Tag Archives: EIghties

Water Baby

Water Baby
Patricia Wallace | Zebra Books | 1987 | 301 pages

After a boating accident claims the lives of her parents and younger sister, seven-year-old Kelly Lucas goes to live under the care of her aunt Brooke. However, something in the sea lays a claim on Kelly, slowly growing in strength and reaching out to destroy the lives of those around her.

Kelly displays little fear of the water following the accident and begins to hear the call of her dead sister, but she quickly fades in importance as the story develops. Aunt Brooke, nominally the protagonist, is also reduced to a mere player in a dueling, who-will-she-choose romantic subplot between a concerned doctor and the earnest Coast Guard officer who rescued Kelly.

An expanding cast of secondary characters spiral out and around Kelly’s wealthy southern California beach community, providing a laundry list of potential victims. Between some general social critiques of the gated community’s lifestyle, many of these privileged sons or philandering fathers meet questionably waterlogged deaths. 

Probably the biggest failing in the book is the lack of a coherently developed lore surrounding the growing link between Kelly and her dead sister, and how it manifests into the supernatural happenings plaguing The Cove. Throw in a building storm that somehow increases the power of darkness at the ocean’s floor, along with the telepathic warnings received by a psychic who specializes in finding lost children, and any mythology the book attempts to build is muddied beyond understanding.

A boring medical malpractice subplot surrounding Kelly’s purported misdiagnosis plods along, resolving itself in a death with no connection at all to the Lucas family tragedy. Among the hospital characters, Dr. Decker is the most directly sympathetic, but ultimately his impact on the outcome of events is negligible beyond vague “feelings” of something not being right about the young girl’s case.

Brooke’s mother is institutionalized with melancholia, a condition that eventually leads to a mother-daughter scene that offers some half-baked ruminations on a vaguely implied hereditary issue. Within the text, “Water Baby” refers to either Brooke or her sister (Kelly’s mother) and their uncanny affinity for the water, although it also later could apply to Kelly and her sister. These generational pairings share some commonalities, but fail to tie together any relevance to the building power under the ocean that desires to pull Kelly under the churning waves.

Like so many other Zebra horror books of the 1980s, Water Baby completely fails to deliver on the promise of its cover. Disappointingly, don’t expect any skeleton mermaids nursing human infants on the bottom of the sea.

The Hunt

The Hunt
James Howard Kunstler | Tor Books | 1988 | 224 pages

“If the creature is just a legend, then what’s trying to kill you?”

A trip into the isolated wilderness of Northern California becomes a struggle for survival for two men in search of Bigfoot, although the dangers may stem more from humans than from sasquatches.

Old college friends Billy Nichols and R.J. Traveal set out from San Francisco for a weeks-long, male-bonding camping excursion in the woods. Billy is fascinated by the Bigfoot legends, and is determined to kill a specimen and return with the corpse as a trophy. 

However, Billy also hides a dark personal agenda. He has never emotionally recovered from a college fling with R.J.’s wife, the break-up precipitating a spiral deep down into a despair that culminated in a brief institutionalization. As the pair’s progress into the woods deepens, so does Billy’s latent hostility and potential for violence.

The story is a no-to-slow burn for at least the first half, as Billy’s growing resentment towards R.J. threatens to break the surface of their relationship. The early Bigfoot sightings are either fakes or false alarms, begging the question of whether or not the cryptid will actually play a role in the psychological struggle between the two men (or if readers will hold on long enough to find out). Billy’s deteriorating mental condition paints him as something of an unreliable witness, casting doubt on some of his observations.

The two protagonists also display a condescending classicism towards the small-town residents of the rural community they use as a starting point for the hunt. Billy and R.J.’s casual affluence (from antique collecting to binge-purchasing sporting goods) is contrasted with the local’s television-blaring lifestyle in broken-down trailers. The foundation for empathy towards these two self-absorbed yuppies and their ready bankroll is built on shaky soil.

Although Bigfoot is mostly absent early in the story, there are probably enough suspicious footprints, foul animal stenches, and ululating noises from the forest to keep creature enthusiasts invested, even while the character development fails to compel much interest.

When the legendary creatures finally make an appearance, it comes with a shocking twist on the Bigfoot canon. Spotted through a telephoto lens, the cryptids seem to share an unexpected appetite with the zombies from Return of the Living Dead.

A speeding Chevrolet Caprice on a lonely stretch of highway serves as a deus ex machina, leading to an oddly downbeat ending that reads closer to a treatise on mental health than a horror story.

Chain Letter

Chain Letter
Ruby Jean Jensen | Zebra Books | 1987 | 382 pages

Suburban kids Brian, Abby, and Shelly follow a lost dog* into an abandoned nursing home, where they discover a cursed missive that unleashes a string of misfortune and death.

*Sorry, Babs, we hardly knew ye. It’s not a spoiler alert to understand that you would fall victim to the genre trope of using dogs to elevate early tension.

Young protagonists are a hallmark of eighties horror fiction, and they are reasonably well drawn here, stashing their bikes in the woods and sneaking into forbidden areas with their parents or guardians none the wiser. Admittedly much paler in comparison to the group of friends on their mission quest in The Body (from Stephen King’s Different Seasons), the kids in Chain Letter at least fall short of crossing into the comic strip territory of their counterparts in The Goonies.

The chain letter itself is not the only source of horror, although once set in motion, its copies waste little time in unleashing violence in the small community. A strange, shadowy man seems to manipulate the action from the boarded up nursing home and haunt the characters. Abby, in particular, experiences some alarming changes in temperament. Her malicious attack on another friend is one of the more viscerally shocking events in the story.

Overall, Chain Letter is not overly explicit in its horrors, relying instead on the creepy atmosphere of the abandoned nursing home and the unsettling appearance of the apparitions of lost friends. The book would probably serve best as a spooky, young-adult tale for Halloween, although not particularly set in the season.

A late twist involving the content of a torn portion of the letter, and the ultimate identity of its shadowy author, mostly falls flat.

The Zebra paperback edition has become highly collectible due to its fantastic cover art by David Mann, whose skeletal postal worker and bloody correspondence (like so many other Zebra covers) arguably suggests a more compelling story than the one contained within its pages.

Ghost Train

Ghost Train
Stephen Laws | Tor | 1986 | 314 pages

Recovering from a near-fatal fall from the speeding King’s Cross train, Mark Davies is plagued by a series of mysterious nightmares, and a strange compulsion to return to the station and the transit line that nearly killed him.

As Mark sits in the station cafe compulsively watching the ticket entrance, a group of other characters from the greater environment of King’s Cross—from fellow commuters to bag ladies—are introduced, only to be killed in a variety of grisly manners. Night after night, Mark dreams of ancient rites and ritual murders, while during the day trying to remember the details of his accident. The early chapters, while somewhat disjointed due to the independent strands of temporary characters, establish a mood of mystery, and the prospect of a folk horror stalking the path of the British railway.

The introduction of Les Chadderton, a former detective whose own wife was a victim of self-immolation after riding the King’s Cross train, widens the scope of the mysterious attacks, and validates Mark’s affliction as something other than simple mental illness. The ex-policeman and stricken commuter serve as a duo of metaphysical investigators, with more overtly supernatural attacks leading them to the diabolic presence running along the King’s Cross rails.

By the time the pair recruit the assistance of a Catholic priest, any subtle folkloric-based creepiness gives way to an over-the-top, rock-em-sock-em horror more akin to The Evil Dead than to The Wicker Man. Passages meant to deliver breathless action begin to fatigue and become monotonous in their execution. Mark’s repeating dreams of purple-fogged pagan rites become repetitive, while the whole primal evil surrounding the ruins of ancient stone circles becomes suspiciously vulnerable to Christian rites of exorcism. A chapter literally listing the stone circle sites of Britain is a particular bore.

Once the final train-bound exorcism begins, the action ramps up even more. A trio of demon-touched passengers infect a range of others, leading to a wild onboard killing spree. More characters, including a soldier and his girlfriend are introduced, only to become fodder for the murderous rampage. The girlfriend is also an egregiously stereotypical histrionic female character—standing out even more due to the lack of other women in the primary cast of characters—existing only to passively watch the carnage, and let loose frequent rounds of screaming.

Weird ectoplasmic fluid coats the interior of the passenger cars, reanimated corpses wield axes, and Mark attains odd psychic powers as the runaway King’s Cross train hurls toward its final destination. It all feels a bit unwieldy and overblown, although peppered with several convenient shortcuts regarding associated powers and abilities designed to bring characters together and streamline the action. Mark’s latent telepathy and mental power to shift the rails are sketchily explained, but without much context in a story that otherwise has ample time to provide backstories on several minor characters.

I’m sure enthusiastic readers of baroque eighties horror will find plenty to like here, but I was left mostly bored, yet simultaneously exhausted, wishing perhaps that Ghost Train was in possession of more subtle terrors.

The Glory Hand

The Glory Hand
Paul & Sharon Boorstin | Berkley Books | 1983 | 289 pages

After her mother’s violent murder, thirteen-year-old Cassie Broyles enrolls in Casmaran, an exclusive summer camp in the wilds of rural Maine. Cassie soon discovers all is not as it appears at Casmaran, starting with her initial meeting with Miss Grace, the ancient, wheelchair-bound headmistress. The reclusive crone welcomes her with an inappropriately erotic kiss.

Cassie’s fellow campers are little more than one-dimensional cut outs, with a single defining trait describing their behavior. Chelsea is a Beverly Hills fashion plate; Jo is a poker-playing daughter of a Wall Street high roller; Melanie is a radio and television obsessed nerd who longs for Pac-Man and episodes of Dallas; and Iris is a Christian social outcast. All are tormented by a group of seniors led by Abigail, an overly developed beauty whose initial rounds of bullying lead to a series of strange hazing rituals.

An unnerving incident at the lakeside pavilion leads Cassie to wonder what strange powers the seniors possess, as several girls from Cassie’s circle—including her best friend Robin—seemingly fall under Abigail’s spell. The girls’ story is interrupted by the intrusion of another flatly developed, clichéd character. Jake Lazarus, a Jewish bohemian New Yorker (and deli-sandwich lover) renting a cabin from Camp Casmaran as an artistic retreat, spouts line after line of aching dialogue that attempts to pass as naturalistic.

While menstruation as a source of horror was arguably effective in Stephen King’s Carrie, here it is awkwardly detailed as a condition of ritual selection. Disappointingly, the elements of a coming-of-age horror set at camp never really gel into a successful story, but are still somehow inherently appealing. The main interest revolves around the adolescent protagonist, investigating weird clues and navigating the sinister landscape at Casmaran in an attempt to emotionally connect with her deceased mother. Jake’s story, however, and his wife’s attempt to intervene, seem like a distraction.

In an odd turn, the Curator of European Musical Instruments at the Metropolitan Museum of Art briefly plays the role of supernatural detective, consulting reference books and adroitly piecing together the hellish shenanigans at Casmaran—finally exclaiming, “You’ve got to get … out of there!”

Spoiler alerts are probably unnecessary, since following the rather obvious roadmap drawn by The Glory Hand eventually leads, of course, to a ***SATANIC COVEN*** debauching in the woods to celebrate the Grand Sabbath. A few final twists limply try to posit the is-she-or-isn’t-she-under-the-demonic-spell question, but fail to generate much suspense. Even the possible complicity of Cassie’s Senator father, circling back to the book’s prologue, ultimately lacks much impact considering his general absence from the story.

Also, points deducted [-1] for the obligatory killing of a kitten.

Cast a Cold Eye

Cast a Cold Eye | Alan Ryan | Tor Books | 1984 | 350 pages

Small, isolated communities always seem to harbor terrible secrets, and the western Irish village of Doolin is no exception. American writer Jack Quinlan travels to Doolin for background research on the Irish Famine for an upcoming historical novel, but soon discovers the tragic victims of the past are hauntingly present in the lives of the villagers.

The barren, windswept coast of Ireland provides an evocative setting for a chilling ghost story, as Jack experiences visitations of mournful, skeletal figures on the roads and in the countryside around his cottage and the village. Grainne Clarkin, a bookstore clerk he met in a brief stopover in Dublin, occasionally comes to visit him for weekends in Doolin, providing a native Irish romantic interest for Jack that occasionally verges on fetishistic.

“He studied her face, her dark eyes, her perfect white skin, her black hair, her fragile build combined with a full ripe body.”

The ongoing will-they-or-won’t-they subplot is finally consummated on a stone slab outdoors during a ferocious rainstorm in an overblown climax that would seem more in keeping with a lurid romance novel. Meanwhile, a group of village old-timers engage in cryptic blood rituals after suffering a few deaths from their ranks, the splattering of the bottled blood around their gravesites echoing the splashing of Grainne’s virginal blood on the rain-soaked ground.

Jack’s ghostly encounters are genuinely creepy; skeletal men by the side of the road, emaciated children crying out to their separated mothers, and ethereal tunes following him across the barrens. Cold to the touch, but seemingly corporeal, these spirits ultimately vanish, leaving Jack to question his own sanity. Protective of Grainne, he reaches out to the local priest for help, but to little avail.

Jack ruminates on the perception of Ireland through the lens of outsiders, particularly those like himself who reach back to their familial homeland in order to find some connection with their lost ancestry. The novel itself is steeped in an emphatic Irishness, although perhaps also filtered through the perspective of an outsider. The breadth of history is argued to be a constant, living presence in the lives of the Doolin villagers, but the Famine in particular serves mostly as a shallow context, a convenient reference point for a group of specters, however effective.

Doolin does, of course, harbor a dark secret, but Cast a Cold Eye refreshingly avoids sending its outsider protagonist down the fatal Wicker Man path. The villagers are just as terrified as Jack Quinlan, and although perhaps suspicious of his motives and Dublin girlfriend, ultimately accept him into their fold.

All events converge and resolve in a satisfactory way, generally avoiding easy genre pitfalls and potential clichés as the days reach toward the quintessential horror boilerplate–-the showdown on All Hallow’s Eve.

Dark Seeker

Dark Seeker | K.W. Jeter | Tor Books | 1987 | 317 Pages

The blue-tinged darkness flickering at the edges of Mike Tyler’s vision constantly threatens to expand and overwhelm his perception of reality, kept at bay only by a strictly regulated series of pills. His medicated state serves as a dark legacy of murders committed in an altered consciousness as part of a cult, directed by a Manson-like guru who dosed his followers into a raised, hive-mind level of awareness with an experimental drug. The capture of his wife, after years on the run from police, triggers a crisis that encourages him to stop his medication, and succumb to the seductive call of a psychotropic past.

Mike’s jailhouse visit with his wife provides the foundation for the core dramatic tension in Dark Seeker. Accepting her own fate, she pleads with him to rescue their son, who—she claims—was stolen away from her by another former cult member just prior to her capture. The story awakens powerful memories in Mike of their son—and of his tragic death just weeks after being born.

A rather convenient explanation involving a changeling sets Mike off to find his missing son. Disposing of his pills, he lapses back into his enhanced mindset, hoping to merge awareness with the other former cultists and discover the location of his son. But Mike knows that something else lives in that psychically enhanced darkness, a presence he remembers as The Host, whose murderous agenda seems to have only grown over the years.

Most of the horror derives from brief visitations from The Host, his liquid black eyes and long teeth swimmingly superimposed on the edge of vision. One sequence involving a corpse in a car could almost play as dark slapstick, with the physicality of an inert body thwarting the attempts at its manipulation and disposal.

A grim and gritty view of Los Angeles provides the backdrop, its geography-of-nowhere landscape of chain link fences and freeway underpasses defining encounters between former cult members, destitute homeless, and former abuse victims desperately attempting to build new lives.

The Host serves as something akin to a bogeyman, its mysterious nature and origins secondary to the shock value derived from fleeting glimpses and unexpected arrivals. Readers looking for some explanation of this enigmatic evil figure will probably be left disappointed. Instead, the dramatic quest for family drives Dark Seeker, through the mirrored domestic units of Mike’s tenuous present and tragic past.

Back on the Chain Gang

 

Back on the Chain Gang
The Pretenders | Learning to Crawl | Sire Records | 1984

I found a picture of you, oh oh oh oh
What hijacked my world that night
To a place in the past
We’ve been cast out of? Oh oh oh oh
Now we’re back in the fight
We’re back on the train
Oh, back on the chain gang

A circumstance beyond our control, oh oh oh oh
The phone, the TV and the news of the world
Got in the house like a pigeon from hell, oh oh oh oh
Threw sand in our eyes and descended like flies
Put us back on the train
Oh, back on the chain gang

The powers that be
That force us to live like we do
Bring me to my knees
When I see what they’ve done to you
But I’ll die as I stand here today
Knowing that deep in my heart
They’ll fall to ruin one day
For making us part

Those were the happiest days of my life
Like a break in the battle was your part, oh oh oh oh
In the wretched life of a lonely heart
Now we’re back on the train
Oh, back on the chain gang