Traveler #11: The Children’s Crusade

Traveler #11: The Children’s Crusade, by D.B. Drumm

February, 1987  Dell Books

I get the impression that Ed Naha prepped for this volume of Traveler by reading the installments that were written by series co-author John Shirley. Instead of the spoofy banality that was #9: The Stalking Time or the parodic descent into Hell that was #10: Hell On Earth, Naha finally delivers exactly what this series needs: a fast-moving action thriller with a taciturn protagonist who despite his bad-assery always finds himself defending “the little guy.” 

Naha does pick up on elements from the previous volume; as we’ll recall, that one had an opening sequence in which Traveler, now dubbed “Storyteller,” was living on some pueblo where he’d tell stories to a pack of mutant children. Naha drops this in the opening chapter of The Children’s Crusade, with Traveler deciding to head back out onto the road. 

We are told that it’s been a year that Traveler has been living here in the pueblo, so at least this time around I’m not as confused by the dating of the series. Naha frequently states that the bombs dropped “two decades ago,” and there are a lot of references to how Traveler’s battles with roadrats and other post-nuke scumbags was “long ago,” in “the early days” after the war. 

It’s curious that Naha has introduced this “long time ago” scenario to Traveler, and my best guess is that he wanted to distance himself from Shirley’s installments, so he could write a series (and hero) that was slightly different than John Shirley’s version. 

In other words, Shirley’s volumes took place in those “early days,” and by setting them long ago in the past, Naha is free to refer to them, but without the emotional trauma that would be necessary if they were events that had occurred recently. Like in particular Jan, Traveler’s soul mate who went off with Traveler in a Happily Ever After in #6: Border War, before we found out at the start of #7: The Road Ghost that she’d been killed – Traveler thinks of Jan once or twice in The Children’s Crusade, but it’s more in a wistful, “she’s been gone a long time” sort of way. 

That said, Ed Naha brings a lot of “emotional content” (as Bruce Lee would say) to the series; for the first time ever, Traveler thinks of his lost wife and son…like throughout the book. Methinks Naha is setting up the final volume in some fashion, but it is otherwise curious that these two characters, who have never been seen in the series and only sporadically mentioned, are the focus of so many of Traveler’s thoughts this time around, up to and including an emotional dream sequence in which Traveler goes out shopping to buy his four year old son some Legos, only to come home and watch as the child and his mother are blasted away in nuclear hellfire, with Traveler unable to help and forced to watch. 

Also curiously, the “children” of the title are not the mutant kids “Storyteller” would entertain; it’s a new pack of kids, new to the series I mean, and Traveler runs into them in an abandoned shopping mall in California. Naha seems to do a Yojimbo riff here with Traveler the lone wolf heading into a town and helping one side while pretending to help the other; perhaps I make this connection because Naha specifically refers to Lone Wolf and Cub in the narrative, so it would seem he is a bit of a fan of samurai movies. 

Otherwise we are very much in John Shirley territory here, only minus the nuke-spawn mutant monsters Shirley would often bring to his tales. Instead of bogging things down into pseudo-epic or religious satire, Naha keeps things moving with Traveler getting in frequent scrapes while doling out action movie-esque one-liners. Traveler is once again a smart-ass, I mean to say, and he delivers a bunch of memorable lines throughout The Children’s Crusade. And unlike The Stalking Time, the action and storyline itself are never mocked; it’s merely Traveler mocking the people he goes up against. In other words, Ed Naha plays it on the level, just like John Shirley did. 

Traveler comes across a group of teens who are drinking beer and talking about a conspiracy back in their hometown, and Traveler immediately takes a liking to them and helps them hide from the mercenaries who come looking for them. Again Naha clearly has his series set in a different world than the earliest volumes; it is made clear to Traveler again and again that this is a “new America” and “his kind” – ie mercenaries and other men of violence – are no longer welcome or wanted. Naha even gets in a little Right Wing-mocking in an early scene where Traveler makes an impromptu stop at the Grand Canyon to see it for the first time in his life, and a local tells Traveler to get out or he’ll be shot dead: “After all, it’s the American way.” 

The changing of the times is especially pronounced when Traveler arrives in Bay City, on the Pacific; actually it’s more like pre-war times, as the little town is fully functioning and has everything from a police force to an amusement park for the kids. At this point Naha has retconned Traveler into essentially a standard men’s adventure series, without any of the post-nuke trappings of the earlier installments. 

Here the Yojimbo stuff arises, as Traveler discovers that something rotten is going on; the scar-faced but good-hearted mayor of the town is secretly being held prisoner, taken captive by a turncoat police chief (who looks like William Shatner, we’re told, in what appears to be intended as a joke that Naha loses interest in). Traveler poses as a guy just visiting town while helping the group of teens hide – their leader is the mayor’s grandson, and they too are wanted by the merciless cops and mercs who have taken over the town. 

It’s more of a long-simmer setup here as Traveler investigates and gets in occasional scrapes. Naha skirts some boundaries with Traveler finding himself attracted to a girl in the group of teens – she’s apparently only 15 or thereabouts – and developing a rapport with her, before Naha drops this as well. Indeed he even has Traveler briefly reflect on his passing fancy with the girl, at the end of the novel, and wonder what he was thinking! But at any rate this is the rare volume where Traveler does not enjoy any female companionship…which, now that I think of it, seems to be a recurring element of the Naha installments. 

That said, Naha does want to tie back to the earlier volumes, but often in unintentionally goofy ways…like when Traveler calls old buddy Orwell on a payphone, who is now working for the new CIA in Las Vegas(!). This sequence exists only to set up ensuing volumes, as Orwell relates that a civil war is brewing in the new United States, and rumor has it that none other than series villain President Andrew Frayling – presumably killed in earlier Shirley installment  Border War – is plotting to overthrow President Jefferson (himself a character in earlier installments). 

Frayling as we’ll recall is a wildly overdone Reagan caricature, but he was old even in the Shirley installments, which as we’ll further recall were two friggin’ decades ago. Naha has it that Frayling is now nearly a hundred years old and what’s more he’s wheelchair bound and with a fried face, so in other words like the original Enterprise captain on Star Trek. Traveler ultimately discovers that Frayling is behind the plotting in Bay City, which entails Frayling getting hold of a few nukes that have been deposited in the area. 

The gore has also been removed from the series, and the climax is mostly bloodless when compared to Shirley’s books. But Naha does set up the next volume; Frayling and his henchmen escape, headed for China (which it is rumored survived WWIII unscathed), and Traveler heads after him – along with a newly-introduced character named Persky. A female cop on the Bay City force, Persky is invariably described as “feline” or “small,” and otherwise is not exploited in any way whatsoever, but she does have a snappy rapport with Traveler, so one wonders if she will become Traveler’s new flame. 

Two more volumes were to follow, and hopefully they will be more like this one than the others Naha wrote for the series.

Black Angel: Dixie Death Hunt

Great news, everyone – a new volume of Black Angel has come out via Tocsin Press! It’s titled Dixie Death Hunt, and here’s the cover: 

It’s Hard Target as a ‘70s Blaxploitation movie starring Pam Grier (or perhaps Jayne Kennedy), as The Black Angel heads down to Georgia and takes on a group of bigots who hunt black men for sport. Along the way we get a naked chase through the woods, our heroine going undercover in a memorable fashion, and the return of the Black Angel’s leather catsuit – not to mention a monstrous mutant redneck freak. Plus all the sex and violence that is to be expected of a Men Of Violence Books publication! 

Head on over to Amazon, where you can preview the first several pages (on desktop only) and order a copy – the perfect stocking stuffer for any action junkie on your Xmas list! And grab copies of the first volume and The Doll Cage while you’re at it!

Satan’s Child

Satan’s Child, by Peter Saxon

No month stated, 1968  Magnum/Lancer Books

Peter Saxon was a house name used by several British authors; the name is most associated with The Guardians, a swinging ‘60s horror-action series that was much loved by Curt Purcell of The Groovy Age Of Horror. Twenty years ago when I was a regular reader of Curt’s site, I went out and picked up a few of those Guardians books, but boy it appears they have become quite scarce and pricey these days; the same goes for the non-series Peter Saxon books, of which Satan’s Child is one. 

According to the Vault of Evil forum, this version of Peter Saxon was an author named William McNeilly, who turned out a few horror paperbacks, all of which are well-regarded by the Vaulters, with this one in particular seeming to be their favorite. Now that I’ve read this fast-moving horror pulp, I can agree with them; Satan’s Child is a very entertaining read, hitting a lot of high points in its 200-page runtime. 

Seemingly taking place in the 1700s, Satan’s Child is a supernatural-themed revenge thriller, like a Hammer take on Death Wish. But this isn’t a simple “kill my enemies” type of revenge yarn; it’s a “I’ll turn myself into a bull and sodomize my enemy’s wife with my two-foot-long dick” type of yarn. So yeah, this one’s really out there – and seems even more so, given the formal, almost omniscient tone McNeilly tells the story in. 

The novel takes place in rural Scotland, for the most part, and one must be prepared to wade through a lot of painful “Scots” dialog that would even give Irvine Welsh pause. When I see stuff like this, I’m reminded why my ancestors came to America. (Or maybe it was Ireland they left; no one seems to know or care.) This is a Scotland just barely out of the Middle Ages, of backwards villagers and deep-rooted superstitions, the type of people who would eagerly burn a woman for being a “witch.” 

This is how the novel begins, with an attractive young woman named Elspet Malcolm being dragged naked to the fire pit, her husband Magnus dutifully whipping her as women watch from the windows of their homes, commenting on the young woman’s “diddies.” Also watching are Elspet’s children: Iain, 13, and Morag, 11. The man whipping Elspet is not their father; Magnus Malcolm is the bastard’s name, a local who has brought Elspet and her two children from a neighboring town, and now he’s about to burn her for being a witch. 

We are given vague detail that Elspet might have been a little “friendly” with some of the men in the village, and this has put her in the cross hairs of Magnus and the village women, who have used the handy ruse of accusing her of witchcraft to get rid of her. McNeilly does not shy in the gruesome details here, complete with the TMI note that Elspet soils herself in her fear, and the horrors continue when the shell-shocked children go home and decide to run away…only for Magnus to come home and stop them, attempting to rape young Morag…before Iain comes along to defend his little sister with an axe. 

A curious note is that Magnus calls Morag a “spawn of Satan,” but Morag soon drops out of the narrative and it is Iain who grows up to be an adept of the Left Hand Path. Presumably Iain is the titular Satan’s Child, not Morag, but methinks McNeilly knew what he was doing here. At any rate we flash forward some unspecified time – it’s many years later and Iain is now an adult, but he still is treated like a young man, so I’m assuming we’re like 15 years or so out. When we meet Iain again he’s in the Himalayas, in the presence of the Masters of the Cult, where he is about to become an Adept of the Eleventh Degree. 

After a druggy initiation ritual, in which Iain is to have sex with a girl and slice her throat during the act – a scene played more for shock than sleaze – Iain finds himself magically transported back to Scotland, where he now is a powerful mage. Whether Iain actually killed the girl – or even had sex with her – is something our hero debates for a hot second before getting on to the business at hand: doling out supernatural vengeance to the townspeople who killed his mother, “so many years ago.” 

From here Satan’s Child follows what the Vault of Evilers refer to as a “vignette approach,” which is in fact a great description of how McNeilly tells his tale. As I’ve found is common with horror fiction, Satan’s Child doesn’t so much follow a protagonist as he or she goes about his or her business, but instead goes from one character to another – more accurately, one victim to another – as he or she suffers his or her horrific fate. 

The problem is that McNeilly has not properly set up any of the townspeople in the opening sequence. We only meet a few of them – Magnus, of course, and the “pricker” (aka the witchfinder), and a few of the women – but none of them are really brought to life so that we may hate them as much as Iain Malcolm does, so that we may lust for their violent demise as much as he does. This I felt was the ultimate problem with Satan’s Child. 

Another thing is that the characters are fairly boring, because they’re all simple townsfolk living in backwards 1700s Scotland. Regardless, Mcneilly displays a vicious imagination that goes in really bizarre places; in the first “vignette,” Iain turns himself into a woman (how very modern!) so as to sow a jealous riff between a husband and wife, leading to an almost EC Comics denouement. 

Even crazier is next; as mentioned above, Iain turns himself into a bull, and allows himself to be “found” by one of his targets, a man who sells and breeds cows and whatnot. There’s a crazy bit of cow-sex-exploitation here that goes into the realms of bestiality because the reader knows the bull is really Iain, and he literally fucks a cow to death, first chasing the poor girl around the pen and then slamming his two-and-a-half-foot dick into her, to the extent that it ruptures the poor animal’s heart! 

As one will note, Iain’s goal isn’t just to kill his victims, but to make them suffer psychologically as well. And spiritually, too; the pricker suffers in this regard, as he’s moved on to Paris and has left behind his rural backwoods witchfinder days. This sequence is masterfully written because it’s another indication that our hero is a bit too driven; essentially Iain works with a lower-level left hand pather, and the two run a caper on the pricker, posing as government agents who need the man’s old skills to get a witch to confess – and of course, after the pricker has crushed the poor girl’s fingers and whatnot, he finds out who she really is. A nice twisting of the blade on Iain’s part, but again it lacks much kick because we weren’t given sufficient time to hate the pricker’s guts at the start of the book. 

But this “vignette approach” continues through the breezily-written book…breezily, that is, save for the painful “Scots” dialog we are occasionally assailed with, not to mention the author’s occasional tendency to lecture us from his high horse. But I guess that’s to be expected from a British pulp writer of yore; they just couldn’t help themselves. 

There’s a more elaborate setup where Iain returns to the village and starts up an actual coven, leading to a crazy bit of one guy wearing the skin of another, gradually being crushed to death by the drying skin, Iain killing two of his prey for the price of one. Here McNeilly brings in a new character, a woman who has also come to the village and stays to herself, but employs several of the locals. 

Meanwhile Iain shows off his occult mastery, transforming himself into various animals and killing off more targets, before ultimately setting his sights on his main goal: his stepfather, Magnus Malcolm, who is still alive – and who has remarried, his new wife about to have a child. Here the author leaves no question that Iain Malcolm has gone too far to the dark side, as he plots to kill the baby – only to find himself in a war of magic with a white witch who is determined to save the child’s life. 

As the Vaulters noted in the link above, the climax is somewhat expected, but nonetheless well delivered, and even touching in a way. I also felt certain that McNeilly knew what he was doing with Iain not being the person referred to as “spawn of Satan” by Magnus, but Iain’s sister, Morag, which nicely sets up the finale; Magnus turns out to be wrong in many ways. 

Overall Satan’s Child was a lot more entertaining than I expected it to be, and certainly went in wild directions – perhaps made even more wild given the overal staid approach of McNeilly’s narrative. Supernatural things happen without much fuss, giving the impression of a world much closer to the power of the occult than our own. Now it looks like one of these days I’ll need to check out the other “Peter Saxon” books I have.

Black Samurai #7: Sword Of Allah

Black Samurai #7: Sword Of Allah, by Marc Olden

April, 1975  Signet Books

Marc Olden throttles it back for the penultimate volume of Black Samurai; I’m not saying Sword Of Allah is bad or anything, but it’s certainly a step down after the insanity that was the previous volume. I’d also say it’s my least favorite volume of the series yet, but again, that’s only when compared to the other volumes, all of which have been great. 

As I’ve mentioned in past reviews, a recurring schtick of Olden’s is to fill pages by jumping willy-nilly into the various perspectives of his characters – and he always features a lot of characters in his books. He does that probably more so in Sword Of Allah than any previous Black Samurai installment…with the ultimate effect that series protagonist Robert “Black Samurai” Sand is seriously lost in the narrative shuffle. He’s almost a supporting character in his own book. 

Sand features in a memorable opening which sees him becoming more personally involved in a mission since way back in the first volume. There’s no detail on how long ago The Warlock was, but we do learn straightaway that Sword Of Allah is essentially a sequel to earlier volume The Inquisition, the events of which we are told occurred a year ago. 

But when we meet him, Sand is once again in Paris – a recurring locale in this series if ever there was one – and he’s sitting on a plane about to take off with some woman he’s met in the past couple mounths, a woman he’s totally in love with and etc, etc. You don’t need a men’s adventure doctorate to know what’s going to happen to this woman. Meanwhile, due to the rampant POV-hopping with which Olden will fill up the pages, we already know a group of radical Muslim terrorists have hijacked the plane Robert Sand just happens to be sitting in. 

This is a tense scene as Sand quickly sees that the handful of terrorists who have overtaken the plane will no doubt kill everyone on board, and Sand must figure out how to get himself and his girlfriend, Ann, to safety. A curious thing is that Olden as ever wants us to understand that Robert Sand, despite being a badass samurai with years and years of training, is not a superman, so he doesn’t even try to take on the terrorists; instead, he searches for a way to get off the grounded plane without being detected. 

The terrorists are part of the Sword of Allah, a violent terrorist group, but again a reminder that such groups were less vile and deadly in the ‘70s, as these guys are more concerned with getting publicity for their cause – and with saving their own skins after they kill their victims. In other words, not the suicide vest radicals of today. But they are still vile, as Sand’s prediction is soon proven correct and the terrorists open fire on the occupants of the plane, blowing away men, women, and children. 

This is no doubt the darkest the series has ever gotten, with kids falling beneath the gunfire as Sand watches helplessly; and also, unsurprisingly, Ann gets blown away. This isn’t a spoiler; you know like within a sentence or two of the girl’s intro that she isn’t fated to be in the book for very long. Sand manages to engage a few of the terrorists in close-quarters combat; in a strangely unelaborated-upon tidbit, we learn that one of the terrorists is a Japanese martial arts expert Sand has fought in the past, who is now working with the Muslim terrorists. 

The Baron digs the knife in by letting Sand know that these very same terrorists were the ones the Baron tried to set Sand on, a few weeks ago, but Sand had been too busy boffing his British girlfriend Ann and so turned down the assignment. And now Ann’s dead, killed by the very terrorists Sand might have stopped if he’d heeded the Baron’s request. Thus Sand is driven by both personal loss and self-anger throughout Sword Of Allah. 

That is, when we see the guy. For the most part, the novel is made up of the random thoughts of the terrorists, their leader (“The Prophet”), and right-wing American terrorist Neal Heath, who last tangled with Sand in The Inquisition. Olden even works in the waning days of the Space Race into the plot, with an unexplored subplot about a joint US-USSR space venture – which a right-wing senator wants to stop at all costs, leading to the hard-to-buy teaming up of Heath’s group and the Prophet’s group. 

Olden tosses so much into the blender that he misses opportunities; for example there’s the Prophet’s sexy daughter, Laila, whose memorable intro has her about to bed some poor astronaut, only to kill him. The veteran pulp reader would expect that Robert Sand and Laila would hook up at some point, but this does not happen, and indeed it is not until the very final pages of the novel that the two even meet. 

So far as nookie goes, Sand goes unlucky in Sword Of Allah, too driven by the loss of Ann to notice any other women. That said, “driven” is a good way to describe Sand, as he is more vicious this time out than previous volumes, leading to a surprising finale where he employs an axe to execute some unarmed opponents. 

Olden specializes in long-running action scenes that really put his heroes through the wringer, and Sword Of Allah features a great such sequence that takes place on a small ship off the coast of France. Sand does a frogman and swims to it, planting explosives like a regular Tiger Shark, and then he goes onboard to “kill the Prophet,” who happens to be hiding on board. Instead Sand gets in a running gun battle with legions of terrorists, gradually pushed up against a wall with little opportunity to escape. 

Another thing Olden specializes in is pulling a deus ex machina to get his hero out of these scrapes; as in previous volumes, this tense battle on the boat ends with Sand’s apparent death, then the next chapter opens later and he’s all well and good – and we learn in quick summary how he got out of his predicament. It’s a copout, but Olden does it so well that you don’t even realize it until later. 

One thing he doesn’t pull off as well as giving Robert Sand his impetus for revenge. We only meet Ann in the opening scene, and Olden really lays it on with a trowel, how much Sand loves her, how great of a woman she is, and etc, to the point that she might as well have “DOA” stamped on her forehead. But this is all we see of her, and from there on Sand is burning and yearning for revenge, killing in cold blood at times, and it’s all cool and well done, but it does lack a little meaning because Ann is a new character who is not given opportunity to make an impression on the reader. 

The uncredited cover artist shows material that does happen in the narrative, with the caveat that Sand’s use of an axe in the finale is more “axe murderer” than “axe-wielding warrior;” it’s probably one of the most surprising finales in Olden’s work, as we see how cold and merciless the Black Samurai can really be. Otherwise, the scantily-clad babe on the cover must be Laila, but it’s not Sand she’s disrobing for – it’s the hapless NASA guy she wastes. Speaking of which, Olden continues to push buttons, as the only sex scene in Sword Of Allah features the Prophet and his daughter! But Olden does leave this scene of incest mostly off-page. 

Overall Sword Of Allah was entertaining, but as mentioned it was also my least favorite Black Samurai yet. It’s not bad or anything, just too mired in hopscotching perspectives from one-off characters, and the impression is given that Olden might’ve just been worn out by the previous volume and turned this one in quickly.

The Thing! (aka Ohhhhh, It Feels Like Dying)

The Thing!, by J.J. Madison

No month stated, 1971  Belmont Tower

(Originally published by Midwood Books as Ohhhhh, It Feels Like Dying)

The copyright page makes no mention that this grungy little paperback original was originally published by sleaze purveyors Midwood Books, but the title page does somewhat confusingly inform us that The Thing! was “first published as Ohhhhh, It Feels Like Dying.” At any rate, the re-titling of this Belmont Tower edition bears no relation to the contents of the novel; The Thing! is not a monsterama creature feature, but is instead what Grandma would’ve called a “stroke book,” with the horror stuff only a secondary concern to the sleaze. 

Which is to say, I loved the hell out of the book. I loved it! But then, I’m a sucker for Belmont Tower at its most grungy. What made this most surprising was the authorship of the book. According to The Vault Of Evil, “J. J. Madison” was in reality British author James Moffat – from all accounts a notoriously “prolific” author whose books are often considered subpar. And yet, I have only read and reviewed one other Moffat novel, the Nazi She-Devil yarn Jackboot Girls, which I really enjoyed, so admitedly I am judging the guy based off of two of his (apparently) three-hundred published novels(!). 

I say this British authorship is surprising because, if you’ve spent any time here, you know I’m not the biggest fan of British pulp. I find it fussy, stuffy, and stodgy. (I just copyrighted that as the title for a new animated series for kids, fyi.) And yet if I had not known a British author wrote The Thing!, I would’ve guessed it had been written by any of the American authors in Belmont Tower’s or Leisure Books’s stable. There is absolutely nothing “British” about the novel, absolutely nothing to give this away, and indeed there is a familiarity with New York City (another commonality with many Belmont and Leisure publications) that gives the impression “J.J. Madison” is a native New Yorker. 

I know zero about James Moffat, but I do see he was born in Canada, so perhaps this explains why his pulp comes off, at least in the two books of his that I’ve read, as more American than British. Then again, a pair of British pulpsters also turned in the decidely “American” Cut around the same time, so who’s to say – these pulp writers were so prolific they could probably mimic a tone when they wanted to, and maybe Moffat’s direction from his editors at Midwood Books was to “sound American.” 

Anyway, I digress, as usual. The Thing! is awesome, truly so, coming in at the usual brief Belmont Tower length (186 pages of big print) and offering all one could want in a sleazy vampire yarn. But those looking for straight horror might come away dissatisfied. To be sure, James Moffat follows a “sleaze first, horror second” approach throughout The Thing!, and folks that’s just fine with me. In fact the sexual material was so frequent and explicitly described, with copious detail on anatomical functions, that I almost started taking notes for future reference. 

But then, there’s just as much time spent on photography, and camera lenses, and how to properly pose models for perfect photos, something the Vault of Evil forum-goers also noted. Moffat adheres to the time-honored method of pulp writers everywhere in how he meets his word count by writing about stuff he’s interested in, even if it has no bearing on the plot. Thus one must be prepared for a lot of detail about photography and proper light and shadow and developing prints and all this other stuff you might not want to read in a novel about a sex-starved vampire babe. 

This, apparently, is the titular “Thing” of the Belmont reprint: Myra Manning, a stacked blonde movie goddess of yore who has gotten a second life in a mega-successful daytime soap opera titled “Deadly Love” which is clearly modelled after Dark Shadows. In the soap Myra plays a vampire, and we readers already know from the back cover that Myra herself is a vampire. Now as as I’ve said before, hot vampire babes are at the very top of the “hot evil women” heap, even higher up than Nazi She-Devils, but friends everyone knows that a hot vampire babe should have black hair, not blonde hair!! 

However, given the zeal with with James Moffat indulges in utter sleaze, filth, and depravity throughout the novel, I was willing to let this one slide. And yes of course, there are exceptions to this rule – I mean good grief, just consider Ingrid Pitt in the 1970 Hammer Films production The Vampire Lovers – but still. It’s a time-worn pulp conceit that good girls have blonde hair and bad girls have black hair, and it’s interesting that Moffat decided to overlook that. 

The book moves fast and Moffat does a great job of making it horror, yet at the same time never explicitly states that there is anything supernatural about it; again, this could be disappointing for someone looking for a standard type of horror novel, but there is absolutely nothing standard about The Thing!. It’s a dirty, smutty, yet undeniably fun little book, mostly because I got the strong mental impression of Moffat drunkenly chortling to himself as he pounded at his typewriter. 

We know what we are getting from the start, as Moffat opens the novel on the set of “Deadly Love,” as an episode of the soap is filming, with Myra as a vampire biting a man – and, when the cameras are turned off, the man complains that Myra has really bitten him. Moffat also shows a Hollywood that is long gone, with hardbitten, foul-mouthed veterans of the studio age who bitch at each other with no concerns over the “inclusion” of today; Myra’s poor co-star is raked over the coals for being gay, and Myra likes to strip in front of the director, displaying her “heavy breasts,” and taunting the gawking director: “You’re about to come in your pants.” 

Next we are introduced to the hero of the tale: Ken Painter, a ‘Nam vet who has no qualms with hitting dogs and roughing up women – another reminder of how “unsafe” 1970s pulp is in our modern era. Our intro to Ken is a harbinger of the type of book The Thing! will be: a several-page sex scene that leaves no sleazy stone unturned as Ken explicity boinks a woman he’s shacked up with in the Midwest…a woman who runs a gas station her dead husband left her, and who came across a stash of cocaine that spilled on the highway after a pharmaceutical truck crashed(!?), and who now spends her days in a dark room with the TV running, in a cocaine daze…and Ken has blissfully joined her for a few days of rampant coke-fueled sex. 

Friends, this is how you introduce your protagonist. 

Ken (as Moffat refers to him throughout the novel) was a combat photographer in Vietnam, and now he wants to make his living as a professional photographer, but he’s a penniless vagabond. He leaves the coke-sex girl and heads for New York, where we have another protracted sequence where Ken jury-rigs some pay phones in the Port Authority, and then runs afoul of the mobsters who run the payphones. Again, none of this has anything to do with the horror genre, but it does bring to life the grungy, crime-ridden New York of the early ‘70s. 

But after running into Myra Manning in Central Park – where Ken mauls the woman’s guard dog and nearly drowns the poor animal, all because it ruined his shot and got water on his camera – Ken is given a new opportunity: to be the personal assistant for famous actress Myra, who promises she’ll get a publisher who will do a book of photos of Myra, photos taken by Ken. 

First, though, the two enjoy an exuberant sex scene that is only a precursor of the wild sleaze we will encounter as the novel progresses: 

Moffat foreshadows that there is more to Myra Manning than there seems: she’s a beauty with a perfect body, but Ken was a “kid” when she was a Hollywood queen and also there’s that pale-faced former assistant of hers with a bandage on his throat who slinks out of Myra’s penthouse apartment on Ken’s first day, trying to throw Ken a meaningful look… 

But really, at this point it’s a Hollywood novel, with a lot of stuff about the filming of Myra’s soap opera and the squabbling that goes on behind the scenes. That is, with a lot of material about photography…and a lot more explicit sex, as Myra begins to “initiate” Ken into something unstated, first by secretly dosing him with strychnine and then engaging him in yet more super-explicit shenanigans: 

But it’s not all drug-fueled super sex with the beautiful Myra who has almost superhuman control of her womanhood (cue those anatomincal notes I mentioned): in between the memories of sexual bliss Ken is haunted by scenes from “a nightmare,” with Myra wearing a “half-mask” with “canines,” and the feeling of blood flowing down Ken’s side as she feeds from his neck, but Ken is sure none of this could be real. Still, there’s this band-aid on his throat, and Myra’s insistence that he not remove it so that it can heal properly…claiming that Ken was so drunk he cut himself shaving… 

Then there’s Noire, Myra’s professor friend who is a mountain of muscle with a shaved head…the impression is he’s an Anton LeVay type after a few visits to the gym. He’s a specialist in all things vampire, and has been teaching Myra about it, and there’s a lot of stuff about historical vampires, and Noire’s insistence that such creatures existed…but, again, there’s nothing here that they are supernatural creatures, ie the living dead as you’d encounter in traditional vampire fiction. Instead, the impression Moffat gives is that these “vampires” are humans who drink blood to stay young. Moffat leaves it vague enough that the reader could take it either way, but the fact that Myra is a famous TV actress who often admires herself in the mirror should tell you right away that the traditional vampire lore is not being followed here. 

The “nightmare” stuff becomes more extreme as Myra continues dosing Ken with strychnine – which leaves him fuzzy-minded but super-aroused, capable of all-night action – and also throwing orgies where Ken witnesses such craziness as a young girl being ravaged by Noire’s massive “phallus.” As I said, the depravity is just off the charts. 

Only gradually does Ken realize what’s really going on: Myra is a vampire and she’s using him as a meal on legs. Ken finds salvation in another group who works on the soap opera, and with their help he escapes Myra’s clutches…and also he also helps a guy with some pointers on photography; even in the climax Moffat still indulges in page-filling, but it’s so well-written and quick-moving that I didn’t mind. 

More importantly, here Ken finds true love, courtesy brunette hottie Carol, an up-and-coming starlet on the soap who initially gave Ken the cold shoulder. Moffatt again displays his penchant for sizzling shenanigans when Carol gets Ken to do a nude photo session of her – for a play she’s interested in, naturally – and then she essentially throws herself on him, leading to a sex scene just as explicit as those with cougar Myra: 

SPOILER ALERT: Skip this and the next four paragraphs if you don’t want to know the finale, but given the obscurity and scarcity of The Thing!, I thought I’d note what happens for posterity. Basically Myra and Noire go the expected route and take Carol prisoner, so like a true Belmont Tower hero Ken goes out for revenge. Yes, I know Midwood originally published the book, but Midwood was a Belmont Tower imprint, so it still works. 

So Ken goes after Myra and, having seen how she “ages ten years” in just a few minutes without her amphetimines (again, the connotation is that Myra is not a traditional vampire, but just a human who has vastly elongated her life by drinking blood and taking uppers), Ken strips Myra and ties her to a chair in the empty studio and then he essentially broils her with high-watt studio lights placed directly on her nude body. Curiously Moffat does not have Myra break, even as her body shrivels in the intense heat, and Ken at length even begins to respect her strength. 

From there to a brief confrontation with Noire, who is about to rape Carol with that massive phallus of his; a fight which sees Ken nearly get ripped apart, and features a finale that seems like a rip-off until you think about it and realize Moffat has pulled off a neat trick with proper setup. Essentially, Noire is about to escape with Carol in his car and he puts Ken’s face up against the exhaust, trying to smother him. Then Noire gets in his car, thinking Ken is dead – but Ken opens the door and pulls Carol out. We recall then the opening setup, in which we were informed that Ken was drummed out of ‘Nam because he’d developed a tendency to hyperventilate when nervous. Thus, when Noire was “smothering” Ken with the exhaust fumes, the carbon monixide was actually helping Ken control his hyperventilation! I’m not sure if the science is legit, but Moffat certainly writes it with confidence. 

That said, Noire’s sendoff is laughable – in his haste he barrells out of the parking lot and runs into a truck, killed by the steering wheel slamming into his chest! And at novel’s end we learn that the withered hag that was Myra Manning has “disappeared” from the world, and, safely knowing that her legend will live forever, she plans to dose herself with strychnine, rip out her teeth and cut off her fingertips, and then douse herself with gasoline and immolate herself “before the tremors” make muscle movement impossible! 

And meanwhile Ken and Carol head off for a happily ever after… 

End spoilers. Yes, the finale is rushed, but hell, what Belmont Tower doesn’t have a rushed finale? I was satisfied that James Moffatt even told us what happened to all of the characters. All told, I loved the hell out of The Thing!, but I will be the first to acknowledge that your own mileage will vary. 

Here is the cover of the original Midwood edition, from 1971, which does a better job than any of the reprints of depicting the actual contents of the book...though note the artist at least also agreed that hot and evil vampire babes should have black hair: 

And here is a link to Too Much Horror Fiction, where you can see a few other covers Belmont Tower graced this book with over the years; according to a comment Andy Decker made at the Vault Of Evil forum, the copy I read, the cover for which is shown at the top of the review, might actually have been from 1978. If so, the copyright page itself only states 1971. My assumption is Belmont Tower just took the actual Midwood Books printing from 1971 and affixed different covers to it over the years.

The Werewolf vs The Vampire Woman

The Werewolf vs Vampire Woman, by Arthur N. Scarm

No month stated, 1972  G-H Books

Ramble House trade paperback reprint (As The Werewolf vs The Vampire Woman), 2007

I’m certain I have a copy of this obscure paperback tie-in somewhere, but I’m unable to find it – thankfully, Ramble House has reprinted The Werewolf vs The Vampire Woman, and their reprint might be even superior to the original, as it contains cool interior illustrations by Alan Hutchinson. 

This novelization of an equally-obscure Spanish horror film is probably more well-known today than it was in 1972. In fact it’s interesting that this movie, part of the cycle of werewolf movies starring Paul Naschy, was even slated for a novelization in America; too bad more drive-in fare wasn’t novelized at the time, but at least we’ll always have Coffy. 

I have not seen all twelve (or thirteen, if you count the rumored “lost” film) of the Naschy werewolf movies, but I have seen a few of them, The Werewolf vs The Vampire Woman among them, and that’s more than can be said for tie-in author “Arthur M. Scarm,” who clearly has not seen the movie, and here turns in a wholly original novel that is like nothing I have read before…and given the amount of trashy, bizarre stuff I’ve reviewed on here since 2010, that’s really saying something. 

Instead of the Gothic yarn lensed by director Leon Kilmovsky, with Naschy’s werewolf character in rural France and trying to save a pair of cute co-eds from a resurrected black magic sorceress of a vampire, Scarm’s “novelization” is a dark comic epic in comparison, a nasty, mean-tempered, but nonetheless humorous story about a werewolf and a vampire queen, and the havoc they wreak together. 

It’s also insane, and seems to be a booze and/or coke-fueled first draft, jumping wily-nily from one atrocity to another, Scarm laughing madly at the typewriter as he pounds the keys. And yet for all that, there is something to The Werewolf vs The Vampire Woman that ascends the nasty nature of the book and instead comes off like the morbid tale of two doomed characters. 

Scarm isn’t content to just make up his own story instead of following the film; he also comes up with a new approach to werewolves and vampires. For the former – well, despite those cool interior illustrations I mentioned in the Ramble House edition, which show “hero” Waldo the Werwolf (presumably Scarm’s version of Waldemar Danisnsky, which is the name of Naschy’s character in the films) as a full-blown wolf man, complete with fur and fangs, Scarm specificies in the novel that Waldo looks for the most part like a normal man…save for a curious “band of hair around his middle,” which is the sign that he is a werewolf. 

As if this wasn’t WTF? enough, we also learn that once a year all werewolves become actual werewolves, ie with the fur and fangs, and Waldo’s night happens to be New Year’s Eve. This is the night the werewolves go really wild and murder with a total bloodlust…not that they don’t kill the same way every other night of the year. Even more strangely, Scarm has it that the werewolves don’t kill by tearing people apart, or by strangling them like Larry Talbot in the old Wolf Man movie; no, Waldo uses stakes, which he carries around in his back pocket and hammers into the hearts of his prey: men, women, and children. 

Vampires in Scarm’s world are also different: they can go out in daylight and they can be photographed and filmed. Actually, Scarm doesn’t mention that this is even notable, giving the impression that he’s not aware that vampires traditionally are supposed to shun daylight and cast no reflection. There are parts where Wandessa, the vampire queen – the same name the character has in the film, though she isn’t referred to as a vampire queen there – looks at her reflection in the mirror, admiring her beauty…not to mention the part toward the end where she becomes a movie superstar. 

I also forgot to mention, but in addition to being “daywalkers” and having reflections/images that can be captured on film, vampires also have “hollow teeth” for fangs, and drink blood direclty through these teeth, like straws. They also don’t seem to be very averse to religious iconography; at least, nothing of the sort is used against Wandessa in the book. 

I’ll refrain from comparing the novelization to the actual film, as there is no comparison. Other than the very beginning, which sees “Waldo” being brought back to life by a foolish coroner who takes the silver bullet out of the dead man’s chest, not believing there’s any such thing as werewolves. As with the film, Waldo kills the man and escapes, and also as with the film, we have a pair of coeds – Genevieve and Elvira – who are interested in the legendary Wandessa, and want to find her for a class project or something. 

It’s here that the novelization deviates, and wildly so, but for posterity, the movie proceeds on an altogether level-headed narrative, at least when compared to Scarm’s story: young Genevieve (hotstuff German actress Barbara Capell) accidentally brings Wandessa to life, and the sexy vampire babe (as played by Patty Shepard) is out for blood – and meanwhile Waldemar and Elivra (big-haired Gaby Fuchs) fall in love. Overall it’s a pretty cool movie, and I’m sure it was a blast to see at the drive-in. 

Scarm says to hell with all that. Genevieve and Elvira are college students who want to find Wandessa, the queen of the vampires, and somehow Waldo the Werewolf hears about this and decides to tag along – that is, when he isn’t banging them, usually both at the same time. Now let me tell you right here and now, while you will often see Arthur Scarm’s The Werewolf vs The Vampire Woman described as sleazy, or filled with sex, I want to specify that all of the sex either occurs off-page or is not even described at all. 

Indeed, there is an almost “storytelling” vibe to the tale, a half-assed omniscient tone that gives the impression that Scarm has pulled up a chair and is telling you a tall tale; there is no real attempt at conveying a proper story, and the entire thing comes off more like the booze-fueled recounting of a legend or myth. It also occurred to me that Scarm’s story is like a ‘50s pre-code horror comic, operating as it does in a non-reality, almost fairy tale-like atmosphere, with a vibe that is both vicious and humorous. 

Waldo is certainly a hard character to relate to, and it’s clear Scarm doesn’t intend him to be a hero. Waldo is a murderer, killing hundreds of men, women, and children in the course of the book, if not by a stake to the heart then by other ways. Wandessa is equally as sadistic, though there are several parts where she tries to break free of her vampire ways, “drinking just enough blood” to keep her satiated, but ensuring that her victims don’t die. 

Actually another interpretation of Scarm’s The Werewolf vs The Vampire Woman is that it’s a thinly-veiled account of two alcoholics getting on and off the wagon. Waldo is the driver, comfortable with his murderous ways and constantly pushing Wandessa to embrace her bloodlust, and Wandessa will put up a struggle but ultimately fall off the wagon and start killing again. But soon enough they both want to be free of their addictions, leading to crazy parts where they go to a therapist. 

There’s no attempt whatsoever at conveying realism; I don’t expect that from a horror novel, but Scarm sets the novel in an entirely different reality. This is apparent from the beginning, in which a pair of college co-eds want to wake up a vampire queen for their college thesis. Scarm doesn’t even bother much with background material; Wandessa has been “dead” in a coffin since the late 1800s, but cannot remember how she got there, and Scarm never bothers to fill in the blanks. As for Waldo, we have no idea how he became a werewolf, but we know he certainly wasn’t born one, because, in another curious tidbit Scarm relays to us, werewolves are made, not born, because werewolves cannot have orgasms. 

Crazily enough, Scarm sticks to his bizarre supernatural theologisms through the book as if they were holy writ; after reading this novel, I thought maybe I’d missed something and maybe werewolves really did look just like normal people, only with a band of hair around their “middle.” And hell, maybe they do stake their prey instead of strangling them or eating them. Hell, who’s to really say?? 

The first chapter alone is nuts. Waldo comes back to life, hooks up with the coeds, and they go looking for Wandessa’s grave. And as mentioned Waldo has his sexual way with both gals, and while the stuff isn’t explicit we do learn that Waldo has a giant “wang,” which is another indication he’s a werewolf. Oh and there’s a third girl, Ruth, who didn’t even exist in the film, a nurse who fell in love with Waldo when he was brought back to life by the coroner (after which Waldo promptly took advantage of her there in the operating room – but she liked it, of course), and who is now in love with Waldo and wants to go wherever he goes. 

Waldo is a bad guy for sure, and to his credit he tells the girls – and us readers – this from the get-go: “Only expect evil from a werewolf.” He treats the girls roughly (though again, they enjoy it), kills to slake his bloodlust, and secretly plots to drive a stake into Wandessa’s heart when they find her because he hates all vampires. “And yet, I was in love with a vampire once,” Waldo ruminates, but this hint of actual backstory is so quickly cast aside that I actually laughed aloud. 

Scarm is like that throughout; he trades between total lurid vileness and soul-plumbing introspection. To be honest, if I hadn’t known better I would’ve suspected The Werewolf vs The Vampire Woman might have been an early novel by Len Levinson, as Scarm’s style is not totally dissimilar. Then again, I might be just as inclined to suspect Russell Smith, given the breathless narrative tone and the overall deranged vibe. But as it turns out, according to the sleuthing of Paul Collins, “Arthur Scarm” was really a writer named Leo Guild…who it turns out I’ve reviewed on here in the past, at least a short piece he wrote about Hollywood for a men's magazine. 

Oh and I forgot to mention, but Scarm (I just prefer to refer to him by his goofy pseudonym) gives werewolves all kinds of bizarre powers…like, Waldo can enter the dreams of people, turning the dream into a nightmare, and also he can…shrink a woman’s breasts, which he promptly does to one of the girls, leading to the unforgettable line, “My wonderful breasts!” Not to worry, as Waldo later grows them back, all via black magic…this scene alone is very Len Levinson-esque and would’ve had me emailing Len asap to see if he wrote the book. 

The novel goes from one atrocity to another as Waldo kills all and sundry – even, suprisingly enough, characters we thought were going to be important to the plot. In one instance Waldo gets so mad that one of the three girls tricked him into having sex with her that he bashes her to pieces…then, in one of Scarm’s frequent bizarre interludes, Waldo runs away and disguises himself as a clown, apropos of nothing, and starts following the two remaining girls as they hunt for Wandessa’s hidden grave. He even buys the circus so he can follow them around “without drawing attention.” 

Unlike the film, Wandessa is the co-protagonist of this novelization; upon her resurrection in a graveyard, she hangs out with the group, fighting against or alongside Waldo for the rest of the book. Waldo plans to kill her, but due to comic reasons is unable to put his silver knife in her heart, but after thinking of it a bit he’s happy because the two can team up and kill people together – the first pairing of a werewolf and a vampire, we’re told. 

Eventually, Wandessa is the only recurring character outside of Waldo who remains in the book, and this only furthers the fairy tale nature of Scarm’s narrative; these two are like the center of the universe, despite being impossible to track down by the police. They rove across the country, killing with abandon – and even here it’s not traditional horror novel stuff, with bizarre, darkly comic stuff like the two of them fixing the switches at an intersection, causing a horrific pile-up of cars, and then Waldo and Wandessa going into the wreckage to kill the maimed survivors. 

Scarm shows no limitations with how far he will go, with an especially repugnant scene where Waldo puts his murderous eye on a group of kids, even luring them back to his apartment so he can kill them. Even Wandessa is sickened when Waldo murders a young boy by smashing his head; for her part, Wandessa “only drinks a small amount” of a little girl’s blood, just enough to satiate herself but to not kill the girl. 

Waldo is even more crazed on his “werewolf night,” ie New Year’s Eve, where he turns into your traditional-looking furry werewolf and goes on a kill spree. Even here Scarm follows his own path; on his special night, Waldo is granted additional powers, and indeed can will himself anywhere he wants just by thinking about it(!). So we have crazy horror movie stuff where he’ll just appear on a train and start staking people in the heart, travelers who find themselves confronted by a werewolf that has come out of nowhere. 

Scarm shows a definite talent for keeping the madcap, vicious plot moving, but it seems clear that he writes himself into a corner, as the second half of the novel goes into freefall. First, Wandessa, who like a recovering alcoholic keeps trying to reform, only to be dragged back down by Waldo, sets her “friend” up with the cops and then takes off to hide in Hollywood…and here we go in an entirely different direction, as a naïve Wandessa somehow lands herself a contract with a movie studio. 

Now it’s essentially a Hollywood novel, only our aspiring starlet is a vampire. Of course Scarm has it that she’s starring in a horror movie, as a vampire no less, and soon Wandessa is using her true vampire nature to become a bigger and bigger star – “actually” biting her co-stars and whatnot. Things get progressively goofier when Wandessa tells the director she knows a “real werewolf” and Waldo gets hired onto the picture! 

Now the narrative has changed entirely, and instead of murderers on a killspree, Waldo and Wandessa are big Hollywood celebrities. They’ve also found true love – though Scarm toys with the idea, he never has Waldo and Wandessa become an item – and are about to get married(!), Wandessa to a black actor and Waldo to a butch sort of stunt woman. Meanwhile the cops are closing in…which is itself goofy, as these two commit atrocities throughout the novel, yet are always “hiding” from the cops…cops who can never seem to catch them. 

Not to make this sound like War and Peace or anything – though to be sure, I’d rather read The Werewolf vs The Vampire Woman than War And Peace – but Scarm does a good job working in the “doomed couple” nature of Waldo and Wandessa, particularly when it comes to their (super)natural hatred for one another. This plays out in a rushed but memorable climax which sees Wandessa having some hot lesbian lovin’ with Waldo’s fiance…much to Waldo’s fury. 

I do appreciate that Leo Guild/Arthur Scarm took the opportunity to write an entirely new story, yet at the same time it would’ve been just as cool if he’d novelized the actual film. I haven’t seen all the Naschy vampire movies, just the ones from the ‘70s, and The Werewolf vs The Vampire Woman is one of the better ones, and a book that actually told its tale would have been welcome. I’m going to bet Naschy himself was unaware that this novelization told a completely different tale than his movie. 

Thanks again to Ramble House for making this bizarre novel available for the masses – head over to their website for your copy today! Guaranteed to be the strangest book you will read this year…or any other year! To be honest, I feel that I’ve barely even described how whacky and disturbed this novel is. 

Here’s the cover for their edition, with artwork by Gavin L. O’Keefe:

Mummies

Mummies, edited by Steve Banes

December, 2017  IDW Publishing

This super-cool trade paperback collects several mummy-centric yarns from the pre-code horror comics of the early 1950s, and boy I had a lot of fun reading it. As a kid in the ‘80s I was a devoted comic reader, but even then I was interested in older stuff, so I knew about the horror comics of the ‘50s, particularly those by EC. As a Stephen King-obsessed teen in the early ‘90s I was really into EC, and I recall having several black-and-white hardcover collections of Tales From The Crypt and Vault Of Horror and the like. Now that I think of it, I wonder whatever happened to them… 

Well anyway, Mummies makes for perfect Halloween reading, collecting as it does several non-EC horror comics. While the stories here are certainly repetitive – basically, an ancient Egyptian mummy comes to life and kills a bunch of people – every single one of them is fun, probably an element that is sorely lacking in today’s comic books. 

I stopped reading comics decades ago, but I still have an appreciation for the old stuff, and there’s nothing better than pre-code horror. I’d forgotten how vicious these comics were, not to mention how darkly comic, which makes it even more humorous when you realize they were essentially produced for the kids of the day. Well, it goes without saying that things have become a lot more watered down in the world of kid’s entertainment in the ensuing decades; then again, I read a lof of pre-code horror comics when I was a kid, and even then I was able to appreciate the goofy, over-the-top vibe without finding any of it scary, so those ‘50s comics creators knew what they were doing. 

I was never a horror kid, but I did have an early obsession with the Universal Monsters Mummy. Looking back on it, I’m certain this obsession started with the cover of an LP my brother, who is seven years older than me, bought sometime in the late ‘70s. A record titled Famous Monsters Speak, which was a spoken-word affair, with a Dracula story on one side and a Frankenstein Monster story on the other side. Despite the cover showing the Mummy, the Wolf Man, and even the Creature From The Black Lagoon (another childhood favorite), none of these three characters were actually featured on the record! Well, all that aside, the illustration of the Mummy really appealed to me: 

I also recall that shortly after this, probably in the very early ‘80s, when I was six or seven years old, I got a Mummy costume for Halloween. One of those oldschool deals with the plastic mask. I just searched for it on Google and found it – apparently it was a Ben Cooper costume from 1979:

I was also so into mummies that I wrote a story about one when I was seven years old.* But it was not until years later that I actually saw all of the Universal Mummy movies, snatching up the DVD box set when it was released. I have fond memories of being unemployed during the summer of 2011 and watching the Mummy movies (and the other Universal horror movies) while drinking my way through several bottles of wine I grabbed off the clearance shelf at Tom Thumb…ah, good times. 

I don’t recall seeing too many mummy pre-code horror comics; I’m sure EC had some that I read back in the day, but if so I don’t remember them. I can see why the concept might not have been used very much, as mummies don’t really lend themselves to much return on investment so far as horror fun goes; just try watching the Lon Chaney Jr. Mummy movies in one sitting. Indeed, you’ll quickly see why clearance-rack wine is necessary. The movies are incredibly one-note and repetitive…nonetheless they are still fun, and I’d rather watch them than any modern-day horror movie. 

This trade paperback was edited by Steve Banes, aka Mr. Karswell, who for many years has run the indispensible The Horrors Of It All blog, where he uploads high-quality scans of stories from his pre-code horror comic collection. This blog is one of the best on the entire internet, and I try to read a comic a day on there – and the blog has been running for so long that there is an incredible wealth of material on there. In fact, many of the stories in Mummies can be found on The Horrors Of It All. 

But still, it is a different experience entirely to see the comics phyiscally, ie not on a computer or device screen, and Banes and IDW have done a phenomenal job reproducing these old comics. For one I am happy to say that they have not felt the need to tidy things up or re-color the comics. Personally I hate it when old comics are re-colored; like for example that Amazing Spider-Man Ultimate Newspaper Comic Collection book I reviewed on here a few months back: great, fun stories, with wonderful art, but the colors had been redone to make it all look more polite and “correct.” 

Personally, I’m a huge fan of the oldschool, blurred-out, “messy” look of vintage four color comics, something I was unable to appreciate all those years ago in the black-and-white EC Comic hardcovers I collected. Sure, the art itself looked great, but missing out on the color really took something away…and, as a simple flipping through Mummies will indicate, the colors certainly popped in pre-code comics. In fact there is an almost proto-psychedelic vibe to these comics in how the colors are so overdone and deranged; in many ways these comics are also harbingers of the drive-in horror fare of the following decade, the cheap monster flicks of the 1960s with their lurid and overdone Technicolor prints. 

And that’s another thing: these comics, despite being from the ‘50s and being made for kids, actually play like the more sensationalistic monster movies of the ‘60s. The only thing missing is the nudity. The violence certainly isn’t missing: in the stories here you will see countless murders, and atrocities like people eaten alive by ants or put inside of iron maidens. And there is in fact a T&A quotient, with each story featuring a young female with ample charms who is often put in a compromising position that results in her clothing being a little torn…yes, the comic producers of yore certainly knew what kind of material their young male (and older male!) readers wanted to see. 

I was interested in the uniformity of design the various artists followed for their depictions of the mummies. Instead of the Boris Karloff or Lon Chaney Jr. approach, which was the mummy wrapping overtop the entire face, the pre-code horror comic illustrators went for a look more aligned with the Ben Cooper costume I showed above, with a demonic skull-like face. They’re more “Pushead” than “Karloff:”

I mean just take a look: 

Only a few mummies in the stories collected here deviate from this look. The mummies themselves are all of a piece, though; unliving pharaohs who are either awoken by wily professors or come back to life due to a curse that was placed eons ago. It’s also humorous that all of the archeologists are either superstitious, stubborn, vengeful, or all three at once. 

The stories are busily plotted despite being so short; some pages are overstuffed with dialog and captions, to the extent that the actual art is often lost in the shuffle. But to be honest this is part of the charm; I much prefer the cluttered storytelling of old comics to the streamlined, “cinematic” art of today’s lame comics. 

Overall I had a lot of fun reading Mummies, and even though I wasn’t even born yet in the ‘50s, it still made me nostalgic, mainly because I did read ‘50s horror comics as a kid in the ‘80s. It made for perfect Halloween reading. Here are some random photos from the book:  

*As mentioned above, I was so inspired by my Halloween mummy costume that I wrote a story about it. I was seven at the time, if not younger, and it was a “drawings with text on construction paper” type of story. Well anyway, all I recall is that the story, humorously, followed the exact same template as many of the stories in Mummies, proving that even a little kid realizes there’s little variety in a mummy-centric horror story: basically, a pharaoh dies, becomes a mummy, and centuries later the mummy comes to life and wreaks havoc. 

I wrote a lot of stories as a kid, but here is why this particular one has always stuck with me. After writing it, I proudly showed the story to my mom, and I recall her standing there and reading it as I waited expectantly for her approval. I recall her face became troubled as she read a certain line, and then she showed me the story and asked, “What does this sentence say?” 

It was at the beginning of the story, the part set in the ancient past, where the pharaoh had just died and was about to be mummified. “Oh,” I said, “that sentence says, ‘The servants wrapped the pharaoh’s body.’” 

The troubled look abruptly left my mom’s face. “Okay,” she said, “but you spell ‘wrapped’ with a ‘w’ and with two ‘p’s.” 

It wasn’t until many years later that I realized the sentence I had actually written: “The servants raped the pharaoh’s body.” No wonder my mom looked so concerned. 

What made me remember this was that look that briefly passed over my mom’s face as she read my story – I got a first-hand, real-time glimpse of the power of storytelling, and how it can elicit both positive and negative reactions. 

Of course the irony is, if I were to write a mummy horror story today, I probably would write, “The servants raped the pharaoh’s body.”