Toys ’R’ Death
If the house you just moved into has a basement stuffed with old mannequins, run. If it has a “toy room” filled with clown puppets, run faster. Because the only things scarier than children are their toys. In Keeper of the Children (1978), a stuffed Smokey the Bear lays waste to an entire house with its ax, a witch marionette uses part of a bannister as a club, a department store mannequin shows up at the front door holding a golf club, and a superstrong scarecrow comes to kill, leaving “little broomstick footprints” in its wake. Eventually the family dog hurls himself out the second-story window, preferring the sweet release of death to this toybox of terror.
Automatonophobia is the name smug people who’ve never been chased by witch marionettes give to the irrational fear of inanimate objects that resemble human beings: puppets, robots, mannequins, dolls. But can it be called an irrational fear if dolls can actually kill you? And are in fact eager to do so? From Ghost Child (1982) by Duffy Stein:
Marionettes surged forward from their pegs along the wall, as if a spring released them, alive, demonic, an army at war, their faces screaming masks. Their cloth bodies swarmed against the girls, covered their noses, their mouths. Their manipulating wires wrapped snake-like around the girls’ necks, pulled taut, tore tender skin, severed arteries, closed off windpipes, and strangled and mutilated their defenseless victims.
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Dead White’s experimental cover caused a stir—and cleverly concealed its cackling horde of killer clowns. Credit 51
Clown marionettes are bad, but real clowns are worse. Since time immemorial, humankind’s greatest natural predator has been the clown. Stephen King terrified readers with Pennywise in It (1986), but that was centuries after most mammals had learned to flee in terror at the sound of floppy shoes.
Our murderous mountebanks arrive courtesy of the anarchic Harlequin in sixteenth-century commedia dell’arte, followed by the seventeenth-century’s insanely violent Punch and Judy puppet shows. The first white-faced, full-makeup-wearing clowns appeared in the nineteenth century. In England it was Joseph Grimaldi, a horribly abused child who became a clown, then retired at age 45 when his tortured joints crumbled to dust. His son, also a clown, drank himself to death at age 30. France’s first clown, Jean-Gaspard Deburau, once beat a child to death in the street (he was acquitted).
Fictional clowns come with a body count. Edgar Allan Poe’s Hop-Frog (1849) was a dwarf forced to be a jester who burned eight courtiers to death. Pagliacci features opera’s most famous clown, a sad sack who stabs his cheating wife to death onstage. In the early 1980s, clown panics erupted in Boston, Omaha, and Pittsburgh when rumors circulated that clowns were luring children into white vans.
Clowns are part of the holy trinity of horror paperback iconography, along with skeletons and dolls, yet few books deliver death jesters. Some of horror fiction’s only blood-smeared Bozos appear in Alan Ryan’s Dead White (1983), the charming Christmas tale of killer clowns riding a circus train of death to a snowbound Catskills community. Obscured by veils of billowing snow, they stay offstage for the most part, appearing only a few times—but that’s enough. “The last things Evan Highland saw were the grinning, wide-eyed, red-lipped face of a clown and gigantic white hands that were reaching for his head.” And “The clown’s grin broadened at once into a merry smile. It tightened its grip on Sally’s neck, and then it began to twist her head to the side.” Too many more killer clowns than that and the book cover would need a warning label.
Sometimes a doll on the cover symbolizes possessiveness (Possession) or general creepiness (The Doll Castle, Dark Companions). But in The Surrogate, an actual doll gleefully strangles humans, and the ghost kid of Somebody Come and Play lures children to their doom with a playroom full of gendered toys: dollhouses and play kitchens for girls, action figures and toy cars for boys. And in Keeper of the Children, it’s not just a teddy bear with an axe, but also a witch marionette, a mannequin with a golf club, and a scarecrow that gleefully murder humans. Credit 52
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If all the knife-wielding kindergarten kids, psychic preschoolers, and homicidal high-school students from this chapter were in a school picture, The Voice of the Clown (1982) would be the snarling six-year-old standing slightly to the side, staring into the camera, clutching a clown doll. Her name is Laura, and she sees right through you. Whatever tricks you try to make her like you, she and her clown are ready.
Laura lives in Oklahoma with her daddy and his new family, and she’s had her clown doll ever since she was born. It’s one of those childhood security objects that just appears in the crib one day and sticks around. But there’s one problem: “Her clown hated her mother.”
Well, that isn’t very comforting. Laura’s mother killed herself long ago, and her father’s new wife fits right into the fairy-tale tradition of wicked stepmothers, although she doesn’t seem to have done anything bad enough to earn the ire of a clown. After Stepmom forces Laura to attend first grade (which ends badly), Laura and her clown declare full-scale war. They start with gaslighting, but when Stepmom gets pregnant and gives birth to what Laura describes as “the screaming mud-baby,” things go full psycho. You will have moments when you need to put this book down and walk away.
Later chapters involve some Native American woo-woo, but in the face of the carnage of the final pages, that’s a minor speed bump on the highway to hell. This book teaches us one thing about kids: you can’t live with ’em, you can’t kill ’em. But they sure can kill you.
Clown dolls (The Voice of the Clown) and ordinary dolls (The Kill) are the hardest working cover models in the horror paperback biz, along with skeletons. Credit 54
JILL BAUMAN
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When Jill Bauman painted the cover for Alan Ryan’s The Kill she took a doll into the woods, shooting it in as many different poses as possible before draping it over a wooden fence like a corpse. Refusing to depict dead bodies in her paintings, she’s since painted dozens, if not hundreds, of dolls on book covers ranging from Elizabeth Engstrom’s When Darkness Loves Us to Edmund Plante’s Garden of Evil.
A self-taught painter from Brooklyn, New York, and now living in Queens, Bauman was working as a studio assistant for the painter Walter Velez when he lost his agent. He made her a deaclass="underline" if she represented his work, he would teach her how to paint. His only condition: she couldn’t show her portfolio to anyone for two years. She agreed and two years later she was ready to rock. One of her first covers was for Charles L. Grant’s A Glow of Candles. “It was my birthday,” she remembers. “I thought everybody forgot it, and I was doing this cover, and no one was calling, so I put the candle on top of [the doll’s] head. That was my birthday present to myself.”
Deeply tied to New York’s horror community, Bauman has painted covers (and dolls) not just for Charles Grant’s books but for Harlan Ellison, Ramsey Campbell, and everyone in between.