Satan’s Love Child
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”.
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