Some of the better covers I've seen lately are from Pinnacle, a regular publisher of thrillers, SF, and horror throughout the 1970s and '80s - that golden era of paperbacks we so dearly love! I haven't read any of these, so I can't comment on content, but I think you can appreciate 'em still.

First up, two by Kenneth Girard: at top, Altered Egos, showcasing the ever-popular and extra-creepy ventriloquist's dummy. I'm diggin' it! The Calling is all kinds of off, and the title and illustration seem to have no connection, the same way dude's arm has no possible connection to his body.

The Hearse is apparently a novelization of a movie I've never heard of, but I like its random thrown-together look. Is the lady being run over by the titular vehicular? Dunno, but damn, the irony!

Heh. I said titular.

Sexual possession! Aw yeah. Great art thanks to Paul Stinson. Is she about to blow a ghost?!

 Fuck yeah! Love this. Watch out mom and dad!

Hey-O. This isn't offensive at all!

"The unsuspecting footsteps" - is that right? What the hell? Although I always like a quieter style of cover too.

Anyway, I hope to get a solid review up soon, but right now I'm leisurely reading my first Agatha Christie book - Endless Night - so I don't know when I'll pick up my next horror novel. Not sure what, or who, to go with next...

Please, if anybody out there's read any of 'em, let us know!

It's no surprise that after the success of his debut horror novel The Manitou in 1975 that Graham Masterton would want to return to his Lovecraft-inspired mythology of Native American medicine men and their attempts to wreak vengeance on the evil, plundering white man. Invoking the unpronounceable names of inhuman gods and demons from the great beyond, these powerful priests are virtually unstoppable, and can reincarnate themselves in unsuspecting humans almost at will. Perfect for sequelization! Revenge of the Manitou (Pinnacle 1982), however, is not that perfect sequel. I felt it lacked the eyebrow-raising absurdity of the original novel, its sense of fun and menace as it dispensed with rational believability in the service of a ripping horror yarn. Revenge was all too easy to put down for a day or two, as it retreads ground already covered in the original, and doesn't really bring any unique characters to the proceedings.


The story has plenty of potential: a boy named Toby Fenner begins to freak out his parents when he and his classmates start seeing ghostly apparitions, having nightmares, drawing horrendous pictures in crayon, and speaking in guttural voices about nonsense like "the day of dark stars" and "the prophecy buried on the stone redwood." Cue more mysterious and deadly occurrences that convince the boy's father, Neil, that his son is being controlled by the dread Misquamacus, the most powerful medicine man, like, ever. He, and 20 other great old Indian medicine men of enormous occult skills, have taken over the bodies of Toby and his young friends in an attempt to call down, using all their combined powers, those amorphous entities of darkness and tentacles (the most fearsome of which has the oddly familiar-sounding name of Ka-tua-la-hu) that will demand the blood of the white man for all his destruction of the Indian way of life. Masterton puts it all too plainly:

The day of the dark stars begins at noon and lasts through to the following noon. It's supposed to be 24 hours of chaos and butchery and torture, the day when the Indian people have their revenge for hundreds of years of treachery and slaughter and rape, all in one huge massacre.


Uh-oh. Mostly the novel feels a bit half-hearted and even under-written in places, although things pick up with the return of that sham occultist Harry Erskine (and I now see a bemused, cynical Tony Curtis in my head after watching him as Erskine in the movie version of The Manitou) and his pal Singing Rock, the modern-day medicine man who uses his powers for good, you know. The lurid cover of the Pinnacle paperback at top (by Paul Stinson) depicts the climax: a schoolbus on a treacherous bridge with the possessed schoolchildren battling it out against Erskine, Fenner, and Singing Rock, as well as a bunch of unfortunate cops and National Guardsmen (the usual expendables). The climax is violent and grotesque, but simply not as exciting as the original novel's; as I said, seems too much a retread.

If you're a Masterton completist you've probably already read Revenge; if not, I'd say you could maybe skip it. However, I'm still eager to read his other titles like The Djinn, Picture of Evil, and Pariah, but I think I'm done visiting with the likes of Misquamacus. As Tony Curt--I mean Erskine hilariously understates at the end, "I don't want to meet that goddamned Misquamacus again as long as I live."