“It would be logical to suppose that troubled art is born out of troubled times. But it would be wrong to be that systematic about it, for what period of history has sailed in, pre-ordained and self-acknowledged a golden age?
Edgar Allan Poe existed in a momentary by-way of relative peace and security in a new country still full of hope, yet his work is limned by the same dark phantoms that haunt E.T.A. Hoffman’s, a writer who lived when Europe was an open field trampled by the Napoleonic Wars. The landscape of the mind does not always correspond to external circumstance. Rather, there seems to be inside us a constant, ever-present yearning for the fantastic, for the darkly mysterious, for the choked terror of the dark.”
[…]
“The superficial moralists who deplore the tendencies of certain movies to alarm them and in the same breath pretend that film is art would do better to realise that always alongside the art that pleases, ‘the Art of seduction’, springs the art of terror. Often we find pleasure in non-pleasurable forms. Next to smiling terracotta couples reclining on top of their Etruscan tombs, to whispering angels with gold-leaf wings, to ‘The Rape of the Lock’ and ‘The Marriage of Figaro’, there have always arisen hair-blanching depictions of the damned, of Saturn devouring his children, the temptations of St Anthony, ‘Wozzeck’, and Man the Wastrel lost to gorgons, dragons, destiny, and death.
Moreover, art works that stir the dregs of human experience have a steady unvarying coherence in their emblems and embodiments, while the style of patterns of perfect, healthy, happy beauty fluctuate as rapidly as fashion itself and contradict one another’s ideal forms according to period and culture. Satan is immutable, it would seem, whether ancestral dark angel or devil in the flesh. Those who imagine him today are not the doctors of demonology but the psychiatrist, the anthropologist, the sociologist. To them, horror movies might be seen as a historical imperative, if not an aesthetic necessity.”
[…]
“Still, we are expected to be terrified by the horror film, and fear, no matter how diluted or sublimated, is a very intense reaction to an experience, aesthetic of otherwise, and, failing Art, one not to be enjoyed with an easy conscience. Rather than sheer perversity, horror films require of the audience a certain sophistication, a recognition of their mystical core, a fascination of the psyche. […] What seemed to put the reviewers off horror films, what prevents them (even now) from surrendering their critical resistance, is their frequent - usually necessary - depiction of the fantastic.
This would be as superficial and absurd as dismissing Fra Angelico or Max Ernst because we don’t, or simply won’t, believe in angels and sphinxes. And yet the movies were progressing from the Manichaean simplicity of the Western - a genre that was more readily acceptable - to the Promethean ambiguity of the horror story, from start back-and-white to the nuances of the dark, from the wide open spaces to the psychic hinterland.”
- Carlos Clarens, from his foreword to ‘Horror Movies: An Illustrated Survey’ (Panther, 1971)
Any questions? No? Good.
I’m aware that updates to this blog have, once again, been rather piecemeal so far this year, but rest assured - I’ve been looking forward to my October horror marathon like a storm-tossed sailor longing for shore leave, and, come hell or high water, I’m going to be offering some choice words on assorted examples of the horror genre in this space across the next 31 days.
It’s unlikely any of it will prove quite as lyrical or well turned out as Mr Clarens’ mellifluous prose above (vocab: “limned”, best phrase: “..the choked terror of the dark”), but I’ll do the best that a couple of tired sessions across the Witching Hour will allow. As always, expect insensible first draft blather, typos and weird grammar all over the joint, but I hope they won’t spoil the fun too much.
Though the brightly-hued cover photo affixed to this edition of Simon Raven’s second published novel ‘Brother Cain’ carries a distinct whiff of pop-art / psychedelic chic, Panther’s paperback was actually printed in February ’65, too early to have really hitched a ride on the ‘swinging sixties’ bandwagon, whilst the book itself was first published back in the grey, buttoned up world of 1959.
One of those renowned-in-their-day-but-now-largely-forgotten authors whose work always sparks a certain fascination, Simon Raven (1927-2001 - and yes, that was indeed his birth name) wrote voluminously through much of the latter half of the 20th century, and, read today, his books feel both strikingly modern (in terms of their frank and non-judgemental approach to sexuality and general air of shark-ish cynicism) and hopelessly old fashioned (being largely concerned with a segment of upper crust British society whose values and behaviours now seem entirely alien, probably even to those lucky enough to have been born into it).
Freely mixing elements of personal / social writing and thinly veiled autobiography into popular genre thrillers, Raven’s more noteworthy works include Oxbridge vampire yarn ‘Doctors Wear Scarlet’ (loosely adapted into Robert Hartford Davis’s disastrous Incense for the Damned in 1971) and, on the other side of the coin, the ten volume ‘Alms for Oblivion’ sequence, which follows the lives and loves of a cadre of toffs, set against the changing social and political mores of post-war England. (I read the first few chapters of the first volume of this epic saga a few years back and actually found it quite compelling, but unfortunately I lost my copy on a train and haven’t got around to picking it up again since.)
Throughout his early literary career, Raven seems to have been fixated on the dilemmas faced by male scions of the English upper classes who, whether through conscious rebellion or mere lethargy and personal weakness, have squandered the privileges conferred to them by their noble upbringing and must find alternative paths through life. This theme is certainly front and centre in ‘Brother Cain’, whose protagonist Jacinth Crewe (note the Moorcock-ian initials) finds himself in a predicament closely mirroring that apparently faced by the author himself a few years beforehand.
Having been expelled from Eton on the grounds of moral turpitude and subsequently forced to curtail his studies at Cambridge due to what we might charitably call a self-inflicted lack of funds, the novel joins Crewe as he is invited to offer his resignation to the British army’s elite training academy at Sandhurst, having accrued gambling debts sufficiently gargantuan as to bring his entire regiment into disrepute.
“Honour and dishonour are conventions,” Captain Crewe’s understanding commanding officer advises him during their final interview, effectively establishing the theme of the novel to follow. “They are relevant in the world in which you have so far existed: they will not be relevant in the world for which it is clear you are now destined.”
Retreating to London with his tail (amongst other things) between his legs, Jacinth throws himself upon the mercy of his regiment’s allotted merry widow, one Miss Kitty Leighton, who, after a night or two of wild passion at her Chelsea flat, places a call to a mysterious contact who may be able to assist her disgraced and destitute young lover before the debt collectors come knocking.
Thus, Jacinth is summoned to a lunch date at the Trocadero in Piccadilly (decades before it became the tourist-choked hellhole we know it as today), where he is greeted by dirty mac-clad, brown ale supping “professional messenger” Mr Shannon - a character I found it impossible not to imagine being played by Donald Pleasance.
Though highly suspicious on all levels, the proposal Mr Shannon’s anonymous employers wish to convey to Captain Crewe is entirely too good for the desperate young layabout to resist. In short, his gambling debts will be covered in full, and he will be issued with sufficient funds to allow him to fly to Rome and install himself in the swank Hotel Hassler overlooking the Spanish Steps, there to await further instructions.
What with this being the height of the First Cold War and everything, you’ll be unsurprised to hear that when those orders do eventually arrive, they direct Jacinth to an appointment at a shabby ‘Institute for the Promotion of Mediterranean Art’, a flimsy front for a top secret wing of the British government whose job, to all intents and purposes, is to create new James Bonds.
Which is to say, Jacinth and the other young rascals corralled by the nameless ‘organisation’ are pointedly not being groomed as spies or intelligence agents. Instead, they are basically just hatchet men - proponents of what one of their instructors (who is of lower middle class extraction, and so naturally a graceless, grudge-bearing git) bluntly calls “the cold art of murder”.
Taking a more refined view on things, the Big Cheese of the whole operation, who naturally enjoys the benefit of a ‘proper’ education, instead waxes lyrical to his new recruits about how, in the light of communist infiltration and so forth, the democratic institutions so cherished by western nations can only be preserved through the unilateral execution of acts which the champions of democracy would find impossible to countenance, should they become aware of them.
(Being unfamiliar with Raven’s own political leanings, assuming he had any, it’s difficult to get a handle on whether this justification for extra-judicial murder and mayhem, which continues at some length, is being presented as satire, or simply as a statement of the author’s own beliefs.)
Furthering the Bond parallel, Jacinth and his fellow recruits are essentially allowed to adopt the lifestyles of globe-trotting playboys, so long as they follow their orders precisely, ask no questions, and leave whatever moral scruples they may once have possessed at the door. And, if they have any thoughts of ducking out and taking their chances in civilian life, well…. their more ruthless classmates will simply have an easy first assignment to look forward to, won’t they?
Despite his military rank, Jacinth Crewe is still more a feckless dosser than a cold-blooded killer, and, still bedevilled by confused notions of personal honour and brotherly conduct, he is naturally terrified by the prospect of having to immerse himself in the paranoid, compassionless world promised by his new profession - all the more so when, with a neatness which surely defies mere coincidence, he is paired up for training with one Nicholas Le Soir, the former schoolmate whose charms led to his being expelled from Eton for corrupting the morals of a younger boy. (This incident directly mirrors Raven’s real life expulsion from Charterhouse public school, incidentally.)
Now a qualified surgeon, Le Soir has arrived at the ‘organisation’ after being struck off and effectively exiled from the UK for performing an illegal abortion upon the daughter of a prominent Catholic family (oops), and the plot is further thickened once both Jacinth and Nicholas find themselves drawn into an embryonic love triangle with Le Soir’s promiscuous yet sexually dysfunctional cousin Eurydice, who is also resident in Rome, working for an equally questionable ‘cultural mission’…. and who seems suspiciously keen on pumping her two mixed up suitors for information on the nature of their employment.
And, there I will leave my plot synopsis, but suffice to say, Raven proves himself eminently capable of setting up a fast-moving, exquisitely intriguing yarn here, even if his story’s conclusion - following an incident in a bat-infested railway tunnel, a scheme to virally infect the whores of a high class brothel and a head-spinningly convoluted murder scheme set against the backdrop of a Venetian masked ball, amongst other diversions - eventually veers more toward the kind of existential, internecine futility in which John le Carré would later specialise than the two-fisted action-adventure stuff beloved by Ian Fleming’s fans.
In view of the fact that ‘Brother Cain’ was first published a full decade before the legalisation of male homosexuality in the UK, one of the most striking aspects of the book for modern readers is Raven’s forthright and unapologetic presentation of his male characters’ bisexuality. Not only acknowledging this dark secret of the English public school system, which tended to be referred to only through implication and innuendo by other writers of this era, he seems keen on eagerly exploring its every nook and cranny, pushing the book’s language about as far as the era’s censorship would allow.
“I’m not a homosexual, or at least, not very often,” Jacinth muses to himself as he drifts into introspective reverie in the flight to Rome. (“What shall I do about women? Well I suppose there must be brothels..,” he charmingly adds, as if to bolster his own sense of masculinity.)
As soon as he falls asleep though, he finds himself dreaming of a beautiful American boy he once briefly courted at Cambridge (and who will, of course, play an integral role in the unfolding plot), and as the book goes on, it becomes increasingly clear that Jacinth’s most significant and long-lasting relationships have always been with other men.
In spite of its attention-grabbing plotline in fact, ‘Brother Cain’ often reads more like a semi-autobiographical personal novel than it does a thriller. More specifically, it seems like an attempt on Raven’s part to take stock of his life to date, and to redefine his place in the world as he hit his early 30s. As noted, the parallels between the background of the book’s protagonist and that of the author himself are considerable, and, given the multiple accusations of libel which were levelled against Raven as a result of his writing over the years, it wouldn’t be surprising to learn that many of the secondary characters in ‘Brother Cain’ were simply thinly veiled versions of his own friends, lovers and acquaintances.
Suffice to say, Raven was presumably not actually press-ganged into committing top secret outrages on behalf of the British crown, but, at a push, you could perhaps see Jacinth Crewe’s recruitment by the ‘organisation’ as a reflection of Raven’s own unique arrangement with the publisher Anthony Blond, who, when the author found himself in particularly dire straits, is reported to have agreed to pay him £15 a week in perpetuity and to publish his books as and when he completed them, on the understanding that he should leave London and never return.
Elsewhere, the book’s story is jammed with sinister, wisdom-dispensing potential father figures and unbalanced, mothering women, whilst Jacinth’s ruthless generational contemporaries all seem ready and willing to trample on his yearning, sensitive soul, creating a maelstrom of weird moral / psychological angst which can only really end with our protagonist becoming entirely consumed by it as he slips helplessly between the cracks separating the world of ‘honour and dishonour’ from the one in which most of us now live, in which such concepts are simply a quaint irrelevance.
Normally of course, I’d be pretty pissed off to find a book which has all the makings of a rip-roaring mid-century thriller derailed by such a load of ponderous navel-gazing, but Simon Raven was such a fascinating character, and the lost world of foppish decadence in which he dwelled such an enticing one to visit, that in his case, I’ll happily make an exception.
Whatever you may think about his conduct or way of life, Raven was a strange and unique literary talent; even at this early stage of his career, his prose and plotting are crisp, witty and ruthlessly efficient, and I’ll certainly be redoubling my quest for more of his work as soon as the doors of the world’s surviving second hand bookshops begin to creak open once again.
For reasons outlined in my previous post, I‘m unable to show off any vintage Lovecraft paperbacks which include ‘Herbert West: Reanimator’ amongst their contents, so failing that, now seems as good a time as any to share these scans of two rather battered remnants of Panther’s early ‘70s UK horror range, which I recently added to my collection.
Both are blessed with hugely evocative wraparound cover illustrations which I think capture the feel of the contents pretty well, in its own idiosyncratic fashion. The artwork for ‘The Haunter of the Dark’ (1972 printing) is unmistakably tbears the seal of the great Ian Miller (who is still working to this day, and was producing Lovecraft-inspired canvasses as recently as 2014), but an artwork credit for ‘The Tomb’ (1969 printing) sadly eludes me.
“It’s not often you get a Lovecraft for 20p,” I recall the lady behind the counter in Michael’s Bookshop in Ramsgate remarking, but a glimpse at the eldritch sigils inscribed upon the interior pages, together with their general condition, certainly helped justify this uniquely affordable price-tag.
‘Haunter of the Dark’ meanwhile is in slightly better shape, but still has a badly cracked spine, leaving pages ready to fly to the four winds as soon as some poor soul actually tries to read it. Ah well. Nonetheless, I’ve tried my best to take some scans of the full, wraparound covers, which can be enjoyed or downloaded by clicking on the images below. Apologies for the slightly blurriness on the ‘Haunter..’ scan – it was difficult to get it lined up on the scanner without further damaging the binding.
“Tex then told Sadie to scout the house for other people. She evidently climbed up the redwood ladder to look in the loft. And then she walked to the south, toward the hallway off which were the two main bedrooms of the house. In the room on the left, Abigail Folger lay reading alone. She looked up, she saw Sadie, and Abigail waved! Waved and smiled, and Sadie smiled back and walked away. Hi death.”
- p.233
Long ago, in my late teenage years, I decided it was time for me to overcome my natural distaste for ‘true crime’ subject matter and get the full dope on this whole Manson Family business, which I kept finding fearful references to in the ‘60s counter-culture books and rock biogs that composed the bulk of my non-fiction reading at the time.
A remaindered copy of Los Angeles County Assistant D.A. & Chief Prosecutor Vincent Bugliosi’s exhaustive 1974 book ‘Helter Skelter: The True Story of The Manson Murders’ certainly did the trick with regard to nailing down the essential facts of the matter (or, the officially recorded versions thereof, at least), but at the same time, the book’s mountain of dry, forensic detail raised as many questions as it answered, particularly with regard to the aspect of the whole business that most interested me – that being, the wider cultural and sociological circumstances that allowed these insane events to transpire in the first place.
When I learned of the existence of Ed Sanders’ ‘The Family’, I naturally supposed that an investigation undertaken by a member of The Fugs might shed a slightly different light on things, but sourcing a copy of Sanders’ book proved difficult at the time, and besides, I didn’t really have the stomach for reading two massive Manson tomes in quick succession.
Fast forward to 2019 however, and I’ve actually ended up with two paperback copies of ‘The Family’ (boring story not worth recounting here), so, with Charlie himself now finally six feet under and the ever-classy Quentin Tarantino apparently revving up his new, Manson-related movie for release to coincide the 50th anniversary of the Tate-LaBianca murders… the time finally seemed nigh to actually read the damned thing. (1)
Before continuing, I should issue a disclaimer to clarify that I generally take a dim view anything which seeks to glorify and/or obsess over the activities of real life serial killers. In and of himself, Charles Manson was little more than a psychotic confidence trickster and pimp, worthy of no more interest or respect than any other creep who has ever made a career out of exploiting human misery.
What fascinates me rather is the frequently extraordinary nature of the marginal – and otherwise largely undocumented - worlds in which Manson moved, and the unique socio-cultural circumstances that allowed him to achieve such remarkable success (in psycho cult leader terms, at least) within them.
Manson’s followers have often been likened to locusts in terms of their tendency to hoover up cash, drugs, vehicles, food, crash-space and favours from anyone who gave them even the slightest opportunity to do so, but in the same way, Charlie himself strikes me as a kind of cultural locust.
In addition to his extensive and well-documented connections to the music and movie industries (which we need not reiterate here), the wider scope of Manson’s activities also seemed to encompass various other cult religious groups, assorted ‘hippie’ communities (including the core San Francisco scene centred around The Diggers, The Grateful Dead and the Haight Ashbury Free Clinic), several fringe Christian churches, Scientology and its shadier off-shoots, Anton Lavey’s comical Church of Satan, certain therapy / self help institutions, behavioural/hypnosis specialists and the formative roots of California’s New Age culture, along with the world of literary science fiction, prison sub-cultures (of both racist and homosexual varieties), college students and Berkeley activist groups, pirate radio broadcasters, underground and documentary filmmakers, the world of strip clubs, go-go dancers and ‘stag films’, outlaw motorcycle gangs, desert motor-racing enthusiasts, a wide variety of drug traffickers and manufacturers, the community of stuntmen and cowboys hanging around the Spahn Ranch, and even the culture of modern day gold prospectors and wilderness homesteaders whom The Family interacted with in Death Valley.
Excepting perhaps Dennis Wilson, I’m not aware that Manson ever hung out with any surfers (his activities being primarily directed in-land), and his virulent racism prohibited him from interacting with any black, Latino or Native American sub-cultures (despite his constant bleating about “Black Panthers”, there doesn’t seem to be any evidence that he was ever even in the same zip code as any of them) - BUT, that aside, it seems as if pretty much EVERYONE who has was cultivating a lifestyle outside of the square, mainstream norm in Southern California in the late 1960s was touched by the dirty fingers of Manson at some point, and the groups on the above list who had any credibility to begin with all found themselves degraded and damaged to some extent by the association. Meanwhile, he managed to feed something gleamed from every single one of them into the insane, indigestible gumbo of his eventual ‘Helter Skelter’ project.
II.
How did so many doors open for him? That’s the question that fascinates. Purely in terms of his attempts to infiltrate the entertainment industry, the fact that a character this unkempt, criminally-minded and evidently deranged could manoeuvre himself into a position one step removed from figures of such diverse cultural import as Doris Day, Kenneth Anger, Nancy Sinatra and Neil Young, is remarkable. Even if he’d never turned to murder, Manson's exploits as a kind of Sunset Strip Rasputin would remain intriguing to those of us with an interest in this particular historical milieu.
And happily, as the back cover blurb for Panther’s UK paperback of ‘The Family’ strongly implies, these wider connections between Manson and the cultures he managed to infiltrate is very much the subject that Sanders gets stuck into herein, striking an extremely precarious balance between credibility and sensationalism in the process.
At the outset, I was slightly worried that, given his own sub-cultural affiliations, Sanders may have been tempted to take a more sympathetic line on Manson and his cronies than Bugliosi, but rest assured, he goes even harder on them than the Chief Prosecutor, if such is possible, with his pejorative-heavy descriptions of the Family members betraying the anger of a man who has seen the public image of the movement he tied himself to warped and discredited by the actions of a bunch of kill-crazy goons.
As anyone who taken even the slightest interest in this stuff will be aware, attempting to research the wider activities of the Manson Family is liable to lead one pretty quickly into a bottomless Death Valley black hole of mis/disinformation, rife with missing links, random dead ends and irresolvable contradictions. For each verifiable fact that can be established about The Family, there are a thousand rumours, exaggerations and outright lies to contend with.
As Sanders outlines in his introduction, his method for dealing with this was basically to trawl through the testimony of anyone and everyone who interacted with The Family and proved willing to talk about the matter (indeed, the author implies that his hippie/yippie ‘cred’ allowed him access to deeper sources than the authorities were able to tap), and then to cross-reference these interviews against a map and timeline outlining (as far as is possible) the locations and activities of the killers, their associates and (where relevant) their victims. Basically it seems, everything that proved both interesting and not verifiably untrue made it into the book, leaving us to draw our own conclusions.
As we’ll discuss below, Sanders’ excursions into the further realms of speculation got him into no small amount of trouble, and the accuracy of more or less everything he throws into ‘The Family’ remains open to question, but, when you’re dealing with a set of witnesses who were likely various combinations of stoned, mentally ill, terrified, brain-washed and self-interested at the time of their testimony, I’d argue that he was probably right to retain as many of the “apparently”s, “allegedly”s and “it is reported that..”s as possible.
I do wish that Sanders had been a bit more forthcoming about his sources, and a bit more circumspect about the wilder rumours he offers up as ‘fact’, but at the same time, when it comes to defining the contours of the vast psychic maelstrom emanating from the undeniably grim realities of Hollywood, August 1969, I tend to think there is probably just as much value in hearing what people were saying about the events in their immediate aftermath, as in the cold hard facts themselves – and, so long as you can take him with a generous pinch of salt, Sanders’ book certainly provides an invaluable record of the former.
III.
“It seems strange that all of a sudden they got in to wearing black capes. The girls made Charlie one that reached to the floor. With a flourish Manson tried it on, remarking how no one for sure now could see him when he creepy-crawled. Mary Brunner had a black cape. Sadie had a cape. Squeeky, according to Danny DeCarlo, used to dye clothing black in a pot in the Spahn Ranch kitchen.”
- p. 185
If nothing else, the version of Charlie presented here was certainly industrious. Whereas you’d naturally expect a messianic cult leader to express hostility toward competing gurus, Manson, in keeping with his locust-like M.O., often seems to have actively encouraged the crossover of personnel and ideas between his ‘Family’ and various other groupings of fringe whackos, and Sanders’ book is particularly strong when it comes to making the case that the Mansonites were not an isolated phenomenon, but merely the most high profile symptom of a entire network of similarly demented (and potentially dangerous) groups who seemed to flourishing on the far outskirts of American society.
It is reported, for instance, that in 1968 Manson was present as a “guest of honour” at a bizarre trial / exorcism rite undertaken by some kind of homosexual “death cult” operating out of a commune house (the Waller Street Ashram, otherwise known as the “Devil House”) in Haight Ashbury. During this alleged event, a young man identified only as “Pussycat” – the former lover of the cult’s boss, one Father P., who is later said to have visited Manson at Spahn Ranch - was put through a series of gruelling ordeals to try to save him from a supposed demonic possession orchestrated by a deserter from the group. “Poor Pussycat,” quoth Sanders. (2)
The author also spends a full chapter outlining the eye-opening history of an outfit known as the Solar Lodge of the O.T.O., an illegitimate off-shoot from the branch of the famed Crowleyite magickal order, which seems to have mutated by the late ‘60s into a controlling personality cult masterminded by a woman named Jean Brayton, the wife of a USC philosophy lecturer.
Like The Family, The Solar Lodge made their home on a remote desert ranch, and there seems to have been a clear crossover of ideas (and, Sanders implies, personnel) between Brayton’s group and the Mansonites. Brayton is reported for instance to have also preached a gospel of hard-line racism, predicting the approach of an apocalyptic race war and telling her followers they would need to hide-out in underground caverns to survive the resulting carnage (sound familiar?).
The control Brayton and her husband exercised over their followers seems to have been even more sadistic and authoritarian than that practiced by Manson, but, thankfully, The Solar Lodge was put on ice in July 1969, when their leadership was arrested en masse on child abuse charges, after some horse traders who had visited their ranch called the police, having observed what investigating officers later confirmed to be a six-year-old boy chained up in a six foot square wooden crate and left exposed to the desert sun – which gives us some insight into the kind of outfit these particular creepos were really operating.
It should be noted however that, despite the publicity surrounding this ‘boy in the box’ case, Sanders’ claims regarding Manson’s connections with the Solar Lodge seem never to have been verified elsewhere. A brief web search reveals that the Braytons – who were soon back on the street and heading up another neo-Crowleyite religious order after initially fleeing to Mexico to avoid the child abuse charges – actually initiated legal action against Sanders in 1973, reaching an out of court settlement which ensured that the entire chapter related to the Solar Lodge was excised from future editions of ‘The Family’. Presumably, Panther’s UK paperback, dated that year, must have made it to the printers shortly before this agreement came into effect. Lucky me! (3)
In parallel with the Solar Lodge, Sanders also raises the spectre of a particularly shady motorcycle gang known as the Satan’s Slaves, whose members are alleged to have provided the connecting tissue between the Solar Lodge, the Mansonites, the Ku Klux Klan and something the author refers to as the “Kirke Order of Dog Blood” (seriously, don’t ask). (4)
“There are subjects associated with the Manson case that are so soaked in evil that the mere knowing of them is like a nightmare,” Sanders states later in the book, kicking off a chapter in which he addresses rumours of unidentified Satanic groups (presumably, but not definitively, connected to the quasi-mythical Kirke mob referenced above) carrying out animal sacrifice / blood-drinking / orgy rituals on several remote West Coast beaches in 1968-69. Pretty hair-raising stuff.
Sanders goes on to print verbatim the transcript of an interview with a young male Manson Family hanger on, who claims to have been present at the Spahn Ranch when a set of films – apparently made by another cult group – were screened, depicting both the killing of domestic animals and the apparent decapitation of a human female, carried out in ritual circumstances on a nocturnal beach.
To be honest, the interviewee sounds pretty out of it, but Sanders insists that the information he provided on other subjects proved reliable, so – make of this what you will. As far as I’m aware, nothing concrete on any of this has ever come to light in subsequent decades, so by this stage, it’s nothing more than another sinister, apocryphal underground legend to add to the ever-growing bonfire of such, any grain of truth lost in a long-forgotten vortex of misfiled missing persons reports and blighted, undocumented lives.
In fact, Sanders seems to have had a real bee in his bonnet about the possibly that The Family may have filmed some of their own crimes (presumably using the equipment they stole from a CBS outside broadcast truck in early ’69?), repeatedly hinting that certain “uptight persons” are holding back information from him on this subject to protect their own skins. Whoever these “persons” were, they must have done a pretty good job, because again, fifty years on, this hypothetical footage remains elusive, insofar as I’m aware. (5)
Amid all this shady occult networking, I was surprised to note that Sanders’ book entirely overlooks Manson’s widely documented connections to that most infamous of Scientology spin-offs, The Process Church of the Final Judgement. The details of Manson’s interactions with The Process Church became public knowledge so early in the game that they even made it into New English Library’s otherwise largely fictitious Manson book (which I wrote about here), so it seemed surprising to me that Sanders would have ignored such a rich vein of High Weirdness.
Well, guess what – the first edition copy of ‘The Family’ consulted by writer John Anthony Day for this review, published in The Harvard Crimson magazine in 1971, apparently contained an extensive (indeed, the reviewer claims, excessive) amount of information concerning Manson’s connections to The Process. But, Day also notes that Robert De Grimston, founder of the Process Church, had launched a $1.5 million lawsuit against Sanders and his U.S. publishers. So, consulting the entirely Process-free 1973 U.K. paperback, we can probably guess how that worked out. (6)
IV.
Sanders’ narrative becomes even sketchier, and even more queasy, when he occasionally turns his attention to the wider scope of The Manson Family’s crimes – unsolved category. Basically this consists of a grim run down of unsolved killings (primarily rape-murders of young women, with a weirdo/mutilation element) which were committed during 1968-69, at points when Sanders’ research leads him to believe that members of The Family were in the immediate vicinity.
As you can well imagine, reading capsule summaries of these cold cases – each of them a potential mini-Black Dahlia, just waiting for the True Crime podcasters to descend – is a grim business, and I’m actually not sure which possibility is more disturbing to contemplate; that Tex, Clem, Charlie and the gang were occasionally enjoying a brutal “boy’s night out” as they drifted hither and yon across the West Coast, or alternatively, that these killings actually had nothing whatsoever to do with the easy scapegoat of Satanic psycho-hippies, instead simply representing yr average, run-of-the-mill crime stats for a large American state over a two year period, the faceless perpetrators simply blending back into the mainstream ebb-and-flow of society and keeping their heads down. (7)
Of all the legally dubious claims contained within ‘The Family’ however, Sanders perhaps sails closest to the wind when he isuggests a connection between Charles Manson and the Esalen Institute, a storied and influential spa resort and spiritual / therapeutic retreat based in Big Sur, which survives to this day.
These claims centre around the admittedly intriguing fact that, a week prior to the Tate-LaBianca killings, Manson seems to have jumped behind the wheel of a stolen Hostess Twinkie bakery truck and spent a weekend tooling around the Big Sur area – entirely on his own, unusually, although he did manage to recruit a new Family member / sex slave / punching bag (a pregnant seventeen-year-old named Stephanie) along the way.
Sanders believes that Manson travelled to Big Sur to visit Esalen, and indeed, various rumours to this effect swirl about the lower depths of online Manson-ology. This is significant due to the fact that Cielo Drive murder victim Abigail Folger was a frequent visitor to the Institute, and Sharon Tate may or may not have also attended at some point.
The suggestion of a tangible connection between Manson and his future victims is chilling enough in itself, but once again, Sanders over-plays his hand by stating, apparently apropos of nothing, that both Folger and Tate were present at Esalen on the same weekend that Manson allegedly visited – a suggestion which I’m sure is contradicted by the official record, if not elsewhere in this very book.
Unsurprisingly perhaps, the Esalen Institute have spent the past fifty years vigorously denying that Manson ever came anywhere near them (their statements on the matter have been pretty weird and contradictory however, but.. that’s another story), and indeed, Sanders reports that a cast iron veil of secrecy hangs over the whole affair, even stating that representatives of the Institute have issued what he describes as a “veiled snuff threat” against him, should he persist in pursuing the matter.
Was there another, subsequent edition of ‘The Family’ with the references to Esalen also redacted? I wouldn’t be surprised. (8)
Exactly how many re-drafts did the text of this book go through to avoid legal action, I wonder? Three, four? I mean, I’m guessing the Kirke Order of Dogs Blood were unlikely to put a call through to their lawyers, but even so, if Sanders took some of the stuff he reports here remotely seriously, he must have spent a few years in fear of waking up some dark night with the smell of axle grease in his nostrils and a curved blade pressed to his throat.
V.
“There was one heavy problem facing Helter Skelter. By early 1969, the West Valley Station of the Los Angeles sheriff’s department had in use Bell-65 two-man helicopters with powerful searchlights installed that could light up a city block from 1000 feet in the air. Manson had various plans to deal with these helicopters. One was to attack the helicopter with magic. Another method was to thwart the helicopters at night by taping the headlights of the dune-buggy battalion with black tape, leaving only a small slit to allow a thin ray of light to escape, hopefully undetectable from the air.”
- p. 124
There is much more I could go on to say about other aspects of ‘The Family’; there is so much rich, soggy flesh here to pile onto the bones of the crazed milieu Manson and his followers operated within. Not least, the significant portion of the book which Sanders devotes to outlining the vast auto-theft / dune buggy manufacturing ring orchestrated by the Mansonites during their final months of freedom - an operation which proved necessary simply to keep the cult’s membership mobile and maintain supply lines across the incredibly inhospitable terrain which Charlie seemed increasingly fixated on forcing his followers to inhabit.
As is implied by the book’s memorable sub-title, Sanders details Manson’s apparent dream of drilling his Family into a unit of full on, ‘Road Warrior’ style desert outlaws, undertaking armed raids on the small towns bordering the Death Valley national monument, carrying off food and women like some kind of motorized neo-vikings, and bamboozling the cops from their impenetrable network of underground hidey-holes.
Even if they’d been left to their own devices however, the chances of The Family achieving this level of self-sufficient barbarity seems remote. Another thing that becomes clear from Sanders’ book is that, far from their rep as ruthless killers, these hapless hippies – many of them nursing either young children or severe mental illness by the time Helter Skelter took hold – were simply not prepared for the hardship of the desert.
As food and shelter became scarce, as Charlie became more violent and demanding, and as lines of communication between various outposts started to fray, The Family’s vital biker allies disappeared, and tertiary family members began drifting away at a steady rate, several of them walking vast distances across the desert in the search of help.
When a combination of armed police units and National Park officials finally began carrying out raids and pulling the Mansonites into custody on grand theft auto and arson charges in September/October 1969, the roving miscreants are reported to have been in an appalling physical condition, riddled with sores and parasites and caked in mud to protect themselves from the sun, the girls having tonsured and shaved their hair into bizarre, Mohawk-ish arrangements….. a far cry from the heady days of '68, when Gregg Jakobson and his fellow “golden penetrators” would cruise over to the group’s latest Hollywood hang-out to enjoy a few sexual favours in exchange for vague promises of booking Manson in for another studio session.
Where might this trip have ended, if the authorities hadn’t moved in to put a stop to it? Would the whitened bones of The Family’s hardcore members and assigned assassins now be buried in the sands of some distant canyon, as survivors of the nastier end of biker/field hippie sub-culture mutter darkly of their legend, and probable fate?
God knows, it certainly would have saved the State of California a lot of time and effort, and given a few generations of “transgressive culture” assholes and neo-nazis one less incarcerated icon to look up to.
Crazy, man. Crazy.
A song for the closing credits:
----
(1) I was initially shocked to hear that Tarantino (and, more to the point, the studio marketing bods backing him up) had decided to tie-in the release of their new movie with the anniversary of – uh - *a mass murder*, but cooled down after reflecting on Jello Biafra’s memorable answer to a question re: whether a Dead Kennedys concert on the anniversary of JFK’s shooting was in good taste: “well, the assassination wasn’t very tasteful either”.
(2)It is interesting to note that, despite his racism, misogyny and relentless enthusiasm for heterosexual congress, Manson never seems to have espoused any homophobic sentiments, having spent much of his of early life exploring the “other side of the tracks” whilst incarcerated.
(3)Those wishing to journey further down the Brayton / Solar Lodge rabbit hole are advised to begin here.
(4)Trying to google up some info on the Satan’s Slaves who were active in California in the mid/late ‘60s turns up practically nothing, beyond the knowledge that dozens of other motorcycle clubs have used the same name over the years (most prominently in the U.K.), and a reference to a California-based gang bearing that name who were “patched over” by (ie, incorporated into) The Hell’s Angels in 1978.
(5)Adult film fans with a stronger stomach for research than myself may wish to take note of the following paragraph, from p. 126: “Around this time [January 1969] Charlie and the girls made a pornographic movie by the swimming pool at 2600 Nicholas Canyon Road in the hills above Malibu. The producer, according to Los Angeles homicide officers, was Marvin Miller.” Your safety filter-free search engine of choice awaits.
(6)It seems ironic in the extreme that De Grimston should have filed for defamation against Sanders in the same year that The Process Church’s official magazine proudly published an article dictated by Manson from his prison cell, but Jesus/God/Lucifer/Satan moves in mysterious ways I suppose.
(7)The timeframe of Sanders’ book, it should be noted, discounts the inclusion of the several rather more compelling “officially unsolved” murder cases which sprang up in parallel with the trial of Manson and his co-defendants during 1970, including the violent death of at least one woman who severed ties with the remnants of The Family, and the mysterious disappearance of a controversial and reportedly incompetent attorney who for a time was representing several of the Mansonites in court… until he reportedly went on a camping holiday and never returned, delaying the trial for several weeks as a result. But, this isn’t a True Crime blog, so I’ll shut up now, and let you investigate further, should you wish to.
(8)If you’ve somehow found your way out of the other internet wormholes I’ve dumped on you so far in this post, take a leap into this one for everything you need to know re: Manson and Esalen. My own takeaway is that, compared to a lot of these rumours, the kernel of this one actually seems pretty plausible.
I mean, it’s certainly not beyond the realm of possibility that Charlie may have called on the Institute, either to try to connive his way in as a guest lecturer/visiting guru, or to audition for someone involved in organising Esalen’s annual folk festival, and that he may have subsequently kept quiet about it to salve his ego after the Institute - known for its tight security and elitest attitude - presumably just told him to get lost. From there, is it too much of a stretch to suggest that, in the depths of his enraged, stoned/paranoid mind, he might have pegged the Esalen crowd as the same “type” he encountered when he scoped out 10050 Cielo Drive in search of Terry Melcher? And, a week later, Helter Skelter time? We will likely never know, but hey - it’s a theory. What’s that? Oh yeah, NOT A TRUE CRIME BLOG. Sorry.
In honour of the fact that today is apparently International Dylan Thomas Day, I thought I’d take the opportunity to pull another recent acquisition from my ever-growing paperback mountain for your enjoyment.
Though admittedly somewhat beyond the pulp fiction remit of this blog, Dylan Thomas remains one of my favourite writers. Growing up in West Wales, I was more or less force-fed his words from a young age, but since rediscovering his work in adulthood, both his prose and poems have become very dear to me.
Nonetheless, until I stumbled upon this volume on a day-trip to Brighton last month, I was entirely unaware that this most revered of twentieth century wordsmiths had ever penned “..a sinister, spine-chilling tale of superstition, black magic and evil” set upon an “exotic and inviting” South Seas island. An instant purchase, needless to say.
In order to maintain an open mind when I get around to reading it, I have deliberately carried out no research whatsoever into the history or perceived literary value of this work, other than to note that it is a re-working of a story of the same name by Robert Louis Stevenson. Likewise, the fact that this book’s copyright originally belonged to The Hearst Corporation (1959) before moving to ‘Viking Films Inc’ in 1963 is instructive, as is the fact that it barely stretches to 120 pages, despite the use of extra-large text and frequent and over-large paragraph/chapter breaks. Should be an interesting read.
I can’t say that Panther’s cover design strikes me as very appealing however. Contrary to the note I’ve scanned above, the woman pictured on the cover is most assuredly NOT a detail from Gauguin’s ‘Aha Oe Feii?’ aka ‘Are You Jealous?’ (1892), and I can only assume that this note was mistakenly retained from an earlier edition of the book. As to where this woman’s head and shoulders actually did come from, god only knows. I suspect they probably just clipped her out of a magazine or something.
So, not exactly a classic in design terms, but in literary terms…? Well, I hope to get around to it soon, so we’ll see.
It stands to reason that paperback editions of the Derleth “collaborations” are less sought after, and thus less pricey and more common, than older paperbacks of genuine Lovecraft. As such, the oldest and most aesthetically pleasing “Lovecraft” p/b in my current collection is this eerily faded US edition of ‘The Shuttered Room and Other Tales of Horror’, as issued by Beagle Books in 1971. Though the ‘hand growing out of a tree stump’ motif is pretty silly, the photo collage approach used by the (uncredited) artist is very effective, and I love the muted purple and green colour palette, the ghostly trees fading into the white background, and the lovely, oh-so-‘60s font. It’s a shame none of the stories inside are much good, but what can you do.
As a bonus, here’s a UK Panther edition of Derleth’s novel ‘The Lurker At The Threshold’ [worth ploughing through on the basis that it features a few excellent passages of Lovecraft prose buried amid the Derlethian trudge, I seem to recall] that I picked up somewhere recently. Year of publication is unknown, but cover art comes courtesy of the exceptionally awesome Gino D’Achille. Perhaps not his best effort (check the galleries in the above link for more on those), but I like it all the same. The little tentacles creeping in through the broken glass are a highlight, and trying to figure out what's going on with the second view of the tower trapped in the identically angled broken pane on the upper right proves pleasantly mind-bending.
(Everyman Library, 1975 – cover photograph by Graham Tucker.)
(Panther, 1967 – “Cover illustration shows ‘Venus Asleep’ be Paul Delvaux. Reproduction by courtesy of the Tate Gallery, London.”)
(Signet, 1960 – cover illustration unaccredited.)
(Digit, year unknown – cover illustration unaccredited.)
Normal posting schedule to hopefully be resumed shortly, but in the meantime, to help get us in an appropriately Autumnal / All Hallows-ish frame of mind, please enjoy this gallery of paperback Poe editions I’ve recently acquired.
By the time my own autumn has done come, I predict I will probably own about 147 printed versions of ‘The Gold Bug’, but, such is the vividness and variety of illustration & design work assigned to Poe collections over the years, I find it hard to say no when I spy one of these on the shelves.
Also, re: the Everyman edition pictured above, let’s just say that if that is indeed a ‘photograph’ as the back cover states, I want this Graham Tucker on my hypothetical payroll, pronto.
Juvenile Delinquency, UK style. Where America had Brando in ‘The Wild One’, ‘Rebel Without a Cause’, Hal Ellson, The Knife and, y’know, this sort of thing, we got the pulse-pounding sight of Max Bygraves telling these young hussies they should stop slouching against the wall and get to choir practice.
I’ve not read Michael Croft’s early entry in canon the hang-wringing, youth-of-today school teacher melodrama (originally published the same year as Evan Hunter’s sub-genre defining ‘Blackboard Jungle’), and as such I’ll refrain from sniggering at it too much, although a brief skim read suggests that it is just as quaint and dreary as one might fear.
Likewise, I’m entirely unfamiliar with the movie adaptation, but £10 says Donald Pleasence plays the corrupt, weak-willed and/or alcoholic headmaster and does so brilliantly.
Best known as the founder of The National Youth Theatre of Great Britain, ‘Spare the Rod’ was Michael Croft’s only novel, insofar as I can tell from my usual exhaustive research.
Last but not least in this series, we couldn’t very well have a Psychedelic Sci-Fi Round Up without a bit of Philip Jose Farmer, could we?
The pleasantly mind-bending cover Illustration is by Peter Tybus, who did a lot of similarly eye-catching ‘70s Penguin SF covers, but it also very much reminds me of Bob Haberfield, a few of whose Moorcock covers can be seen in this 2012 post.
I’ve also got the respect the way that the front cover art and back cover blurb here do exactly what they set to do: take a book I otherwise might not have looked twice at, and make me want to read it immediately. What did those tapes reveal? If it’s anything like Tybus’s illustration, these 173 pages must be quite a ride…
Last summer I finally got around to reading Roger Zelazny’s canonical SF classic ‘Lord of Light’ (here accompanied by a rare SF cover from the fantastic pop/pulp painter Michael Johnson), and I enjoyed it very much.
It’s been years since I read anything with that particular kind of ‘epic world-building fantasy’ kind of feel to it, and it certainly made for a welcome change of pace amid my usual diet of hard-boiled crime and mid 20th century British miserablism.
In particular, I was quite surprised that the weighty mystical / philosophical content one might reasonably expect to find in a book like this generally took a back-seat to thunderous descriptions of the hyper-weaponised avatars of the Hindu pantheon blasting the shit out of each other as they bestride a far future terraformed world of verdant neo-medieval splendour and ‘Dancers at the End of Time’ techno-decadence. Heady stuff indeed.
Whilst I’m not much of a fan of current CGI-heavy giant monster/robot-based blockbusters (you’d never have guessed, would you?), I’ve got to admit that if the makers of, say, ‘Pacific Rim’ were given the GDP of a small country to make a movie out of this one, I’d definitely be standing in line on the day of release – in the right hands, it could be fantastic. Unfortunately I suppose the possibility of offending every Hindu on earth probably mitigates against that possibility somewhat, but we can dream.
At an impressionable age, my brother and I both developed an unhealthy interest in the writings of H.P. Lovecraft (an obsession that persists to this day, in my case at least). With assorted anthologies of the master's work duly acquired and consumed, it wasn’t long before we found ourselves scouring second hand bookshops for the even more obscure, night-haunted outpourings of the numerous other writers (influences, acquaintances and Weird Tales-affiliated contemporaries) who are generally thought of as constituting Lovecraft’s ‘circle’.
Frank Belknap Long (1901-1994) was high on the list, and the enticing 1975 Panther anthology you see above was soon in our hands. THE BLACK DRUID. Yeah, that’s the stuff. And what a cover!
A few pages into the title story however, and Frank Belknap Long was very much off the list. You’d have thought that exposure to HPL’s more fragrant meanderings might have already prepared us for what was in store, but all the same, Long’s particular brand of bizarre, artless prose and rambling, hackneyed storytelling provoked such a strong negative reaction that until recently I’d pretty much written the guy off completely, consigning this book to the shelf, leaving most of the other stories unread.
The opening paragraphs were questionable enough:
“Mr Stephen Benefield entered the library and hung his black Chesterfield overcoat on the rack which the trustees had grudgingly provided for the accommodation of inclement and cold weather accessories. There were seven other overcoats on the rack. Mr Benefield paused to count them – he was a methodical and observing man – and passed to the reference desk. When the librarian approached him he nodded amiably. ‘I wish to peruse, please, Lucian Brown’s The Cromlech Jeelos. It is No. 3268 A. I looked it up yesterday in the catalogue.’ […] Closing the book Mr Benefield smiled and passed it back over the desk. ‘That is the passage I was looking for,’ he explained. ‘I do not believe I shall need a copy of it. I thought it might be a very long passage, but it is so brief that I can remember enough to paraphrase it without the aid of a written copy. Thank you very much. I am Stephen Benefield, an archaeologist. I use such passages in my books.’”
But I recall that it was the author’s subsequent description of his protagonist that particularly aroused our derision: “It is true that Mr Benefield was, in some respects, an odd looking man. His hair was absurdly long and it descended upon his forehead in a circular, antiquated bang; his hat was two sizes too small for his immoderately large head – a brachycephalic head, although he boasted twenty generations of Saxon forebears – and his socks, which his wife had purchased for him, were of heavy wool, and unsupported by garters they bulged above his shoes like the elephantine folds on the torso of an Abyssinian eunuch.”
Needless to say, reading these passages again as an adult, I can’t help but feel that we were missing the point somewhat. Although Long’s prose is certainly somewhat peculiar, I think I’m now more able to appreciate the quasi-tongue in cheek, knowingly antiquated pulp style that he was going for. Rather than laughing AT him, perhaps we should have been laughing WITH him, so to speak. Lacking the more ‘refined’ literary affectations of his fellow Weird Tales writers, Long instead writes with a kind of woolly, bellowing gusto - somewhat like the prose equivalent of Brian Blessed’s speaking voice - and most of his stories give the impression of having been hammered out at break-neck speed to reach the next issue’s deadline… which was more than likely the case I suppose, given his position as an aspirant full-time writer struggling to support a family through the worst years of the great depression.
Perhaps as a result of these pressures, the bulk of the innumerable weird tales Long cranked out through the ‘20s and 30s are indeed somewhat less than inspired. But when he did hit on something good, he hit it HARD, as is demonstrated by the handful of his more celebrated efforts compiled in the Arkham House anthology ‘Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos’, which I finally got around to reading last month.
‘The Hounds of Tindalos’ (1929) is probably his best-known tale, and indeed, it is an absolute corker. Mixing up half-understood quantum physics, medieval occultism, ‘House On The Borderland’-esque cosmic awe, proto-psychedelic indigestion of “strange drugs” and good old fashioned nameless evil into a compressed ten page dose of boggle-eyed, metaphysical madness, it is perhaps the most archetypically perfect ‘weird tale’ ever written… with the emphasis kept very much on the WEIRD.
Read it as I did, bleary-eyed after a few drinks in the final half hour before sleep, and it’s pretty wild stuff, whether in 1929, 2013, or in the dark, curved spaces before the dawn of recorded time:
“Chalmers lay stretched out upon his back in the centre of the room. He was starkly nude, and his chest and arms were covered with a peculiar bluish pus or ichor. His head lay grotesquely upon his chest. It had been completely severed from his body, and the features were twisted and torn and horribly mangled. Nowhere was there a trace of blood. The room presented a most astonishing appearance. The intersections of the walls, ceiling and floor had been thickly smeared with plaster of paris, but at intervals fragments had cracked and fallen off, and someone had grouped these upon the floor around the murdered man so as to form a perfect triangle. Beside the body were several sheets of charred yellow paper. These bore fantastic geometric designs and symbols and several hastily scrawled sentences. The sentences were almost illegible and so absurd in content that they furnished no possible clue to the perpetrator of the crime. ‘I am waiting and watching,’ Chalmers wrote. ‘I sit by the window and watch the walls and ceiling. I do not believe they can reach me, but I must be aware of the Doels. Perhaps they can help them break through. The satyrs will help, and they can advance through the scarlet circles. The Greeks knew a way of preventing that. It is a great pity that we have forgotten so much.’ On another sheet of paper, the badly charred remains of seven or eight fragments found by Detective-Sergeant Douglas (of the Partridgeville Reserve), was scrawled the following: ‘Good god, the plaster is falling! A terrific shock has loosened the plaster and it is falling. An earthquake perhaps! I could never have anticipated this. It is glowing dark in the room. I must phone Frank. But can he get here in time? I will try. I will recite the Einstein formula. I will - God, they are breaking through! They are breaking through! Smoke is pouring from the corners of the wall. Their tongues – aghhh –’”
Perhaps not quite as far-out, but equally entertaining, ‘The Space Eaters’ (1928) not only opens with one of the greatest non-sequitur, one sentence paragraphs of all-time (I defy you to beat “The horror came to Partridgeville in a blind fog.”), but also adopts an in-joke filled, fourth wall-breaking format that lends it a particular resonance for fans of H.P. Lovecraft and the world he inhabited.
More than just another correspondent or contemporary, Frank Belknap Long was one of the few people who could actually claim to have been a close personal friend of Lovecraft, getting to know him not merely through the voluminous exchanges of correspondence with which Lovecraft managed most of his personal relationships, but in person too. Lovecraft regularly stayed with Long’s family in Brooklyn whilst visiting New York, and the pair spent a great deal of time together during HPL’s ill-fated sojourn in the city in the mid-‘20s.
Howard & Frank, Flatbush, Brooklyn, 1931
With this in mind, little is left to the imagination when ‘The Space Eaters’ introduces us to ‘Frank’, a practical, rambunctious sort of fellow who is currently ensconced in a remote farmhouse with his good friend ‘Howard’, an intense, haunted author of sanity-shaking macabre tales;
“My friend wrote short stories. He wrote to please himself, in defiance of contemporary taste, and his tales were unusual. They would have delighted Poe; they would have delighted Hawthorne, or Ambrose Bierce, or Villiers de l’Isle-Adam. They were studies of abnormal men, abnormal beasts, abnormal plants. He wrote of remote relams of imagination and horror, and the colors, sounds and odors which he dared to evoke were never seen, heard or smelt on the familiar side of the moon. He projected his creations against mind-chilling backgrounds. They stalked through still and lonely forests, over ragged mountains, and slithered down the stairs of ancient houses, and between the piles of rotting black wharves.”
Indulgent as such self-referential blather may seem to us now, I’m sure that at the time of writing neither man had any idea that their stories – confined to the pages of marginal, cheaply printed pulps – would still be being pored over by readers nearly a century later. And despite the injokey tone, I find it interesting that, whilst clearly not short on praise for his friend’s writing, Long’s actual characterisation of Lovecraft in the story is somewhat less than wholly complimentary.
“As I continued to stare at him he suddenly stopped writing and shook his head. ‘I can’t do it,’ he said. ‘I should have to invent a new language. And yet I can comprehend the thing emotionally, intuitively, if you will. If I could only convey it in a sentence somehow – the strange crawling of its fleshless spirit!’ ‘Is it some new horror?’ I asked. He shook his head. ‘It is not new to me. I have known and felt it for years – a horror utterly beyond anything your prosaic brain can conceive.’ ‘Thank you,’ I said.”
Whilst I’m sure it was all in good fun, ‘Howard’ is nonetheless revealed to be a rather callous and unstable individual, his behaviour quickly becoming slightly unhinged as the brain-eating horrors lurking within that ‘blind fog’ descend:
“Slowly we became aware that the wails came from far away. As far away, perhaps, as Mulligan Wood. ‘A soul in torture,’ muttered Howard. ‘A poor, damned soul in the grip of the horror I’ve been telling you about – the horror I’ve known and felt for years.’ He rose unsteadily to his feet. His eyes were shining and he was breathing heavily. I seized his shoulders and shook him. ‘You shouldn’t project yourself into your stories that way,’ I exclaimed. ‘Some poor chap is in distress. I don’t know what’s happened. Perhaps a ship foundered. I’m going to put on a slicker and find out what it’s all about. I have an idea we may be needed.’ ‘We may be needed,’ repeated Howard slowly. ‘We may be needed indeed. It will not be satisfied with a single victim. Think of that great journey through space, the thirst and dreadful hungers it must have known! It is preposterous to imagine it will be content with one victim!’ Then, suddenly, a change came over him. The light went out of his eyes and his voice lost its quiver. He shivered.
‘Forgive me,’ he said. ‘I’m afraid you’ll think I’m as mad as the yokel who was here a few minutes ago. But I can’t help identifying myself with my characters when I write. I’d described something very evil, and those yells – well they are exactly like the yells a man would make if – if..’”
Despite such ruminations on the perils of confusing fantasy with reality however, Long’s usual jaunty, good-natured tone continues to predominate, and overall ‘The Space Eaters’ emerges as another rampantly weird pulp outing, playing out like some sweaty, chronically twisted Boy’s Own adventure, as our dynamic duo of macabre scribblers don their ‘slickers’ to take on brain-sucking vampires in the dark woods and come under siege from telepathic alien evils and trepanned zombie rednecks in their cabin (shades of ‘The Evil Dead’ perhaps?), eventually making their escape via motorboat, throwing magically-charged cross gestures at the demonic apparition rising above the ill-starred forest… a poorly judged intrusion of Christianity into the bleak Lovecraftian cosmos that seems likely to have enraged HPL far more than any perceived slight on his character.
As with ‘The Hounds of Tindalos’, ‘The Space Eaters’ ends with an epilogue that sees the good-natured Frank arriving too late to prevent the powers of alien-occult damnation returning to claim his more obsessive friend, thus furnishing both stories with conclusions which could possibly be read as not-too-deeply-coded warnings re: a certain someone’s propensity to take all this abyss-gazing just a bit too seriously.
Unlike his ill-fated friend, Frank Belknap Long never seems to have much troubled the thoughts of critics, academics or high-falutin’ pop culture weirdos, but one gets the impression he probably didn’t object to relative anonymity that much, spending the remainder of life thoroughly immersed in the world of commercial pulp fiction, and earning his living as a working writer right up to the early ‘80s. Through the ‘30s and ‘40s he continued to contribute to Weird Tales and other pulps, also finding time to ghost-write several Ellery Queen mysteries alongside scripts for numerous comic books, including DC’s Superman and Green Lantern. From the late ‘50s onward he followed several of his fellow Weird Tales scribes into the lucrative(?) realm of paperback sci-fi, penning such bluntly titled epics as ‘Woman From Another Planet’ (1959) and ‘It Was The Day of the Robot’ (1963), before paying the bills into the mid ‘70s with a series of gothic mysteries, written under the name of his wife Lyda.
By this point, retirement must surely have beckoned, but Long’s connection to the by-now-legendary Lovecraft still kept his name on (a few) people’s lips, and his bibliography is rounded out with a steady stream of reminiscences, book introductions, convention appearances and fan-published chapbooks of Lovecraftian verse, all harking back to those few years he spent knocking about with that long-faced geezer from Providence.
