The Devil Rides Out

The Devil Rides Out
Dennis Wheatley | Bantam | 1967 (first published 1934) | 310 pages

“I disliked him intensely. He’s a pot-bellied, bald-headed man of about sixty, with large, protuberant, fishy eyes, limp hands, and a most unattractive lisp. He reminded me of a large white slug.”

When his old friend Simon Aron falls under the spell of a powerful occultist, the Duke de Richleau springs into action, battling a group of satanists bent on staging an infernal ritual that could unleash a great evil into the world. 

Enlisting his brash American colleague, Rex Van Ryn, for assistance, the Duke discovers that Mocata, an advanced practitioner of the black arts, has extended a strange hold over Simon. Interrupting a ceremony at Simon’s isolated country house, the Duke and Rex prevent the hapless man from being initiated into a circle of satanic worshippers led by Mocata. Simon’s respite from evil is short lived, however, as Mocata’s magnetic powers of persuasion return Simon to his control, and set him up for a greater maleficent purpose on the upcoming occasion of Walpurgis Night.

What follows is just as much a two-fisted adventure tale as an occult horror. Dashing between locations, the Duke and Rex engage Macata and his minions in an epic battle of wills, with a far greater number of lives hanging in the balance than simply their friend Simon. From breaking up a black mass on the Salisbury Plain, to performing a cleansing ritual in the ruins of Stonehenge, to flying across Europe in a small airplane on the trail of Mocata, the Duke only seems to pause the action long enough to lecture on the esoteric nature of the occult.

And lecture he does. Frequently crossing over into the pedantic, the Duke’s endless pontifications on satanic ritual and ceremony become something of a bore, overstepping any welcome break in the breathless action passages. A self-professed dabbler in the esoteric, the Duke nonetheless seems to have picked up an endless reservoir of arcane knowledge from a single morning’s visit to the British Library. He certainly shows no reservations in droning away in minute detail to Rex and a few other allies he enlists along the way.

Although his experience and intelligence are beyond reproach, the Duke is also arguably something of a pompous ass. Possessing some questionable views on class and politics, he exhibits the values of an elite class with the time and resources to dedicate to a leisure of practicing the esoteric arts. Even in the face of great mortal danger, an ally of the Duke’s laments over an evening spent without an apéritif.

Rex picks up a love interest in Tanith, a young woman with a pessimistic view of her own future, who has fallen under Mocata’s spell along with Simon. She offers another candidate for the Duke’s protection, and a cause for the bluntly-spoken American.

A highlight of the action is a dramatic stand against the forces of darkness, with the Duke and his friends fortified within the chalk-drawn protection of a pentacle, waiting out the night as a series of evil manifestations try to break through their defenses. All the trappings of a supernatural battle are here, from holy water and white candles, to prayers and incantations against the duplicitous forces of evil attempting to trick and divide the Duke’s party.

Mocata’s ultimate plans are never specified in detail, but the horrors of World War I are intimated as being the result of similar evil unleashed in the world. Originally written in the thirties, contemporary readers will undoubtedly benefit from the historical foresight the book cannot possess, sadly anticipating the wave of real-life horrors about to break over England and the world, even if the Duke succeeds in his battle against Mocata. That the embodiment of all they are trying to prevent lies gathering strength just over the horizon occasionally tinges the proceedings with a meta-textual sense of melancholy.

Ultimately the action sequences are engaging and the overall atmosphere thick with malice. Even though lacking in actual scares, what other book offers its protagonist the opportunity to hold the mummified phallus of an Egyptian god in his hand?

The Old Gods Waken

The Old Gods Waken
Manly Wade Wellman | Berkley Books | 1984 (first published 1979) | 186 pages

Appalachian farmer Creed Forshay is drawn into conflict with his mysterious new neighbors after they attempt to build a fence across his property line. He enlists the help of John, a wandering minstrel with a silver-stringed guitar, who has befriended his son, Luke.

Forshay’s easy embrace of John runs contrary to the expected real-world reaction towards a transient balladeer, which would arguably be summarized as, “Get the **** off my property, BARD!” (followed by the pump of a shotgun).

At Forshay’s request, John climbs the mountain path to the property owned by the Voth brothers. He immediately senses something wrong with the brothers, noting a large wicker figure they have constructed. In addition, he glimpses something watching from the large oak tree in front of their farmhouse. Returning to the Forshay house, John feels a dark, watchful presence just out of sight.

John takes his suspicions to Reuben Manco, an old friend and Cherokee medicine man. Before you have time to yell, “DRUIDS!”, the pair have figured out that the Voth brothers are Druid cultists attempting to apply Old World magick in order to raise ancient New World gods from their slumber.

The set-up unfolds very quickly, and after Luke and a female companion are kidnapped, John and Reuben set out to rescue the pair from probable human sacrifice and defeat the Voth brothers. The narrative is structured around seven challenges the pair must face, ranging from a giant boar to magical boundaries of water and fire.

Overcoming each challenge leads to Manco explaining the history and lore of druidism, and the related mysticism of indigenous American peoples. These convenient information dumps are primarily static, interrupting other passages that could have easily been lifted from action-adventure serials. A lengthy climb up a sheer mountain cliff provides thrills unrelated to any gods, spirits or magic spells.

For all his hinted experience, John seems, at first, to bring little to the fight against the Voths, relying on the expertise of those he enlists to aid him. As the seven challenges progress, however, he comes into his own and proves to be an unflappable adventurer. Both he and Reuben show remarkable calm when confronted with their ultimate adversaries, mythical creatures with the vague shape of a human form, but with fleshy wings stretching from hand to foot.

The Appalachian setting provides an atmospheric background, although the text’s repeated use of regional colloquialisms, both in speech and description,occasionally threatens to descend into cloying. But Old Gods also takes a few steps to subvert the expected stereotypes. Luke is not just another hick local boy, but has graduated from college, valuably adding to the group’s discussion of the history of global folklore. Reuben employs the monosyllabic grunt of a racist’s conception of “Indian” language to the Voths, hiding his advanced knowledge and tricking the brothers into dismissing him as a threat.

Old Gods Waken is a quick and engaging read, filled with a regional atmosphere. Perhaps the mystical revelations are too front-loaded to build much suspense, and the folkloric information comes as an occasional block of exposition, but readers will ultimately be invested in seeing John’s (albeit brief) journey to the end.

Fortunately, the pace provides John with little time to plunk his guitar and unleash too many folksy ballads.

The Night Strangler

The Night Strangler
Jeff Rice | Pocket Books | 1974 | 160 pages

“If you have come here seeking something to lend credence to the lunatic blatherings of that incompetent lout Kolchak, Mr. Rice, you are a bigger idiot than he, sir….”

A pale carbon-copy of The Night Stalker, Jeff Rice’s follow-up novel exhibits a loss in quality resulting from duplication, but still manages to deliver an appealing vehicle for its iconic main character, Carl Kolchak.

Unlike the first novel, The Night Strangler is not an original work, but is instead adapted from the Richard Matheson screenplay of the second made-for-television Kolchak film. Filled with less gritty detail than its predecessor, the story echoes similar themes of police cover-ups and press collusion. The structural concept also remains the same, with an introduction by the author framing the first-person case files from Kolchak’s own notes.

After relocating to Seattle and landing a newspaper job with his old boss, Tony Vincenzo, Kolchak immediately encounters a rash of vicious murders echoing the killings that eventually drove him out of Las Vegas. The bodies of several young dancers are found around Pioneer Square with their throats brutally crushed, and small samples of blood extracted from the base of their brains with a needle-like instrument.

Just like in Vegas, the Seattle police want to avoid releasing the details of the crimes, and Kolchak’s publisher at the Daily Chronicle is hostile to printing the true story. However, it all feels a little watered down from the earlier book, with a less intense narrative driving Kolchak forward. Kolchak’s outbursts begin to feel like a shorthand for his character, rather than an organic response to the unwavering self-interests of those in power blocking his attempts at unraveling the mystery.

Vincenzo fares even worse, being reduced to a single-note character. Although making more appearances, his personal encounters are more shallow, restricted to bellowing his discomfort with Kolchak while popping handfuls of Maalox to combat his flaring ulcers. Better to not even discuss Kolchak’s wince-inducing Humphrey Bogart impression, or his pants-wetting episode in a moment of terror.

Kolchak’s developing relationship with Louise Harper, a belly dancer from the scene of an early murder, seems out of place here. Although a welcome reprieve from his relentlessly downbeat luck, the personal details of their coupling are out-of-step with the conceit of the narrative as Kolchak’s direct account of the murders. Better is Kolchak’s new friend, and perhaps kindred spirit, newspaper morgue manager Mr. Berry, who shares the reporter’s desire to unpack the supernatural history of the crimes—from the safety of his basement office.

The book suffers because the alchemy storyline is just less interesting than the vampire story from The Night Stalker. Kolchak’s final confrontation with the killer, as he reveals his evil plans, reads like a tete-a-tete with a Bond villain in his lair. The text itself contains something of an admission of propagating lazy coincidences for the sake of plot, as it transfers Dr. Kirsten Helms from Las Vegas to Seattle to help Kolchak research the supernatural trappings of the murders.

The Seattle location is a clear step down from Las Vegas. Although underground Seattle possesses some undeniably spooky charm, it feels a bit predictable, and not as intimately documented as the true-crime Vegas streets of The Night Stalker. Perhaps the lesser impact is due to the lost Victorian streetscape under Seattle flirting with cliche as a horror setting. The same underground in which Kolchak confronts his immortal alchemist served as the backdrop for an episode of Scooby Doo (Scooby and the Mystery Machine gang of meddling kids fought demons).

Still, it’s hard not to root for Kolchak as the underdog, predictably driven out of yet another city in disgrace, and lament the fact that Jeff Rice did not continue the series with any additional installments. My nine-year-old self taped episodes of The Night Stalker from broadcast television using a cheap portable cassette recorder, playing the audio back to relive the stories later. I would have been beyond thrilled to find paperback novelizations of Kolchak’s monstrous encounters (The Spanish Moss Murders, I’m looking at you).

Burn, Witch, Burn!

Burn, Witch, Burn!
Abraham Merritt | Corgi Books | 1963 (first published 1932) | 161 pages

Dr. Lowell, a self-proclaimed “orthodox man of medicine” struggles to find rational explanations in a mysterious case that places him in direct conflict with an ancient, “dark flame of evil wisdom”. Presented in a breathless, first-person account, Lowell details the experiences he admits would be mercilessly dismissed by his own medical community, in a story that could have alternately been named with the doctor’s own casebook title, The Dolls of Madame Mandilip.

Entering his New York City hospital late one night, Dr. Lowell is confronted by Julian Ricori, an infamous local gangster. Ricori and a group of his henchmen are delivering Peters, Ricori’s right-hand man in the organization, to the emergency room. Peters has been stricken with a mysterious malady, rendering him in a catatonic state. He was suddenly and unexpectedly crippled, debilitated with a frozen expression of horror locked on his face, unseeing eyes locked on terrors seemingly both internal and external. Recognizing Lowell as a distinguished brain specialist, Ricoli enlists his aid in treating his strangely afflicted associate, whom he suspects is the victim of foul play.

After Peters dies, his corpse exhibits a nearly supernatural onset and release of rigor mortis. In addition, his blood work shows an unusual, luminous presence in the corpuscles. Lowell reaches out to some of his distinguished colleagues in the medical profession, and discovers a rash of similar deaths throughout New York. Prompted by the vengeful Ricori, Lowell pursues a commonality among the victims, eventually discovering shared encounters with a strange downtown dollmaker.

The early chapters establish an appealingly creepy atmosphere, primarily due to Lowell’s first-person account. His inner-monologue, as he grapples with the strange agency of the assorted deaths, reads something like the voice-over narration in a bleak film noir, only with an occult tinge. Interestingly, Ricori and his gunsel, McCann, are portrayed in an unexpectedly positive light. Originally written in the thirties, the text’s empathy towards these mafiosi perhaps stems from the inherently flawed prohibition against alcohol that presumably drove their criminal enterprise.

In the subsequent decades following the book’s publication, the notion of killer dolls has descended into outrageous camp [Bride of Chucky, I’m looking at you], but here the concept is presented in all seriousness. The little details supporting the curses, from the sinister balms to the “witches ladder” of braided hair placed in the possession of the victims, serve to enhance the overall mood of malignancy.

If Madame Mandilip ultimately remains a cipher as the villain, at least she is an imposing character. A giant woman, with a huge bust and pronounced mustache, her motivations are never clearly identified beyond evil-for-the-sake-of-evil. Her mousy niece elicits some sympathy, trapped in a cycle of witchcraft that she cannot herself escape.

A final chapter avoids the pitfall of an easy, rational explanation explaining away all the horrors. This connect-all-the-dots type of conclusion arguably tarnishes such otherwise notable classics as Psycho (or, ahem, any of a dozen Scooby Doo mysteries).Lowell feigns a potential, post-hypnotic solution, but when ultimately asked if he believes in the scientific over the supernatural in this case, he responds simply, “No.”

Darker Than You Think

Darker Than You Think
Jack Williamson | Berkley Medallion  | 1969 (first published 1940) | 282 pages

How dark can a novel really pretend to be, when it features a naked, red-haired witch riding on the back of a sabre-tooth tiger?

After attending an airport press conference held by his estranged former professor, small-town reporter Will Barbee is plunged into a nightmare world of murderously vivid dreams. Dr. Mondrick, along with a few of Barbee’s former university colleagues, has just returned from a scientific exhibition in the Gobi Desert, and intimates the discovery of a major finding in human evolution. Before making his announcement to the press, Dr. Mondrick is mysteriously killed, and his research team flees from the scene.

At the airport, Barbee meets fellow reporter April Bell, a vivacious young woman who immediately captivates his imagination. Barbee is puzzled by her strange behaviour during the event, however, and ultimately elicits a strange confession. April Bell is a witch, and she killed Dr. Mondrick to protect her fellow witch-folk from the dangers inherent in Mondrick’s undisclosed discovery.

While Barbee ponders the meaning of April’s uncanny revelation, he begins to suffer from chronic nightmares. In his dream state, he takes the form of a huge gray wolf, and along with a similarly transformed April Bell, begins to stalk and murder the remaining members Dr. Mondrick’s research party. When he awakens, Barbee is horrified to learn that the fates of his dream victims have also manifested in the waking world.

The dream-wolf April Bell feeds Barbee a load of pseudo-scientific babble, covering the emergence of ancient races of witches, eugenics, telepathy, ESP, and astral projection. She desires to recruit him into protecting the emergent “Child of Night”, a messiah-like witch who will revitalize their ancestral line. This unloading of information feels inorganic, with April Bell serving as a convenient mouthpiece for all the supernatural context.

There is a slight sense of rinse-and-repeat to Barbee’s dreams, in which he murders another of his friends, awakens to discover they have actually been killed, and then begins to question his own sanity. The dreams themselves are entertaining, with Barbee and April Bell shifting into various forms beyond just wolves. Snakes, sabre-tooth tigers, and even pterosaurs become his astral plane killing vessels. As Barbee reluctantly takes the necessary action to kill, April goads him forward with her reading of the probabilities of the situation, like a demented dungeon master deciphering the roll of a twenty-sided die.

Barbee’s reactions also become repetitive, always ineffectually questioning his dream kills. After much agonizing, he invariably follows April’s instructions. Even the language of the book frequently repeats, with multiple descriptions of various creatures as “tawny” and April’s astral state as a “white wolf bitch.”

Limitations notwithstanding, the book possesses an appealing noirish atmosphere, with its hapless, alcoholic protagonist driven into near-madness by a dangerous femme-fatale—who (in a break from noir tradition) sometimes rides naked astride his transmogrified bestial back.

Ghost Train

Ghost Train
Stephen Laws | Tor | 1986 | 314 pages

Recovering from a near-fatal fall from the speeding King’s Cross train, Mark Davies is plagued by a series of mysterious nightmares, and a strange compulsion to return to the station and the transit line that nearly killed him.

As Mark sits in the station cafe compulsively watching the ticket entrance, a group of other characters from the greater environment of King’s Cross—from fellow commuters to bag ladies—are introduced, only to be killed in a variety of grisly manners. Night after night, Mark dreams of ancient rites and ritual murders, while during the day trying to remember the details of his accident. The early chapters, while somewhat disjointed due to the independent strands of temporary characters, establish a mood of mystery, and the prospect of a folk horror stalking the path of the British railway.

The introduction of Les Chadderton, a former detective whose own wife was a victim of self-immolation after riding the King’s Cross train, widens the scope of the mysterious attacks, and validates Mark’s affliction as something other than simple mental illness. The ex-policeman and stricken commuter serve as a duo of metaphysical investigators, with more overtly supernatural attacks leading them to the diabolic presence running along the King’s Cross rails.

By the time the pair recruit the assistance of a Catholic priest, any subtle folkloric-based creepiness gives way to an over-the-top, rock-em-sock-em horror more akin to The Evil Dead than to The Wicker Man. Passages meant to deliver breathless action begin to fatigue and become monotonous in their execution. Mark’s repeating dreams of purple-fogged pagan rites become repetitive, while the whole primal evil surrounding the ruins of ancient stone circles becomes suspiciously vulnerable to Christian rites of exorcism. A chapter literally listing the stone circle sites of Britain is a particular bore.

Once the final train-bound exorcism begins, the action ramps up even more. A trio of demon-touched passengers infect a range of others, leading to a wild onboard killing spree. More characters, including a soldier and his girlfriend are introduced, only to become fodder for the murderous rampage. The girlfriend is also an egregiously stereotypical histrionic female character—standing out even more due to the lack of other women in the primary cast of characters—existing only to passively watch the carnage, and let loose frequent rounds of screaming.

Weird ectoplasmic fluid coats the interior of the passenger cars, reanimated corpses wield axes, and Mark attains odd psychic powers as the runaway King’s Cross train hurls toward its final destination. It all feels a bit unwieldy and overblown, although peppered with several convenient shortcuts regarding associated powers and abilities designed to bring characters together and streamline the action. Mark’s latent telepathy and mental power to shift the rails are sketchily explained, but without much context in a story that otherwise has ample time to provide backstories on several minor characters.

I’m sure enthusiastic readers of baroque eighties horror will find plenty to like here, but I was left mostly bored, yet simultaneously exhausted, wishing perhaps that Ghost Train was in possession of more subtle terrors.

The Grave

The Grave
Charles L. Grant | Fawcett Popular Library | 1981 | 223 pages

Joshua Miller finds things. Not missing persons, or stolen jewels, or anything of particular value or notoriety, but items of interest desired for some personal reason by a group of select clients in the small Connecticut town of Oxrun Station. The search for a seemingly innocuous 18th-century hand plow, The Grave’s version of a Hitchcockian MacGuffin, leads Miller to uncover a secret that someone wants to remain hidden, and sets off a series of uncanny events that leaves him questioning his own sanity.

The aftermath of a strange accident introduces an early mystery, although Miller is not directly involved in the proceedings. A violent car crash on a lonely stretch of road outside the town claims the lives of four passengers. However, among the four corpses alongside the wreckage, police find an extraneous severed arm, the only remains of a purported fifth victim whose body is never found. Although this curious puzzle fires Miller’s imagination, he continues on with his own caseload, searching for a historic plow, a sheaf of vintage sheet music, and other more mundane items.

Although the writing is full of descriptive details—the overstuffed decor of a wealthy woman’s library, the components of a finely prepared dinner, or the simple pleasures of a warm bath—mundane proves to be the key word. A full ten more chapters unfold, with the crash receding in the background, until a new mysterious element is introduced. Mrs. Thames, Miller’s primary client, eventually confides in him her own fears regarding a strange series of disappearances. 

Several women in her circle of friends have all gone missing. The individual circumstances vary, but the missing persons share a similar characteristic—they all vanished on their birthday. Although she does not understand the forces at play, with her own birthday fast approaching, she is terrified she may be next on the list.

Miller humors Mrs. Thames, but several distractions keep him from investigating the rash of birthday disappearances. In fact, nearly the entire first half of the novel reads more like the foundation of a romance than a horror story, with Miller at one corner of a latent love triangle. The main problem with this focus is the fact Miller is something of a jerk.

He harbors a deep attraction to Andrea Murdoch, the sheltered yet voluptuous daughter of a local writer, living in isolation with her father in a remote farmhouse outside of town. Her breathy interchanges with Miller leave him stricken with desire, but crippled with an impotence to act upon his feelings. At the same time, his flirtatious banter and intimate behaviour with Felicity Lancaster, his employee at the detective agency, easily crosses contemporary boundaries of inappropriate workplace behaviour. His attitude towards her ranges from a patronizing creepiness to blatant harassment.

It all serves to fuel a slow burn suspense, but there is a qualitative difference between slow burn and no burn. A few eerie incidents hint at the supernatural, with the atmosphere of the town suggesting a building storm, whether electrical or psychological. Miller overhears an argument between Andrea’s father and a strange old woman inside the farmhouse, a wasp-induced panic attack fuels a resurgence of a childhood trauma, and Miller almost drowns in the bath during a visionary experience as the curved sides of the tub recede upwards and out of reach.

The pace doesn’t really pick up until near the end, after Miller is nearly killed in an hallucination-fueled accident. The attempt on his life arguably proves itself unnecessary during the events of the climax. Even while the villain explains the motives behind his actions, Miller clearly does not possess all the answers that would have made him a threat. Another character, who is unceremoniously killed off-page, actually posits the initial theory that ties all the pieces of the mystery together. 

The underlying lore also remains sketchy, as if deemed unnecessary in the rush to a conclusion. This final omission is particularly glaring, given the wealth of incidental details on other matters along the way. Yet the final rituals and source of related powers remain vague.

Author Charles L. Grant was a notable proponent of “quiet horror”, and set nearly a dozen novels and a host of short stories in the extended Oxrun Station universe. Although possessing a modestly enjoyable overall atmosphere of suspense, the place-specific charms of Oxrun Station in The Grave fail to inspire much enthusiasm for a return visit.

[On a technical (and somewhat petulant) note, the title should more accurately read The Graves, since there are at least nine in the story.]

Strangers at Collins House (Dark Shadows #3)

Strangers at Collins House (Dark Shadows #3)
Marilyn Ross | Paperback Library | 1967 | 159 pages

The elderly and infirm Henry Collins, Elizabeth and Roger’s uncle, arrives at Collins House to reflect upon a troubled and tragic past, and provides a tantalizing clue to Victoria Winters regarding the mystery of her true identity.

Elizabeth installs the ailing Henry in the apartment suite in the nearly abandoned rear wing of Collins House, opening and dusting the musty rooms as if the events in the previous book of the series (involving Henry Francis and his invalid daughter) never happened. Henry is accompanied by his elderly servant, Benjamin Willard, who has been his employee and companion for many decades. Benjamin’s son, Jack, a “bloated and disreputable…race-track type”, and daughter-in-law, Molly, a mousy blonde, serve as his extended retinue, supporting the senior Collins on what is likely to be his final trip home to Collins House.

Not only has the memory of the entire Henry Francis incident been purged, but the underlying lesson as well. This new round of outsiders to Collins House once again brings strange occurrences, unexplained apparitions, and blatant danger for Victoria Winters.

In addition to the apartment, Elizabeth reveals a new room, one connected with the others through a secret door, that shares a meaningful history with Henry. This hidden room is a painstakingly restored hotel room from the Ritz Hampton in New York City. It serves as a time capsule—down to the magazines, calendars, and ephemera it contains—from a Halloween night fifty years earlier. 

The room holds a dark secret at its heart. Henry bought and disassembled its entire contents in 1916 after the unsolved murder of his mistress, a Ziegfeld Follies girl who was strangled following a visit to the hotel. Although blame initially fell to a cab driver, the case was never solved. Henry seemingly never fully recovered from the tragedy, the mysterious death still haunting him half a century later.

However, Victoria’s presence changes the old man’s gloomy disposition. Taking a natural shine to her, he lavishes her with the gift of some valuable emerald jewelry. Intimating that she inherently deserves the gift, Henry’s affection fuels Victoria’s secret suspicion that she is actually a lost member of the Collins family.

The mystery of the hidden room, and how it informs Victoria’s lost lineage, is central to Strangers at Collins House. Along the way, Victoria’s room is burglarized (repeatedly), blunt attempts are made on her life, and she encounters a phantom—threateningly whispering her name, “Victoria. Vic-TOR-i-a!” 

After three volumes, these Dark Shadows novels seem to heavily depend upon their guest characters, with familiar faces from the television series (and even from previous books) removed from the action. Carolyn and David Collins are absent again, raising the question, “Just what does Victoria Winters do at Collins House?” Love interest Ernest Collins remains away on his extended violin tour, and Burke Devlin pops up only occasionally to provide mentorship to the young governess. Secondary love interest, and Collins family lawyer, Will Grant, also fails to make an appearance. Roger Collins is in rare form, however, more entertainingly drunk and mean-spirited than ever, slurring his quips and presiding over the sideboard—and its bottomless decanters of brandy.

Roger introduces another new character, Rupert Harvey, a self-proclaimed “psychometrist” whose interest in the occult has led him to Collins House. Harvey’s psychic readings, first through a single object, and then later in the hidden room itself, are the closest brush with the supernatural the series has taken [we are still waiting for the arrival of Barnabas Collins]. Short of an actual séance, Harvey gathers the Collins together to engage in a reading of the hidden room, triggering the climax and ultimately driving the resolution to the mystery.

The books follow a familiar pattern, which is both predictable and comforting at the same time. Everything feels slightly disposable, as if the canon for this series is being improvised while written. This is probably the case, since author Marilyn (William Edward Daniel) Ross wrote thirty-two Dark Shadows novels, and over three-hundred other books. The stories and characters here may ultimately suffer the same fate as Henry’s hidden room, walled up and forgotten, left to molder in isolation.

The Bedeviled

The Bedeviled
Thomas Cullinan | Avon Books | 1979 | 253 pages

The Bedeviled issues another pop-cultural warning to city folk about what they have long suspected regarding rural America—the mundane currents of small-town life mask an insidious underground network of occultism, diabolic ritual, and devil worship.

After her New York advertising executive husband, Jack, suffers a health crisis, Maggie Caine agrees to travel with him and their two children to his historic family farmhouse in rural Ohio, left to them by their late great-aunt Hannah, for a period of rest and recuperation. The house was originally built by Jack’s ancestor, Brigadier General Duffin Caine, a Union Civil War hero honored for his war service, but feared for the sadistic treatment given equally to enemy combatants and soldiers under his command. On their first night in Cainesville, Jack falls down the stairs and breaks his hip, precipitating a series of events that—much to Maggie’s consternation—transforms an intended brief stay into a prolonged residence.

Almost immediately upon their arrival, the house begins to affect Maggie’s teenage son, Duff, whose personality and behavior begins to exhibit troubling changes. Formerly a standout student, Duff starts skipping classes and engaging in violent behavior with his new classmates. However, he shows an unusual interest in learning about the local history, along with studying the vintage Caine family papers stored in the attic. Later, in a squirm-inducing account, Maggie’s ten-year-old daughter, Franny, tells of a possible attempted molestation by her brother. The reveal reduces an ugly incident to a chapter-ending shock line.

As a character, Maggie comes across as rather unlikable, never reticent about providing critical comments about her husband or marriage. Her frankness is unusually compelling, though, and offers a refreshing alternative to the more traditional role of hapless victim or traditional wife and mother. Some of her foibles lay the eventual groundwork for a case of the unreliable narrator, particularly when she becomes the focus for strange new occurrences. She does manage to elicit sympathy, as she struggles to convince a local priest that something supernatural is indeed occurring around the Caine farm.

Maggie herself experiences a series of inexplicable visions, witnessing an older, belligerent man physically replace Duff in a variety of settings around the farmhouse and in the car on the road to town. Due to Duff’s abrupt personality shift, and her own uncanny experiences, Maggie comes to believe the spirit of General Duffin Caine is trying to possess her son.

A general sense of paranoia surrounds Maggie’s personal struggle with the events at the farm. An older priest informs Maggie of the general’s rumored occultism, with several present-day residents suspected of carrying on the tradition of demonic ritual, including Mrs. Reddy, aunt Hannah’s former housekeeper and the Caine family’s closest neighbor. She later recognizes both the local doctor and lawyer as participants in a ceremony she observed at Mrs. Reddy’s house.

Questions regarding Maggie’s sanity grow, as she fears her own attempted possession by a woman she assumes was the general’s mistress. The dual possession of mother and son allows for the introduction of a potential new and entirely different horror, spelled out in tiles placed on the board by Maggie during her turn in a game of Scrabble:  “I-N-C-E-S-T”. Although never explicit, someone or something is sharing her bed at night other than her husband, who has been relegated to a downstairs bedroom.

As the focus shifts to Maggie’s declining mental health during the final third of the story, a few other potential horror elements are neglected. While recuperating, Jack remains physically and emotionally distant from Maggie, furiously scribbling what he claims is his own book on the Caine family history. When Maggie eventually reads the contents, written longhand in a series of yellow legal pads, the expected pay-off never materializes. Perhaps a case of unreasonable expectations, but certainly a missed opportunity for an early variation on “All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy.”

The specifics of the general’s occultism are often left vague, with Mrs. Reddy’s rituals defined by a few tropes, including robed acolytes and inverted crucifixes. The logistics surrounding the Caine family plot are nebulous, with several graves occasionally unearthed and later found refilled. Plots shift frequently and bodies seem in active rotation for such a small graveyard.

A final death remains shocking, even with the foretelling in an early chapter, and the downbeat ending fits neatly within the general pessimism of the era that gave us Harvest Home, The Wicker Man and Race with the Devil.

Carnacki, the Ghost-Finder

Carnacki the Ghost-Finder | William Hope Hodgson | Sphere Books | 1981 (First published 1913) | 239 pages

“I am not given to either believing or disbelieving things ‘on principle,’ as I have found many idiots prone to be, and what is more, some of them not ashamed to boast of the insane fact.”

The telling of the ghostly tales is always the same. Carnacki gathers his long-suffering group of companions—Dodgson, Jessop, Arkwright, and Taylor—for a dinner, revealing nothing until the time is right. After settling into a comfortable chair with an after-dinner smoke from his pipe, Carnacki finally gives his captive audience what they want: a detailed account of his latest case of occult detective work.

Carnacki seems relentlessly cheerful in his retelling, imploring his friends to keep up by frequently peppering his monologue with repetitive calls of “Do you follow?” However, his breathless delivery seems to occasionally undercut any potential horror derived from the scene.

The cases vary from instances of hauntings to strange manifestations, but are not always supernatural in origin. A good fifty years before Scooby Doo ushered in its gang of meddling kids unmasking evildoers perpetrating ghostly deeds, Carnacki uncovers (The House Among the Laurels) the hidden wire used to mysteriously slam shut a door, and the secret ceiling recess where an otherwise inexplicable rain of blood drops originates.

Although drawing on some mystical properties, such as the defensive force provided by a pentagram drawn on the floor, Carnacki also utilizes a system of scientific methods to battle the forces of the occult. In The Gateway Monster and The Hog, he implements a battery-powered series of vacuum tubes that channel electric current to boost the effectiveness of the pentacle. Carnacki also elaborates, in some detail, the inherent powers of the spectrum, with a system of colored vacuum tubes providing an additional line of psychic defense.

Although some cases are revealed as frauds, most are ultimately supernatural in their origins. Psychic forces manifest in the material world, and Carnacki references an entire arcane body of work in his methodology. Drawing material from these fantastic texts, he battles instances of “induced hauntings” (The Horse of the Invisible) and psychical imprint of past evil deeds (The Gateway of the Monster), before facing his ultimate deadly test in The Hog.

Whereas most of the earlier accounts are retold with a breezy good humor, the tale of The Hog presents an epic struggle against a malevolent intrusion from an “Outer Level” of existence. Carnaki’s success, although foregone by the structure of the telling, seems tenuous. Saddled with his stricken client—who is incapacitated, and reduced to making grunting  noises—in a fragile series of electric-powered vacuum tubes installed to defend against a powerful psychical intrustion, Carnacki nearly succumbs to the black pit of an interdimensional void, through which comes the snout of a gigantic hog.

In addition to the previously cited metaphysical text references, this tale unpacks an entire cosmology on the nature of “psychic gases” in the solar system, the creatures spawned by it, and their intrusion into our world. But following all the long-winded pontificating comes relief, as Carnacki eventually finishes his tale and (once again) curtly dismisses his audience:

‘Out you go!’ he said using the recognised formula in friendly fashion. ‘Out you go! I want a sleep.’