The Djinn By Graham Masterton

The Djinn
By Graham Masterton
1977 Pinnacle Books
Paperback, 210 pages

                I have been aware of Graham Masterton and his dozens of horror novels for much of my life, but I had never read him. I’ve been told he is great. Well, I finally burst my Masterton cherry and I agree… yes, he is great! I went for his second novel, the one that came right after his debut and probably his most famous book, 1975’s The Manitou. This one is in keeping with that book’s idea; an ancient evil threatens folks in modern times.

 

                Harry Erskine (back from The Manitou) goes to his Godfather Max’s funeral on Cape Cod. The deceased was a collector of early Arabic artifacts and throughout his life, Harry would see some of the collection when he visited. At the funeral, he meets Anne, and they head off to dinner rather than stay and mourn around the Cape house, which has all but fallen to ruins. His Godmother Marjorie is acting strange and there are no paintings or photos left on the walls. Oh, and Max died when he cut off his own face. The mystery is made even worse by the fact that one of the treasures of the collection, an old jar from Iran (that Max likely stole) is sealed up in the turret of the old house. Guess what’s in the jar!

 

                The story is told in more or less real time, the action and unraveling of the mystery taking place over just a few days. Anne, it turns out, is there to try to get the jar and return it to the country to which it belongs. She has a nearby friend in Professor Qualt who also knows a thing or two about ancient Arabic magic and the genies, or djinns, that are thought to inhabit jars. It seems that the one in the Cape house is a famous jar containing an evil djinn that can kill you in forty ways.

 

                Never mind the fact that there are so many people that know so much about dead languages and ancient magic. This book is exciting from start to finish and the primordial evil threatening contemporary people who clearly do not understand it is exciting as hell. Some genuine chills are provided by a wispy hooded entity and when the djinn does appear, it is a roller-coaster ride to hell. Harry might be a bit of a dick, but his reactions and fear come off as very real. He tells the story in first person, a device that I normally don’t like (“hey, that means he’s gonna live!”) but it’s all good and he returns in subsequent Masterton novels.

 

                A+ for my first Masterton book. I’m looking forward to more. The cool stepback cover artwork on this one is by Ed Soyka.

The Colony By Paul Lalley

The Colony
By Paul Lalley
1979 Carlyle
Paperback, 221 pages

 

                Carlyle was porn publisher Bee-Line’s imprint for publishing other genres. They had had some success with Brian McNaughton’s Satan series so you’d think they would have had a lot of horror novels made to order but there aren’t many. This nature-strikes-back monsterpiece is one of the few I can find, and finding it (affordable, or at all) hasn’t been easy. Reading it certainly was easy.

 

                The book starts right off with a bang. The South American Fire Ant has served up a few corpses in a small Mississippi town. Luckily, they have Mark West of the Crop and Pest Commission and an able-bodied sheriff in the person of Web Maddox. Together, these two try to wrap their brains around how these foreign insects have come to set up colonies in their sleepy town. A visiting carnival is attacked just pages after it is mentioned, which made me feel pretty darn good about the Pediatric Hospital mentioned on page 9!

 

                The attacks are suitably gruesome and the first third of the book is riddled with envenomated and chewed up humans. The middle section slows down a bit so we can get some back story on our heroes and the other characters involved in the admittedly paper-thin plot. Mark and Web form a good friendship and soon become a good buddy team. Women? Not much to see here, folks. Mark is seeing his secretary but not seriously and he has an ex-wife. That’s pretty much the only estrogen in the book.

 

                Still, reading this one is a hoot. Lalley, whoever he might be, is no Shakespeare and the text is filled with monstrous mistakes: misspellings, missing words, improper or missing punctuation. It only adds to the charm. (I’m sure Bee-Lines porn books were similarly error-ridden.) Funny enough, Mark West’s ex-wife is a proofreader!! I commented to my own wife that the ex-Mrs. West should have worked on this book!

 

                Unlike McNaughton’s Satan’s Love Child published by Carlyle in 1977, it appears that Lalley wasn’t asked to sex-up the narrative. It is quite chaste, in fact, unless you count the town’s name, which is Beaverton. But we won’t count that, OK? This book, warts and all, is an extremely fun read and it blows the shit out of Peter Tremain’s tepid Ants (Sphere, 1979).

The Millfield Terror By John Monsees

The Millfield Terror
By John Monsees
2025 Grindhouse Horror
Paperback, 210 pages

                I received an advanced review copy to… review. So here I go!

 

                The Millfield Terror fits in comfortably with the books released by Hamlyn and New English Library in the Seventies and Eighties but also offers a heavy dose of good ol’ American corruption. It turns out that, even with all mod cons like cellphones and the interwebz, you’re still fucked if mutated nature gets a taste for human meat.

 

                The brain trust in Millfield, Ohio cut corners and hire a shady clean-up crew to take care of a closed chemical plant but their method makes the local centipedes into human hunting, organized giant monsters. Not willing to admit a mistake was made, the councilman who made the call and his brother, the sheriff, initiate a cover-up, despite what locals have seen. The town is sealed off, dooming the citizens, while a group of four believers with evidence (foreman on the clean-up, a doctor, a former scientist and a paperboy) become wanted criminals because they believe in telling the truth. It’s a mad race to stay one step ahead of the rapidly evolving centipedes.

 

                That’s the story in a nutshell but this is a multi-layered story with a town rife with corruption and full of really bad choices, really flawed people trying to save themselves and the town, and intelligent bugs who are far smarter than their prey. Monsees’ science all looks and sounds pretty spot on; my own knowledge is with reptiles and amphibians, not etymology, but it all reads plausible to my eyes. A great deal of writing about the town and its legal (and illegal) dealings also ring true. Obviously, a lot of research went into this and the reader is rewarded with an intelligent and more or less believable tale of giant, mutant centipedes feeding on a small town.

 

The author is a remarkably gifted wordsmith, enjoying some excellent turns of phrases in the vein of Raymond Chandler-meets-Ramsay Campbell. His main characters are all well-formed, behaving believably and the quartet of “good guys” are really worth cheering for. I’m happy to say that, like in our beloved nasties from the past, we get a few small characters introduced just to be bug chow. While the blood and meat does get splattered about and the action is breath-taking, the story really is more about survival, guilt and penance.

 

                Monsees really deserves to be read by a larger audience. It’s tough for an Indy author to gain traction and his writing really has style and panache that should be seen and enjoyed. Give this one a shot and thank me later. The author is responsible for the cover art as well.

Satan’s Love Child By Brian McNaughton

Satan’s Love Child

By Brian McNaughton
1977 Carlyle
Paperback, 256 pages

 

                After a decade or so of publishing adult paperbacks, Bee-Line Books started the imprint of Carlyle Communications in 1977 to test the waters of more respectable book genres. Like Horror. They hired one of their authors, Brian McNaughton, who had written a handful of adult books with the nom de porn Mark Bloodstone to start things out. Satan’s Love Child was the result.

 

                Marcia, a former hippie, is a reporter for the Riveredge Banner, a small-town newspaper. She is also the married mother of three children. Speaking of hippies, a group of them have been hanging around in town and raising a lot of suspicion and Marcia feels that she, with her background, should get a crack at a story. But with murders (some townsfolk point to her pet Doberman as the killer), a crumbling marriage and a teenage daughter, Melody, that hates her stepfather and disappears into the night, Marcia has her hands very full.

 

                Man, everybody hates hippies. Like, just because they’re dirty outsiders doesn’t mean they’re dangerous. Unless they really are a Satanic cult, hell bent on raising the Old Ones and sacrificing the innocent to achieve their goal. Melody’s future and her mother’s past look like they’re going on similar paths and Hell couldn’t be happier. And is there an actual monster on the prowl?

 

                McNaughton is an excellent writer but evidently, when he turned in his manuscript, the publisher asked him to spice it up significantly. You know, like the other books they were trying to break away from. Well, he sure did. The added hard-core sex scenes stand out like a sore thumb and are howlingly hilarious next to the somewhat solemn story that he’d been telling. Not that his previous draft was without a sense of humor, but the sex is so in-your-face that you just have to laugh. No book ever published has more uses of the words “cunt” and “prick”. And all of the good things that go with them.

 

                Like the other McNaughton Satan books I have read, this first one is an easy quick read that never has a chance to get dull. Marcia is a good character, though she is surrounded by less than desirable folks. Her mothering is questionable (always leaving the two youngest children alone) but her motives are just. McNaughton’s original draft, without the howling porn, is now in print as Gemini Rising by Wildside Press (2018). But hey, as a McNaughton fan, why not read as many words that he has written as possible? Even if a huge percentage of those words are “cunt”.

Night-Shriek by Michael Wolfitt

Night-Shriek
by Michael Wolfitt

1983 Granada
Paperback, 223 pages

                I swear I thought I was reading a William Johnstone novel except there was no right-wing agenda and it took place in London, not Louisiana! But holy hell, it’s just as batshit crazy as anything in the Johnstone oeuvre!

 

                A couple, Roger and Hilary, get into an accident on the way home from their friends’ house and wind up in the hospital. Hilary was pregnant and loses the baby. The fetus was a weird looking thing, so the doctor saved it to examine later. The fetus breaks out of the storage cupboard. Cats start spying on people. Nurses die. Everyone involved with the case start dying violently. It seems Hilary had the bloodline of the ancient Cat Goddess Bast. See what I mean?

 

                You know me. I can’t resist cat-horror. There is plenty of feline fear in the pages of this book, be it a sleek black cat staring a victim down through a window or a person actually becoming a cat. The more convoluted the storyline became, the more I had fun with this absolute mess of a book. Egyptology often loses my interest in books but this time, it all worked for me because of the laughably over the top audacity of the story.

 

                I’m not saying this is a terrible book. I found it thoroughly entertaining. Yes, it is batshit crazy, but it never dragged and kept me smiling throughout. And if the cover art by Tim White (actually credited on the back cover!) doesn’t grab you, then I don’t know what will. Filled with kinky sex, mutilations and mind-control… they just don’t publish books like this anymore.

 

Online sources say that Wolfitt is actually Mystery writer/ poet Mike Fredman but I haven’t seen Fredman himself admit that anywhere. I won’t be searching out his recent poetry or any of his Willie Halliday detective novels, but I will cherish this strange little piece of pulp forever.