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March 7 - March 9, 2020
The Gestapochauns live in the dark, battling their ancient rat enemies with teeny bullwhips. Shortly after we meet them, the author lets us know that these are not just any Nazi leprechauns. These are psychic Nazi leprechauns who enjoy S&M, are covered with scars from pleasure/pain sessions with their creator, were trained as sex slaves for full-sized human men, and are actually stunted fetuses taken from Jewish concentration camp victims. And one of them is named Adolph.
St. George knows who the culprits are: “Hippies, drop outs, draft dodgers, left-wing radicals, right-wing militants, Jesus Freaks, Devil worshippers, generation gappers, motorcycle weirdos—the whole shebang.” He balances the scales with these cultists (one of whom is “as gay as a green goose when the asses were down”) using LSD and hand grenades.
One thing all these books had in common, besides a fanatical devotion to the forces of darkness and a phobic fear of private clubs, was that their characters were as white as the driven snow. Why was Satan only bothering white people? Turns out he wasn’t.
After being shocked by her lesbian neighbors (“Masturbation and lesbianism. Right in front of me!”) Alison takes to fainting randomly.
As for the succubus, Angela Tansa, she drives Porsches and must have sex every seven days in order to stay alive. Her latest Romeo is a Eurotrash aristocrat who says things like, “I want to fuck that fatness out of you!” as Angela gorges on artichokes and Mexican food…because she’s carrying Cardinal Ricci’s baby!
But in 1977 the publishers saw horror novels all over drugstore racks and asked one of its authors, Brian McNaughton, to rip off the recent hit The Omen. When he turned in his sex-free manuscript, the head of the company ordered him to put in more “quivering breasts” and “stirring pricks.”
If you are visiting a fertility clinic that has a conveyor belt running directly from the delivery room to what everyone refers to as “the Off-Limits Building,” find another doctor.
The message seemed to be that women should have babies by finding them in a cabbage patch or receiving them from a stork, the way nature intended, rather than using their dangerous, weird-looking wombs.
Every fetus eventually turns into a child, and, as so many wise men and women in the horror paperback industry know, terror toddles on two chubby legs.
If Whitney Houston is right, and the children are indeed our future, then we need to approach our future with maximum caution.
“But how do I know if the man I’m dating is the devil?” I hear you ask. Here are some warning signs learned from Seed of Evil: Does he refuse to use contractions when he speaks? Does he deliver pickup lines like, “You live on the edge of darkness”? When nude, is his body the most beautiful male form you have ever seen, but possessed of a penis that’s either monstrously enormous, double-headed, has glowing yellow eyes, or all three? After intercourse, does he laugh malevolently, urinate on your mattress, and then disappear? If you spot any of these behaviors, chances are you went on a date with
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On the glass-half-full side, the whole town works together and brings their psychotic progeny under control, with local Vietnam and Korean War vets teaming up to machine-gun the little ankle biters into kibble. As they say: it takes a village.
Hating clowns is a waste of time because you’ll never loathe a clown as much as he loathes himself. But a magician? Magicians think they’re wise and witty, full of patter and panache, walking around like they don’t deserve to be shot in the back of the head and dumped in a lake. For all the grandeur of its self-regard, magic consists of nothing more than making a total stranger feel stupid. Worse, the magician usually dresses like a jackass.
It forms a cloud and drifts across England like a deadly fart, turning cows psychotic, making schoolboys castrate their gym teachers (Herbert hates gym teachers),
The gas turns out to be the work of a bacteria called a mycoplasma that has grown enormous, but Holman could give a flip. He’s going to blow it the hell up.
for Herbert had revealed a great truth to aspiring horror novelists that would guide British horror books for the next twenty years: human beings are delicious, and England is full of them.
Next up: crabs. What could drive a crab to kill? Doesn’t take much, as it turns out. They’re the angriest residents in nature’s death zoo. You barely have to look at one sideways before it’s making menacing clickety-clicks.
Immediately turning giant praying mantises into giant praying-mantis lemonade, Dyke trains them to kill at his command.
There is no moral. God is dead and life is a bleak, dark tunnel lined with hungry insects.
If social and political anxiety spawns zombies, then economic anxiety births haunted houses.
At the climax it’s revealed that she is the living embodiment of Mother Earth and Dracula goes to her, crawling up inside her cavernous vagina while glowing like a 100-watt light bulb. Before Anne Rice, vampires killed humans. Now they got in touch with their sensitive sides while muffin-spelunking inside of them. They aren’t predators, they are, literally, a part of us.
