror and the like. Now that I think of it, I wonder whatever happened to them… 

Well anyway, Mummies makes for perfect Halloween reading, collecting as it does several non-EC horror comics. While the stories here are certainly repetitive – basically, an ancient Egyptian mummy comes to life and kills a bunch of people – every single one of them is fun, probably an element that is sorely lacking in today’s comic books. 

I stopped reading comics decades ago, but I still have an appreciation for the old stuff, and there’s nothing better than pre-code horror. I’d forgotten how vicious these comics were, not to mention how darkly comic, which makes it even more humorous when you realize they were essentially produced for the kids of the day. Well, it goes without saying that things have become a lot more watered down in the world of kid’s entertainment in the ensuing decades; then again, I read a lof of pre-code horror comics when I was a kid, and even then I was able to appreciate the goofy, over-the-top vibe without finding any of it scary, so those ‘50s comics creators knew what they were doing. 

I was never a horror kid, but I did have an early obsession with the Universal Monsters Mummy. Looking back on it, I’m certain this obsession started with the cover of an LP my brother, who is seven years older than me, bought sometime in the late ‘70s. A record titled Famous Monsters Speak, which was a spoken-word affair, with a Dracula story on one side and a Frankenstein Monster story on the other side. Despite the cover showing the Mummy, the Wolf Man, and even the Creature From The Black Lagoon (another childhood favorite), none of these three characters were actually featured on the record! Well, all that aside, the illustration of the Mummy really appealed to me: 

I also recall that shortly after this, probably in the very early ‘80s, when I was six or seven years old, I got a Mummy costume for Halloween. One of those oldschool deals with the plastic mask. I just searched for it on Google and found it – apparently it was a Ben Cooper costume from 1979:

I was also so into mummies that I wrote a story about one when I was seven years old.* But it was not until years later that I actually saw all of the Universal Mummy movies, snatching up the DVD box set when it was released. I have fond memories of being unemployed during the summer of 2011 and watching the Mummy movies (and the other Universal horror movies) while drinking my way through several bottles of wine I grabbed off the clearance shelf at Tom Thumb…ah, good times. 

I don’t recall seeing too many mummy pre-code horror comics; I’m sure EC had some that I read back in the day, but if so I don’t remember them. I can see why the concept might not have been used very much, as mummies don’t really lend themselves to much return on investment so far as horror fun goes; just try watching the Lon Chaney Jr. Mummy movies in one sitting. Indeed, you’ll quickly see why clearance-rack wine is necessary. The movies are incredibly one-note and repetitive…nonetheless they are still fun, and I’d rather watch them than any modern-day horror movie. 

This trade paperback was edited by Steve Banes, aka Mr. Karswell, who for many years has run the indispensible The Horrors Of It All blog, where he uploads high-quality scans of stories from his pre-code horror comic collection. This blog is one of the best on the entire internet, and I try to read a comic a day on there – and the blog has been running for so long that there is an incredible wealth of material on there. In fact, many of the stories in Mummies can be found on The Horrors Of It All. 

But still, it is a different experience entirely to see the comics phyiscally, ie not on a computer or device screen, and Banes and IDW have done a phenomenal job reproducing these old comics. For one I am happy to say that they have not felt the need to tidy things up or re-color the comics. Personally I hate it when old comics are re-colored; like for example that Amazing Spider-Man Ultimate Newspaper Comic Collection book I reviewed on here a few months back: great, fun stories, with wonderful art, but the colors had been redone to make it all look more polite and “correct.” 

Personally, I’m a huge fan of the oldschool, blurred-out, “messy” look of vintage four color comics, something I was unable to appreciate all those years ago in the black-and-white EC Comic hardcovers I collected. Sure, the art itself looked great, but missing out on the color really took something away…and, as a simple flipping through Mummies will indicate, the colors certainly popped in pre-code comics. In fact there is an almost proto-psychedelic vibe to these comics in how the colors are so overdone and deranged; in many ways these comics are also harbingers of the drive-in horror fare of the following decade, the cheap monster flicks of the 1960s with their lurid and overdone Technicolor prints. 

And that’s another thing: these comics, despite being from the ‘50s and being made for kids, actually play like the more sensationalistic monster movies of the ‘60s. The only thing missing is the nudity. The violence certainly isn’t missing: in the stories here you will see countless murders, and atrocities like people eaten alive by ants or put inside of iron maidens. And there is in fact a T&A quotient, with each story featuring a young female with ample charms who is often put in a compromising position that results in her clothing being a little torn…yes, the comic producers of yore certainly knew what kind of material their young male (and older male!) readers wanted to see. 

I was interested in the uniformity of design the various artists followed for their depictions of the mummies. Instead of the Boris Karloff or Lon Chaney Jr. approach, which was the mummy wrapping overtop the entire face, the pre-code horror comic illustrators went for a look more aligned with the Ben Cooper costume I showed above, with a demonic skull-like face. They’re more “Pushead” than “Karloff:”

I mean just take a look: 

Only a few mummies in the stories collected here deviate from this look. The mummies themselves are all of a piece, though; unliving pharaohs who are either awoken by wily professors or come back to life due to a curse that was placed eons ago. It’s also humorous that all of the archeologists are either superstitious, stubborn, vengeful, or all three at once. 

The stories are busily plotted despite being so short; some pages are overstuffed with dialog and captions, to the extent that the actual art is often lost in the shuffle. But to be honest this is part of the charm; I much prefer the cluttered storytelling of old comics to the streamlined, “cinematic” art of today’s lame comics. 

Overall I had a lot of fun reading Mummies, and even though I wasn’t even born yet in the ‘50s, it still made me nostalgic, mainly because I did read ‘50s horror comics as a kid in the ‘80s. It made for perfect Halloween reading. Here are some random photos from the book:  

*As mentioned above, I was so inspired by my Halloween mummy costume that I wrote a story about it. I was seven at the time, if not younger, and it was a “drawings with text on construction paper” type of story. Well anyway, all I recall is that the story, humorously, followed the exact same template as many of the stories in Mummies, proving that even a little kid realizes there’s little variety in a mummy-centric horror story: basically, a pharaoh dies, becomes a mummy, and centuries later the mummy comes to life and wreaks havoc. 

I wrote a lot of stories as a kid, but here is why this particular one has always stuck with me. After writing it, I proudly showed the story to my mom, and I recall her standing there and reading it as I waited expectantly for her approval. I recall her face became troubled as she read a certain line, and then she showed me the story and asked, “What does this sentence say?” 

It was at the beginning of the story, the part set in the ancient past, where the pharaoh had just died and was about to be mummified. “Oh,” I said, “that sentence says, ‘The servants wrapped the pharaoh’s body.’” 

The troubled look abruptly left my mom’s face. “Okay,” she said, “but you spell ‘wrapped’ with a ‘w’ and with two ‘p’s.” 

It wasn’t until many years later that I realized the sentence I had actually written: “The servants raped the pharaoh’s body.” No wonder my mom looked so concerned. 

What made me remember this was that look that briefly passed over my mom’s face as she read my story – I got a first-hand, real-time glimpse of the power of storytelling, and how it can elicit both positive and negative reactions. 

Of course the irony is, if I were to write a mummy horror story today, I probably would write, “The servants raped the pharaoh’s body.”