The history of sixteenth-century Scotland, where witches were hung every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, was the basis for this last as well as early folk-horror novel Satan’s Child and Jane Parkhurst’s Isobel, which was based on the life of Isobel Gowdie, the only witch ever to freely confess to her crimes.
Demonic incubuses and succubuses slithered out of Italian discotheques to send entire apartment buildings into sexual frenzies and to impregnate women with their demon seed. And the most turned-on, now-era, groove daddy of them all was a forgotten hero known as the Satan Sleuth.
ROWENA MORRILL
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Isobel’s electrifying cover painting is the first horror art sold by Rowena Morrill, one of the all-time greats. Better known for her work in science fiction and fantasy, Morrill also painted covers for a freaky series of Lovecraft reprints from Jove. And she remains the only artist in the field whose work has graced not only the cover of Metallica’s greatest bootleg album (No Life ’til Power) but also the walls of one of Saddam Hussein’s love nests.
The Greatest Man in the Whole Entire World
Call him Troy Conway. Call him Vance Stanton. Call him Edwina Noone, or Dorothea Nile, or Jean-Anne de Pre, or any of the seventeen pseudonyms he used to write his more than two hundred novels. He was Michael Avallone, and by his own estimation he was the “King of the Paperback” and the “Fastest Typewriter in the East.” Avallone wrote detective fiction, and gothics, and Partridge Family tie-ins, and the novelization of Friday the 13th Part III in 3-D. And when Satan got hot, he wrote all three slim volumes of The Satan Sleuth series for Warner Books, published between November 1974 and January 1975.
Avallone’s protagonist Philip St. George III “makes even Robert Redford look vapid.” He is “one hundred and eighty-five pounds of whipcord muscles” with “a mind bordering on Einstein IQ.” St. George has “scaled Everest, mastered the Matterhorn, [and] located a lost tribe of headhunters in the Amazon,” but now he receives a phone call that his fiancée Dorothea Daley has been murdered. The killers? Three devil worshippers who are “really sick, demented, half-mad creatures from another universe. Some other planet. They were not human.”
When he sees the carnage (worse than “the Tate-Manson killing orgy of ’68”), St. George develops two white streaks in his hair. “The bastards!” rages his lawyer. “They should fall into Hell with no clothes on.” St. George knows who the culprits are: “Hippies, drop outs, draft dodgers, left-wing radicals, right-wing militants, Jesus Freaks, Devil worshippers, generation gappers, motorcycle weirdos—the whole shebang.” He balances the scales with these cultists (one of whom is “as gay as a green goose when the asses were down”) using LSD and hand grenades.
Avellone planned two more Satan Sleuth novels—Vampires Wild and Zombie Depot—but Warner Books never bought them, so he never wrote them. But Philip St. George III lives forever in our hearts, and in ourremainder bins.
The Satan Sleuth used karate to take on werewolves and dynamite to take out chic but satanic fashion designers obsessed with short women. Credit 13
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Hip chicks with LSD are gateways to Hell in Exorcism, while demons with deadly wieners feature in The Stigma and Incubus. The Succubus is based on the Manacled Mormon, a kidnapping case that rocked London in 1977. Son of Endless Night is a satanic legal thriller and, despite the cover, Dark Advent is a postapocalyptic novel with no Satan at all. Credit 15
Putting the Cult in Occult
The 1968 Manson murders and the 1970 trial of the Manson family so shocked America that we couldn’t wait to get our hands on Helter Skelter, the 1974 book by prosecutor Vincent Bugliosi. The biggest best-selling true-crime book in history, its tale of life with Charlie was also a gift for horror novelists, providing a new and timely antagonist: the satanic cult. Until then, satanic covens met in basements or wooded glades, slapping at mosquitos who flew up their black robes. They marched around in circles, hailing Satan the way New Yorkers hail a cab, muttering curses and spells in barely remembered high school Latin.
But thanks to Helter Skelter, ritual murder became the highlight of the satanic social season. Consider Joy Fielding’s The Transformation (which she has since disowned), published only five years after Charles Manson was sentenced to death. In it, young actresses on the make fall under the influence of their great god Tony, who says things like, “To love your family, you must kill them.”He encourages his glamorous disciples to break into homes and poop on the carpets. At the book’s climax, he sends them to murder every other major character in a genuinely shocking Tate/LaBianca–style home invasion.
In Barney Parrish’s The Closed Circle thinly veiled versions of Robert Redford, Elizabeth Taylor, Ann-Margret, and Jackie Gleason pick up hitchhikers and murder them to praise Satan and stay famous. And they would have gotten away with it, too, if not for a darn psychic pursuing a “university-level” course in weaving who can tune into their telepathic wavelength. Cannibal cultists in upstate New York kidnap young women in The Sharing, and in The Sacrifice, fabulously wealthy elbow-patch types obtain extended lives via human sacrifice and are defeated only when a fanatically loyal Yale professor becomes enraged that they stole a book from the university library.
One thing all these books had in common, besides a fanatical devotion to the forces of darkness and a phobic fear of private clubs, was that their characters were as white as the driven snow. Why was Satan only bothering white people? Turns out he wasn’t.
Cults are inclusive. The Inner Circle worships the Aztec jaguar god, Tezcatlipoca. Credit 16
RON SAUBER
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He didn’t belong to a cult of kill-crazed Hollywood stars, but he certainly painted the covers of books about them. The Transformation and The Closed Circle both sport cover art by Ron Sauber, whose gauzy, fluid artwork was a favorite of art directors. Sauber was born and educated in California and then moved to New York City in 1979. Arriving on Halloween, he almost immediately began working for clients ranging from Twilight Zone magazine to children’s book publishers. He later expanded into painting collectible plates—probably not bearing scenes of cult activity—for which he won great recognition.