It's that day again: Halloween! For some people, horror is a year 'round interest, but for many, this is the only time of the year they're really interested in it. Personally, I fall somewhere in between, but regardless of where your interests lie, here's some reading recommendations for the scariest time of the year.

First, Ravenwood Quarterly's Halloween Annual is out and includes a short comic story by me and Steve Rupp, plus a dozen or so prose stories, poems and so forth.

For more scary comics by yours truly, why not check out my Ghastly Award-nominated series MYTHOS: LOVECRAFT'S WORLDS?

Eight short stories adapting the myriad corners of the worlds legendary writer H.P. Lovecraft created, filled with horror, dark fantasy and even a touch of humor!

If you're more interested in words than you are pictures, how about my occult-detective book THE CASTLE-TOWN TRAGEDY, featuring four stories about Carnacki, the Ghost-Finder?

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You can find it on Kindle here or in print here!

Check 'em out, let me know what you think and enjoy your Halloween!

I don't normally do reviews here, but I don't know what else to call this, so bear with me. 

I've read a lot of Harry Whittington. A couple I've really liked, a few I've liked less, but this is the only one I've actively disliked and since I haven't seen much about it elsewhere online, I decided I'd post my thoughts in case someone is curious about the book (like I was, when I saw the cover on a tumblr aggregator a while back) and its relations to the rest of Whittington's body of work.

Whittington wrote a lot of things, but primarily, he's known for crime and westerns and Gold Medal--who published many of his works--plays that up by presenting this book as if it's a crime novel. It's not. It's not even crime-adjacent.

It's a literary novel about Clay Stuart, an aging Hollywood superstar, one of the last of the mega-stars in the same category as Cary Grant, Clark Gable, etc, we're told, whose wife of 25 years passes away. He is, understandably, lost without her. Despite the fact that he mainly ignored her during their life together, he's come to realize what a big presence she really was in his home and life. 

With Ruth gone, Clay is listless. He doesn't have any interests, he can't work, barely eats. Does little but drink and sleep. His personal manager, knowing him better than anyone, finds a girl who is Clay's perfect dream woman, hires her to pick him up, make him fall for her, etc (all beknownst to Clay or the other people who work for him) thinking Clay will be wrested from his stupor, get a little life in him and go back to work. Only the girl, Joanne Star,k is smarter than any of them realize and has plans of her own.

The set-up has potential, but Whittington doesn't use it well.

Clay and Joanne have a torrid love affair, but all she's really after is a career boost. She wants to be a movie star. Using his connections, Stuart gets her a screen-test with a very famous director, who hires her for a lead in a low-budget film. It's not much, but she's on her way and dumps Clay. Predictably, he has a nervous breakdown and is left worse off than when Ruth died. Even after his agent (not his personal manager, who hired the girl) plays private detective (for all of maybe 1500 words), learning that she's a con artist with a long history of scamming men, breaking homes, marriages and careers to get what she wants, Clay still loves her, he says, even knowing she probably never cared for him at all. 

There were all sorts of ways Whittington could have gone from here, but he went very safe, and too predictable, while setting up a couple lame red herrings that were never followed up on. For example, he repeatedly implies and then outright tells us that Clay has a weak heart, seemingly foreshadowing Clay's death, by either accident or murder. Nothing comes of it. Whittington simply stops mentioning it three-quarters of the way through the novel. 

Anyway, Clay pines for Joanne, mopes a lot, stalks her a little tiny bit, finally decides he's just going to go to her apartment house and wait for her. But when he sees how Joanne lives--in squalor, with a bunch of drugged up, oversexed hippies, who go after him, violently, delighting in a chance to beat on a big celebrity (it's entirely unprovoked, Clay does nothing to upset them)--he comes to his senses and washes her out of his mind and heart. 

Meanwhile, Joanne thinks she's going to be a big star, only to discover that she's got such a terrible screen-presence (the audience can tell she's a miserable phony, as one director puts it) that the studio has only hired her as a favor to Clay and that once shooting wraps on her single film, they're cutting her loose. The film is unwatchable, but the studio is willing to eat a minor loss to keep a big name like Clay happy (so they think). When she learns this, she decides she wants Clay back (of course), but he's realized she's poison and sends her packing. He goes back to work, taking a meeting with a big director about a part in a major film, only to come home and discover Joanne has returned while he was out and killed herself in his pool, apparently hoping to ruin him with scandal according to witnesses to her ranting.

Here, Whittington could have given us another five or ten thousand words about the fall-out and Clay's career being ruined or something like that, but nothing comes of Joanne's ersatz tragedy. Clay's personal manager, who originally hired her, it turns out, still has cancelled checks showing payments to Joanne and simply claims that the girl was a deranged employee of hers to the police and media, allowing the potential scandal to wash right over Clay.

At the end of the book, I was left thinking: "So what? Why am I supposed to care about this?" There was no major personal growth for the main characters, no lasting consequences for Clay, the protagonist. The only change at all, really, is his May/December romance has made him accepting of his daughter Sharon's (who is the same age as Joanne and is engaged to a middle-aged man who sincerely loves her), but even that seemed like an afterthought. 

There just didn't seem to be any point to this novel and I was left feeling cheated of my time and money. It's one of Whittington's rarer books to find, which is why I was interested in the first place, but after reading it, I'm guessing it's relatively rare because it didn't sell when first published - and with good reason. It's just not a good example of either Whittington's work or a novel in general.

I normally read a novel a day. This past week I read seven, which I believe is a five-day record for me. But I had some thoughts on each of them I shared elsewhere, so I thought I'd round them up here with some micro-reviews.

Graham Greene's MINISTRY OF FEAR - C+. A surreal spy novel written, set and published during the Blitz period in London. Not badly written but very very dated compared to other Greene works I've read
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James M. Cain's SERENADE - F+. Prose is decent, but the plot is moronic and the main character absolutely vile; Cain uses him to spout A LOT of hatred towards Hispanics, Indians and gay people. I already wasn't a Cain fan, but I'm never reading him again after reading this.
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Lawrence Block's A DIET OF TREACLE - B. Not my favorite Block novel, but decent. It's basically a spin-off of his soft-core porn novel 69 BARROW STREET, complete with reuse of some characters (slightly renamed) and some scenes, but focusing more on the crimes, mainly drug-related, of two characters than sex scenes. The last two lines irritated me a lot, though, turning a concrete ending into a cliffhanger that will never be resolved.
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Ao Jyumonji's GRIMGAR OF FANTASY AND ASH, volume 3 - B. More focused on a single event than the first two volumes and stronger for it plot-wise, but less character development than the first two volumes, making most of the characters more set-pieces than anything else.
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Harry Whittington's DON'T SPEAK TO STRANGE GIRLS - D. Decent prose, but the plot was extremely thin and pointless. The weakest Whittington novel I've read. If Whittington wasn't already "the Paperback King" when this was published, it probably wouldn't have been published - at least not by Gold Medal.
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Gil Brewer's THE EROTICS - B-. Fairly standard Brewer plot of self-made loser trying to get out of his hole and making it worse. Oddly, it has a happy ending, which is rare in Brewer novels.
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Gil Brewer's ANGRY ARNOLD - C-. The weakest Brewer novel I've read, also a departure from his normal formula as this is a serial-killer novel rather than a heist/con-man/attempted murder for love/money novel, as virtually all the rest of his I've read are. His characterization of the killer is actually excellent--he really makes you feel the guy's sickness and desperation--but the plot overall is weak and relies on too much coincidence to be believable.

This is a little bit of an unusual diversion from my normal topics, but I've been reading a lot of the same type of novel lately (unintentionally) from the same general time period and it got me thinking, specifically about the origins of the post-World War II (and Korean War, to a degree) thriller.

It started, for me, anyway, with Michael Crichton's early novels, written under the pen-name John Lange. I haven't read every single novel he wrote under this name (5 of 8, actually), but they mostly follow a pattern: an American man abroad, almost inevitably a veteran of WWII or Korea, involved in a high-stakes adventure involving international crime. Sometimes, he's the criminal, sometimes he's trying to stop the criminal, doesn't matter - the result is the same, either way. These novels, while entertaining in their way, are the macho equivalent of high-camp. They're kind of ridiculous, actually. Every woman is stunning, every situation is deadly or sexy, every foe is impossible to overcome and yet the hero is always able to squeak by somehow. There's a reason Crichton used a pen-name to publish these, after all.

But that's fine once in a while. I wanted to try something different, something by authors I'd never read. I came across OPIUM FLOWER, by Dan Cushman, a writer who I'd previously only known as a writer of westerns. The blurb sounded so-so, but I bought it really for the Robert McGuiness cover painting. Overall, I was very disappointed in the novel (it's terrible), but, though somewhat older than the Crichton/Lange novels, it follows the same basic pattern: a Korean War veteran traipsing through Southeast Asia, trying to smuggle opium  (at the US government's behest) out of Laos in order to figure out how the "real" bad guys are getting it into the US. But almost beat-for-beat, it follows the same pattern as Lange.

Well, moving on, to something even older, by a much more famous (infamous, even), author: E. Howard Hunt's THE VIOLENT ONES, from 1950. And what do you know? It follows the exact same pattern: a WWII veteran in France, trying to find who murdered his childhood friend over gold missing since the war. THE VIOLENT ONES is better written than the Lange or Cushman novels (it's very serious in tone and the prose is really quite good), but the essence is the same.

And I started thinking about this pattern and it's origins and it hit me immediately: almost an entire generation of American men went to war in Europe and Asia, in WWII and the Korean War, then came home, most settling down to marriage, families, jobs. But even years later, in the 50s and 60s, many were still relatively young (the average age of a US serviceman in WWII was 19, I've read), and probably, let's be frank, many were probably bored as so many of us are with our own monotonous lives today. 

But unlike many of us today, many of these men had literally deadly experiences in foreign countries, places that probably seemed both foreign and familiar after years away, and a certain nostalgia probably developed - a sort of what might have been. I'm sure that these characters in the novels I've mentioned, and likely thousands of other books, were intended to be a sort of every man for that generation - a "this could have been YOU, reader" kind of thing. Of course, these readers knew that wasn't so, and most probably wouldn't want it to be so, but it's always nice to dream of adventure, right? It's certainly a lot safer than living it.

Maybe I'm off base, but this makes a lot of sense to me.

​What do you think?

Though Robert Bloch will always be known first and foremost as the author of Psycho (and with good reason), I recently read his first novel, The Scarf, and loved it. Like Psycho, it's a psychological crime novel, but this one is rather different.

Originally published in 1947, twelve years before Psycho, The Scarf seems to have been quietly published and quietly slipped under the radar for many years. Bloch continued to write and publish, but it wasn't until Alfred Hitchcock adapted Psycho to film that many of Bloch's older works received renewed interest. (You'll note that the copy of the book I own is published by Gold Medal; the 60 cent price puts it squarely in the mid-60s, '66 in this case.) Some of those works were solid, but forgettable, but The Scarf at least deserves that attention.

The novel is about Daniel Morley, a man with a self-proclaimed fetish for the scarf he always wears -  a scarf which he received from his high school English teacher who--so Morley says--tried to rape him and he killed in self-defense. This earned Morley a degree of fame early in his life, but not the kind anyone really wants, and he spends the next decade wandering as something of a ne'er-do-well, committing minor crimes, grifting, but always carrying with him the scarf - with which he has killed multiple times, essentially whenever he feels a woman is becoming too close to him emotionally. Morley's dream, however, is to become a writer and he resolves to give up his past and start fresh, hopefully as a rich and famous novelist. And it seemingly works out well - for a while, anyway, until that old "fetish" rears its ugly head again.

The Scarf, told in a first-person narrative with an inherently unreliable narrator, is basically the story of a man trying to save himself from himself and we're kept in suspense as Morley tries, taking increasingly extraordinary steps, to do so. Where Bloch's mastery of psychological fiction shows through, though, is that he doesn't try to make Morley sympathetic, as many authors would try to do. Morley is a deranged, vile scumbag. We're wondering if he'll succeed while hoping he doesn't and as Bloch, and Morley himself via his journal he calls "The Black Notebook", gives us more insight into his background, we wonder if all is as it seems.

Of course, since it's Bloch, it's not and one of my favorite things about this novel is that, unlike Psycho, the ending is completely natural to the story and the character. Don't get me wrong, I like Psycho a lot, but the ending, with its forced exposition to make sense of the scenario, felt just that - forced. When we are shown the "secret" behind Morley's history, everything in The Scarf neatly makes sense.

Do yourself a favor and track this one down. It's worth it.