Showing posts with label Satanism. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Satanism. Show all posts

Wednesday, January 3, 2024

The Family


The Family, by Ed Sanders
No month stated, 1971  E.P. Dutton

Years ago I went on a short-lived Charles Manson kick and picked up this first edition of The Family, courtesy author-poet Ed Sanders, founding member of the group The Fugs and also the author of the surreal Shards Of God, which I keep meaning to re-read some day. Given how much I enjoyed that novel I decided I’d read Sanders’ nonfiction study of the Manson cult, and specifically this first edition, as it contains material that was expurgated in all subsequent editions. 

At 400+ pages, The Family is certainly comprehensive, perhaps too much so, as it almost pedantically details the day-by-day events of the Manson “family” (Sanders never capitalizes the term, by the way, and nor will I), to the extent that the reader gets exhausted. And Manson and cohorts aren’t the most enjoyable people to spend over 400 pages with. Sanders’ unusual prose style is a huge help in making the mundane stuff entertaining; he routinely doles out memorable, oddball phrases, and he writes the book in a sort of New Journalism style that isn’t too far off from what Tom Wolfe was doing at the time. With the caveat that Sanders, unlike Wolfe, is deadly serious throughout, and indeed his hatred for Manson and his ilk is palpable. 

Consider my surprise, then, when I accessed my Rolling Stone Cover To Cover CD-Rom and pulled up the review of Sanders’s book, from the November 25, 1971 issue. Reviewer Ed McClanahan spends three columns of small print bashing the book, mostly due to Ed Sanders’s “aggressively moralizing” tone. For some reason the Rolling Stone reviewer is surprised that Sanders comes out against sacrifice, muder, and blood-drinking; in particular McClanahan is shocked that Sanders ends the book with the plea that California must be purged of freaks like Manson. Also, McClanahan disparages the “bad writing” of The Family, noting Sanders’s frequent subpar phrases and outright mistakes, though he theorizes that such things might be “intentional…[as if] Sanders had cunningly planted them throughout the book as a kind of peculiar comic relief.” (Somehow though McClanahan, when giving examples of Sanders’s “bad writing,” fails to note the most egregious example – both of bad writing and an indication that it was intentional for comedic effect – when at one point Sanders actually writes the phrase “allegedly alleged.” You don’t write a phrase like that accidentally.) 

Indeed, McClanahan caps off his Rolling Stone review with “The Family…is the very best bad book I’ve ever read,” as if this were the book equivalent of cinema turkeys like The Valley Of The Dolls…which, of course, featured Manson victim Sharon Tate. Personally I enjoyed Sanders’s writing here; he has a definite gift for those aforementioned oddball phrases and description, though it must be acknowledged that sometimes his narrative becomes rather flat in its wearying documentation of every single day’s events. He also often undercuts his own tension with asides that quickly become grating, like narratorial versions of eye-rolling (ie, mocking certain Manson banalities with the phrase “ooo-eee-ooo”). I also got annoyed with Sanders’ apparent obsession with the word “oozing,” which is used so frequently that one could make a drinking game out of it. 

Now, as to this first edition from E.P. Dutton. It features an entire chapter removed from all ensuing editions, focusing as it does on ‘60s subcult The Process. In addition to this chapter, it appears that all references to The Process throughout the book have been removed from later editions of The Family. This must make for a bumpy read, as Sanders refers to The Process a helluva lot in this first edition of the book, and he makes a grand case that Charles Manson was heavily influenced by them. (Later editions of the book lacked all this material because The Process successfully sued E.P. Dutton and Ed Sanders, but it appears the UK editions remained unscathed.) Several years ago I read Maury Terry’s phenomenal ‘80s True Crime classic The Ultimate Evil, which is where I learned of Ed Sanders’ book in the first place; Terry refers often to Sanders’ Process connection, building up an argument that Manson was actually part of a sort of Satanic crime syndicate. 

Ed Sanders doesn’t go to such theories in The Family; for the most part he sticks to the narrative prosecuting attorney Vincent Bugliosi used to get Manson and his assassins on Death Row – and speaking of which, I so enjoyed The Family that immediately after finishing it I ordered myself a copy of Bugliosi’s bestseller Helter Skelter. The title of Bugliosi’s book refers to Manson’s supposed doctrine: that a race war would take over America and Manson and his followers would hide out in a magical city beneath Death Valley (one with friggin’ chocolate fountains), to eventually come out and be accepted as the leaders of the victorious blacks – who, per Manson’s warped ideology, would be unable to govern themselves. 

The Process was just one of the “sleazo inputs” Sanders says Manson was inspired by; there was also a Satanic cult that drank dog blood that was running around in Southern California at the time, and also Manson was really into the biker cults of the day, particularly the Straight Satans. Not to mention the Esalen Institute. And of course there was Manson’s years and years in prison, where he learned about Scientology, another belief system that Manson pillaged from to make his own. Sanders relegates the book to the years 1955 through 1969, opening with Manson getting married and having a child but regularly – almost addictively – getting in trouble with the law and going to jail, until ultimately he spends the majority of the early to mid ‘60s in Federal prison…which he reportedly begged to stay in, because he didn’t understand straight society. 

What makes this curious is the multiple times Manson will manage to escape custody once he’s out; Sanders, clearly in disbelief himself, documents time and again how Manson escapes prison, even after commiting rape, murder, theft, possession, and a host of other infractions. Regardless, Charles Manson certainly picked up on the vibe of the times, going around like a sleazier version of Ken Kesey and putting together his own not-so-Merry Pranksters. Sanders documents all of this; there are a host of characters in The Family, and it becomes difficult at times for the reader to remember who is who, particularly given that so many of the family members have several names. Sanders keeps it all straight, yet at the same time one can’t help but wonder how accurate a lot of this is – even down to random mistakes that cast doubt on the entirety. By this I mean Sanders’s statemement, midway through the book, that Manson shoots a drug dealer in the stomach on July 1…and then notes later that the guy gets out of the hospital on June 14. And this is all the same year, 1969. (A mistake McClanahan also notes in his review.) 

Otherwise The Family was very informative, as I must admit I only knew the general story of Manson and his followers. Having read the book I can’t say my perceptions were greatly changed; it just added more detail to the chaos and suffering they caused. As mentioned I got exhausted at times; the family was nothing if not peripatetic, constantly traveling around California until ultimately holing up at the infamous Spahn Ranch and later in Death Valley. It must’ve been a serious amount of work to keep track of all this, not to mention trying to make sense of what happened. But then, the argument is made, even today, that Sanders’ narrative – which appears to have had its genesis with Vincent Bugliosi – might not be the whole story. In other words, the tale of the hippie killer cult might be more a product of the prosecuting attorney than what really happened. 

What’s curious is that I figured there would be no mysteries left…but I frequently found myself going down rabbit holes during my reading of The Family, only to find that, 50+ years later, there are still no answers to many of the questions posed by Sanders. For example, throughout the later half Sanders recounts random murders that occurred in California when family members were in the vicinity, implicating of course that this could be their work. I looked up the unfortunate victims, only to find that the cases were still cold. Sanders also wonders how in the hell William Garretson, the young long-haired caretaker on Sharon Tate’s property, could have “slept through” the murders that were occuring mere yards away from his cottage, complete with screams in the night that would have echoed through the valley. It seems that there never was a sufficient answer for this (Garretson himself died in 2016, and in the late ‘80s he gave one interview where he said he did see two women chasing each other that night), and Sanders speculates that Garretson might have been “hypnotized” by the family. My guess is that the dude was probably high on acid or whatever (hey, it was L.A. in 1969) and didn’t want to tell the cops that when they interrogated him. 

Another rabbit hole is the missing videotape Sanders almost obsessively refers to in the book. In another of those random flukes that seemed to bless the early family, Manson et al were able to get hold of an NBC camera and proceeded to make videotapes of themselves. According to Sanders, some of these depicted the drugged-out family doing dances that recounted the Tate murders, or another tape showing them drinking blood, or another one depicting a Satanic orgy, and on and on – but, according to Sanders, the tapes have disappeared. Doesn’t look like they’ve been found yet, that is if they ever existed. Some years ago I recall watching a program on the Fox network titled Manson: The Lost Tapes, or something like that, but as I recall the “newly-discovered footage” was innocuous stuff like the family members at the Spahn Ranch talking about how great Charlie was. Another mythical film Sanders notes is the one the LAPD supposedly found in the Tate residence, depicting big-name Hollywood elite indulging in an orgy and other kinky affairs; none of this has ever come to light, over 50 years later. 

The biggest question of course is why the Tate residence? Or, more importantly, why the LaBianca residence? Another mystery still unsolved all these years later. Manson never elaborated, plus years later he claimed the killings weren’t even his idea, they were Tex Watson’s (who indeed did the majority of the killing for the family). Thus we are left with all these weird coincidences that are unexplained. Like speaking of Tex Watson, Sanders notes when Watson is introduced to the text that Watson had a successful wig shop in Laurel Canyon…and, many pages later, we will see that one of Watson’s victims is Jay Sebring, a famous hairstylist who worked in Laurel Canyon at the same time that Watson had his wig shop. How could these two not have known of each other? And yet it would appear they didn’t, as one of the main stories recounted by all the family members in the Tate home that night was that Sebring asked Watson who he was, leading to the infamous “I’m the devil” response from Watson. 

Ed Sanders doesn’t even speculate on this; as McClanahan notes in his Rolling Stone review, The Family is filled with “red herrings” and “unfinished subplots” that Sanders never explains. One also suspects that Sanders basically put into the book everything he was fed about Manson, which ultimately does make Manson seem more myth than man, which certainly wasn’t Sanders’ intention. What else are we to make of the random story recounted by some nameless family member that once upon a time Charlie was getting a b.j. from a nervous female new to the family, who accidentally bit Manson’s dick “in twain,” yet with the power of his own will Charlie was able to make himself whole again? 

Or, in another howler that McClanahan also notes, what are we to make of the story that, months after the Tate-LaBianca murders, the cops infiltrated Manson’s desert hideout, wanting to bring him in on charges of dune buggy theft (it took months for the killings to be pinned on the family), and Charlie motioned into the darkened hills and told the cops he had family members out there with guns trained on them…and the cops ran away? I mean, Manson’s followers were acid-fried teens who thought Charlie was Jesus Christ, and otherwise Manson’s compatriots were bikers and other social outcasts, so perhaps all this is testament to the type of informant Ed Sanders came across: they were willing to believe anything. 

Speaking of which, Sanders provides an entertaining intro where he notes the type of sicko freaks he encountered while reseaching The Family, even stating how he went undercover at one point. All of this would have made for fine material, but Sanders doesn’t go much into it, for the most part keeping himself out of the narrative. But what really bummed me was that Sanders also noted the “thousands” of photos he took in the course of his investigation…yet there is not a single photo reproduced in The Family. Indeed, one gets the impression it was rushed straight from the galleys to the printing press, so as to be the first “major” book on Charles Manson. This would also explain the occasional gaffe in Sanders’ reporting…and also why the trial material is completely skipped over, Sanders ending his book with Manson finally being arrested. 

The murders are documented clinically, but obviously Sanders has relied on those trials for this material, as all of what happened at the Tate and LaBianca homes was only known to the killers. For some reason I was under the impression that the victims at the Tate home were mutilated, but so far as Sanders has it, they were just killed – I realize of course I’m getting into a “Hamas didn’t behead any babies, they just murdered them!” argument, but still. Sanders does allude to this when he notes that someone in the coroner’s office gave out misleading info that made the murders sound even more horrific. More interestingly is Sanders’s argument that Manson and someone else (Sanders speculates that it might’ve been family member Clem) came back to the Tate home after the killings and moved the bodies around, as none of them were found in the positions the murderers left them in. It’s my understanding Manson admitted to this in a book published decades later, but still never divulged who went with him to the murder house. 

I’ve kind of jumped around in the review, but my assumption is practically everyone is familiar with this subject. It’s curious though that, in our modern age of mass shooters and other atrocities, the Manson family still holds such interest. In that regard I’d say the old saw that the Manson families tarnished the Woodstock era might be accurate. Anyway, Sanders spends the first quarter of The Family on Manson’s early days in various jails and then getting out in the late ‘60s and basically collecting runaway, easily-molded girls and driving around Southern California in a school bus that was painted black. Around late 1968 the rot sets in; another mystery is what exactly pushed the Manson family into death and killing in 1969. This could be another indication of later editions of The Family being a bumpy read, what with all those Process mentions removed; here in the first edition, Sanders notes the “coincidence” that the Process moved into death and swastikas right before Manson did. 

The last quarter-plus is devoted to the killings, with the most “famous” of the lot, the Tate murders, getting the most spotlight. Again, the question is how this particular residence was chosen, but of course Sanders notes the connection with producer Terry Melcher, whom Manson had been chasing for months for a movie and album deal. A curious thing here is Sanders keeps using the phrase “genuine Roebucks” when describing the black jeans the killers wear on the killing missions…the same garb worn the following night, on the LaBianca murders. “Genuine Roebucks,” over and over. I mean were those jeans really that special? I mean they just bought them at Sears, right?? “Look out, everyone, I’ve got on my genuine Penneys tonight!” (I used to work at the J.C. Penney corporate office, btw – only the old-timers still called the place “Penneys.”) 

Sanders does his best to make sense out of insanity. Like for example the LaBianca kill. It starts with Charlie wanting to show his “kids” how it’s done, riding around in a car with them and then “randomly” picking out a house…which, again “coincidentally,” happens to be across from a house familiar to the family. Then he “creepy-crawls” into the house, gets the spring on the middle-aged man and woman inside, ties them up, and sends in his killers to off them. This, Sanders and Bugliosi claim, was Manson’s way to start up “helter skelter,” his race war idea that was gleaned from one of the best Beatles songs – though, as Sanders notes, it’s regrettable that Manson was unaware that a “helter skelter” was an amusement park ride in England. But if a race war, why Manson’s direction for the girls to put something “witchy” on the walls after the murders? 

Maury Terry picked up this ball in The Ultimate Evil, and now it’s pretty much a given that I’ll re-read that book. In fact I think Sanders might’ve even been one of Terry’s sources; it was from Terry’s book that I learned the first edition of The Family had the cut Process material. Terry in particular took note of a claim made by Dennis Hopper, which first appeared here in Ed Sanders’s book, that the occupents of Ciello Drive (ie the Sharon Tate residence) were into kinky freak scenes and had filmed the ritual whipping of someone who had “burned” them in a drug deal. Sanders does focus a little on the “drug burn” angle, but if anything his behind-the-scenes intimation is that Manson was perhaps working for some other cult in the killings. Maury Terry sort of extrapolates on that, picking up on the Process connection and brining in a sort of Satanic Mafia angle. 

One thing I can say though is that this is one of those books where I wished I could magically transport myself into the text so I could kick hippie ass. Surely this was some of the impetus behind Tarantino’s Once Upon A Time In Hollywood (the novelization of which I’ll probably now get around to reading). I mean Pitt and DiCaprio – the actors themselves, not just the characters they played – could’ve probably taken out Manson and his followers without breaking a sweat. I mean Manson was like a hundred pounds soaking wet, as the saying goes – and also surely I can’t be the only one who sees the resemblance between him and The Jefferson Airplane’s Marty Balin? Yet for some reason Manson was able to scare people. Well, he did have a gun on the LaBiancas, and I read elsewhere that Tex Watson also creepy-crawled into the house with him, something I don’t think Sanders notes here. 

Speaking of creepy-crawling, I wonder also if Manson, or maybe even this book, was an influence on Joseph DiAngelo, the East Area Rapist/Original Night Stalker/Golden State Killer. “Creepy-crawling” was Manson’s term for breaking into homes at night and slipping around inside while the owners were asleep, stealing minor things or even messing with the owners in some psychological way. DiAngelo started his crime career around this time, also in Southern California, as the Visalia Cat Burglar, and given the time and place I wonder if he wasn’t somehow inspired by reading this book. Who knows – another mystery. If The Family makes anything clear it’s that a ton of weird shit was going on in Southern California in the late ‘60s and early ‘70s. 

Overall I was certainly entertained by The Family, even though it probably wasn’t the best book to be reading during the Christmas season. It also had me hitting Google for searches that likely put me on various FBI watch lists. But I must mention that at times I found myself a little bored with the sometimes flat and clinical reportage; again, the impression I got was that the book was rushed to meet a deadline. I did learn a lot from it, though; I had no idea that it wasn’t for a few months that the August 1969 murders were pinned on the Manson family. Nor did I know about the dune buggy army thing Manson had in mind, a “Rommeloid” vision of him and his family ripping through Death Valley and pillaging towns. Sanders’ writing, when not going for the clinical angle, is inventive and really gives a feeling for the era. But if anything I found The Family to be like an appetizer for Bugliosi’s Helter Skelter, which was published a few years later and would go on to become the bestselling True Crime book ever. 

Speaking of which, I’ve added a “True Crime” tag here on the blog, so will be reviewing Helter Skelter here once I’ve read it, along with other true crime paperbacks (not just Manson-related) I’ve picked up over the years. But sticking to the Manson topic, if interested you can also check out my review from a few years back for the obscure Manson cash-in novel The Cult Of Killers

Oh and speaking of the Xmas break, apologies for the two-week delay in posts. I might have to go to a single review per week schedule for the time being, as I’m reading pretty long books at the moment (one of them a literal doorstep at 1200 pages!), so I need to actually finish the books before I can review them!

Wednesday, November 15, 2023

Atomic Werewolves And Man-Eating Plants


Atomic Werewolves And Man-Eating Plants, edited by Robert Deis and Wyatt Doyle
August, 2023  New Texture

Robert Deis and Wyatt Doyle knock it out of the park again with another gift-quality hardcover anthology of vintage men’s adventure magazine yarns. The theme this time is similar to their earlier publication Cryptozoology Anthology, but whereas the men’s mag stories in that one at least attempted a “realistic” vibe, the stories in the fantastically-titled Atomic Werewolves And Man-Eating Plants are for the most part straight fiction with a supernatural bent. That so many such stories could be collected for this 300-page tome once again indicates how fertile the men’s mag genre really was; it wasn’t just all war stories and the like. 

Publication quality is phenomenal, with thick, pulpy paper and full-color art reproduced throughout the book, as well as copious black-and-white illustrations. If you are looking for a nice Christmas present for that men’s adventure magazine lover in your life, then Atomic Werewolves And Man-Eating Plants would make for a fine gift. Or if you’re still in the Halloween spirit, pick up a copy for yourself; I read my copy around that time, and it made for a perfect seasonal read. For indeed herein you will find werewolves, man-eating plants, bloodthirsty stone age cults, and even post-nuke mutant hellbeasts. 

The book opens with a few well-written essays from various sources, going over the connections between the pulps of the early 20th Century and the later men’s adventure magazines, noting how some of the latter would even reprint stories from the former. As ever Bob Deis’s intro was my favorite, as he provides an overview of every story collected along with what’s known about the writer. In most cases not much at all is known, likely because the author was a pseudonym; especially true in Atomic Werewolves because so many of these stories are the b.s. “as told to” yarns that constantly ran in men’s magazines – meaning a fictional narrator tells you “what really happened” directly. Bob also does a great job giving details on the various men’s mag artists who worked on these stories. 

As usual the stories are arranged chronologically by order of publication. Thus first story “The Flag Of The Stonewall Brigade,” from the March, 1953 Action, is the earliest, taking place while the Korean War was still going on. This fun story, credited to Ronald Adamson, really comes from a different era, as Bob alludes to in his intro: the gist of it concerns an old Confederate flag which brings luck to a battered platoon in the thick of it in Korea. Hoisted by a new guy from deep in the South – the flag belonged to his grandfather – the flag seems to keep the soldiers from any casualties. And when things get real bad, the ghosts of the old Stonewall Brigade show up to help! A fun, goofy tale, one that tries to retain the “true” conceit of most men’s mags – our narrator just knows that no one will believe him, but he knows what he saw, dammit! 

“When The Vampire Was Captured,” by Ward Semple and from the March 1953 True Weird, takes a page from Bram Stoker (again as noted by Bob!). This one tells us of “England’s famous Croglin Grange vampire,” told in an expose sort of style. The titular vampire gets his fangs into a local virgin, and some concerned folk set a trap for it. Very gothic story, and worth noting that the vampire isn’t the lothario type that woos his female prey but is instead a decayed and repugnant freak. 

“Vampires Ripped My Flesh,” by Lewis Greer and from the March 1956 Man’s Life, features a title that calls back to a more famous men’s mag story (even though as Bob notes in his intro, this one was published first), and the story could’ve come right out Bob and Wyatt’s I Watched Them Eat Me Alive anthology (review forthcoming!). It’s 1946, the jungles of Colombia, and the narrator tells us how he and his companions had just “escaped the spears of the savages” when they ended up in a worse predicament – a cave filled with blood-thirsty vampire bats. 

Up next is one that could’ve appeared in Cryptozoology: “Island Of Doom,” by Bill Wharton and from the Spring 1957 Sport Trails. This one’s in third person and concerns a trio of guys on an island with a fifteen foot high, fifty foot “dragon,” one that has a taste for human flesh. (A recurring theme if ever there was one in this anthology!) Wharton plays fast and loose with his “true” vibe, telling us at the end that the dragon might’ve been a really big iguana! 

Those “man-eating plants” of the book’s title appear in the ghoulish “Trapped By A Man-Eating Tree,” by Robert Moore and from the March 1958 Man’s Life. Another “as told to” yarn, this one purports to be the account of a Dutch guy who escaped a Japanese camp in 1943 and ended up shipwrecked on an island. His two companions, hungering for a smoke, set upon a tree with tobacco-like leaves…but it’s a tree that friggin’ eats people, setting off a gharish story – one with very nice, Hannes Bok-esque art that is nicely rendered in green-and-black duotone on the front and back covers of Atomic Werewolves And Man-Eating Plants

One of my favorite stories here is “The Hunted,” by Rick Rubin and from the October 1961 issue of Adventure. Decades before he produced the Beastie Boys, Rick Rubin turned out this piece of fast-moving sci-fi. (Just kidding – it’s another guy of the same name…or pseudonym.) It’s a third-person tale in which a male and female, both described as “big” and “rugged,” escape the slavepens humans are kept in by robots in this grim future – where “The strong will survive” is emblazoned on posters everywhere. The two lose some comrades as they make their way across harsh terrain, occasionally chased by robots, while also (inevitably) becoming close with one another – not that the story has any naughty stuff. Indeed, their relationship is based off mutual need for survival, then blossoms into respect for one another. This one also features a goofy “surprise” ending that, despite being goofy, just feels right. Oh, and a great line’s in this one: “Maybe brutality is the price of freedom.” 

We get the titular “werewolf” of the anthology next, in “The Werewolf And The Cowboy,” from the November 1961 See For Men and written by Stuart Evans. Set in 1937, this one’s about a werewolf plaguing a rural area, showing up each fool moon and killing sheep or people. Features an evocative finale in which the protagonist sets up a trap for the werewolf and waits for him with a .44 magnum; if Stephen King had ever written expressly for men’s adventure magazines (not withstanding the stories he had printed in girlie mags and whatnot), it would’ve been something like this. 

“Mad Doctor Of No-Name Key” is really along the horror lines; it’s by Peter Aldridge and from the December 1961 Adventure Life. This one was pretty ghoulish, but not done in a very exploitative style, concerning an old doctor who falls in love with a young girl – a love that spans into necrophilia (helpfully explained for us…a sad indictment of our times that “necrophilia” no longer has to be explained!). 

Probably the most (intentionally?) funny story in the book follows: “Her Body Belonged To The Devil,” a paranoid trip into the narrator’s psyche, courtesy George Venner and from the December 1961 Man’s Look. This one’s really over the top – “You see that pretty girl over there? She could be a WITCH!” and the like. I got a good laugh out of it, particularly how the narrator informs us that a sexy young gal back in Omaha once took him to a party…one that turned out to be a Black Mass, and he ran away from her in a panic. Now he has “the mark” on him, and witches and warlocks all over the world are coming for him…maybe! 

“Their Bodies Glowed With Fire,” by Dave Marshall and from the December 1961 Peril, is my favorite story in the collection. This one almost seems like an abdridgement of a longer work: told in first person, it concerns Joe Rainwater, an American Indian ex-GI who sees a UFO land in the desert and is soon approached by its occupants – a trio in form-fitting metallic spacesuits that glow. But things are getting more risque here in the early ‘60s, as these aliens are hotstuff women of the most curvaceous sort (indeed, with “voluptuous breasts”)…and buddy they each want a go at Mr. Rainwater. The one in charge tells Joe he will become their “high priest,” after which the three alien babes take him through “the rites of love.” It’s all pretty crazy, but also pretty vague given that it is just the early ‘60s, but features a crazy ending where Joe Rainwater tells us that, like Nietszche’s Zarathustra, he’s now coming down the mountain and he has “plans” for those yokels who used to race-bait him. Man, I almost wish this one was a novel. 

“Fowl Play” by William Bayne, from the May 1962 Escape To Adventure, is like an EC Comic without the art. It’s also very much on the Stephen King tip, about a guy whose job it is to chop off chicken heads plotting to kill his wife and mother-in-law. The dark comedy is thick in this one, climaxing in a scene as illustrated in the splash, of our “hero” strapped to a bed and about to find out how those poor chickens feel. 

“Strange Cult Of The Vampire Tarantulas,” by Rick Manners and from the September 1962 Peril, again shows how things are getting a bit more risque in the world of men’s mags here in the early ‘60s: our narrator, a “marine growth” researcher or somesuch, is sent on an expedition with his colleague Elaine who has “luscious breasts.” Hey, my favorite kind! There’s a lot of heavy petting between the two (“My hands sought the twin globes of her breasts…”), but no sexual hijinks – the two keep putting it off, wanting it to be “good” when they finally do the deed. Meanwhile we’re in sweat mag territory, as their ship crashes, same as the previous expeditions did, and they’re washed up on an island with…giant tarantulas! And there’s a psycho named Dr. Unicorn who runs his own castle! It’s all straight out of Ed Wood, and also ends on a humorous final note about there not being any cobwebs in the narrator’s apartment these days. 

Up next is a sweat mag yarn I’ve wanted to read for a while, if only for Norm Eastman’s typically-crazy cover art: “Soft Nudes For The Nazis’ Doktor Horror,” by Martin Bowers and from the September 1964 Man’s Story. True to the men’s mag style, the story opens depicting Eastman’s illustration: a hotstuff, half-nude babe is strapped to a table while some deformed Nazi sadist saws off the arm of an ape…and then proceeds to saw off the babe’s arm. Why? So to see if the sutures and whatnot will work and the ape’s arm will latch onto the girl’s body. From here we go into an almost perfunctory overview of the “Traveling Circus” of Nazi doctors who went all-in for sadism; typical of a lot of these sweat mag yarns, only the opening itself is a piece of horror fiction – likely catered to the art – after which the story becomes a dry sort of overview on the topic. I personally hoped for a story of a Nazi-brainwashed babe raising havoc with her surgically-implanted ape arm! Oh and also, there’s no character named “Doktor Horror” in the story! 

Next up is another sweaty one: “Stone Age Lust – Today,” credited to Geoffrey Costain and from the July 1965 Man’s Daring. Another first-person yarn in which “Geoffrey,” a British anthropologist or something, is tasked with looking into a recent string of cult killings. His sexy colleague Doris wants to come along on the trip, but Geoffrey tells her it will be too dangerous. The future #metoo movement be damned, Doris changes our hero’s mind the old fashioned way: she offers herself to him in his office. We already know Doris should’ve heeded our narrator’s initial refusal, however; typical of men’s mag yarns, this one opens en media res, with Doris the bound victim of a cult of druids – and indeed she will be gang-raped by them before Geoffrey manages to save her. Interesting note of comparison here: in “The Strange Cult Of The Vampire Tarantulas,” Elaine is not raped after being captured – she is about to be, but the narrator saves her. And remember, the narrator and Elaine have not had sex yet. But here in “Stone Age Lust – Today,” the narrator has already had his way with Doris before she is captured…and in the climax she is gang-raped by the villains. So it’s very similar to the slasher movie gimmick of the ‘80s in which the girls who have sex are the first ones to be killed. 

We’re in post-nuke pulp territory next: “Killer Of The Cave” by Gene Preen and from the April 1966 Adventure. This one doesn’t even fool around with pretending to be true: it’s a third-person tale concerning Don Newman, one of the few survivors of an atomic war. Spelunking in some caves with a handful of others, Don came out to find the world destroyed. They try to survive in this hellish new world, living in the safety of the caves, but something keeps killing them one by one every night. It’s more of a suspense yarn, one with a shock twist ending that becomes more and more apparent the longer the story goes on. But special mention must be made of Basil Gogos’ art, featured on the front cover of the dustjacket for Atomic Werewolves And Man-Eating Plants; it almost looks like a still from a never-made film in which John Philip Law played a werewolf. 

This hardcover edition contains a bonus story that is not featured in the other editions: “Tonight Satan Claims His Naked Bride,” by Ted McDonald and from the December 1971 Man’s Story. This one is definitely in “sweats” territory, part of the hippie-killer craze of the early ‘70s; I reviewed a few such yarns in a previous sweat mags round-up post. Bob provides a special intro for this one, but one thing I wondered was if “Ted” McDonald was a pseudonym for Jim McDonald, a prolific sweat mag writer of the day. And this one follows the same template of the other such yarns: our narrator, a doctor, tells us of how a mind-blown hippie girl was brought into the hospital one day by the seductive and mysterious Monique…who kept coming by to check on the girl’s condition. It all leads up to the narrator’s lovely and innocent girlfriend, Alice, about to be the sacrificial victim of a cult of Satanic hippies! Overall a fun one, not too exploitative but still with more of a sleazy and lurid vibe than the earlier stories in the collection; I know these sweat yarns aren’t Bob’s favorite, but it might be fun to do a special Halloween edition or somesuch devoted to them. 

In addition to all the above we also get vintage pulp stories from Manly Wade Wellman and Gardner Fox, as well as frequent pieces of art from assorted men’s mags that fall within the collection’s theme. All told Atomic Werewolves And Man-Eating Plants is yet another stellar publication from Robert Deis and Wyatt Doyle, and as mentioned would make for a great gift this holiday season – even if it’s just a gift for yourself! Here’s hoping there are many more of these collections on the way.

Thursday, May 11, 2023

New title from Tocsin Press

Just wanted to let you all know that there’s a new book out from Tocsin PressSuper Cop Joe Blitz: The Maimer, by Nelson T. Novak. Here’s the cover: 

Sgt. Joe Blitz, that tough 1970s New York cop who featured in The Psycho Killers, is back in another sordid tale which sees him up against a Satanic snuff-flick cult. 

You can check out the back cover copy and read the first few pages of the book here

And let’s not forget the other books currently available at Tocsin Press… 




The Undertaker #2: Black Lives Murder, which was another of the best books I read last year – I mean if you get the first one you should get this one, too! 


If you like thigh-boot wearing Nazi she-devil vixens, and you like John Eagle Expeditor, then you’ll certainly enjoy John Falcon Infiltrator: The Hollow Earth


The Triggerman: Brains For Brunch, in which Johnny Larock, the Triggerman (who is of course not to be confused with The Sharpshooter or The Marksman), satiates his hunger for Mafia blood!


Mentioned above, Super Cop Joe Blitz: The Psycho Killers is the previously-published adventure with Joe Blitz...one involving a rather grisly rape case.

And like the old Pinnacle house ads said, there’s more to come…

Thursday, March 9, 2023

Stakeout Squad: Miami Heat (Stakeout Squad #2)


Stakeout Squad: Miami Heat, by D. A. Hodgman
June, 1995

The second volume of Stakeout Squad is about the same as the first, heavy on the firearms detail and cop-world vibe, but bogged down by a flabby storytelling structure and totally lacking the pulp charm the plot would’ve had in a men’s adventure novel of two decades before. Because in this one, friends, the Stakeout Squad goes up against – Satanists! But sadly as it turns out, these aren’t the fun pulpy Satanists you’d want, filled with hotshit socialite babes looking for some devil-worshipping kicks…instead, they are a freakish lot who get off on mutilating and murdering children. 

So already we see that damned “realism” is again invading our men’s adventure in the 1990s, aka The Decade That Killed Men’s Adventure. Author D.A. Hodgman, aka Dorothy Ayoob, is once again damned determined to buzzkill any pulp thrills, despite having a Satanic cult as the villains. She’s also already lost the plot of the series itself; the setup of Stakeout Squad is that the squad of cops, uh, stakes out places that are getting frequently robbed. But this volume the’re turned into security guards, their task to protect the families of preachers and anti-cult academics from the vile clutches of the Satanists. Only the very beginning of the novel, where super-hot Melinda Hoffritz, aka the Smurfette of the Stakeout Squad, takes out a pair of would-be ATM robbers, retains the vibe of the first volume. 

Ayoob shamelessly rides the Satanic panic bandwagon of the day, her book likely inspired by Maury Terry’s The Ultimate Evil…which also inspired Night Kill and the Psycho Squad series. Actually I just realized this book’s from 1995 (even though it seems more ‘80s), so the Satanic Panic fad was over already. It’s curious though that Ayoob already drops the series template with this second volume. When one thinks of a series grounded in realism (perhaps a bit too grounded) and concerned with a squad of cops who stake out high-crime areas, the last thing one would think of would be Satanist villains. But Ayoob does work in the mandatory Gold Eagle gun-p0rn, as these Satanists turn out to be heavily armed, their various firearms and assault weapons dutifully namedropped for us. Ayoob slightly reigns in on the overbearing gun detail of the first volume, but not much. 

However she doesn’t reign in on the awkward storytelling structure that hampered Line Of Fire. Here too forward momentum is constantly stalled by egregious flashbacks to this or that incident one of the cop protagonists previously experienced in the line of duty, or flashbacks to guns they once carried. I kid you not. There’s a part toward the end where the tension has finally ramped up, and oblivious to her own narrative Ayoob goes off on a tangent in which one of the main cops flashes back to a gun he used to carry…for like pages and pages. And plus this guy isn’t even on the scene with the Stakeout Squad members who are about to get in a firefight! I mean Miami Heat just comes off like someone who wants to write about guns and ammo and the life of a cop, but doesn’t know how to deliver it in the form of a gripping novel. 

Another curious thing is that the cover for this volume and the first volume shows white cops, however Stakeout Squad is more concerned with the black characters. There are three main figures in the group who are black, and Ayoob spends a lot of the narrative with each of them; one of them, Tom West, is a new member who grew up in the projects, giving Ayoob ample opportunity to waste thirty pages on backstory about his days as a child gang member. Presumably the blond dude on the cover is Bob Carmody, who only gradually emerges as the protagonist, or at least the protagonist who sees the most action in the finale…same as the previous volume. Not sure who the black-haired guy is supposed to be. Otherwise the other “main” character is, again, Melinda Hoffritz, who features with Carmody in the finale. And also again Ayoob dangles the idea that these two are attracted to each other, but Hoffritz constantly gives Carmody the brush-off, not wanting to get involved with a fellow cop. Remember folks, it’s Gold Eage…no sleazy tomfoolery here

Well anyway, we already know we’re in for a grim ride when the plot proper opens with a 12-year-old girl and her aunt getting in a fender bender with a man…who turns out to be a Satanist who has orchestrated the wreck so he can abduct the girl and murder her in horrendous fashion (off-page, at least). Later on we will see the autopsy of the poor girl and learn all the nightmarish stuff that was done to her, most of it of a sexual nature. As I’ve said before, there’s fun pulp and there’s no-fun pulp, and Miami Heat is certainly the latter. However, Ayoob’s intent here is to make the reader hate these Satanists – the reader and the Stakeout Squad both. For when they hear of these atrocities being performed – the 12-year-old is just one of a few child victims of the cult – they are all-in for taking down the satanists, even if it’s outside their normal purview. 

The cult, led by a Manson-type named Lawrence Franklin, has set its sights on religious figureheads and academics who have spoken out against Satanism. In particular, on the children of those figureheads. Stakeout Squad acts as bodyguards for the families. So in a way I guess it sticks to the series setup, with the caveat that the Squad is staking out homes, not frequently-robbed businesses. This leads to unexpected places – like stout Squad member Frank Cross getting laid. This is courtesy Dr. Jessica Wollman, one of those anti-cult academics, a brunette described as “a knockout…with a body you’d expect to see on a Penthouse cover.” Wollman, who delivers to the Squad an unmerciful fifteen-page expository info-dump on Satanism, later throws herself at Cross for some off-page lovin’, and the fool almost gets wasted when the cult attacks. A recurring series subplot is that another Squad member, Dan Harrington, is a coward, and that is proved out here with Harrington hiding while Cross is nearly killed – and, as with the previous book, none of the cops are the wiser to Harrington’s cowardice. 

Things finally pick up in the final quarter, which sees Bob Carmody and Melinda Hoffritz go undercover as Satanists. Ayoob only slightly delivers on the sleaze angle a similar plot would’ve received in a men’s adventure novel of the 1970s; the two must go “skyclad,” aka nude, and we are informed that “Melinda Hoffritz ha(s) breasts like few other women.” Indeed, to the point that her jugs make even the female Satanists gasp. Oh and I forgot – we’re also told none of the cultists are attractive, men or women. Again, it’s the buzzkilling “realism” of the ‘90s in full effect. And on that same note, Carmody and Hoffritz spend the entirety of the finale naked…and Carmody realizes at the end that he hasn’t even looked at Melinda’s hot bod this whole time! I mean so much for exploitative stuff like notes of Melinda’s “heaving, full breasts” as she runs around in the firefight, or other egregious mentions of her nude splendor. Such material has well and fully been gutted from the genre at this point in time. 

The gun stuff hasn’t been gutted, though; true to Gold Eagle form, the Satanists have taken over an old farmhouse in the woods…and it’s stuffed to the gills with assault weapons, of course. But it’s not full-on auto hellfire action, with Carmody and Hoffritz appropriating an M-14 and an M-16 and blasting away at the cultists, Carmody eventually setting off a fire with drums of gasoline. Ayoob doesn’t play up the violence much at all. In fact, she doesn’t play up much of anything at all; there is a sterile, drained feeling to Miami Heat, which again just brings to mind the vibe of the entire men’s adventure genre in 1995. 

Interestingly, the final page of the book contains an ad for The Color Of Blood, which is announced as “the final volume of Stakeout Squad.” So it would appear that this series was conceived as a limited one from the start.

Monday, March 6, 2023

Black Magic Today


Black Magic Today, by June Johns
April, 1971  NEL Books

NEL Books sure came up with some covers, didn’t they? Hopefully Blogger won’t flag this one for “adult content” like they did the cover for Bloodletter. I picked this one up years ago, fortunately for a nice price, with the hope that it would focus on that late ‘60s/early ‘70s shaggy-haired occult revival scene I’ve always been interested in. As it turns out, Black Magic Today only occasionally captures this vibe. 

Instead, author June Johns, of whom I know nothing, turns in a digressive polemic on the dark arts; she sums up that only the “deviant” are ultimately drawn to black magic. “I am neither a witch nor a black magician,” she tells us in the intro, and then goes into chapters with titles like “What Is Magic?” We get the history of magic, from primitive superstition to “the astronaut of today who carries a rabbit foot as a mascot.” 

As mentioned, the book is pretty digressive throughout its 127 pages. We have “Magic Versus Religion,” with detours into Egyptian and Aztec beliefs, as well as a study of Druids. There’s also a feature on the Salem witch trials – many of the accused witches who claimed to have had sex with the devil. (“His member cold and painful…”) Johns notes the modern belief that these Medieval women were tricked by rascally warlocks who penetrated them with metal dildos or somesuch, fooling the women into thinking it was Satan’s, uh, “cold and painful member.” 

There’s an overview on how the Catholic Church created the devil, Johns noting that the Bible has no real figure one could compare to the concept of Satan. She further claims that black magic and devil worship were an outcome of the Inquisition, with the persecuted pushed into further realms of devilry. Of course soon enough we’re on the topic of Aleistar Crowley, which goes on for several pages. Only here, toward the end of the book, does Johns get into the “groovy era” stuff I was looking for, with overviews of news stories about this or that black magic atrocity in England or elsewhere. 

Black Magic Today is really more of a digressive overview on magic belief in general than the expose on post-Altamont depravity that I was hoping for. Since I don’t have much to say about the book, I’ll just pad out the review with some arbitrary excerpts:









Monday, May 23, 2022

Witchcraft Today


Witchcraft Today, edited by Martin Ebon
April, 1971  Signet Books

This slim paperback is a nice encapsulation of the Occult Revival that took place in the late ‘60s and early ‘70s, that post-Aquarian moment when suburban housewives decided they were witches and started wearing pentagrams. The book was also published just as the Manson cult had cast a pall on the scene, as some of the pieces here elucidate. For Witchcraft Today is really an anthology of pieces on witchcraft and occultism in general, taken from a variety of mainstream and occult publications. Martin Ebon, with whom I’m unfamiliar, has assembled articles that present witchcraft from the perspectives of insiders, the curious, and the concerned. 

“It is lack of personal power that usually spurs one on the road to witchcraft,” Ebon notes in his introduction. In addition to his intro, which provides a general overview of the occult revival and wonders “why now?,” Ebon serves up pithy intros for each of the pieces he’s chosen for the anthology. Here’s a quick rundown of each: 

“Witchcraft Today – A Survey,” is by Raymond Van Over and sort of continues the vibe of Ebon’s intro, delivering a concise history of witchcraft with a focus on the ‘60s revival. The piece is pretty ‘60s, too, with tidbits on turned-on modern witches like Louise Huebner (who appears later) and mentions of the suddenly-trendy Carl Jung. 

“Britain’s Witchcraft Scene” is by John Kobler and seems to be from earlier in the ‘60s.  “Britain’s witches are not very sinister,” Kobler sums up in his recounting of various witchy movements in England through the centuries, culminating in covens like the one housewife Mrs. Jenkins participates in…“in the buff.” 

“America’s Leading Witches: Sybil Leek vs Louise Huebner” is by Joy Miller and takes on more of the vibe of mainstream journalism. It’s a character piece, comparing elderly British witch Sybil Leek, who moved to the US and considers herself “the number one witch in America,” and “sexy” Louise Huebner, “a shapely woman in her late 30s with long dark hair.” Years ago I downloaded a vinyl rip of Huebner’s 1969 LP Seduction Through Witchcraft, now a hotly traded collectible, in which she recounts spells overtop avante-garde proto-electronica. Cool stuff! She definitely comes off as the more memorable of the two; whereas Leek is stodgy and arrogant, certain she’ll be the only witch remembered when one looks back on the 20th Century, Huebner dismisses most witch lore and likes to do spells for city officials in Los Angeles – and indeed became the “Official Witch of Los Angeles.” According to Wikipedia, though, soon after the publication of Witchcraft Today Louise Huebner moved out of the public eye, which is surprising given how publicity conscious she comes off as in this piece. 

“New York’s Witch Explosion” is by Mary Bringle and is another mainstream journalism piece that also gives a nice view of the era. Most of it is dimissive, the “real witches” Bringle interviews mocking that “You can’t walk into a party anymore without meeting a half-dozen girls who think they’re witches.” We learn how some of these girls are just latching onto the latest trend and use witchcraft to snare a boyfriend or other mundane things. But the story really picks up with the too-brief appearance of Pietro, a warlock who has gotten into the black magic scene and who states that the first Black Mass he attended was “Bad! On the level of a Forty-Second Street skin flick.” 

“The Witchcraft Boom In Canada” by Bill Trent is a short puff piece trying to fathom the “explosion” of occult interest in Canada. 

“I Was Born A Witch” is by Helen McCarthy and is a character piece focused on Lavora, a Creole witch who now lives in New York. It’s mostly Lavora’s colorful history and how she moved to the big city, with such memorable details as the abortion she had to get when she was 15 – and the witch charm she used to gain her revenge on the guy who knocked her up. 

“Black Magic Against White” is by Gordon Fleming and about Brazil’s macumba witchcraft. I wasn’t interested in the topic so skipped it. 

“The Original Black Mass” by Stephen A. Hoeller presents an historical overview of the Black Mass, with the details that when first practiced in 1600s France it might have entailed the sacrifice of children. Hoeller, as Ebon notes in the piece’s intro, is a reverend, and it’s to his credit that the article doesn’t come off like some proto-Satanic Panic. Indeed, Hoeller notes that the so-called Black Mass of notorious Aleister Crowley is mostly just “poetry.” 

“Meet A Practicing Sorcerer!” by Peter Bloxham is one of the more fun pieces in the collection, totally giving a glimpse of the groovy age of horror. Once again we’re back in England, where we meet “modern Merlin” Cecil Williamson, proprietor of Witches House Museum; a tour will cost you 18 cents! Williamson, who drives a station wagon(!), sneers at the “playgirl witches” of the day who have “suburban orgies” in their “comic covens.” He also makes vague mentions of a “big business Occult Mafia.” 

“Anton LaVey: San Francisco Satanist” is by Jean Molina and is a character piece on LaVey, who comes off as a guy with a pretty sharp sense of humor. “To LaVey black is beautiful, but it refers to his brand of magic, not his skin color,” notes Molina – and Ebon also informs us that “Molina” is a pseudonym. LaVey shares stories about starting up his Church of Satanism, also noting how Jayne Mansfield would’ve lived if she’d listened to LaVey and stayed away from her boyfriend, whom LaVey put a hex on. 

“The Devil And Sharon Tate” is by Michael Ballantine and gets into the darker aspects of the movement. This is a piece of mainstream journalism that captures the weird vibe of the late ‘60s, and works into the overall theme of the anthology in that Manson’s girls considered themselves to be “witches,” something I hadn’t been aware of. Ballantine however mostly quotes other sources; in particular he keeps noting “Rolling Stones Magazine”[sic] and its interview with Manson. If anything this article made me decide to finally get around to reading Ed Sanders’s study of the Manson scene, The Family. Two years ago I got a copy of the first edition, which has material that’s been cut from every other edition of the book, and I’ve been meaning to read it. 

“The Innocents Of Salem” by Eleanor Early is, as you’d expect, a history of the Salem Witch Trials. All I need to know about this particular subject I leaned from that two-part episode of Bewitched where Sam went back in time to confront the judges, so I skipped this one. 

“Twentieth-Century Victim” by Paul Langdon is “lurid,” per Ebon’s intro…and it certainly is. This is the sad story of a teen girl in Zurich named Bernadette Hasber who, in 1966, was beaten to death by the members of a Christian cult that was trying to “save” Bernadette from demonic possession. And her parents are the ones who turned her over to the cult! 

“The Warning Witch: An African Adventure” is by WJ Ousby and seems to come out of a men’s mag, only without any of the fun. It’s about a guy meeting witches in the jungle. I skimmed it. 

“Healing Witches” by Frank Osgood follows the previous article, and given my lack of interest I skipped it as well. 

“It Worked For Me” by Max Gunther closes out Witchcraft Today. This is another pithy piece that captures the vibe of the era, with the topics including a witchcraft supply store some young witch opens in New York. Gunther relates the story of how he employed a spell to get something, and it came true, which may be an indication that it’s all for real…or that the current occult thing is just “a fascinating hobby.” 

Overall Witchcraft Today is pretty enjoyable if you’re into that late ‘60s/early ‘70s “dark side of the Aquarian Age” scene like I am, with the caveat that most of the articles here are along the lines of puff pieces, as if the editors at Life had decided to do a special issue on witchcraft.

Thursday, October 29, 2020

The Devil’s Night (Universal Monsters Trilogy #3)


The Devil’s Night, by David Jacobs
 
February, 2001 Berkley Boulevard 

I’ve meant to read this concluding volume of the Universal Monsters trilogy for a few years now; I read the second volume for Halloween in 2016, and meant to get to this one sooner. But I haven’t really been on a horror kick in a while, so I just never got around to it. Anyway I kind of wish I’d gotten to The Devil’s Night sooner, as David Jacobs picks up events immediately after the conclusion of the previous book; despite the title, for the most part The Devil’s Night takes place the day after The Devil’s Brood, and someone new to the trilogy would have a hard time figuring out what’s going on. 

But while everything takes place immediately after the events of the previous volume, there have been some curious changes to both the personalities of the characters as well as to the narrative style itself. While for the most part we have new characters this time, the returning ones seem to have completely changed, like for example Dorian, the medium/witch who served black magician Uncle Basil in The Devil’s Brood. Dorian started a relationship with Mafia bigwig Steve Soto in that book, but in this volume she’s pretty much a cold fish, bitter and angry. She says she hated Basil, also drops the implication that he’d been molesting her since he took her on as his assistant (when she was 12!), and further says she has absolutely no feelings for Soto – who’s dead, anyway. But folks mark your calendars, because I was actually wrong last time; I figured Soto wouldn’t return to the series, but “zombie Soto” is indeed in this book…bearing none of the personality of his previous self. While he can think, talk, fight, and even make lame one-liners, he lacks any emotion or personality. 

Stranger still is the curious change to the narrative style itself. While The Devil’s Brood did an admirable job of capturing the vibe of classic horror movies with a bit of a Fangoria overlay, for the most part playing things straight, this time there’s a sardonic tone to Jacobs’s narrative. Characters often make lame jokes or comments about the nightmarish situations they’re in, which jibes with the otherwise-horrific vibe Jacobs tries to create. Even worse is that the narrative itself pokes fun at things – at one point Visaria, the fictional Eastern European fiefdom which is ruled by Dracula’s daughter, Countess Marya Zaleka, is referred to as “a Monaco for monsters,” given how so many of them congregate there. And whereas last time Jacobs correctly referred to Frankenstein’s monster as “the Monster,” this time for some unfathomable reason he keeps incorrectly referring to him as “Frankenstein.” You would think that an editor would’ve at least caught that. I mean that’s just basic Universal Monster knowledge – the creator was named Frankenstein, not the monster. It’s fine for the characters to make this mistake, but not the author. 

Otherwise Jacobs loses that “Aurora model” vibe from the previous book, with its glow-in-the-dark Dracula Blob and assorted zombies, and goes for more of an action-horror hybrid; the novel is for the most part padded out with overlong action scenes that ultimately go nowhere or overlong sequences of new characters trying to find the monsters. At the very least I’m happy that, unlike Jeff Rovin’s overly fan-fictionish Return Of The Wolf Man, all the characters here are aware that monsters exist and etc; I mean there’s no point where some dim-witted disbeliever has to learn the hard way that Dracula, the Monster, werewolves, and other assorted creatures actually exist. The “heroes” for the most part are all members of Marya’s Satanic coven, which is run out of Visaria, and they’ve come to Isla Morgana – the fictional Caribbean island from White Zombie which has featured in the trilogy from the beginning – to collect Dracula and the Monster and take them back to Visaria. 

Now Jacobs was a contract author, and as we know he had his hand in some men’s adventure series, like Tracker and Psycho Squad. Given this he was able to meet a deadline quickly for the publisher – and also given this it means he would often result to inordinate padding to fill up the word quota and meet the deadline. While The Devil’s Brood seemed like a well-thought-out novel, The Devil’s Night seems downright rushed. I mean consider this: the previous book ended with Marya capturing Winfred Glendon the Third, the grandson of the original Werewolf of London, whose ghost Marya conjured in a Satanic ritual. The ghost told Marya the secret of the Moon-Ray technology, a clever creation of Jacobs’s which tied together The Werewolf of London and The Bride Of Frankenstein; the ghost of Glendon the First revealed that it was the Moon-Ray which Frankenstein and Dr. Petronius used to bring the Bride to life, which is why all other succeeding attempts to revive her have failed. Now with the secret in her posession, Marya was poised to awaken the Bride from her century-long slumber and use her in some unspecified means of “propagating a new race” or somesuch. 

So that’s how The Devil’s Brood ended. Promises some cool shit, doesn’t it? Well get this. Jacobs ignores all of it until page 229 of this book…which only runs 252 pages! The vast majority of The Devil’s Night is composed of padded-out action scenes or lame “sarcastic” exchanges among the cult members as they try to collect the various creatures and take them back to Visaria. Even more damning is that the Bride is finally woken at the end of this book…but Jacobs blows the opportunity in a major way. In fact, and not to spoil things too soon, he pretty much rewrites the finale of The Bride of Frankenstein, with a lovestruck Monster chasing the Bride around a dungeon and the Bride shrieking at him. I mean Jacobs could’ve done something with the Bride, actually brought her to life (not just reviving her), as Elizabeth Hand did in her own Universal-approved sequel. But it’s as if Jacobs is only good at assembling all his various pieces and doesn’t know what exactly to do with them once they’re together. 

At any rate, Marya is the force that brings all this together, and Jacobs should’ve spent more narrative time with her. The majority of this book takes place the very day after the previous one, most of it occuring just a few hours later – and indeed the entire novel takes place over the course of this single day. Despite having the knowledge of how to revive the Bride, Marya basically rests during the day – after putting the captured Glendon the Third through a few tests. This being the last night of a full moon, she wants to test out his werewolf powers or something. Like all the other characters, Marya has nothing in common with her filmic ancestor: this Marya is a sleek beauty with some sadistic tendencies. Whereas the Marya of Dracula’s Daughter struggled with her vampiric condition, this one revels in it. She’s also presented as a much more, shall we say, hot babe, given to waltzing around her domain in “knee-length red-leather high-heeled boots.” She enjoys taunting the captured Glendon the Third with how he will become her loyal servant; curiously Glendon shows nothing but revulsion for the hot vampire queen, whereas I’d at least try to hit on her a little if I were in his position. I mean when it comes to hot evil babes, vampire chicks are at the top of the heap. The one thing I wanted from this trilogy was monsters having sex with each other, but dammit it’s the one thing we don’t get! 

This opening sequence gives us a taste of what we’re in for: an overlong action scene that doesn’t go anywhere, and ultimately comes off as pointless. Marya, instead of reviving the Bride immediately, instead taunts Glendon a bit, then has her various scientist underlings test him as he turns into a werewolf. Then she sets him loose on a captive local babe. But a big difference between Glendon’s “werewolf” and Larry Talbot’s “wolfman” is that Glendon is a thinking creature, not just a blood-driven beast. Jacobs again capably relays this from Glendon’s point of view; he thinks of himself as “Glendon,” remembers things from his human life and retains all his human knowledge – it’s just that he is no longer burdened with Glendon’s moral fiber and thus can kill whatever he wants and eat whatever he wants (the monsters are very fond of eating people, this time around). He’s able to escape, after mauling a few of Marya’s kevlar-suited guards; he even captures Marya herself, using her as a shield, but she turns herself into a giant bat-woman and flies away. Jacobs continues to make novel refinements to the Universal monsters; Glendon is also capable of shape-shifting, elongating his forearm to escape a pair of manacles. 

But here’s the thing – Glendon escapes, and the last we see of him he’s set fire to an orphanage to cause a distraction. However, the next time we see him…it’s the next morning, he’s back in human form, and he’s once again a captive of Marya. It’s like that throughout The Devil’s Night: elongated sequences that bear little impact on events. This sequence alone goes on for like 50 pages, with absolutely no plot-relevant outcome. Instead of doing something with all his assembled monsters – I mean for once in the trilogy, Jacobs has Dracula, the Monster, the Bride, Dracula’s Daughter, and a friggin’ werewolf, all together in the same location at the same time – our author doesn’t even deliver on the promise until like the last couple pages. And blows the opportunity once again when he does. It’s maddening in a way. Though still not as maddening as Rovin’s tiresome first installment, which wasted pages on incidental stuff, like about what happened to the characters Abbott and Costello played. 

Meanwhile on Isla Morgana it’s the morning after the zombie massacre which climaxed The Devil’s Brood. Jacobs here introduces a group of new characters who will take up the brunt of the narrative, all of them members of Marya’s cult: Jax Breen, foppish but merciless leader of the group; Julia Evans, “full-bodied Amazon” who serves as the muscle; and Kearney, “skull-faced” sadist whose most memorable moment has him happily gunning down some rioting natives with a .50 caliber machine gun. Breen gets the most narrative focus; his mission is to collect the “corpses” of the Monster and Dracula and transport them immediately to Visaria – indeed, to get them there that very night. That Jacobs chooses to focus more on these characters than Marya or Glendon – not to mention Dracula or the Monster – tells you all you need to know about his narrative approach to the trilogy. But still I say again: I enjoyed both his novels more than Rovin’s. 

The initial portion of this has Breen et al gunning down the restless natives, who understandably are a little freaked given the zombies, giant vampire bat, and giant monster that ran roughshod over the populace the night before. Julie blows away a few of the rioters, and as mentioned Kearney guns down more, but it’s all just so pointless given the denoument of the previous book: readers don’t want this, they want the revived Bride that was promised at the climax of the previous book, not to mention all the assembled Universal Monsters. But we get lots of stuff with Breen plotting with Obregon, leader of Isla Morgana’s “paramilitary” police force, as they get down beneath the ruins of Baron Latos’s castle to find the Monster and Dracula – as we’ll recall, the castle collapsed over the two at the climax of The Devil’s Brood. It takes quite a while to get there, though, but when it happens we have some memorable stuff, like Breen goading a local Christian into placing his cross on Dracula’s coffin to imprison him, and Breen’s men pouring noxious “plastigoo” onto the Monster, which forms into a huge block of plastic the creature can’t break out of. 

Dorian and Soto only feature a little in the narrative; Dorian just shows up, captured lurking around the grounds, and Breen sneers at her for Uncle Basil’s failure, previous volume, and says he’s now taking her back to Visaria for Marya to deal with. But as mentioned Dorian is a pale reflection of the character from the previous book. As is Soto, who only appears over a few pages. He’s a zombie, seems pretty unfazed about it, and while directionless initially he starts to feel pulled in various directions. This is because one of the characters is using him as an undead vassal, which is a pretty cool and subtly-developed subplot from Jacobs. Soto’s sudden penchant for one-liners only furthers the strange, sardonic tone of The Devil’s Night. Soto engages in a few battles, getting parts of him shot off, including one of his eyes; late in the book he commandeers a jeep from some horrified soldiers and tells them, “Zombie squad, official business.” That said, there’s a cool, gore-strong bit where Soto takes on Obregon’s military cops. 

I forgot to mention the part where the Monster is captured; before the “plastigoo” is dumped on him, the Monster is freed from beneath the collapsed castle and goes wild on Breen’s forces. As stated the monsters are particularly violent this time around, especially the Monster, who as we’ll recall is now fueled by black magic, courtesy Uncle Basil’s witchcraft last volume. In fact it’s hypothesized by Breen (the characters all spend most of their time talking about the monsters, by the way) that a demon might even posses the Monster. Well anyway this sequence, while good so far as the monster action goes, is another indication of the repetitive nature of the novel; the Monster raises hell, breaks free, escapes into Isla Morgana…then turns around and heads back for the castle…where he’s promptly captured by Breen’s men. Again, an overlong action bit that has no outcome on the plot – the Monster is still captured, regardless of the havoc. 

As for Dracula, he really gets narrative short shrift. After his Blob-to-Mothra transformation last time, wherein he regained his full vampire form at novel’s end (just in time for Latos’s castle to fall on him), he’s now in his coffin resting – and stays that way until page 209, when Jacobs finally returns to him. Throughout Dracula’s been stuck in the coffin, due to the cross Breen used to trap him there. Breen also devises outrageous means to subdue Dracula on the flight to Visaria: massive banks of high-power ultra-violet lights, which are so strong that humans break into a sweat mere seconds after stepping beneath them. But Breen is a moron, as he’s also placed the Monster, in his massive plastic square of a prison, in the same chamber…and the heat begins to melt the plastic. This leads to a suitably nightmarish scenario, as both Dracula and the Monster free themselves as the plane comes in for a landing in Visaria. Jacobs here proves how easily he’ll dispatch major characters, at least doling out memorable sendoffs: Dracula melts the cross with his own hand and shoves the molten metal down one character’s throat. 

And so now here they all are. Dracula and the Monster call off their battle as the plane lands; Dracula flies off as a bat and the Monster charges through the streets of Visaria after him. Meanwhile Marya is finally ready to bring the Bride to life. And here it all happens…like five pages before the book ends. Rather than reap any of the opportunities he has created for himself, Jacobs instead rushes through everything like a true contract writer with a deadline fast approaching. Dracula and his daughter meet and engage in casual conversation, despite this being the first time they’ve been together in the entire trilogy. But again, these characters bear little resemblance to their film counterparts; one could not see Bela Lugosi as this particular Dracula, who has none of Lugosi’s suave mannerisms. He’s a bloodlusting fiend, as is his daughter. Oh and by the way Glendon is here, the friggin Werewolf of London – but for some inexplicable reason Jacobs sets all this the night after the last full moon of the month, so he’s stuck in human form! 

The reviving of the Bride is pretty cool, but again seems lifted from The Bride of Frankenstein, save for the fact that the Bride is nude here. Plus we’re told in no uncertain terms she’s got a helluva body, though one that’s ruined by all those pesky surgical scars. But curiously the one thing these monsters lack is a libido; the Monster is about the only one who seems to want something more than just blood and death, and when he shows up on the scene he starts chasing the Bride around…again, all just like the ’35 film. But as a laughing Glendon – who’s a scientist, of course – relates, now that the Monster and the Bride share the same charge, they can’t attract, as only opposites extract. So as the Monster tries to touch the Bride, electricity shocks him. Dracula gets a good laugh out of this, making some of his own sarcastic comments, spoofing the situation – another indication of how no one takes anything seriously in the novel, which sort of ruins it for the reader. 

It gets worse. Spoiler alert for this paragraph. The Monster knocks the Moon-Ray device down, and it hits Glendon, who promptly turns into a werewolf. And folks, get this…it’s like a page and a half before the end of the book. So instead of having the giant monster fight we’d expect – I mean all the monsters are here, right now, in full force – Jacobs instead dispenses with everything in the most rushed manner possible. Werewolf Glendon hops over to the Moon-Ray device and starts shooting its beam across the dungeon, killing everyone. Dracula and Marya turn into bats to escape, but the ray hits them, turning them into “moon dust.” Soto even jumps into the ray to dispose of himself. As for the Monster and the Bride, Jacobs is so half-assed he doesn’t even mention what happens to them! Last we see of them the Monster’s chasing after her, and this is before Glendon gets hold of the Moon-Ray. The implication is that they all go up in the Moon-Ray…I mean all of them just disposed of in less than a full page. The end. Talk about one hell of an anticlimactic finale.  

In a way though, this rushed, piss-poor finale harkens back to those Universal classics, which also saved the monster fights for the final few minutes. But that’s no excuse for Jacobs to do the same thing! Just so much potential, squandered. Jacobs does try to incorporate a theme, baldly exposited in the final paragraph: that the monsters are really just reflections of the evil nature in the hearts of humans, only taken to ludicrous extremes. The theme comes off as lame, though, given that Jacobs has only presented human characters who are either warlocks, witches, Mafia thugs, or sadists. Even Glendon seems rather comfortable with his werewolf alter ego, which eats people. 

Regardless, this was it for the Universal Monsters Trilogy, and what a sad end it was. Actually, The Devil’s Brood and The Devil’s Night could’ve just been edited into one novel, making for a better read. So much of this one was padding, and it took way too long to pick up on the events that concluded the previous book. Again, Jacobs’s contract writer roots show strongly here. Perhaps the publisher should’ve just gone with yet another writer for this third book. Personally I would’ve done a sort of “Harold Robbins take on the Universal Monsters” thing, with coke-snorting, high-libido versions of Dracula, the Wolfman, and Dracula’s Daughter engaging in some Satanic depravity. Hell, maybe I’ll just write the book anyway.