“Weirdos turn me on.”
Against my better judgement, I am writing about Incubus.
Despite its reputation as just a bunch of people attempting to ride the coattails of Stephen King’s phenomenal success, the paperback horror boom of the 1980s actually produced a wide range of different writers and stories, most of them now buried under the sediment of history, despite noble efforts at resuscitation, such as Paperbacks from Hell and its companion reprint line from Valancourt Books.
However, it is also true that a lion’s share of the books that lurked behind those garish covers were trading in a handful of the exact same elements: A picture-postcard, Norman Rockwell town beset by often ancient evil, frequently tied to the town’s own history. A sprawling cast of POV characters who were likely to buy the farm shortly after they were introduced. A voyeuristic peek into the inner lives and often sordid underbellies of “regular folk.” And, accompanying that voyeurism, a focus on sexual “deviance” and sexual violence that frequently bordered on misogyny – when it didn’t go careening over the border altogether.
All of these elements are refracted from the doorstop novels of Stephen King, particularly works like Salem’s Lot, first published in 1975, and later It. Ray Russell’s Incubus was published just a year after Salem’s Lot, meaning that it is potentially fair to lump it in with the horror boom that followed. If so, however, it is an early example. More to the point, if those elements we described above are the defining features of so many of the paperback horrors that followed, then Incubus is the book that they all wish they could be.
Some time back, I wrote about the experience of watching Incubus, the 1982 adaptation of Russell’s 1976 novel, directed by John Hough, for the first time. And about the problems that the story’s central premise present when trying to enjoy it. What was true of the film, at least in that regard, is also true of the novel; in some ways more so.
In fact, movie and book run in a perhaps surprising number of parallels, even while they are, in other ways, entirely different beasts. The film somewhat inexplicably transposes the action from California to Wisconsin, of all places, for example. And in an unusual turn of events, my recollection of the film’s ending is quite a bit more of a downer than where the book ultimately goes. Probably the most significant change, however, comes from the elimination of Julian Trask, who is one of the closest things the novel has to a main character.
Trask is to the book as Van Helsing is to Dracula. He is also a familiar figure, by 1976 – an inexplicably well-off playboy anthropology professor who drives a Porsche and has dedicated himself to studying the paranormal. In the book, this makes him one of the main sources of exposition. In the movie, his role is instead divided between a couple of other characters, though the cinematic version also gets less into the exposition than the book does, instead being content to just be like, “Look, demon,” rather than building up a whole vaguely Lovecraftian mythology about “dawn gods” and prehuman ancestors and such.
I had put off reading Incubus for the same reason I put off watching the film: The subject matter. And the subject matter is also what guarantees that Incubus will likely never be singled out as a forgotten classic – and maybe shouldn’t be.
Writing about the movie, I summed up that problem by describing Incubus as “essentially a slasher movie if slashing was replaced with raping.” And that’s largely true in the book, as well, leaving aside that “slasher movie” was a genre that didn’t yet meaningfully exist in 1976.
The town of Galen is beset by a serial rapist whose assaults are so violent – and whose endowment is so gargantuan – that he leaves most of his victims dead. This leads the aforementioned Trask, who once taught anthropology in Galen and who has since devoted his life to the study of these sorts of beings, to the conclusion that there may be an incubus loose in the town, which brings him back to try to help.
“I didn’t love Incubus,” I also wrote about the movie. “The subject matter alone kind of guaranteed that.” And I didn’t love the book, for similar reasons, and yet, while I was still reading the book, I messaged a friend something to the effect that I was legitimately mad about how good it was, because I didn’t want to enjoy a book about this subject matter as much as I was.
It helps in some ways – and hurts in others – that Incubus feels kind of old-fashioned, even for 1976. This means that the assaults themselves are handled with a finesse and consideration that would be absent in just about any book published later in the horror boom. But it also shows up in some of the book’s presentation of men and women and sexuality. Blowjobs are regarded by several characters as either novel or scandalous, while other characters suggest that homosexuality is abnormal, and there is certainly an unpleasant frisson about trans bodies in the novel’s ending chapters, although by then there is so much horror piled up that it’s hard to untangle one thread of it from another.
“Was Russell being sexy or sexist?” wrote Will Errickson, for Tor.com. “Throughout the novel are moments in which it becomes clear that Russell had spent formative years as Playboy’s fiction editor,” Errickson points out. Yet, there are also moments when “women are decpicted as having a sex drive comparable to men and are able to express it in their own terms.”
It’s also true that the male gaze is rampant throughout Incubus, a decision that is at least partly an intentional one, designed to give the impression that, as characters say on more than one occasion, every man in town is a suspect. But it’s also partly just, y’know, the way things too often go. Ray Russell may have been a hell of a writer, but it’s not likely that he’s going to get held up for his feminism anytime soon.
While that undeniably lurid and undoubtedly problematic subject matter is what will turn many people – myself included – off of Incubus, that thing where Russell is a hell of a writer is what made me keep reading, regardless. And while Incubus is far from a perfect novel, even from a narrative standpoint, it shows off nicely what the horror boom formula was capable of, in the right hands.
Russell moves effortlessly between point-of-view characters like a stone skipping across the surface of a pond, with a deftness that is enviable, accomplishing in a few short sentences what other novels would have labored for chapters to do half as well. The mystery and uncertainty is maintained in a way that keeps one turning pages without smacking too much of manipulation (though, of course, it is). In fact, the primary complaint, from a narrative standpoint, is that several of the book’s red herrings and sub-plots aren’t resolved well enough in the closing chapters to justify the amount of time we’ve spent with them up ’til then.
Discovering a heretofore new to me Russell short story in an old anthology recently led me to request what I could of his work from the library that I hadn’t already read. While I knew Russell primarily as a screenwriter, my main previous exposure to his prose was in the form of Haunted Castles, which collected some of his best gothic fiction, including his infamous novellas such as Sardonicus and Sagittarius.
I first read The Case Against Satan, since it was easier to get ahold of due to a Penguin re-issue with a Laird Barron intro from a few years back. A novel notorious mainly for having prefigured The Exorcist nearly a decade earlier, The Case Against Satan pulls off a similar trick to Incubus, in that it takes a form of story I have almost literally zero interest in (the Catholic exorcism tale, in this case) and transforms it into a page-turning mystery mainly by dint of Russell’s approach to the material.
And ultimately that’s the thing that made me keep reading – and keep enjoying – Incubus, despite really not wanting to read about this much sexual assault. Inside the front cover of the copy of Sardonicus & Other Stories that I got from the library was a blurb claiming that, “To anyone in search of the paralyzing thrills provided by the grand guignol (sic), Ray Russell’s horror writing is a fine substitute.” I found that to be true then, and I find it to be true now. Sometimes, that’s enough.
