Familiar Spirit

Sarah is determined not to be frightened out of the house (the rent’s so cheap!), and we see that her sexual longing is a perfect entry point for the supernatural to creep in. Doing her requisite research about the house’s history, Sarah comes into possession of the owner’s diary from decades before. For one long chapter, Tuttle switches over to these diary entries, one of the most fascinating parts of the novel: “I was flesh, I was alive, and the pleasure I felt beneath his hands frightened me. I felt his breath on my face, and then his tongue in my mouth, flickering like a snake’s. But the venom was so sweet . . .”

Tuttle’s approach is more mature than the usual glut of juvenile, generic horror, and therefore more convincing: as Spirit progresses, Sarah’s sexual appetite comes to the fore. Tuttle does not shy away from almost uncomfortably graphic sex scenes, which add an earthy depth and believability to the proceedings. These elements of ecstasy, violence, and even humiliation are not simply tacked on as exploitative cheap thrills. No, these elements need to be here, they are motivation; they power the engine of occult doings that upends Sarah’s life and sanity, illuminating the characters we’re reading about, right up to the delicious final line.

“Nothing waited for her there,” Tuttle writes, as Sarah returns to the house she’s run from after a particularly nasty encounter there with an enraged feline. “No cat with glowing eyes, no evil, supernatural rat, no diabolical spirit. Because such things didn’t exist.” Oh, Sarah. You’ve spent too much time reading Flannery O’Connor and William Faulkner, and not nearly enough reading Eighties horror paperbacks, where those things—and worse—not only exist, but thrive, and will not be denied.

Will Errickson

July 2020

Will Errickson is a lifelong horror enthusiast and author of the Too Much Horror Fiction blog, where he rediscovers forgotten titles and writers and celebrates the genre’s resplendent cover art. With Grady Hendrix in 2017, he co-wrote the Bram Stoker Award-­winning Paperbacks from Hell, which featured many books from his personal collection. Today Will resides in Portland, Oregon, with his wife Ashley and his ever-growing library of vintage horror paperbacks.

For Bill and Sally Wallace and the rest of my ghost-hunting, spirit-raising, table-rapping friends,

and

for Harlan Ellison, a few years late, but still with gratitude and affection. Forget the one about Texas under water; it was a dumb idea.

Prologue

After a long while Valerie rose from her slumped, broken position like a puppet whose dangling strings have at last been gathered and pulled. She looked down at herself, running hands over arms, legs, breasts, stomach, and a triumphant smile stretched across her face. Without haste, she walked down the short hallway from the bedroom to the bathroom, and stared into the soap-spotted mirror above the sink.

The smile grew harder and brighter. But although the triumph in it doubled, shining out of the mirror, the odd golden gleam in Valerie’s eyes, almost like a glimpse of flame, had no reflection.

“Yes,” she said, testing her voice. “Yes, you’ll do. You’ll do for now. A temporary home.” She leaned closer to the mirror, intent upon the reflection, studying her face. “I’ll make some changes, of course. I’ll take better care of you, Valerie, than you ever took of yourself.” She laughed, a rich, satisfied chuckle, all the while watching the face in the mirror to see how she looked when she laughed.

Her hands had been resting lightly on the porcelain rim of the sink, unneeded and unnoticed as she concentrated on face and voice. Now, still unnoticed, they moved. The right arm lifted and reached in an old, familiar gesture, and the right hand took hold of the drinking glass that hung on the wall. That hand then brought the glass down, cracking it against the side of the sink with a deft flick of the wrist. Half the glass sheared away and fell to the floor, leaving behind a curved glass dagger in a heavy base.

Hardly more than a second had passed; the tinkling crunch of breaking glass had not yet registered on the mind of the woman who spoke to herself as to a stranger.

Left hand turned over, presenting the pale, veined throat of a wrist to the sacrificial knife. Right hand brought the glass blade jabbing down hard, then ripped inwards, towards the body, tearing the skin and letting a blood-river halfway to the elbow. Only then did Valerie look away from the mirror, down to see what her hands were doing.