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.

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:

The Penetrator #45: Quaking Terror

The Penetrator #45: Quaking Terror, by Lionel Derrick

February, 1982  Pinnacle Books

Boy, we’re getting into the homestretch of The Penetrator, aren’t we? At this point there are only a few instalments left until #53, the series finale. And I’m happy to say that Mark Roberts continues to show a new investment in the series, as Quaking Terror is for the most part a bunch of goofy fun, Roberts doling out juicy gore and explicit sex with aplomb – meaning there is none of the half-assedry of the past twenty-some (or more!) volumes. 

I kind of hoped it would be the case when I saw the cover (credited to George Wilson on the copyright page), and I’m happy to report that Quaking Terror is indeed Mark “The Penetrator” Hardin versus a vampire! Not just any vampire, either, but Count Dracula! Granted, Roberts doesn’t go all the way with the setup, but it’s evident that he wanted to. Throughout the book he walks a thin line that the novel’s villain is either Dracula or just some nutjob Eastern European named Magarac who merely thinks he’s Dracula. Otherwise the horror-action hybrid you might be hoping for doesn’t really exist in the actual novel, as Mark Hardin spends the majority of the 200 pages gunning down technicians and guards who work for the would-be vampire. That said, Quaking Terror does at least end with a chainsaw-vs-chainsaw showdown between the Penetrator and Count Dracula! 

There’s also some of Roberts’s typical continuity, as one of Magarac’s men worked on the vibrating “super gun” that Mark destroyed way back in #21: The Supergun Mission. This is what Magarac-Dracula is using to set off volcanoes around the United States, in order to get a ransom from the government. Roberts ties into the then-recent Mount St. Helens eruption, implying that Magarac was behind it, and is now looking to set off more volcanoes. Given that there are limited areas where Magarac can carry out this plan, the entirety of Quaking Terror occurs in Washington state. 

Speaking of topical references, Mark Roberts even finds the opportunity to mention Mork & Mindy; Magarac breaks over the airwaves of the United States just as “Mork had climbed into his Orkan egg.” This line actually took me back; for no reason whatsoever, it made me remember a Mork & Mindy toy some kid in elementary school had at the time (I would’ve been seven years old when this book was published), and I really wanted one of my own, but I never got one. It was this cool little Mork action figure that came with an egg, and I’d completely forgotten about it over the past four friggin’ decades, until I read this line in Quaking Terror. I guess I must’ve really wanted the damn thing, as here I am 50 years old and I still remember it – well anyway, here is the toy. 

Continuing on, Magarac breaks over the TV airwaves to make his threat – sort of how Max Headroom hijacked signals a few years later – and this causes panic across the US. In particular the Mafia gets involved, putting together a hit squad to take out Magarac, becase he’s infringing on their territory. Or something. It’s reasons like this that leads me to conclude that Roberts wanted to do a straight horror-action hybrid, but felt straitjacketed by the conventions of the series. So instead of vampires, the Penetrator fights mobsters and henchmen, and Magarac stays off-page for the majority of the text. 

This is unfortunate, as Roberts really builds him up in the opening. For one, he looks more like Nosferatu than Dracula; Wilson’s cover art is great, but Roberts actually describes Magarac as being “egg-bald [with a] long, lobey head and over-large ears, all flour paste white so that the huge, smoke-gray eyes and nearly lipless gash of a mouth made stygian holes in a skeleton mask.” Ten points for the creation of the word “lobey,” by the way. Magarac also has a dwarf “familiar” named Koslov, who prepares Magarac’s victims – usually employees who have failed him in some way – for a “life bath.” Meaning, their veins are opened and Magarac does something with the blood, though it’s never outright stated if he drinks it. But boy, Mark Roberts ultimately drops all of this in the course of the novel; hell, the dwarf doesn’t even appear again, and there’s no part where Mark Hardin kicks him or anything. I mean, and spoiler alert, but Koslov the dwarf familiar is dead when the Penetrator comes upon him, at the very end of the novel! 

Mark Hardin doesn’t appear in the book until page 28. Roberts spends the preceding pages in exposition overload; we have an overlong bit where a scientist goes on and on about volcanoes and what sets them off and etc…and then, humorously, the scientist is killed off like a page later. But this guy was friends with Professor Haskins, ie the Penetrator’s mentor, or whatever the Professor is to the Penetrator. I mean, it’s not like he’s the M to Mark’s Bond. He doesn’t give Mark orders, or do much else. Well anyway, who cares; the series is almost over, anyway. 

So Mark heads to smalltown, Washington (he does not visit Seattle in the entirety of the book), Roberts of course taking the opportunity to engage in some of his flying fiction as he tells us about Mark’s plane and his flight. One thing to note though is that Mark comes fully stocked this time; in the course of Quaking Terror he uses a riot shotgun, a Mac-10 submachine gun (referred to as an “Ingram M-10”), various pistols, and even once again he uses Ava, his dart gun – with both the knockout pellets and the “instant kill” pellets. So again, the ferocity has somewhat returned to The Penetrator, and Mark avidly kills the majority of his opponents, instead of knocking them out like he was doing for a long, tepid stretch of the seeries. 

This is displayed posthaste, as Mark when he first appears in the text gets in a big gunfight with some of Magarac’s men around the base of a volcano in Washington. Mark guns them down and then heads into a small town on his plane, where he soon hooks up with a small-breasted, “raven-haired” beauty named Carrie who waitresses at a local bar…but is also a college student who is studying the psychological aspects of vampires. Magarac has been seen in the vicinity, and Mark looks to Carrie for info on vampires…cue even more page-filling exposition, as Carrie goes on and on about historical “vampire” cases. 

Here is where we learn of all the mysterious disappearances in the area, with blood-drained bodies showing up, and Mark will spend the time wondering if Magarac is really a vampire and if he’s really been drinking the blood of his victims. Meanwhile Mark gets it on with Carrie, though Roberts does not go for the full-bore exploitation as he would in the later Soldier For Hire. Or, for that matter, as he did in some of the earlier volumes of The Penetrator. But we do get a winner of a line when Carrie strokes Mark’s “pendulous, rising maleness…to fullness.” Sadly though Roberts denies us any similarly-goofy sleaze in the actual sex scene, with Mark castely “turning out the light” before he gets busy with the gal. 

Roberts does deliver a fair bit of action throughout. Mark not only blows away scads of technicians and thugs who work for Magarac, but he also takes on the Mafia. This is courtesy Lucky Lou Battaglia, a gunner from Chicago who has been hired to wipe out Magarac, but instead finds himself running afoul of the Penetrator himself. As ever Mark makes short work of these goons, to the point that you figure if the Penetrator swapped places with The Executioner, the Mafia would be finished off in a few volumes. Roberts injects a fair bit of gore into the tale, though as ever he it as if he’s consulted a copy of Grey’s Anatomy: 

For the most part, Mark Hardin spends the majority of the novel going around Washington, from one Magarac location to another, and shooting up his men – or shooting up the mobsters who are supposedly looking for Magarac. There’s a lot of repetition in the narrative, too; Carrie is abduced by the mobsters midway through the novel, and Mark rescues her humorously fast. But then, Carrie is abducted again later in the book! There’s also a page-filling bit where Mark has to quell a rebellion among the American Indians in town, who feel they are getting blamed for the earthquakes or somesuch. Honestly this part seemed grafted on. 

Which again makes it a shame that so little time is spent with Magarac himself. It isn’t until the very end of the novel that Mark launches an assault on the villain and the two come face-to-face…or perhaps that should be chainsaw-to-chainsaw. Apropos of nothing, Magarac grabs one up when Mark is chasing him, and Mark picks up one of his own…it’s pretty wild, even if it’s just a goofy way for Mark Roberts to establish that a tree stump is conveniently chainsawed into a handy stake! 

Overall, Quaking Terror is pretty entertaining, and it’s nice to see the Penetrator acting like his old self. But it’s a shame the “vampire” stuff isn’t more dwelt upon, so either Mark Roberts didn’t think he could make it work, or perhaps he didn’t get buy-in from series editor Andy Ettinger.

They Thirst

They Thirst, by Robert R. McCammon

May, 1981  Avon Books

Robert McCammon was a name I knew well in my horror-reading teen years; you’d often see copies of his super-fat paperbacks in middle school and high school. I was a Stephen King guy, though, and rarely ventured outside his world to other horror fiction. I do recall attempting to read McCammon’s Swan Song at some point in high school – yet another super-fat paperback, this one about the end of the world – but I couldn’t get over how similar it was to King’s The Stand (which I’d read in its recently-published uncut version shortly before), so I put it aside. Literally the only thing I recall about Swan Song was the description that one of the characters, a black professional wrestler, had a stomach that had gone to “marshmellow” due to his eating donuts or something, and that “marshmellow” description always stuck with me. 

 Well anyway! I’ve been on a horror kick lately, though to tell the truth it’s starting to wane now (it actually lasted longer than previous horror fiction kicks!), and I decided to give McCammon another chance. But as usual with me it couldn’t be easy. The book that really caught my interest was this one, an early novel of his, yet another super-fat paperback, about vampires in Los Angeles. Another one seemingly inspired by King, in this case Salem’s Lot. But folks They Thirst ain’t easy to get hold of. The days of Robert McCammon’s paperbacks being ubiquitous are long gone, especially when it comes to the first four he published, which McCammon himself has kept from being reprinted. They’re now known as the “Condemned Four.” 

Predictably, this means that those first four books are overpriced on the used books marketplace, even though they each went through a few printings. And They Thirst is the most overpriced of all. Hell, there isn’t even a digital scan of it on The Internet Archive. Sellers want $30 and up for copies. I became so obsessed with finding this book that I actually purchased a coverless copy of the original Avon Books edition…and it cost me a dollar. The thing is in super beaten shape, but hey, I just wanted to read the book, you know…I don’t really get worked up about “mint condition” and etc these days. Plus the cover’s kind of lame on this edition. And also, for the first time I’d been called for jury duty, so I thought I’d bring the book along to read. You don’t have to worry about maintaining the condition of a book when it’s already missing the front cover, has a broken spine, and in general looks like it was carried in a backpack on a trek across Europe. I also thought if they saw me reading a book about vampires in L.A. they wouldn’t pick me for the jury, but unfortunately that didn’t work and I was picked anyway. 

Running to 531 small-print pages, They Thirst is not a quick read. Not by a long shot! It took me a few weeks to read it. And I have to say, there were times when I was sufficiently caught up in it that I wanted to read nothing else. (I’m not always faithful to long books when I’m reading them.) I thought They Thirst might be this year’s Colony or The Tomorrow File, a long book that could’ve just kept going on and on, such was my enjoyment. And speaking of Ben Bova’s Colony, it seems to me that Robert McCammon was attempting the same sort of thing, like also what Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle did with Lucifer’s Hammer: a genre novel written in the style of the bestselling mainstream fiction of the day. They Thirst is ostensibly horror, but like those other novels it offers a panoramic view of a large cast of characters interracting across a large canvass of action, with the idea of appealing to a larger readership than just horror fans. 

But here’s the thing. They Thirst is usually loglined as “vampires in Los Angeles.” It wasn’t until around page 400, though, that I realized IT WASN’T EVEN A VAMPIRE NOVEL. I have no real knowledge of Robert McCammon, haven’t researched him at all, but if I am correct he has “banned” They Thirst and the previous three novels because he considers them subpar, or at least not good indications of his writing. I don’t know what he holds particularly against They Thirst, but my own personal guess would be because the novel suffers from identity confusion. I mean the first two hundred pages are like a crime novel about a serial killer in L.A., sort of a prefigure of Marcel Montecino’s The Cross Killer. Then They Thirst turns into an end-of-the-world disaster novel, before transforming yet again into a quest novel in the final quarter. Actual vampire stuff is scant, and like John Steakley’s later Vampire$, the vampires that do show up come off more like zombies. 

To be sure, this is not a Dracula type of yarn; these vampires are not the suave sinister types who lure in young women (or men) and have their way with them one by one. Hell, Thirst is more of a “traditional” vampire novel than this is. Rather, They Thirst is more of a virus contagion sort of yarn, with vampirism quickly spreading across sections of Los Angeles and turning regular everyday folks into bloodthirsty vampires who thirst for blood. To me, it just all seemed more like a zombie apocalypse sort of story, only McCammon wants his cake and to eat it, too, as he tries to have it both ways – vampirism spreads to such an extent that almost the entirety of L.A. has become vampires, or knows about vampires, yet our author also wants to have it that the actual existence of vampires is still questioned by most people, especially those outside of L.A. This becomes especially hard to buy as the action becomes more and more apocalyptic in the final section. 

Oh and I almost forgot: above I wrote that They Thirst clearly seems to cater to the bestselling fiction template of the day, but one thing I was bummed to learn was that it was very tepid in the sleaze arena. I believe there’s only one sex scene in the novel, early on, and it’s minimal at best. What I’m trying to say is, this is certainly no Live Girls. And hell for that matter, McCammon doesn’t even exploit the setting much. When I saw this novel was about “vampires in L.A.” I imagined, you know, vampires running amok in the neon glow of Sunset Strip, but that never happens in the book. We get a lot of namedropping of various streets, buildings, and sections of the barrios, but for the most part the zombie-like vampires lurk in the shadows of empty houses, and the king vampire himself lurks above the city, in a castle built by a murdered horror movie actor. 

Now this bit really grinded my gears. Another thing the McCammon of today might not like about They Thirst is that there’s so much setup with little payoff, from characters to subplots. One of the latter concerns the wonderfully-named Orlon Kronsteen, a Bela Lugosi-type horror actor who starred in a movie about Jack the Ripper (and other stuff, though we are told woefully little of him) and had a castle built above Los Angeles. But “several years ago” Kronsteen was murdered, apparently in some sort of ritual deal, with his head cut off or something…and Prince Vulkan, the king vampire of They Thirst, decides this castle will be his perfect home base. But nothing whatsoever is made of Kronsteen, the entire mystery of why or how he was killed just totally dropped from the narrative…even worse is that some random biker seems to imply that he was there the night it happened, but this biker too is dropped from the narrative. 

It's like that throughout. In pure “bestselling fiction” style, Robert McCammon introduces sundry characters at the start of They Thirst, but he turns out to be like a pet-sitter who takes on too many animals to watch. I mean pretty soon most of these characters are just plain gone, and folks by the end of the novel they still haven’t come back! In fact it’s a wonder Avon Books didn’t package They Thirst like a blockbuster-type novel, giving a quick logline of the many main characters: 

Andy Palatazin – Los Angeles police captain who knows vampires are real and ultimately sees himself as the only man who can stop the infestation. Plus he’s haunted by the ghost of his mom. 

Gayle Clarke – Hotstuff reporter for a tabloid; when her boyfriend tries to drink her blood she realizes vampires might exist. Intermittently disappears from the narrative, only to return hundreds of pages later. 

Prince Vulkan – Dead since the 1400s, turned into a vampire as a teen, with the appropriate temper tantrums of an undead teenager. The chosen disciple of “The Headmaster” (ie the devil in all but name), for reasons not explained he’s only now decided to conquer L.A., despite being hundreds of years old. 

The Roach – Serial killer freak with a penchant for murdering hookers who look like his dead mother and stuffing cockroaches in their mouths. Serves as the would-be Renfield to Prince Vulkan’s Dracula. 

Kobra – Albino biker with the memorable intro in which he blows away some rednecks in a bar with his Mauser for absolutely no reason. Perhaps the most wasted character in the novel; Kobra is developed as this super cool badass but anticlimactically drops out of the narrative, only to return sporadically afterward. 

Tommy Chandler – Another teen, this one alive, a monster movie fan with posters of Orlon Kronsteen on his wall and also who knows how Kronsteen’s castle is layed out, thanks to a feature in an old issue of Famous Monsters Of Filmland. 

Wes Richer and Solange – He’s a rising star on the comedy scene with a hit show in which he plays a moron Sherlock Holmes; she’s his “Afro-Asian” mistress, a stacked beauty with a penchant for reading ouija boards and whatnot. In fact it’s through one of these that the title of the novel comes into play, as Solange receives the message “THEY THIRST” from the spirit world. 

Ratty – A ‘Nam vet who lives in the sewers beneath L.A., where he grows his own drugs. In his “Timothy Leary for President” shirt he’s the highlight of the novel, though only appears in the final quarter. 

Father Silvera – A brawny priest with a hidden disease that’s killing him, he takes the expected route of denying that vampires exist, then realizing it, then refusing to go on the quest to the Kronsteen castle to kill Vulkan, and then instead saving his flock…before finally heading to the Kronsteen castle. 

There are sundry other characters, many of them unnecessary, like the hotstuff real estate lady who helped Vulkan buy the castle. She gets a few chapters, then just flat-out drops from the narrative. Same goes for the owner of a funeral parlor chain. Or Rico, who is searching for his lost girlfriend in the barrio. Or a doctor at a hospital who realizes too late that her “dead” patients are really vampires. Many of these characters are of course turned into vampires, but even then they disappear afterwards, with no “I’m a vampire now!” shock return. It’s a bit disappointing, but it must be said that, while you’re reading the book, you don’t realize that the majority of this stuff isn’t going to pan out. I mean it’s about the journey, not the destination, as I’m sure Ratty would say, but still. It wasn’t until around page 500 or so that I realized so much of this stuff was not going to be resolved. 

The first couple hundred pages were by far my favorite. McCammon delivers a taut suspense thriller with only minor supernatural overturns; this opening section is almost a standard crime novel, with Capt. Palatazin obsessed with finding and stopping a serial killer the papers have dubbed the Roach. It’s very much a police procedural, with no action, just Palatazin going about the work of deduction and following clues. And we have stuff from the Roach’s point of view; curiously, his day job is as a pest exterminator, same as the serial killer in Lou Cameron’s The Closing Circle. The horror novel stuff gradually develops, mostly through the strange bit of corpses being mysteriously dug out of graves at night. Palatazin, whose father was bitten by a vampire when Palatazin was a child in Hungary, knows something is going on. 

But the “vampire virus” stuff builds up and soon it’s more of a zombie apocalypse yarn, with whole sections of the barrio for example overrun by vampires. Then the end of the world vibe begins; Vulkan uses his powers to bring down an apocalyptic sandstorm on Los Angeles, blocking the city off from the world and keeping people from leaving. Phone lines are down, planes can’t leave, etc. This section goes on for a long time and again made me think of King’s The Stand. It’s very much a piece of disaster fiction now, with long sequences of various characters getting trapped in cars or in their homes and trying to get out before the daylight goes away so they can kill vampires. This part was my least favorite in the novel. 

Then the final quarter takes on a quest angle. Some of the characters band together to get to the Kronsteen castle, where they figure the “king vampire” might lurk. This too takes up a large brunt of the narrative; I mean they aren’t like “Let’s go there,” and then they’re at the castle the next chapter. It’s almost grueling and again takes away from the vampire stuff the reader might want. It’s really just characters fighting their way through blinding clouds of sand and trying to figure out where they are. To tell the truth it was exhausting to read. What makes it worse is that McCammon drops the ball in the finale. Major characters are dispensed with in an almost offhand fashion, and worse yet the entire point of certain characters even being here is rendered moot. No spoilers, but Palatazin in particular. I mean this guy’s dad turned into a vampire, so he has a personal, uh, “stake” in the matter, but he doesn’t contribute much to the climax. 

Even funnier, McCammon doesn’t seem to know when to end the novel. So even after the good guys have sort of won, we get like an extended 20-page bit where Gayle Clarke, who has mostly disappeared from the novel at this point, tries to escape from the military base in which survivors are being held. And it just keeps going on and on. All so she can get out to the real world and tell the story that vampires exist…not that anyone believes her. Even though the entirety of L.A. turned into vampires, complete with even the deejay on a radio station taunting the last few humans in the city. But like I said, McCammon wants his cake and to eat it too. 

So yeah, I was a bit underwhelmed with They Thirst. I do think though that I enjoyed it more than Will did, over at Too Much Horror Fiction. I was sufficiently caught up in it, at least for the first few hundred pages. But once it got to the apocalyptic sandstorm bit it started to lose my interest. I also felt the climactic assault on Vulkan in Kronsteen’s castle could have been more thrilling, but McCammon was so focused on showing how dire the plight of his characters was that he did succeed in making it all seem hopeless. But then he makes it seem so hopeless that the climax is a bit hard to buy. 

I’ve got some more Robert McCammon novels which I might read someday; one of them, Wolf’s Hour, about a werewolf in World War II, is one I really wanted to read back when it came out, but just never got around to.

Vampire$

Vampire$, by John Steakley

May, 1992  ROC Books

This is a novel I’ve always remembered, because I bought it fresh off the racks when it was first published; it came out during my sudden interest in horror fiction in my teen years. I am not sure what attracted me to Vampire$; maybe it was the back cover, which promised a sort of men’s adventure take on horror fiction, with bounty hunters taking on vampires. At the time, mixing horror with action wasn’t nearly as commonplace an idea as it is now, so likely this appealed to me. Also, I’m sure I recognized the name of the author; John Steakley’s previous novel, Armor, was always displayed in the sci-fi paperback section of my local WaldenBooks, and I thought it looked super cool with its cover art of an armored space guy taking on a bug-eyed space monster, but for some reason I never actually purchased the book. 

But the reason I remember Vampire$ is because it’s one of the very few books I’ve ever given away. I’ll admit, I am stingy with my books; I don’t hoard them, because I do actually read them (even if it takes me decades to get to them). But I don’t give them away! And yet I did give this one away; I tried reading it shortly after buying it, but just couldn’t get into the novel. I had a friend, with the odd name of “Jamec” (or, “James with a ‘C,” as he always explained it), and if I recall correctly he was interested in the book so I gave it to him. I probably traded him for something. I also seem to recall that he did read Vampire$ and liked it a lot. 

The curious thing is, even though I only read the first several pages of the novel, it still stuck with me – I vividly recalled a weird pseudo-Western opening in which a group of vampire hunters were staking zombie-like “goons” before finally taking on the “Master Vampire,” and they were using crossbows and stakes and whatnot. Also, the bit with the Master Vampire calling the leader of the bounty hunters, Jack Crow, by name also stuck with me. But I stopped reading the book! Then some years later I realized that John Carpenter’s new film Vampires was a film adaptation of this novel, even though they changed the dollar sign to an “s.” 

Steakley certainly wasn’t prolific. This and Armor were his only two published novels. Vampire$ did well enough to warrant a film version, though, so it’s surprising Steakley (who died in 2010) didn’t write more books. Initially Vampire$ seems to be in the vein of the horror paperbacks that were proliferating on bookstore shelves at the time, but one quickly sees it’s of a slightly higher literary caliber; indeed, this novel answers the unasked question: “What if Tom Wolfe wrote a horror-action novel?” Parts of Vampire$ seem to have been taken directly from The Right Stuff or The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, both in tone, narrative style, and even in the simultaneous mocking and worshiping of macho heroism. Particularly in the action scenes; like Wolfe, Steakley eschews the terse, punchy short sentences normally associated with pulp action scenes and instead goes for endless run-on sentences: 

It’s like this throughout the novel; anytime something exciting or tense or dramatic happens,the sentences start getting more and more breathless, just going on and on. I found the style to be grating, at least in a novel about bounty hunters who go after vampires. I wanted a more direct approach to the action; John Shirley could’ve turned this concept into a nail-biter of a novel. Instead, Steakley turns in a book that I found tedious for the most part, mostly due to the glib nature of his protagonists. We are to understand that Jack Crow and his team are burnt out and hide their eternal fear behind macho bravura, but Steakley can’t decide which of the two he wants to show us more. To the point that if the protagonists aren’t trying to one-up each other in drinking contests or whatever, they’re running off into the shadows to cry alone. 

The ”scenery description” bits are even more Tom Wolfe-esque; the below could come straight out of the part in The Right Stuff where the Mercury Seven astronauts move to Houston, Texas (doubly so, as this excerpt takes place in Dallas): 

I still haven’t watched John Carpenter’s Vampires, but judging from the trailer it seems that Carpenter really went for that Western vibe. As it turns out, the novel itself doesn’t have that style at all, save for the opening – with Team Crow in a small dusty town taking out vampires and dealing with a Mayor who doesn’t want to pay the bounty hunters. But after that the novel ranges from Rome to Los Angeles to Dallas, with a long detour in Cleburne, Texas, and this latter part is actually more so “small town, USA” than pseudo-Western. For that matter, Team Crow go about their vampire-busting duties in a very un-Western manner: they wear chain mail of “high-tech plastic” that covers them from head to toe (with cross-shaped halogen lamps on their chests), and they kill vampires with crossbows, pikes, and stakes. But the Western stuff does enter the fray with the Team acquiring the services of a “Gunman.” Despite doing this for a few years, Jack Crow in this novel has the sudden revelation that they could use guns to blow away vampires, instead of cumbersome crossbows and whatnot. 

The only problem is, neither Jack Crow nor any of his Team members are “shooters.” So they need a guy who can use a gun. And yes, a guy; this is not an equal opportunity gig, as Jack Crow insists that only men be on his team…and fit ones, at that. The only women in the orbit are Annabelle, the middle-aged matron-type who oversees the group (widow of the man who originally funded them), and new gal Davette, who is constantly described as “beautiful,” and that’s it. Steakley is incredibly reserved in the sleaze and sin department; Vampire$ is anemic (if you’ll pardon the lame vampire-esque pun) in the sex department, with zero in the way of titillation or exploitation or anything. Hell for that matter, even the violence is pretty tame. 

Also on the team is new priest Father Adam – the Catholic Church is secretly behind the vampire killing, you see, so Team Crow always needs a priest. And Father Adam instructs, for reasons not elaborated on, that it must be single single bullets used to shoot vampires. Ie, no machine-gun auto hellfire, so there goes any expectations that this might be a more entertaining Nightblood. In the opening sequence we see Team Crow in action: basically they find the resting places of vampires during the day, and Crow and a few others will go into the dark confines to peg the vamps with crossbows – crossbows which are attached to a rig on a truck, which pulls the vampires out into the sunlight to burn them up. But in this opening scene Crow inadvertently learns that silver also can harm vampires, to the point that vampires can’t heal these wounds, like they can others. 

Another thing to note is that vampires in Steakley’s novel are basically gods; in fact one of them refers to himself as such. Steakley does not spend much time at all on vampire lore, or the hierarchy of vampires, but it seems to go like this: there are “Master Vampires,” ie the godlike ones who move quicker than the eye can follow, can jump incredible distances, and who are impervious to most weapons. But to become a Master Vampire, first you must be bitten by one…and die…and then you come back as a zombie-like “goon.” These are mindless creatures that just shuffle around, looking for blood, and Team Crow spends most of its time taking these lower-level creatures out. Even though they are lower-level, they’re still hard to kill. If a goon lasts long enough, apparently, it regains its senses and becomes a Master Vampire, and Master Vampires are almost impossible to kill; Crow has only killed a few of them in his two-year career. But now it appears that the vampires know Crow, even referencing him by name, and the opening sequence further features the majority of Crow’s team getting wiped out by a vengeance-minded Master Vampire. The rest of Vampire$ concerns Crow hiring a “gunman” and continuing with his vampire-killing job. 

The novel is very sloppily constructed. There is a lot of showing and telling; there are so many times where characters will talk about doing something…then they’ll do it…then they’ll go talk about what they just did. Sometimes it’s pretty egregious, too, particularly when Steakley will have characters discuss something we just saw happen. A lot of this is given over to the “boys” in Team Crow telling “the girls” what happened during the job, and it’s all just so repetitious. A lot of the book could’ve been cut. Also there are bizarre narrative choices. The first 100 pages get tedious in how nothing really happens but lots of talk and Team Crow getting drunk and talking about it. Then there follows a bravura hundred-page sequence where they take on vampires in smalltown Cleburne, Texas. Then after this stellar sequence we have a super-random backstory that goes on for nearly seventy pages and concerns a previously minor character. Who is suddenly revealed to be tin the thrall of the vampire Team Crow just killed, which renders all this moot. I mean this out-of-sequence stuff might work in a Tarantino movie, but here it just comes off as super random…particularly given that the character with the long story being recounted was a minor character at best in the preceding 200 pages. 

There’s also a helluva lot of POV-hopping, by which I mean that gear-grinding manner in which we jump willy-nilly from the thoughts and perspectives of one character into the thoughts and perspectives of another character, with no white space or other sort of warning that, “hey, we’re about to switch to another character’s perspective!” This goes on throughout the damn book and it just drove me nuts. There’s also way too much explaining of what happened…characters will dole out glib comments (pretty much the only kind of comments they make), there will be a lot of macho posturing in return…and then someone will explain to a new character (most often a female) what the boys were really just trying to say to each other. It’s very insulting to the reader’s intelligence. 

Perhaps the biggest misstep in the construction of the novel is that the first hundred pages seem to feature Jack Crow as the protagonist…then a hundred pages in Steakley introduces a new character, Walter Felix, and he becomes the main character! And the annoyance is Crow is still there, just a supporting character now, and Felix spends the next 250-plus pages questioning Crow’s leadership and butting heads with him and mocking his “samurai bullshit.” The problem here is that there’s nothing wrong with Crow’s leadership; we know from page 1 that he’s been handed a thankless, sure-to-get-him-killed job, and besides he seems to have walked out of any action movie of the era. We’re told he’s a giant of a man, six-feet-plus of pure muscle; Steakley clearly had a Stallone or a Schwarzenegger in mind, which makes it humorous that James Woods got the role in John Carpenter’s 1998 film adaptation.  Another thing to note is that Steakley fails to really describe any of the other characters; the reader’s imagination must do some heavy lifting throughout the novel. 

But see that’s another thing about Vampire$: I didn’t like any of the characters. They’re all so glib and spend so much time butting heads, particularly with Felix’s introduction, that you never really feel anything for them. This was Steakley’s biggest stumble, because the novel starts off with Crow losing his team after what seemed to be a successful mission; one of the horror highlights of the novel is when the revenge-seeking vampire attacks the drunken partiers in their hotel. After this we have a bit with Crow getting drunk and then crying in the lap of none other than the Pope (his team is sanctioned by the Catholic Church, but Steakley doesn’t do much with this, either)…then we have that excellent midway action sequence which caps off with the big reveal that one of the vampires knows Crow by name. But all the drama and tension Steakley tries to instill here is squandered because these characters seem so distant; we aren’t told enough about them, nor why they even got into the vampire-hunting game to begin with. This is another miss, as with “new guy” Felix the author had the opportunity to show how a new team would develop, but instead he has Felix and Crow arguing the entire time, and Felix constantly threatening to quit. 

John Carpenter must have had the same issue with Steakley’s plotting, as it appears that the character of Felix didn’t even make it into the film. It also appears that Carpenter added a new subplot concerning a vampire; one of the frustrations of Vampire$ is that the vampires themselves are not very exploited. They’re evil and nearly impossible to kill, but Team Crow shows no interest in them whatsoever. Even the dangling subplot of the vampires banding together to take out Crow himself is not much exploited. Instead, so much of the novel is given over to the glib back-and-forths of Team Crow, plus the increasingly fractional relationship between Crow and Felix. By far the highlight of the novel is the hundred-page stretch where they go to Cleburne and bust up a nest of vampires; this sequence is stellar, playing out almost in real time, as Crow and his best buddy Cherry Cat go into the town courthouse (where the vampires have holed up) and lure out “goons” before facing off against a Master Vampire. 

Compared to this, the finale is underwhelming. And it’s messy again. We go into a freefall here, Steakley jettisoning all the headwind he’d achieved in the Cleburne sequence with an overlong flashback concerning a minor character…then we have the almost-casual offing of several major characters…then the sudden revelation that a Dallas bigwig is actually a Master Vampire…then the harried confrontation with said vampire. None of this stuff matches the tension and sheer fun of the Cleburne sequence. The epilogue in particular is annoying because a main character suddenly returns as a vampire – a development you can see coming from miles away – and Steakley writes the sequence with such opaque prose that you have no frigging clue whatsoever what exactly happens to him. The finale’s dumb too, as we see Felix starting up his own team of vampire busters…with nothing to make his way of leading the team seem different from the “Samurai bullshit” he accused Crow of. 

It seems to me that John Steakley was trying to both spoof and pay hommage to manly masculine action entertainment, but unfortunately this ironic detachment schtick works fine when it’s Tom Wolfe studying the early Space Race but falls flat when it’s about a bunch of crossbow-armed vampire killers. Steakley seems to be trying to question the masculine heroic sacrifice of Jack Crow through the constant badgering of Felix…but Felix offers nothing different. Felix is even more violent than Crow, for that matter, gunning down scads of vampires in the course of the novel. Maybe one of the (very few) female characters in the novel might have offered a different, less “Samurai bullshit” take, but the female characters are literally escorted off to safety before any of the action scenes. 

I mean, Vampire$ is entertaining, and Steakley can certainly write, but it’s just kind of a mess…and gets to be a bit of a beating at 357 pages. Maybe Steakley struggled with writing, hence why Vampire$ and Armor were his only two novels. And speaking of which, he had something weird in mind, as apparently “Jack Crow” and “Felix” were the names of the two main protagonists in Armor; a cryptic Author’s Note in Vampire$ informs us that “This Crow is no other Crow” and “This Felix is no other Felix.” Another thing to note is that this 1992 edition is the stated “first mass market printing,” but the book is copyright 1990. 

Steakley by the way lived right next door to me, in McKinney, Texas (though I was unaware of this at the time), and as I mentioned in an earlier post he appeared in an episode of the 1980s Dallas-area show The Texas 27 Film Vault, which you can see here (link cued to Steakley’s appearance).