Familiar Spirit

While that book was never to be, a germ of it resides in Familiar Spirit. As for the actual origins of the novel, Tuttle states that “it began as a very long short story that I tried to sell to Charles L. Grant.” Grant, who died in 2006, was a quiet giant in horror fiction, an author and editor whose ten-volume anthology series Shadows (1978-1991) has long been considered a high point of the genre’s heyday. Encouraged by Grant to turn “The Familiar Spirit” into a full-length novel, Tuttle says she “went on past the ending of the original story [and] my ideas about it changed . . . dropping the idea of writing about my own thinly-disguised friends, lovers, and ex-lovers freed me up.”

First published by Berkley Books as an unassuming paperback original in February 1983 bearing the tagline “A novel of love and terror,” Familiar Spirit was one of many titles from that publisher who had had enormous success with science fiction. They began adding horror titles around 1980, with a lineup that included bestselling big guns Dean R. Koontz, Peter Straub, F. Paul Wilson, and eventually the first American publications of Clive Barker’s Books of Blood. Tuttle recalls her book “was rejected by seven or eight publishers—most of them saying they did not think it was ‘strong enough . . . to stand out against all the other occult/haunted house type novels.’ ”

But one Berkley editor, Victoria Shocket, did like it, and after a few happy revisions, Spirit reached the bookshelves. Two months later, it was published in the U.K. by New English Library, her publisher for the science fiction novel she’d written with George R.R. Martin, 1981’s Windhaven. That edition of Spirit boasted a lovely cover by noted British artist Steve Crisp—and its own apt tagline: “Her mind, then her body, were being invaded, perverted, destroyed.”

April 1989 saw Spirit reprinted by Tor Books, after Tor published Tuttle’s second novel, 1987’s Gabriel, which editor Melissa Singer had acquired. Tuttle’s tireless agent Howard Morhaim tried to interest Singer in A Nest of Nightmares, but Singer wanted a horror novel. Morhaim made a wise decision of his own, sending Singer the now out-of-print Berkley edition of Spirit, which the editor was “wildly enthusiastic” about. Although Morhaim secured Tuttle a two-book deal with Tor for both Spirit and Nest, only the former was published; the end of the horror boom was nigh, and Tor cut back their horror output. “I got to keep the advance,” Tuttle notes.

Tor, founded in 1980 by former bookseller Tom Doherty, is one of the most prominent science fiction and fantasy publishers in the world. In the Eighties and Nineties, Tor put out plenty of horror, its distinctive spine icon of a rock-faced monster—designed by Carol Russo and actually used as cover art for Scare Tactics, the 1988 collection of short stories by John Farris—instantly recognizable to serious fans of the genre. No doubt you know the authors: the aforementioned Grant, Robert Bloch, Ramsey Campbell, Elizabeth Engstrom, Graham Masterton, Kathryn Ptacek, T. M. Wright, and dozens more. Tuttle fit right into this august cadre.

This cover is a good example of the era’s style, with the title in vibrant green and orange, with a huge hand and a dancing jade-like figure showing off her feminine wiles, illustrative of events in the novel. Artist Lee MacLeod painted distinctive work not only for Tor but also Pinnacle, Pocket, and Avon Books (do look up his cover for the 1989 Western horror anthology Razored Saddles!). The Tor tagline, “Even a broken heart has a heart’s desire,” gets right at the very essence of the tale within . . .

Familiar Spirit is a story about heartache, desire, and plain old horniness, topics which so many horror writers were eager to write about but, let’s be honest, which so few were equipped to. Tuttle eschews the intensity of many Eighties horror novels in favor of the restrained and the intimate. Just as in many of her chilling short stories, Tuttle uses quiet, unassuming prose to navigate her protagonist’s interior life, revealing turmoil beneath placid waters. Sarah has hardly settled into her new home before the odd and the uncanny begin, and then one night, a ghostly voice from the darkness: “I can give you whatever you want, whatever you most desire. Your lover. I can tell you how to win him back . . .”