Women Of The Green Berets

 
Women Of The Green Berets, by Rand Michaels

No month stated, 1967  Lancer Books

I have to admit, I never would have thought of combining Robin Moore’s The Green Berets with Jacqueline Susann’s Valley Of The Dolls, but obscure author Rand Michaels thought of that very thing. Or perhaps it was publisher Lancer Books who came up with the genre mash-up and slapped a blurb on the back cover of Women Of The Green Berets, who knows. The important thing is that this paperback original of 223 pages does a fairly good job of juggling hellish ‘Nam battle sequences with soapy melodrama – the only problem is, there’s zero in the way of the exploitative stuff you might expect, with the novel ultimately coming off as rather anemic on the trash front. 

The novel also doesn’t really live up to its title, as it is more so concerned with the Green Berets themselves, instead of their women. Also, I was surprised that the entire novel is set in Vietnam; I assumed there would be stateside material with those lonely and sex-starved Green Beret women playing the field. Rather, there’s only one wife in the book, her name Evelyn, and she’s come to Saigon to see her husband, 27 year-old Captain Mike Colby. Otherwise we have a native woman who is involved with Ken Hubbard, another guy on Captain Mike’s force, and also a hotstuff doctor named Nina Field, who is involved with yet another of Captain Mike’s men, Dave Lawlor. And yes, “Captain Mike;” author Rand Michaels for the most part refers to all characters by their first names. 

It's Eveyln who serves as the main female protagonist, and Michaels takes her through hell over the course of the book. The plotting has you expecting that soap opera stuff, and what’s funny is the author seems to be catering to it…only to go in an entirely different direction. Long story short, Evelyn comes to Saigon to see Mike, but due to the war and all they’re unable to meet. Evelyn nearly gets picked up by another white guy here in Saigon on business, but he ultimately turns her down because as it turns out he is married, too, and wants to be faithful. So Evelyn then is determined to have some extramarital sex. She goes into a bar to get picked up, only to get drugged by yet another American here on business, one who thinks he’s accidentally killed Evelyn with an overdose, and thus orchestrates leaving her body to be found. As I say, the plotting is all over the place in this one. 

It only gets more frenzied, as it turns out Evelyn did not die of an overdose, just passed out. A kindly native kid takes her back to his home so she can change into clean clothes (the “faked death” orchestration entailed putting Evelyn’s “corpse” in a crashed car)…and then the kid’s dad comes downstairs, pulls Evelyn back up to his room, and rapes her all night! Actually, this does have a bit of a dark Jacqueline Susann vibe to it. Shockingly, this is I think the only sex scene in the entire novel, though its of course up to debate whether a rape scene even counts as a sex scene. Personally I’d say it doesn’t, but I’m only noting here because this is it so far as the sleazy stuff goes…and all of it occurs entirely off-page! 

So yes, folks, this is one of those curiously “dirty” books that isn’t dirty at all. Rather, it is as mentioned the war stuff that takes more of a focus in the narrative. Captain Mike can’t meet with Evelyn when she comes to Saigon because he’s been tasked with starting up a new base out in the ‘Nam hinterlands, and must put together an A Team to helm the base. So he spends the majority of the novel in the field fighting Charlie. Rand Michaels certainly has an understanding of the nightmarish life of an American soldier in Vietnam, with Mike and team alternately bored out of their wits or vastly outnumbered by an entrenched enemy. Michaels also has no qualms with killing off major characters in these battle sequences. 

Michaels also has no qualms with dropping potentially-interesting subplots. Nina Field, the hotstuff doctor who works the base and handles the injured GIs, has an early subplot that I thought was the most interesting thing in Women Of The Green Berets. She’s kidnapped early on, by the thugs who work for a native who is clearly wealthy, and taken to a place where a VC bigwig demands that Nina do plastic surgery to his injured face. Nina does so – and Rand Michaels displays some plastic surgery knowledge here, again giving the book the vibe of a Susann et al potboiler – but she also permanently disfigures the guy’s face with a “V” and a “C” on each cheek, so that he will be unable to hide his true nature. Nina manages to escape, and tells the military authorities…but nothing else is done with this. I envisioned a plotline of a guy with “VC” on his face coming after Nina for revenge, but it never happened. 

Instead, there is a lot of stuff about Mike and his crew out in the Vietnam jungle trying to get a base started while fending off frequent VC attacks. There is a definite air of defeatism to the battles, so this certainly isn’t a gung-ho combat novel. And yet, there’s no real violence, either. Mike and crew will “shoot down” VC and occasionally we’ll read of someone “blown to bits” by mortar or bomb traps. So this isn’t The Black Eagles, is what I’m saying, and is more of a prefigure of Michael Herr’s Dispatches, with the author managing to convey the nightmarishly surreal atmosphere of combat in ‘Nam. 

In this regard there’s a lot of material about Captain Mike and team trying to fortify the base while winning the hearts and minds of the natives. “Pacification” is the concept Mike keeps drilling into his team. This is an especially hard lesson for Dave Lawlor, sort of the “Animal Mother” of the group, for those of who have read Gustav Hasford’s The Short-Timers…or seen the film version, Full Metal Jacket (which pales in comparison to the source material). Even here, though, Rand drops potentially-cool subplots. There’s a part early on where Mike and team get some R&R in Saigon, and Lawlor goes out with a sexy native babe he’s fairly certain is a VC honey trap. He goes along with her, pretending ignorance, laughing to himself how she’s so clearly leading him into a trap…and ready to kill her VC pals with his bare hands. 

And the reader keeps waiting to get back to this section – in true potboiler style, Rand Michaels tells Women Of The Green Berets in a sort of snapshot style, jumping from character to character – and the reader is disappointed. Ultimately we do not see any of it happen; when finally Lawlor returns to the narrative, it’s from the perspective of Nina Field, and she has to mend the beaten-up Lawlor who is carried into her operating room. Only through dialog does a bloody but grinning Lawlor inform us that he did indeed kill those VC scum with his bare hands. Strange decisions like this ultimately sink Women Of The Green Berets; it’s like the author cannot fully commit to either a soapy melodrama or a violent war yarn. 

On that note, Mike and wife Evelyn handle the brunt of the melodrama stuff. They spend the majority of the novel separated, until briefly reconnecting during another of Mike’s infrequent R&Rs, late in the book – and here again all the lovin’ is off-page. The soapy stuff is all from Evelyn’s perspective, as after the rape she’s decided she will divorce Mike, due to shame or somesuch, but after a week together with Mike she apparently changes her mind. But Rand throws another plot curveball and things pan out much differently than Evelyn suspected – and the author doesn’t even bother to give us a resolution to this subplot, as the last we see of Evelyn she’s flying back home to America. 

Meanwhile Women Of The Green Berets ends on a big battle scene – we’ve already had a long sequence detailing a Khe Sahn-like siege the base endured – with the Green Berets withstanding a big VC attack. We get more “Animal Mother” stuff with Dave Lawlor cruelly toying with his prey before killing them, and also more on the hell of war with VC “kids” being gunned down in the crossfire, even after the American soldiers have let them go. And here Women Of The Green Berets comes to a close, the titular “women” long forgotten about and ultimately inconsequential to the narrative. All of which leads me to conclude that it was in fact Lancer Books that slapped this “The Green Berets meets Valley Of The Dolls” tag on the back cover, because as it turns out that is not the novel Rand Michaels actually delivers.

The Making Of The Happy Hooker

The Making Of The Happy Hooker, by Robin Moore

October, 1973  Signet Books

A few years ago I reviewed The Happy Hooker, a book I had been meaning to read for years and years, as I’d picked up the majority of the books Xaviera Hollander published at the time. But that review is a bit of a sore spot for me, given that Blogger for no reason whatsoever put it behind a sensitivity filter, flagging it for adult content. I tried editing the title, the image, etc, but nothing worked and to this day the review is stuck behind a privacy screen, and stuff like this makes me laugh because it’s yet another reminder of how things are becoming more and more restricted in our otherwise “progressive” age. (To be filed under: “Sex parties are for me, not for thee.”) 

Well anyway, The Happy Hooker is credited to the titular hooker herself, Xaviera Hollander, but “co-written” by Robin Moore and Yvonne Dunleavy. Published a few years after that bestseller, The Making Of The Happy Hooker is by Robin Moore himself, telling the tale of how The Happy Hooker came to be, and the fallout from the book’s publication. Interestingly, Xaveria published a few more “nonfiction books” under her own name, without Moore or Dunleavy, so I wonder if those books – with titles like Xaviera! and Xaveria Goes Wild! – cover the same ground. I’m betting not, as glancing through them they appear to be more focused on Xaveria’s robust sex life, whereas The Making Of The Happy Hooker is more focused on the uninentional criminal and federal ramifactions that were spawned in the research and writing of The Happy Hooker. 

Moore was an incredibly prolific writer and I’m surprised I’ve yet to review one of his books on here. When I was 10 years old I picked up a paperback copy of his early ‘60s bestseller, The Green Berets, and it’s one of the few books from my childhood that I still have. (It has a lame cover photo of a soldier wearing camo facepaint.) But to this day I have not read the book, nor have I read any of Robin Moore’s many other books. I even have some PBOs he did through Manor Books in the late ‘70s, which might indicate that Moore gradually lost his “name” in the literary world; but then, The Happy Hooker itself was a PBO, and according to this book was the number one selling PBO of all time, with 7 million copies sold. 

I only bring up the “name” stuff because Robin Moore is at pains to remind us that he’s a big-name author throughout the entirety of The Making Of The Happy Hooker. He so often informs us that he’s well-known – at one point he even has a character directly state that “[Moore] is a big-time author” – that I got the impression the guy already knew his “name” was slipping, and was trying to double down on the fame he previously enjoyed. But that’s just my impression. There’s just a level of arrogance to his narrative that is not too disimilar from Norman Mailer’s, in Of A Fire On The Moon. That said, he also just as often reminds us of how skillfully-researched his books are, but then Moore is reportedly the only civilian to ever graduate Green Beret training, all during the course of research for his book on them. 

Well anyway, one suspects he published this book as a further boon to his rapidly-fading literary star; the only reason it seems to exist is so that Moore can provide his own interpretation of the bestselling The Happy Hooker, which is strange given that he was credited as the “co-writer” of the actual book. And a lot of the same material is covered herein, with the caveat that Moore’s “making of” book becomes more of a crime thriller, or at least more of a sub-The Anderson Tapes yarn, with its focus on illegal surveillance and the ensuing fallout of such. The plot is also less focused on Xaviera’s whoring life than it is on the Knapp Commission, which was tasked with rooting out corruption in the NYPD; basically, Xaviera’s cathouse became an illegal listening post for various cops who were trying to bust people. 

But then, Moore cagily asserts in his intro that The Making Of The Happy Hooker is “faction,” stating that some of it is “the fantasy of a middle-aged man who may wish more may have happened under certain exotic and erotic circumstances.” On that note, Moore tells us straight out that he had sex with Xaviera, and a few times at that. Indeed, their first meeting led to the inevitable; Moore has it that he was finishing up work on a book titled The Khaki Mafia, co-writing it with a lovely young dish named June who apparently had nice breasts (in true sleazy early ‘70s style, Moore does indeed tell us about the breasts of his female co-writers), and Moore started getting calls from a foreign-voiced chick who wanted him to visit her. Moore quickly deduced that she was a new hooker in town (this being 1970), and she’d bought the “black book” of another hooker – one who had Moore’s name in her book. 

Well, Moore does visit, and he informs us that Xaveria “wasn’t really a pretty girl,” but she carried herself like a “superstar.” Also, according to this book Xaviera had a tendency to say things like, “I would like to suck your cock” to a man shortly after meeting him, which certainly goes a long ways in making of up for her not being “really pretty.” “[Xaveria] encouraged me into positions I had never tried…taking me deep up into her,” Moore informs us in what will be one of the very few sexual scenes in the book – and one that only lasts a paragraph, at that. We get another Moore-Xaveria boff later in the book, when a horny Xaveria insists Moore stop working on the book and come back into her room: “Xaviera was astride me…begging me to ejaculate in her.” This part is funny, though, as Xaveria’s boyfriend Larry (who wrote his own book on Xaveria, believe it or not – and yes, I have it and will read it someday) comes back, knows what Moore and Xaviera are doing in there, and gets mad – not because of Xaveria’s infidelity, but because he knows Xaveria is giving Moore a freebie! But all is well when Moore hands over fifty bucks, after which Larry’s treating him like his best friend. 

As for The Happy Hooker, Moore has it that he hit upon the idea after that first tustle with Xaveria. But then, he states he’d already been thinking about a book on prositution, and indeed the prologue of the book is perhaps the best part, as Moore relates another funny story. It’s 1968, and Moore has brought in 18 Green Berets for the New York premiere of the film version of his book The Green Berets. They ended up at a fashionable East Side townhouse after the premiere, and Moore piles on the sleazy description of the madam’s five-floor bordello…which is raided by the cops the next day, after Moore and the Berets have left. But it’s from this that Moore got the idea to do a “Hookerbook,” which he informs us was his original title for the book that became The Happy Hooker. 

Moore also makes it clear that Xaveria Hollander did not write The Happy Hooker. He breaks it down in movie terms: “Produced by Robin Moore. Written by Yvonne Dunleavy. Starring Xaveria Hollander.” But then, Moore doesn’t even tell us much about Dunleavy’s contribution, other than her frequent run-ins with Xaveria. Dunleavy is apparently Australian, and is another lovely young thing with “nice breasts” that Moore hires to co-write with him, arguing that a book on a hooker needs a “woman’s touch,” indeed a woman who would understand that Xaveria’s blatant whorish attitude would seem alien to the average female reader. But really, all we learn of Dunleavy is she gets annoyed with Xaveria, who is constantly asking Dunleavy to “help out” at the cathouse, ie serve as a hooker for a group of men who are coming in, etc. 

The book starts off on the sleazy footing we’d expect, with Xaveria casually informing Moore and Dunleavy of her kinky customers and her history of hookering…but it’s also gross, because we get a lot on the “freak” aspect, complete with a dude who likes to eat shit. Literally. But The Making Of The Happy Hooker changes course with the introduction of “Ben the Bugger,” a wiretapping expert Moore hires to bug Xaveria’s place…so Moore doesn’t have to be there all the time, picking up material for the book. Essentially Ben bugs all the rooms, with Xaveria’s blessing, so Moore and Dunleavy can later listen to the tapes and transcribe the sleazy details for “Hookerbook.” 

The only problem is, Ben the Bugger starts tapping the phones and calling over cops, and Moore soon discovers that Ben is part of the Knapp Commission, and Moore has essentially funded an illegal surveillance scheme. This is what The Making Of The Happy Hooker ultimately becomes concerned with, and in fact Xaveria sort of gets lost in the narrative, only appearing willy-nilly, and usually being duped iby Ben the Bugger. At one point he even puts a video camera behind her mirror, controlled by “laser,” so that he can videotape Xaveria as she’s having sex…and since he’s broadcasting on “the high band” of the UHF spectrum, it so happens that one day something slips and the real-life hardcore stuff s being broadcast on “a Puerto Rican station” in New York City, until the Feds hear about it and shut it down…but really they just ask Ben to stop, given that they all are aware of him. I suspect this material could be that “faction” stuff. 

The book does take on the tone of a crime thriller, with Xaveria even agreeing to work with the Knapp boys, using her girls to ensnare people they have their eyes on…like a group of Arabs. Oh, and there’s also a subplot about Ellen, a married British lady Moore likes who takes a job secretly at Xaveria’s so she can get enough money to leave her husband, and Ben the Bugger falls in love with her. The stuff with Ben also has an unintentionally humorous aspect to it, because at one point he zeroes in on a dirty cop named…Don Johnson. And humorously, “Don Johnson” comes off exactly like Sonny Crockett in Miami Vice, just a too-cool cop, but unlike Crockett he’s essentially corrupt. So I guess he’s more like Sonny’s alter ego, Sonny Burnett. 

We do get a recreation of the scene that opened The Happy Hooker: Xaveria and her posh girls thrown in jail with a bunch of street-hardened black hookers. It’s even more outrageous here, with the lead black hooker taking a “small, phallus-shaped gravity knife” from out of her inner recesses and threatening to cut up Xaveria. Also, we learn that Xavera did not like the title “The Happy Hooker,” arguing correctly that she was not a “hooker,” but a “madam.” She wanted the book to be titled “The Happy Madam,” but Moore – who suddenly claims he was the proponent of titling it The Happy Hooker late in the book, despite his earlier statement that he wanted to call it “Hookerbook” – prevails, and soon enough they have a bestselling monster on their hands. 

Moore basically makes The Making Of The Happy Hooker a behind the scenes meets “where are they now?” affair, telling us of the fallout of the book – Xaveria on the witness stand, due to serving the Knapp commission, Ben the Bugger fleeing to England and fighting against extradition, and Moore moving on to his next book. He says nothing of Xaveria’s many other books, no doubt because he wasn’t involved with them (and also none of them were published by Signet). Moore also doesn’t tell us much about his own life, other than mentioning his various books and research for them. He casually informs us he’s unhappily married – and this only after we’ve had a few conjugal visits with Xaviera – but the wife isn’t even named. 

At 184 small, dense pages, The Making Of The Happy Hooker moves at a fairly fast clip, but be advised that the title is a bit misleading. The actual writing of Xaveria Hollander’s book is sort of the framework that Robin Moore uses to tell a tale that is more concerned with wiretapping, bugging, and other illegal surveilling techniques. It also has a topical relevance, as the wiretapping entrapment scheme with the New York-based Knapp Commission and Xaviera seems quite similar to whatever is going on with Puff Daddy today.

Chrysalis Of Death

Chrysalis Of Death, by Eleanor Robinson

May, 1976  Pocket Books

I’d never heard of this obscure paperback original until I recently came across it on the clearance rack at a local Half Price Books. One dollar, so I figured what the hell. I’ve been watching a lot of ‘70s drive-in movies lately, and the setup for this one seemed really in-line with those, to the extent that I wondered why someone like Roger Corman didn’t option the rights. In a nutshell, Chrysalis Of Death concerns a contagion in the Arizona desert that turns people into Neanderthals. 

But then, the uncredited cover art blows this surprise. Author Eleanor Robinson doesn’t outright state “Neanderthal” or “Cro-Magnon” in the brief, 175-page course of the novel; instead, she goes for a “cinematic” sort of approach, one that does imbue the story with tension and suspense, but one that also robs it of concrete details that allow the reader to understand what is happening. As it turns out, big stuff happens in the course of the novel – like main characters dying – but the reader doesn’t even realize something “big” has happened until later on, given the way Robinson has written the book. 

Also, she jams way too many characters into the novel, but then my impression was she was catering to the disaster obsession of the day. But the effect is, the reader doesn’t really get a grip on who is who, other than a few characters who sort of rise to the top in prominence. Otherwise, the characters loglined on the back cover and first-page preview aren’t given much room to breathe…like the drunkard best-selling novelist, or the Joe Namath-esque football player. Robinson tries to cater to the “large cast of characters” aesthetic of the disaster story, but the effect is limited given how short the novel is. Again, this is what gives the impression that it’s a tie-in for a drive-in movie that never was…the more lurid version of The Poseidon Adventure or something. 

The only problem is…it’s not very lurid! I’ll note the sad fact here that Chrysalis Of Death has zero in the way of sex, and the majority of the violence occurs off-page. Rather it is more of a long-simmer potboiler sort of affair, most reminscent of the contemporary Snowman (which also came off like the novelization of a drive-in movie that never was), with the caveat that Chrysalis Of Death doesn’t even feature a big action finale; the cover art not only blows the surprise of the storyline, but also misleads with the explosions and helicopters circling over the Cro-Magnons. Actually that does all sort of happen, but again it’s a little lost on the reader given the “cinematic” way Eleanor Robinson writes the book. 

By “cinematic” I mean the way Robinson will cut away from action; I did appreciate how she stayed, for the most part, locked in the perspectives of her various characters. This means that the narrative doesn’t jump willy-nilly from the perspective of one character to another, without any line breaks or chapter breaks to alert the reader that such a change is occuring. But this also means that Robinson has a tendency to have something occuring from the perspective of one character, then there will be a break to another character…and we’ll only learn in passing what happened to that previous character, due to the obsfucated way Robinson handles the action scenes. Meaning, characters will die, and we don’t even know it until it’s relayed in dialog later in the book. And these are major characters, too. 

The action begins with a young anthropologist or somesuch named Jeff blasting rocks in the Arizona desert, inadvertently releasing an ancient form of life that will soon infect the residents of nearby small town Lazy Creek  The infection is mostly relayed through the plight of several people staying at an out-of-the-way hotel in Lazy Creek, owned by a new arrival to the area named Henry. How the place stays in business, what with its being off the main road and in the middle of the desert, is something Henry is struggling with, but meanwhile he does have some people staying with him, and Robinson introduces them all without much fanfare, expecting us readers to be able to keep track of all of them. 

The way the contagion works is there are these saclike egg things in the desert, freed from their millennia in the rocks by Jeff’s dynamite, and when torn open little fuzzy caterpillars come out, ones that stink horribly. If you touch them it hurts, and soon your hand will swell, and next thing you know you’ll be puking your guts out for an entire day, in addition to passing out a bunch. Slowly your forehead becomes larger and larger and you become more Neanderthal, with heightened senses and only a modicum of intelligence. Again, Robinson never outright states all of this, just showing the infection first through one particular character as it happens to him, with his of course not even knowing he’s become infected with some super-ancient virus. 

As mentioned Robinson really stuffs the pages with a lot of characters: Henry the owner of the place and his wife; Jeff the scientist (whose wife back home is about to give birth); a young woman who is babysitting for another couple who aren’t even there; a famous novelist gone to seed; a pair of Hispanics who pretend to be brother and sister but are really engaged to be married; an old socialite lady and her minder; a drug courier who is carrying a suitcase filled with money; a sheriff who harbors designs on said suitcase; even if he has to kill to get it; a football player and his entourage, including among them yet another wealthy socialite who has a super-annoying tendency to say “big heap” all the time; and that’s just the ones I can think of off the top of my head. I mean all these characters and more – including I just remembered the people who own and work in the local grocery store – all in the brief span of 175 pages. There are even subplots within the subplots, like the football player’s wife who is miserable (eventually we’ll learn it’s because the famous football player is in the closet, though this is “revealed” so hurriedly it barely registers), or even the friend of the football player’s wife who has secretly been stealing jewelry from her “friend” for the past several years. 

Robinson really has it on the long-simmer, with the book occuring over just a few days, so that the horror of the virus becomes slowly apparent both to the characters and to the reader. Gradually we have yet another new character added to the mix: a somewhat-arrogant young doctor who is flown in and who immediately puts Lazy River in a quarantine. Yes, the parallels to COVID are interesting here, particularly given how the Lazy River people begrudgingly give in to the whims of the government during the quarantine…until slowly coming to their senses and realizing the government people have no idea what the hell they are doing. But even when they do rebel, the impact of their action is lost in the way the narrative is handled. For example, a group of the hotel guests plot to hijack a government helicopter that is coming in with supplies. When the attempted hijacking transpires, however, Robinson doesn’t relay it from the perspective of the hijackers or even the people on the helicopter – she relays it from the perspective of someone infected by the virus, whose intelligence has been so ruined that he doesn’t even fully comprehend what he is seeing. 

It's things like this that ultimately sink Chrysalis Of Death, just one wrong narratorial decision after another. There is a lot of setup and little payoff, particularly for the many subplots. And also, some of the subplots are kind of thrust on us with no warning. Like when the sheriff starts searching for the drug courier, and thinks to himself that he’ll deputize the young anthropologist – so it won’t look as suspicious when the young anthropologist turns up dead. This is almost shocking in how casually it’s relayed to us readers, given that prior to this there was no warning our sheriff character would even be a villain. But no, we will gradually learn his own subplot concerns his determination to get the suitcase of money the drug courier might have hidden in Lazy Creek, and he’ll kill anyone who gets in his way. But this subplot too is totally lost in the narrative, with no payoff. Worse yet is the Spanish guy whose wife and child are killed by someone infected by the virus, and who swears revenge – and then disappears from the novel. 

Robinson does well capture the growing horror of the situation, and also she’s good at planting clues that indicate a person might ultimately become infected by the virus, even though they’re acting fine. But it seems that she loses control of her narrative as it nears its conclusion, with a lot of characters dying off-page, and the drama of it totally unexploited. She earns points though for delivering a ‘70s-mandatory bummer ending, which again aligns with the drive-in movie that’s playing in your mind. 

Overall, Chrysalis Of Death was interesting to find on the clearance rack, but not a book I’d recommend. It’s more sluggish than its short page length would imply, and it was a lot of work to keep track of the various characters. Also, the book really could’ve benefitted from some naughty stuff. The editors at Pocket Books really try to make it seem like the book has naughty stuff in it, though; this is one of those instances where you wish the book was more like the back-cover copy would indicate. As for Eleanor Robinson, it appears that she only published one more novel, The Silverleaf Syndrome, another “biological horror” affair that was published in 1980 by Tower Books.  It was also published that same year by Leisure Books as The Freak.

While researching Eleanor Robinson, I came across this 2009 article that tells how Robinson, who apparently passed away some time ago (in 1985, if my math is correct from the dates given in the article), inspired her granddaughter from beyond the grave.

The Doll

The Doll, by Gerard Gormley

May, 1977  Pinnacle Books

Unjustly obscure, this Pinnacle paperback original deserved a better fate. At least it got a great cover illustration, courtesy Bruce Minney (who is credited on the copyright page); it’s a stepback cover, as shown below. And to Minney’s credit, he clearly read the manuscript (or was given good direction by the art director at Pinnacle), as he faithfully details the two main characters in the novel, as well as the bronze statue the protagonist works on, even down to the expression on the statue’s face. 

Coming in at 211 pages, The Doll is interesting in how it melds two disparate tones: the first half of the novel is essentially a love story, one complete with ‘70s-mandatory explicit sex. But the second half of the novel is a dark and disturbing descent into madness. My assumption is Gerard Gormley, who proves himself a gifted author, must have shot for the hardcover leagues but for whatever reason ended up publishing the book through Pinnacle…possibly not the best outfit for this book. I mean a subplot here concerns “The Man,” a Mafia bigwig in Boston, and one keeps waiting for the protagonist to call in Pinnacle Books star Mack Bolan. 

Opening in November of 1969, The Doll concerns Mark Forman, a thirty year-old sculptor who makes a meager living turning out statues in his Boston penthouse studio-apartment. Gormley well brings the character to life; Forman sports a beard (as per Minney’s illustration), and he’s very serious about his work, living almost a hermetic life. He’s approached one day by his landlord, Lou Pacino, who has a plush job for Forman: Pacino’s acquaintance, a wealthy man, wants a bronze statue made of his woman, and price will not be an issue. 

We already have an indication of the way the novel will be going, given the opening note that the story begins “like most nightmares.” Which is to say, without any indication that it will become a nightmare. But Gormley well establishes the forbidden nature of the romance that will expectedly ensue between Forman and the woman he is to create a statue of: Anna, a smokin’ hot “chestnut haired” beauty with violet eyes in her mid-twenties who is delivered to Forman’s door one day like a package. Gormley also handles the groundwork of the romance well, with the chemistry between Forman and Anna naturally developing and not seeming forced. Both characters are given personalities, and despite being a goddess-level beauty, Anna is easy to talk to and they have a nicely-developed rapport. 

Gormley also isn’t one to focus on the exploitation, which makes the ensuing sex scenes so hard-hitting. For one, when Anna does strip down for some nude sketches, Forman focuses on the task at hand before briefly allowing himself to “marvel at the perfection of [Anna’s] breasts” (size 36, as we learn when Forman takes her measurements), noting further that she is a “visual delight.” But instead the focus is on the chemistry between the two, rather than the exploitation of Anna’s ample charms. That said, the lovin’ doesn’t take too long to happen; but then, the two of them spend full days together alone in Forman’s studio, and one quickly detects that Anna is enjoying her time away from “The Man,” which is how Forman soon comes to think of the mysterious man Anna is the mistress of. 

In a way it’s all sort of like a rom-com or something; on their first day Anna asks Forman if he’s got a lot of girlfriends, but Forman claims he’s more of a shy type and wouldn’t even know how to hit on a woman as gorgeous as Anna, which leads to some role-playing that becomes serious quick for both of them. This leads to them thinking of each other all weekend, complete with Anna making surprise calls to Forman. Some of it is funny, like when Anna gives a tired Forman a massage, which gives him an immediate hard-on. But boy when the sexual shenanigans transpire, no sleazy stone is left unturned; it goes on for a few pages, complete with Anna’s explicit descriptions of her orgasms (“Darling, I’m coming again. Deep inside this time!”) and TMI detail like Forman “gloriously gushing” into her upon his own orgasm. Actually, “gloriously gushing” is used again in the novel; personally I think it should’ve been the title of the book. 

Here's where the “nightmare” angle comes into play, because – you won’t be surprised to learn – Anna’s boyfriend is clearly a high-ranking Mafioso. Anna is tight-lipped about him, but we learn he is not the expected old and ugly guy who could afford such a beauty as Anna, but rather a young and attractive man who happens to be in an unhappy marriage arranged by “the families.” So Anna’s in two secret relationships: one with “The Man,” which is kep secret from the Man’s wife, and one with Forman, which is kept secret from the Man. 

But the relationship with Forman is where Anna’s heart is, and Gormley does lay it on a little thick with Anna and Forman expressing love for each other, even down to ridiculous “foreshadowing” stuff where Anna proclaims how “even death” wouldn’t keep her from Forman. I mean let’s telegraph it a little more, huh? Also, Forman knows he’s getting in hot water because his landlord, Pacino, is becoming increasingly nervous on the project, saying how his friend thinks the statue should be done already – I forgot to mention, but Forman never even meets the Man, the entire project handled through Pacino. And it’s clear that the Man is starting to suspect Forman of intentionally taking his time. 

Gormley also well captures the artistic mindset and the laborious process of making a bronze statue. It’s not overbearing and is handled well, letting us see Forman in action. His goal is to capture Anna’s beauty – and also we learn that her body is so incredible that Forman decides to make it slightly less gobsmacking, so the statue will be more believable! He struggles over the expression for the statue, finally deciding on a yearning, gazing-into-the-distance expression Anna had on her face on that first day, when Forman was doing sketches of her; Forman had asked her to think of her childhood, and that was the expression on Anna’s face when she talked of being a child. This is also the expression Bruce Minney has tried to convey in his cover illustration, so again he either read the book or read this section to do a faithful job of it. 

The nightmare portion of The Doll develops just as naturally as the rom-com portion. Anna is quickly removed from Forman’s life, the Man calling her back – and having Pacino kick Forman out of his studio apartment, as the Man clearly suspects Forman of having screwed Anna. Even though Forman and Anna have no way of contacting each other, Forman not even knowing Anna’s last name, our industrious protagonist figures out a way to track her down…with devastating results. The ensuing sequence is out of a Pinnacle novel, complete with Forman getting beaten near to death by a pair of Mafia stooges. 

But whereas the hero of a typical Pinnacle book would recuperate and then train himself in the fine art of killing, Mark Forman instead tries to get his hands to work again so he can get back to sculpting. The novel gradually becomes more of a sick descent into a damaged mind, as Forman’s brain was injured in the beating, and gradually he loses any connection between fantasy and reality. This is how the titular “doll” comes into the story; Forman kept the wax mold used to create the bronze statue of Anna, meaning Forman has a perfect likeness of Anna…and he creates a life-size latex doll of this likeness. And soon enough he’s shopping for wigs of real hair, gemstone eyes of the same violet color as Anna’s eyes, using spare hair from the wig to create eyebrows and pubic hair, etc. Just a crazy descent into sickness, with the interesting gimmick that Gormley writes it all casually, given that Forman himself doesn’t think it’s sick – he’s just a man determined to get Anna back. 

So yes, the latter half of The Doll concerns a guy in love with a lifesize latex doll, even hollowing out a section in the crotch so that he can “gush gloriously” into it. And the madness is well handled, with Forman coming up with a complete alternate reality of what happened to Anna…sometimes the doll is really her, other times he realizes it’s just a simulacrum he’s made of her, etc. That said, I did find the reveal of what really happened to Anna a little underwhelming, and had wished for more insight into her story, even if Forman had to get it from someone else, like perhaps his landlord Pacino – again, I wanted more of your standard Pinnacle hero, more of a man of action who would’ve gotten the answers he wanted. 

Ultimately The Doll left me with a sick feeling, Gerard Gormley doing a great job of documenting a man’s slipping hold on sanity, but I felt that it was too hard of a punch after the easy, naturally-developing chemistry of the opening half. The book essentially delivers an unexpected uppercut to the reader, and I can’t say I enjoyed the experience…perhaps it would have been more palatable if it had built to a more satisfying climax. But Gormley is determined to tell a dark tale, and clearly his ending is more realistic than the one I would’ve wanted – say, Mark Forman buying himself a shotgun and doling out some bloody payback. 

That said, the finale itself is pretty nuts, dark, and twisted, with a pair of young hoodlums breaking into Forman’s studio and discovering the doll and, uh, having a little sick fun with it. When Forman gets back from an art show and discovers the transgression, he goes ballistic, and given that he’s now a psycho he has psycho strength, smashing out brains and whatnot. It’s crazy and all, but again just so out of sync with the vibe of the first half of the novel. But then as mentioned the novel is really two stories in the same book: a romance for the first half, followed by a hundred pages of a guy falling in love with a lifesize doll and screwing it a bunch. 

But on that note, I guess this element of The Doll was a lot more shocking in its day. Lifesize latex sex dolls are fairly common today; I think I have a couple in my downstairs closet. Just kidding. But didn’t I read a news story a few years ago about some dude marrying a latex sex doll? Crazy, but in retrospect I guess it’s no more crazy than marrying a real woman, is it? I mean at least the doll won’t nag you to death. 

As promised, here’s Bruce Minney’s interior illustration – as you’ll note, my copy has writing on it, but that’s cool. I don’t mind that sort of thing nearly as much as I once did. In fact I think it’s cool that someone named “Lottie” once owned this copy, and liked it so much she even wrote “please return” on it. Sorry, Lottie – I’m keeping it. 

No Sympathy For The Devil

No Sympathy For The Devil, by Frederick Snow

April, 1982  Fawcett Gold Medal

I’ve managed to discover yet another obscure rock novel, one so obscure that there wasn’t even a scan of the cover online, so I had to take one with my phone. And also there’s no info out there about Frederick Snow; apparently this is his only book, and No Sympathy For The Devil is copyright under his name, but it could be a pseudonym; whoever it is, the writing is very clunky throughout, much clunkier than anything I’ve ever read from Fawcett, which in my mind was a slightly more upscale imprint. 

On the positive side, I can say without question that No Sympathy For The Devil is by far the raunchiest rock novel I’ve yet had the pleasure to read. Even more raunchy than Mick Farren’s The Tale Of Willy’s Rats; almost every other page features characters having sex, thinking about sex, or talking about sex. The image very much conveyed is that the rock world is comprised of fragile, juvenile egos that are driven by insatiable impulses, constantly snorting coke, smoking dope, or having depraved sex. This of course is a huge mark in the book’s favor. 

On the negative side, No Sympathy For The Devil is poorly written, with the aforementioned clunky prose, expository dialog, and often awkward sentence construction. Frederick Snow also POV-hops like a champ, meaning we’ll start a paragraph in the perspective of one character but finish the same paragraph in the perspective of another character. That sort of thing really grinds my gears. Also the plot is goofy – a suspense subplot is grafted onto the trashy template of the story, perhaps catering to the demands of publisher Fawcett, which of course was known for its suspense and crime fiction.

Another problem is the year of publication…I mean 1982 doesn’t scream “rock” to me. Fortunately Snow makes no mention of punk or new wave or synthesizers or whatnot, though “disco” is mentioned in passing a few times, mostly as in “disco clubs” up-and-coming singers got their starts in. Another interesting note is that the rockers for the most part presented here are all women…this however is so Snow can feature each of them in kinky, drug-fueled sexcapades. Hell, the women in this novel are so horny that at one point a 46 year-old housewife is abducted by thugs – while she’s masturbating in the shower – and one of the kidnappers is a lesbian who immeditely goes down on her when they pull her out of the shower; an orgy ensues. 

The most interesting thing about No Sympathy For The Devil is how it’s so much like something Belmont Tower or Leisure Books might have published the decade before. I’m not exaggerating. It has the same coarse narrative style as, say, The Savage Women, and the same focus on sadism as pretty much any of those BT or Leisure paperbacks – even the same big print. In fact there was something familiar about the writing style, and belatedly I wondered if it might have been written by J.C. Conaway, as there is a touch of his style to the prose – and also I can find no info on a writer named “Frederick Snow.” (Not to mention that I also suspect Conaway wrote The Savage Women.) The glitzy Hollywood trappings are another Conaway hallmark…and really the “glitz” stuff takes precedence over the “rock” stuff, as like Angel Dust this is another “rock novel” where the occupation of the main characters could be changed, from rockers to, say, movie stars, and the plot wouldn’t change. 

The chief rocker in the novel is Jennifer Carron, now “at the top of the rock and roll ladder” but at one point a no-name who sang in those aformentioned disco clubs and whatnot. Curiously Snow does not tell us what Jennifer Carron looks like; he has a tendency to not much describe his characters at all. He also doesn’t much describe the sex scenes, shockingly enough; while No Sympathy For The Devil is certainly raunchy and adult in nature, the actual sex either happens off-page or is only minimally described. What I mean to say is, the novel never truly descends (or should it be “ascends?”) to hardcore. 

And I’ve gone this far without acknowledging that the title, of course, is a nod to one of the greatest songs in history: “Sympathy For The Devil” by The Rolling Stones. At first I thought No Sympathy For The Devil took place in its own reality, with a made-up cast of rock stars and whatnot, but as it develops it is indeed a roman a clef, with occasional mentions of the Stones or The Beatles. We’re told though that the most famous rock group in the novel is “The Cinco’s,” five British guys who are “mentioned historically in the same breath as the Beatles, the Stones, or Elvis.” 

And yes, friends, it’s “The Cinco’s,” with the apostrophe before the “s,” as if “The Cinco” owns something. Remember when I mentioned the clunky writing? 

But as it turns out, The Cinco’s are a minimal presence anyway. It’s the women who stay at the forefront in the novel…which honestly could be yet another clue that Frederick Snow was really J.C. Conaway, given his preference for female protagonists. Jennifer Carron is sort of the main character, or should that be main antagonist, though surprisingly she fades into a supporting role, after a memorable opening which features her snorting coke and having sex in the studio. But there’s also a Tina Turner-esque singer named Darlene Silk, who has a rivlary with Jennifer, and the plot concerns their battle for which will receive this year’s “Entertainer of the Year” Grammy. 

And this is yet another “rock novel” where the author never tells us what the music sounds like, nor really much describes it – we have the opening bit where Jennifer Carron belts out what we’re told is a surefire hit in the studio, but describing the song itself is outside the author’s ability. Later in the book both Jennifer and Darlene will each sing a song at the Grammys, but again we aren’t told how it sounds – and friends that is it, so far as the “rock stuff” goes. As I said, Jennifer and Darlene could be changed into movie star divas, fighting for an Oscar instead of a Grammy, and the novel would be the same. 

Because, as it develops, the “thriller” stuff, such as it is, takes precedence. In the opening chapter we are told how, two years ago, a sleazy individual named Rudy Cannon was fired from IEM Records, where he served as VP of Sales – he was outed by hotsthot producer Greg Welles, who claimed that Cannon was selling pirated copies of the Cinco’s latest album, which had been withdrawn due to the Cinco’s being unhappy with the mix. IEM Chairman of the Board Townsend Parker, urged on by Welles, had no choice but to fire Cannon, who vowed revenge. 

Then the plot itself begins, two years later, and we see Greg Welles in the studio with Jennifer Carron, and this is the most “rock stuff” part of the novel, with studio musicians playing and Jennifer singing what will surely become a huge hit, then doing coke and screwing Greg while the engineers listen in the control booth. But after this No Sympathy For The Devil changes course and the focus of the plot concerns Ashley Burdnoy, attractive 46 year-old wife of John Burdnoy, a CPA who runs the agency that counts ballots for the Grammys. Burdnoy is a non-celebrity who, each year, enjoys a few seconds of celebrity as the guy who brings out the letter containing the winner of the “Entertainer of the Year” on live TV during the awards. 

Readers soon learn that Rudy Cannon’s revenge scheme concerns the Burdnoys: now running his own label, Good Vibrations (which started off due to a wealthy funder whose identity is left a mystery until novel’s end), Cannon seeks to steal artists from IEM, particularly ones who have worked with his archenemy Greg Welles. Jennifer Carron would be the big score, and Rudy has promised her a plush contract – as well as guaranteeing she will become Entertainer of the Year if she moves to his label. Jennifer is all for it, whatever Rudy must do to guarantee it – and his plan is to abduct Ashley Burdnoy and use her as collateral to force John Burdnoy to change the name written on the winning card to “Jennifer Carron.” 

A lot of the narrative is focused on the kidnapping, drugging, and raping of Ashely Burdnoy, who as mentioned is abducted while pleasuring herself, so of course Snow skirts the line with the subtext that Ashley, a bored housewife with no children and who keeps fit on the tennis courts, begins to enjoy it. Her kidnappers are a motley group: a radical lesbian named Ronni, a junkie slut named Eva, and a burly biker-type named Denny. Each of them will have their way with Ashley in the short course of the novel, including even a sequence where she’s forced to have sex with Denny on videotape as yet more collateral – Rudy Cannon’s safeguard to prevent John Burdnoy from going to the cops after all this is over. The kidnappers also have fun drugging Ashley up, most notably a part where they dose her with LSD and then Eva goes down on her, leading Ashley to experience the biggest orgasm of her life. 

So as you can see, No Sympathy For The Devil is pretty depraved. The issue is, it’s really more of a kidnapping/extortion novel than it is a rock novel. The “rock world” trappings are for the most part lost as the narrative becomes more concerned with Greg Welles trying to help John Burdnoy find his abducted wife. But this too is goofy, because multiple times through the novel they could just go to the police, but this is never addressed. But the idea is that Burdnoy assumes the mystery man who has kidnapped his wife – and who keeps calling Burdnoy with orders to declare Jennifer Carron the winner that night at the Grammys – must be Greg Welles, who of course happens to be Jennifer Carrons’ producer. 

As for Welles, he’s kind of a cipher and not much brought to life, despite being the hero of the piece. I did appreciate how the author recreated the casual infidelities of the rock world: as mentioned the novel opens with Welles and Jennifer having casual sex in the studio, even though both of them have respective others: Jennifer’s a sleazebag who serves as her manager and who is also part of the kidnapping plot (which Jennifer is aware of), and Welles’ a hotstuff movie actress named Frederica. The grimy vibe extends to all of this, with every character talking about sex or wondering when they’ll have sex again – even the Cinco’s show up at Welles’ place, having brought along a young girl they discovered in England who literally orgasms at the sound of the lead singer’s voice, entailing a bit where everyone sits around and watches her climax on the floor, complete with details on how wet her panties are getting! 

So yeah, all this depraved stuff is great, but the book is constantly undone by the comically-inept lack of payoff. Like for example, the opening sex between Jennifer and Welles. It’s Jennifer Carron who initiates it, fondling her producer in the studio and asking if he wants to “fuck” after offering him some coke. Later on we realize this is a casual thing between them, but Jennifer seems to secretly be in love with Greg Welles, and that he spurns her is one of the reasons she’s looking to jump ship from the label. But this is never paid off. Even worse is the case of Eva, the junkie who still likes men but for the most part is in a relationship with full-fledged lesbian Ronni. Well folks, we get the WTF? revelation midway through the book that Eva was once married to Greg Welles, and this is never really brought up again, other than another random WTF? tidbit that Welles’s chaffeur/bodyguard Tonto (a white guy with a very un-PC nickname) has “had a crush on Eva since college.” This info is just randomly introduced and then not dwelt on again…indeed, Eva seems to disappear from the text at novel’s end, leaving the reader to wonder what her fate is. 

But really the book is more focused on the various degredations of Ashley Burdnoy, who is captured while fondling herself in the shower and will spend the rest of the novel – which occurs over a few hours – either nude or in a bathrobe that’s constantly coming open so her adbuctors can fondle her nether regions. Meanwhile Greg Welles, working with Darlene Silk’s people, tries to figure out who abducted Burdnoy’s wife. Here’s where it gets hard to believe, with Tonto and another dude ultimately heading for the place where Ashley’s being held, one of them even toting a Magnum revolver – again, it would be just as simple for them to have gone to the cops, given that they’ve not only figured out where Ashley is being held but also who is behind the kidnapping plot. 

Instead the climax plays out at the Grammys, with lots of “tension” as Welles and Burdnoy wait desperately for word that Ashley is safe, the notification upon which Burdnoy will change the cards again so that Jennifer Carron does not win. This entire part is goofy – and here’s where I really started to suspect J.C. Conaway was the author – because there’s a bit where guest presenters The Cinco’s do a dumb comedy routine while presenting the Entertainer of the Year award, complete with them playing “peekaboo” with the audience from behind the award stage curtains, and it’s all very Conaway-esque. 

That Leisure Books vibe also extends to Ashley’s rescue: just as she was abducted while pleasuring herself, so too is she rescued while being forced into lesbian sex with Ronni. I mean this lady is really taken over the coals throughout the book. But there is a nice payoff with Ashley getting hold of that Magnum and blasting out vengeance – complete with the nonchalant reveal, at the end of the book, that she’s blown off the friggin’ head of one of her captors. 

Humorously, Frederick Snow just flat-out ends the book at the Grammys, complete with Ashley showing up still in nothing but that damn bathrobe – not that anyone seems to notice. It’s kind of hilarious in how poorly constructed the novel is at times, but also a refreshing reminder of the days when publishers didn’t have “focus groups” to judge the quality of a book before publication. But while it’s kind of a cold finish, it does at least resolve the kidnapping and revenge scheme storylines, as well as the outing of Rudy Cannon’s secret funder – which, honestly, is kind of easy to figure out, given that there are only a handful of characters in the novel. 

Overall No Sympathy For The Devil is certainly trashy and depraved, and in that regard serves up everything I could want from a rock novel. And at 224 pages of big ol’ print, it is a pretty quick read. Yet at the same time, the rock stuff in it is so minimal that it’s mostly just window dressing…in actuality the novel is more of a kidnapping yarn with a lot of sleaze and sadism, and I’d really love to know if “Frederick Snow” was J.C. Conaway or some other Belmont Tower/Leisure Books veteran.

Angel Dust

Angel Dust, by Lindsay Maracotta

January, 1979  Jove Books

Well friends, somehow I’ve managed to discover yet another obscure paperback original rock novel from the ‘70s. This one promised much, too, following the trash template of the era: a roman a clef about the famous personages of the era, opening in 1974 and then flashing back to 1964, detailing the torid year-by-year events of the age of rock. I mean I was in trash heaven when I saw that the back cover was like so many of the trashy bestseller paperbacks of the era, listing off the characters and noting their kinky proclivities.

But man, first of all, let’s take a look at this uncredited photo cover…and try to figure out what the hell is going on. So I get the guy with the guitar and microphone is supposed to be a rock star up on the stage, but what are the women doing below him? Are they in rock rapture, or are they bending their heads back in cultlike supplication? I guess both things are the same, but still. Then if you look at the back cover, you’ll note the cover is a wraparound, with more “bent back in supplication” heads below the rocker – but the perspective just seems off. Are these “bent heads” people standing or lying on the ground? 

This however isn’t even the big question. TAKE A LOOK AT THE ROCK STAR’S FACE. Here’s a closeup – don’t look if you don’t want nightmares! 

I think I speak for us all when I ask, “What the fuck??” I’ve spent altogether too much time trying to puzzle out what exactly this guy’s expression represents…this insane leering sneer. What is this, “Tim Curry as Mick Jagger?” I mean has the cover photographer ever seen a rock star? Or perhaps the goal here was to mimic (or mock) a shock rocker of the day, like Alice Cooper or something. The only problem is, there’s no shock rocker in Angel Dust, so perhaps this bizarre and lame (but for those very same reasons, friggin’ great) cover is why the book is so obscure. 

And speaking of which, the title of the book, “Angel Dust,” has nothing whatsoever to do with the contents of the novel. Perhaps it is a play on the underworld name for PCP, but if so that is not made clear in the narrative itself. While several characters do get hooked on drugs, it’s the same heroin and speed that is common in rock novels. Also, there’s a bit of a morality tale at play, as the drugs are part and parcel of the various downward spirals the large cast of characters go through as the sixties become the seventies. But then, another theme here is that essentially everyone involved in the rock biz is a self-involved narcissist hell-bent on destroying themselves. Well…so what if they are? I mean the last thing I want is a self-respecting and well-behaved rock star… 

No, the main issue with Angel Dust is that Lindsay Maracotta, to borrow a phrase Kirkus used in their review of contemporary rock novel Rising Higher, “hasn’t even bothered to be inventive” with her story. Basically Angel Dust takes all the topical points of ‘60s rock and filters them through a bland prism of characters who are analogs of real rockers. Bob Dylan going electric, Altamont, the Rolling Stones becoming increasingly “evil” and decadent, Yoko Ono and John Lennon breaking up The Beatles, Jimi Hendrix dying young…hell, even the Redlands bust: all of these and more are here in Angel Dust, only the, uh, names have been changed to protect the (not so) innocent. 

Not only that, but like so many of these contemporary rock novels – ie Triple Platinum, Rock & Roll Retreat Blues, or the aforementioned Rising Higher – actual rock stuff is scant at best. Indeed, the entire “rock” theme could be replaced by any other theme, and the essence of the novel would be the same. By which I mean, this could just as easily have been a novel about movie stars, or hell even opera singers or something. Angel Dust is more of a tepid soap opera than a “rock novel,” having even less to do with the business than those previously-mentioned books. Maracotta spends hardly any time at all on the creative process of the music, or the recording of the albums; other than a handful of too-brief scenes, we rarely see these famous rockers creating or performing. Rather, the focus is on their mundane soap operatic lives, with the caveat that the novel rarely attains the trashy level one might hope for. 

Not surprisingly, given that the author is a woman, the main characters are women, all of them analogs of real women in the rock scene. The male characters – ie the famous rock stars – mostly exist on the periphery, and come off as callous pricks. There’s even a Paul McCartney analog who is a self-involved cad who demands his women to be subservient. The Hendrix analog is a heroin junkie who constantly needs to be told how great he is and walks over women with scorn; a far cry from what the real Jimi Hendrix appeared to be like. To make things easier, I’ll just follow that back cover format and tell you who the characters of Angel Dust are clearly intended to be: 

Jim Destry: The “smouldering eyes” line on the back cover had me hoping Destry was going to be a Jim Morrison analog, as in the 1970 rock novel Cold Iron. But unfortunately, Destry is in fact…Bob Dylan. (Dylan, by the way, was the inspiration for a surprisingly sleazy paperback original in 1970, The Golden Groove.) 

Meredith Fairchild: This is the closest we get to a main character in Angel Dust. A beautiful American gal from a wealthy family who becomes a rock photographer and ultimately marries a member of the most famous rock group of the day, The Shades. Meredith Fairchild is, of course, Linda Eastman. 

Bryan Revere: The guy Meredith marries, the best-looking member of The Shades who all the girls go crazy for – Paul McCartney. 

Morgan Meeker: Lead singer of “the second best band in England,” the Marked Cards, Morgan is the stand-in for Mick Jagger. 

Christina de la Inglesia: This is the Bianca Perez-Mora Macias to Morgan Meeker’s Mick Jagger. 

Averill Sloane: This is the only original character in the novel, a manipulative mastermind in the mold of Jango Beck, from the contemporary rock novel Passing Through The Flame. 

Humorously, the back cover doesn’t even mention some of the more important characters in the novel. Here they are, as well as less-important characters who are based on famous rockers: 

Tom Sampling: This is the John Lennon analog, the lead singer of The Shades, who becomes increasingly gaunt and politically aware as the sixties progress. 

Monica Choy: The Yoko Ono to Tom Sampling’s John Lennon…only she’s Chinese! Otherwise this is Yoko in all but name, or at least the Yoko of the tabloids of the day – a self-involved social-climber with delusions of her own importance, who latches onto famous men. 

Lazarus “Laz” Allen: The Hendrix analog, but a far cry from the real thing; he barely appears in the novel. 

Bill McHale: Aka Jann Wenner of Rolling Stone; upstart publisher of rock magazine Tumbling Dice, though accused by his subordinates of being domineering and not possessing any writing talent of his own; he started the mag to be around rock royalty. 

Sabina: Foul-mouthed and fat-bottomed lead singer of The Psychedelic Invention, “the high priests of acid rock.” Aka Janis Joplin, who was the basis for a much superior rock novel also published in 1979, The Rose. 

Josie James: One of the more curious misses on the back cover, as Josie is a fairly important character, a Joni Mitchell-style folk singer who must sell her soul to become famous – and, this being a trash novel, can only find true happiness in the sack with other women. Her parts reminded me very much of another contemporary rock novel, The Scene. 

Sonny Lanahan: A hot-tempered businessman who fights Averill Sloane for control of various groups – no doubt supposed to be Allan Klein. 

So there are a lot of characters afoot, but Maracotta does a fairly good job juggling them. The only problem is Angel Dust is constructed a little strangely. It runs to 395 pages of small print, but Tom Sampling and Bryan Revere – ie the John and Paul analogs – aren’t introduced until page 295…and practically the rest of the novel revolves around them! What makes it worse is that the majority of this is just John-Paul rivalry stuff (the two aren’t introduced until 1969, long after their group, The Shades, has been a tight unit), with slightly more soapy recreations of the real-life fights between the two. Also, Angel Dust opens in 1974, giving the impression that all the “rock world” stuff was long in the past…but as the novel progresses, Maracotta takes us from 1964 to 1970, before finally returning to that opening 1974 sequence…meaning that the opening is really just four years later! 

The “1974” opening has Jim Destry about to make his long-awaited return concert in Madison Square Garden, and Meredith Fairchild has come here to relive “the old times” or whatever. We learn here she’s married to a “Bryan,” a guy who has a rivalry with a “Tom,” but it won’t be for like 290 pages until we even find out who these guys are. Meredith also runs into old friend Josie James, there to open for Destry and now an angry, hard-edged bitchy type, a far cry from the willowy and idealistic girl Meredith once knew… 

From there we flash back to 1964, and Maracotta actually spends most of the narrative here in the early days of the age of rock. But despite her Cliff’s Notes take on rock, Maracotta still pulls some anachronistic blunders…most particularly with Tumbling Dice magazine. A newspaper-style underground rag devoted to rock and the youth movement and what not, running out of San Francisco…four years before Rolling Stone. And hell, eight years before the Rolling Stones would even release the song “Tumbling Dice!” I mean this Bill McHale guy might’ve been a hack, but he sure did have a knack for seeing the future. 

One unique thing Maracotta brings to the tale is that this group of characters is essentially the main movers of rock; hardly any other musicians are mentioned, though in true roman a clef style we will have super-brief references to real groups, like the Beatles or the Stones or Dylan…or at one point even Rolling Stone is mentioned as a competitor magazine. But clearly this is an alternate reality where those groups are not nearly as famous as The Shades, Jim Destry, or the Marked Cards. Otherwise what Maracotta adds is they all have shared history, beginning in 1964: Jim Destry is in love with Josie James, two folkies in New York, and Chinese-American artist Monica Choy makes her way through basically all of the guys here, until finally scoring her biggest coup in Tom Sampling. But man, if you’ve ever wanted to read some Yoko Ono-Bob Dylan slash fiction, you’ll find it here in Angel Dust. 

Well, sort of. It’s my sad duty to report that the novel is incredibly timid in the sleaze and trash fronts. Most all of the sex occurs off-page and what we do get is tepid stuff along the lines of, “His strokes were quick and hard.” I mean, is this dude screwing or swimming? Also, what with Lindsay Maracotta being a woman and all, there’s zero in the way of the customary female exploitation one might demand from their trashy paperback cash-in fiction. But that’s another curious thing. A not-so-subtle theme at play here is that none of these studly rock gods can satisfy their women in bed! Not only that, but they’re all closet homosexuals; multiple times Bryan is accused of being in love with Tom, and vice versa. On the female front, all the women are latent lesbians; Meredith’s first time is with Morgan Meeker, the Jagger analog, and she finds herself unsatisfied afterward. Despite which, we get the unforgettable line, “Meredith felt a sharp pain as [Morgan] thrust deeper in her body, which increased as the full length of his cock penetrated her.” The Marked Cards, baby! Meredith with also be unsatisfied with Bryan Revere…her only true orgasm in the novel occurs in a lesbian fling in 1969 with Josie James. Hell, even Laz Allen can’t keep her happy – though as mentioned the Laz here is a cad. Jimi clearly made his way through a ton of women, but per the bios of him I’ve read he didn’t go out of his way to brag and boast about it, or flaunt it in the faces of other women. 

The unwieldy construction runs through the book; Meredith is mostly the main character, using her father’s connections to get a gig as a photographer for Tumbling Dice. She’s there for when Jim Destry is still unknown, getting some of his first pictures, and also some of the Marked Cards’s first show in the US. From there we hopscotch through the sixties, with Morgan and the Marked Cards becoming increasingly brutish and decadent, the drugs becoming increasingly commonplace, and an eventual spreading of malaise and boredom through the rock elite. Curiously, Woodstock is the one real-life incident Maracotta doesn’t rip off, though we do have a pseudo-Altamont in 1969…complete with Jim Destry appearing on stage with the Marked Cards. This, confusingly, will be the first of Destry’s two “return concerts,” this one being after a motorcycle crash he got into a few years before (humorously, right after being heckled onstage for coming out with an electric guitar, Maracotta getting double-bang for her real-life-ripoff buck); Destry’s second “return concert” is the opening one in 1974. 

I’m also sad to report that Lindsay Maracotta is another of those rock novelists who makes the curious decision to hardly ever describe the music. This is such a recurring failing of these novels that it almost makes me wonder if there was an unspoken agreement among all rock novelists in the ‘70s. Indeed, the characters here are rarely if ever shown on stage or in the studio; if they are, Maracotta will hurry through the proceedings and then get back to lots of soap opera-esque dialog. One gets the impression from Angel Dust that being “a famous rock star” entails nothing more than looking the part and doing the right drug; there’s no feeling that any of these characters are musicians capable of selling albums – other, that is, than the occasional bit of expositional dialog where characters will tell Meredith about recording or performing. 

Also, like Passing Through The Flame, midway through the novel becomes focused on the mercenary practices of the businessmen who plundered the rock world, “soiling” the art and whatnot…but again, none of these characters seem very artistic, not even Monica Choy, who is an artist. Otherwise the focus is on the increasing torpor and decadence of the rock world, with Morgan Meeker treating Meredith like shit and Meredith gradually becoming a “groupie” who sleeps her way through sundry rockers (all off page), before ending up with Bryan Revere in 1969. Her fling with Laz Allen is barely mentioned, other than a random bit where Laz screws Meredith in a New York City porno theater – one of the few scenes in the novel that does get fairly explicit. As for Morgan, his descent into sexual sadism is hard to understand, given that he starts the novel as a relatively cheery and thoughtful individual, but my assumption is Maracotta’s intent is that the mysterious death of a friend of his, midway through the novel, pushes him into the path – him and Christina, who also gets off on being beaten around during sex, thus becomes a perfect match for Morgan. Also special mention must be made of the arbitrary bit where Morgan breaks the neck of a pigeon before that Altamont analog concert. 

It's funny though how when the John and Paul stand-ins Tom and Bryan make their belated appearance, it’s like Angel Dust has been about nothing but them since the beginning. What I mean to say is, Destry, Morgan, Josie – all of these characters who were important for the past 290 pages are mostly brushed aside, and the stars of the show are now Bryan and Tom as they bicker and banter. It’s almost embarrassing how Maracotta just lifts real-life incidents without bothering to change them up at all, complete even with Monica bringing a mattress into the studio during the recording of a Shades album so she can be with Tom all the time – and also pushing him into more of a radical political direction. 

Monica is also of course duplicitous and vindictive; above I said that Bill McHale could see the future with Tumbling Dice. The same could be said of Lindsay Maracotta herself. In the 1969 section, Monica is getting her hooks in Tom, and has made herself a rival of Meredith, just as Tom is a rival of Bryan. To get revenge on Bryan and Meredith for the latest bantering session, Monica calls in an anonymous tip to the cops that they’ll find a lot of marijuana at a certain residence – the same residence Bryan and Meredith happen to be renting here in England. In the ensuing bust Bryan is arrested and spends time in jail. Angel Dust was published in January 1979…and exactly one year later Yoko Ono, according to Albert Goldman and Frederic Seaman, called in a tip to some friends in Japan to bust Paul and Linda as they arrived in Tokyo, all because the two threatened to ruin John and Yoko’s “hotel karma” by staying at their favorite Tokyo hotel. Now, who knows if this is what really happened; what’s incredible is that Lindsay Maracotta has here predicted something that mirrors what would become a real-life incident. I mean, imagine if John and Yoko got the “let’s get Paul busted” idea from this very novel! 

The narrative gets more interesting, and more sordid, as the sixties progress. The Redlands bust analog is one of the first instances of this sordid nature, with Maracotta again mixing and matching her Rock Babylon material; whereas it was just the Stones in the Redlands caper, here it’s the Stones analogs the Marked Cards, along with Josie James (the Joni Mitchell analog) and Sabina (the Janis Joplin analog). But we even get the infamous “candy bar” bit, but here it’s an acid-soaring Josie who has a candy bar inserted into her nether regions and the Marked Cards take turns taking bites from it – humorous stuff here with one of the Cards being a closeted gay and disgusted by the whole thing, but going along with it. Curiously, a character Maracotta doesn’t even return to in the novel; only her penchant for perspective-hopping even lets us know who this guy is. 

The Altamont analog isn’t a match for its real-world counterpart, though Maracotta tries to amp it up by having one of the characters shot while on stage…sort of a prefigure of The Armageddon Rag. From there we are thrust back into the opening 1974 section, where we learn that Morgan is truly into his decadent trip, having a three-way with wife Christina and a “glitter rock” star clearly modelled on David Bowie. But curiously even this framework section doesn’t work, because Angel Dust opens and closes on a section titled “1974,” yet a few pages toward the end we’re told it’s 1975! Oh and also, this novel features an insane finale that’s reminiscent of Once Is Not Enough in how it seems to come from a different novel. Since Angel Dust is so obscure and scarce, I’ll describe it, but skip to the next paragraph if you don’t want to know. Basically, Meredith accuses Bryan of wanting to fuck Tom and Bryan storms off in a rage. Meredith, losing her mind, takes a ton of drugs and gives her toddler daughter a sleeping pill (Maracotta intentionally leaves the child’s fate vague). Then Meredith, totally insane now, gets in her car and roars off into the night on what is clearly a death trip – truly a WTF? type of bitch-slap finale. 

But man, if only the entire novel matched the sheer bitch-slappery of that finale. Instead, Angel Dust is strangely dull and lifeless, despite being a sort of “greatest hits” of various ‘60s rock-world hijinks. The characters don’t seem real and are pale reflections of their real-world inspirations. And there is zero feeling for the time and the place; essentially Angel Dust is a “rock novel” for people who are only vaguely aware of rock music. As I said above, the characters here could just as easily have been actors or models or whatever, and the story wouldn’t have been much changed – the focus is on soap opera dynamics between the various characters, nothing more. Still, I was super happy to discover the book – I’m always excited when I discover a new rock novel paperback original – so I can’t complain too much.

DJ

DJ, by Alan Jefferys and Bill Owen

No month stated, 1971  Popular Library

I discovered this obscure paperback, first published as a hardcover by Ashley Books in 1971, many years ago – and it seemed to be all I was seeking in trash fiction. A contemporary novel about high-libido radio DJs at the height of the rock era! Hell, even the first-page preview provided a glimpse of one of the DJs dropping acid before a little hippie-chick lovin’. 

But then I actually started to read the book (which is an unwieldy 447 pages)…and discovered that it wasn’t anything like what I was expecting. For one, the majority of the tale takes place in the pre-rock era, like the very early 1960s. Even worse, despite being titled DJ, the novel isn’t even really about the DJs! It’s more focused on the business end of running a radio station in New York City, with the jocks reduced to side characters and hardly any narrative at all spent on their on-air activities. Indeed, the main protagonist isn’t even a jock, but the director of the station, a savvy business-minded dude named Basil Kelcke. 

As it turns out, the novel is more focused on the business aspect of things. It’s also a clumsily-written novel. We’re introduced to the state of things in the mid ‘60s as Kelcke learns that his hit DJ, Daddy-O, wants to retire…because Daddy-O is sick of the drug-centric, moral-lacking rock music that is becoming popular and feels that he is contributing to the overall decline of society. He just wants to move back out to the sticks and raise his child in nature and whatnot. And mind you friends, this is like 1965! Well anyway, apropos of nothing Kelcke flashes back to how he hired Daddy-O in the first place…and this flashback turns out to be the exact same plot that started off the book: how Kelcke manages to replace a famous radio personality and not lose out on market share. 

So we flash back to the sticks and it’s now 1960…I mean the hopes of this being a no-holds-barred novel about FM rock radio jocks at the height of the progressive freeform era are just repeatedly dashed. Kelcke is known for fixing up failing radio stations and we see him accomplish this on a regional station…then he takes a job with WMBE in New York, and here he goes about hiring the guy who will eventually end up quitting, aka the aforementioned Daddy-O. But it’s all so focused on the business end of things – it’s about competition with the other stations, pleasing the numbers guys back at the office, shit like that. Absolutely none of DJ actually features a, you know, DJ doing a show on the air. 

There’s a humorous attempt at sleazing things up, per the style of the times, and sometimes it’s so egregious it made me laugh out loud. Like one part where a famous DJ goes home, blasts a classical LP on his turntable, jerks off, and…dies. Then we have a bit where cipher-like protagonist Kelcke is being cuckholded by some delivery guy…there follows super-explicit parts where this guy gives the goods to Kelcke’s wife, Millie, and, when the hotstuff gal who lives next door discovers them in the act, she gets in on it, too! But this subplot is dropped as soon as it’s introduced, having no ramifications on the narrative. 

That’s another thing. DJ is credited to two authors, and I don’t think they compared notes very often. In fact, there’s actually a titular “DJ,” and he doesn’t appear until halfway through the book. My assumption is one author wrote the first half of the book, which focuses on Basil Kelcke, and the other author wrote the other half of the book, which focuses on DJ, aka Daryl Jackson, Kelcke’s latest jock personality who replaces Daddy-O and becomes the hit WMBE DJ through the 1960s. Stuff that comes up in the first half of the book doesn’t pan out in the second half, and in fact Kelcke, ostensibly the protagonist of the first half, is hardly even a supporting character in the second half. 

But then there’s a lot of dropped stuff even in the first half; for example, Kelcke gets a lovely female assistant named Jeannie, one who is a radio superfan. One thing to remember, though, is that this is the early ‘60s, and thus her penchant for radio history is rooted in the old stuff, ie the Lux Radio Theater and stuff like that. Well anyway, she’s pretty and available but Kelcke is a strictly “I’m married” type (of course the ironing is thick given how his wife’s into a three-way affair), so there’s no hanky panky. But there are parts with her trying to find a guy, going out on dates, and none of it ever really goes anywhere. Indeed, she abruptly leaves the narrative with little fanfare and is never heard from again. 

There’s hardly any feel for the era, either. One of the things that pops up in the first half is the nascent rock movement, which Daddy-O isn’t fond of, but man there’s hardly anything topical about it…it’s just yet another “business thing” Kelcke must concern himself with. The book is so incredibly bland and unfocused, and misses out on so much potential. Even when things progress into the mid-‘60s later on, we hardly get any of the “sixties stuff” one would expect – the editors at Popular Library clearly knew what their readers would want, spotlighting a part where DJ (the guy) does LSD, but man this happens toward the very end of the novel…and almost seems to come out of a bad Afterschool Special from the ‘70s. 

I mean really…the tone of this novel is so unintentionally hilarious. According to DJ, if you take a job at a big-city radio station, you’re bound to be corrupted by the forces of evil, committing adultery, getting hooked on heroin, knocking up jailbait…hell, even robbing liquor stores. But you don’t have to worry about actually peforming on the air, because that’s the one damn thing these two authors don’t show us about the job. 

Oh, and DJ is so pathetic that the novel basically rips itself off; Daddy-O is really a back-to-the-country guy who just wants to fish with his kid and live in the woods and stuff, and doesn’t cotton to all that big-city shit. And the titular “DJ,” aka Daryl Jackson…is the same! Folks, more of that unintnentional hilarity ensues when Kelcke, who has discovered DJ in some regional station, brings him to New York and lets him familiarize himself with the city. I kid you not, folks, but DJ actually vomits in fear after a day out, being hit on by hookers and whatnot. It’s just so stupid and lame and pathetic. And DJ too has a button-downed wife back home, one who worries over him, etc, etc…just a retread of the material with Daddy-O. 

Since the novel occurs in a cultural vacuum there’s no insight into the rock happenings of the time, nor is there – believe it or not – anything about progressive freeform FM radio and how it cornered the rock market. But eventually DJ is swooned by a British band called The Glad Stones that takes him over to London and sets him off on an LSD trip…these guys are total ciphers, though, and the authors do nothing to bring them to life. 

Jefferys and Owen do have a gift for dark comedy, though; there’s a part where DJ is finally pushed into wanton behavior by his friend/enemy Rex, a guy who harbors a grudge because DJ beat him out of the WMBE gig; DJ ends up screwing a pretty young female fan…who turns out to be only fifteen. And he gets her pregnant! The authors bring a nightmarish vibe to it all, as DJ is called into the WMBE offices and questioned about his seduction of the innocent, and they almost casually mention he also got the girl pregnant. Later she shows up, after having gotten an abortion (paid for by WMBE!), and throws herself at him – and DJ literally runs away from her! 

But from here it gets even more darkly comic, with DJ spiralling into heroin addiction; again, hardly anything is made of his actual friggin’ radio job. I mean even the Glad Stones stuff doesn’t pan out; Kelcke sends DJ over to London as a big PR venture for WMBE, for DJ to become friends with the band and then officially welcome them for the station when they come to the US for their tour…but even all this is just sort of brushed under the narratorial carpet. Honestly, so much of DJ is told in summary that I had a hard time connecting with any of it. 

And that’s a helluva thing, because a novel about a rock radio station is a novel I want to read. Unfortunately, DJ is not that novel. It hardly has anything to do with rock or radio, despite being set in that world. Kelcke, Daddy-O, even DJ…all of them don’t even like rock music, and it’s really just treated as another trend WMBE needs to exploit to stay ahead of the competition. 

At least the finale packs an unexpected punch – though again it’s so over the top as to be hilarious. We flash forward to 1971, with DJ now destitute after saying “fuck” on air (courtesy that heroin addiction), and he needs some cash, and there’s a liquor store nearby that he decides to rob…a crazy, out-of-nowhere finale that’s rendered even more crazy with Basil Kelcke suddenly turned into a heartless prick on the final page. As mentioned Kelcke is barely a presence in the second half of the novel, which makes me suspect that Jeffery wrote one half and Owen wrote the other. But I don’t know, and to tell the truth I don’t really care – I’d say DJ is justifiably forgotten.