Satan’s Mistress By Brian McNaughton

Satan’s Mistress
By Brian McNaughton
1978 Carlyle
Paperback, 252 pages

                McNaughton’s follow-up to Satan’s Love Child isn’t as sex-filled as its predecessor, but it’s a truly inspired piece of lunacy in and of itself. Nobody in the book has a shred of decency and wonderfully awful things happen to everyone.

 

                The Laughlins are a fucked-up family. Mom’s an insane hippy, dad is a commercial artist and young Patrick is confused as hell. They live in Mom’s inherited old Mill that has a suspect history. Patrick is an awkward nerd but has typical teenage thoughts and desires, and dreams of a red-haired mistress. In the waking world, he has a crush on a cheerleader. When the folks have an “adult” party, everyone gathers at the Mill and, quite literally, all hell starts to break loose. You see, Mom has found a hidden passageway in the basement that leads to her ancestor’s library which is filled with evil writings. It turns out that the Cthulhu Mythos that Lovecraft wrote about was not fiction!

 

                That’s about the gist of it and believe me, that premise allows all kinds of wacky things to happen. Patrick gets taken over by evil spirits, Dad buggers his gay boss, and everyone gets wrapped up in the madness. There is incest, infant-eating, possession, and brutality, but it’s all served up with a healthy sense of humor and clever storytelling. At one point, the family lawyer, a Lovecraft fan, figures out the connection when he finds the real Necronomicon in the library and says he has to call Colin Wilson, L. Sprague de Camp and Robert E. Briney, all real-life writers who have dabbled in the Mythos (the last one, a collaborator with McNaughton!) to see what they know about it.

 

                In a word, this book is fun. Sit back and enjoy the silly weirdness. By the way, it was Carlyle Books that made this and three other books “the Satan Series” back in the day. Overall, they don’t really share a common thread, though the third book, Satan’s Seductress, does continue this storyline. This title has been restored as Downward to Darkness with McNaughton’s original, preferred text and title, by Wildside Press and it is readily available online. But feel free to stick with this, the pulpier version, for a wild ride.

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).

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”.