Gothic romances seeded readers’ imaginations for the horror boom that was on the horizon. Brooding, shadowy mysteries were relocated to the domestic sphere, turning every home into a haunted castle and every potential bride into a potential victim. The blood of the resilient gothic heroine would flow in the veins of ’70s and ’80s heroines fighting to save their souls from Satan, or were-sharks. And were-sharks were coming. Because over on the other side of the bookrack, pulp fiction was getting interested in the occult.
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A Mod Approach to Demon-Fighting
The Guardians were pulp adventurers right out of the ’30s, juiced with the trendy occult fascination of the late ’60s, when suddenly everybody wanted to know your sign and Parker Brothers was selling Ouija boards in toy stores. Anton LaVey’s Church of Satan opened its doors in San Francisco in 1966; a year later the Rolling Stones released Their Satanic Majesties Request, and the year after that came their song “Sympathy for the Devil.” By 1969, the cover of Time magazine was talking about “Astrology and the New Cult of the Occult.” Pulp was ready to cash in.
The totally macho moniker “Peter Saxon” was a group pen name for a bunch of British authors (W. Howard Baker, Rex Dolphin, and Wilfred McNeilly, among others) who churned out ersatz pulp novels with fully painted covers that looked like all the other pulp reprints on the stands. Baker had used the Saxon pen name to write some popular installments of the Sexton Blake detective series, and by many accounts he was the mastermind who ensured that his cabal of Guardian ghost writers hit their quota of nubile flesh, gratuitous violence, and sexy swinging.
The six Guardian books were about square-jawed, tweed-and-blackbriar-pipe types investigating haunted houses, underwater vampires, voodoo cults, and Australians. Sort of like Scooby-Doo, only with more orgies. Occult detectives had been literary superstars in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, but this was their first major upgrade to Swinging London, and the books read like Hammer horror films gone mod.
On the frontlines of the fight against “Black Magic, Satanism, Necromancy, Witchcraft, Sorcery, Voodoo, Vampirism” was Steven Kane, the square-jawed occult expert and judo master. He was joined by hypochondriac private investigator Lionel Marks, Anglican priest Father John Dyball, and the exotic and alluring miniskirted psychic Anne Ashby, whose silver wrist cuffs gave her heightened psychic perceptions.
The Guardians logged their adventures in the Journal of Evil while their enormous cat, Bubastis, lurked about lapping up sherry. They discovered where evil dwelt by dowsing a road map, then zipped off in their Jaguars and Land Rovers to battle Scottish Death Dwarves, voodoo caverns located beneath the streets of London, and sinister covens of Glasgow beatniks. In The Vampires of Finistere, their best adventure, a young bride-to-be is abducted from under her boyfriend’s nose during a mysterious pagan fertility festival in Brittany. Underwater vampires are to blame, and Steven Kane has to battle wolves and were-sharks and even lead an army of dolphins against the Drowned City of Ker-Ys before the climactic storming of an ancient castle.
The Guardians were transitional figures between pulp and horror, running around socking Satan worshippers in the jaw. But underneath their adventures runs a disquieting river of occultism that delivers moments of true horrific frisson. The Guardians were training wheels, getting readers used to horror as something everyday city dwellers might encounter rather than an outside force from another country, softening them up for the birth of the big demonic baby to come.
JEFFREY CATHERINE JONES
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Jeffrey Catherine Jones, the artist behind these decadent covers, got her first gig on an Edgar Rice Burroughs book because she could imitate the dark, doomy dynamism of Frank Frazetta (whose hard-rocking art graced almost every book and album cover of the era). Jones eventually made art for everyone from Screw magazine to DC Comics. She found her own dreamy style, combining Art Nouveau influences with Frazetta’s muscularity to depict liquid human forms in delicate landscapes that kept threatening to dissolve into purely abstract Rorschach blots. From 1975 to 1979, Jones shared studio space with Michael Kaluta, Barry Windsor-Smith, and Bernie Wrightson, and together the four of them helped reinvent American fantasy illustration. Jones was born male, but identified as a woman, and began hormone therapy in 1998. When she passed away in 2011, she had painted at least 150 covers.
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Unholy Trinity: Rosemary’s Baby (1967), The Other (1971), and The Exorcist (1971) spawned a new era in horror fiction. Credit 8
Between April 1967 and December 1973, everything changed.
In a little more than five years, horror fiction became fit for adults, thanks to three books. Ira Levin’s Rosemary’s Baby, Thomas Tryon’s The Other, and William Peter Blatty’s The Exorcist were the first horror novels to grace Publishers Weekly’s annual best-seller list since Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca in 1938. And except for three books by Peter “Jaws” Benchley, they’d be the only horror titles on that list until Stephen King’s The Dead Zone in 1979. All three spawned movies and, most important, set the tone for the next two decades of horror publishing.
Horror was for nobodies when Ira Levin—a scriptwriter with a single book (1953’s A Kiss before Dying) and a failed Broadway musical (Drat! The Cat!) to his name—sat down to write a novel about a woman who gives birth to the devil. A minimalist masterpiece written in deft, surgical sentences, Rosemary’s Baby became a massive best seller. The film rights were sold before the book was even published. Four months after the book hit the stands, Roman Polanski rolled cameras on an adaptation that would earn an Oscar. The film, described as “sick and obscene” by the Los Angeles Times and given a “C for Condemned” rating by the Catholic Church, wound up saving Paramount Studios from bankruptcy.
Rosemary’s Baby was a spark to the heart for horror fiction, but the corpse really began to boogie in June 1971, when Thomas Tryon’s The Other and William Peter Blatty’s The Exorcist simultaneously made the New York Times Best-Seller List. Fueled by amphetamines and written during a feverish ten-month spree, Blatty’s book was dead on arrival in bookstores until a last-minute guest cancellation earned him a sudden appearance on The Dick Cavett Show. A blockbuster was born. For eleven weeks, The Exorcist and The Other held the #1 and #3 marks on the New York Times Best-Seller List. The Other slipped off after twenty-four weeks; The Exorcist would hold on for a whopping fifty-five.