Gwen, in Green

GWEN, IN GREEN

With a new introduction by

WILL ERRICKSON

VALANCOURT BOOKS

Dedication: For May, who planted the seed

Gwen, in Green by Hugh Zachary

Originally published by Fawcett Books in 1974

Copyright © 1974 by Hugh Zachary

Republished by arrangment with the Estate of Hugh Zachary

Introduction copyright © 2021 by Will Errickson

“Paperbacks from Hell” logo designed by Timothy O’Donnell. © 2017 Quirk Books. Used under license. All rights reserved.

Published by Valancourt Books, Richmond, Virginia

http://www.valancourtbooks.com

All rights reserved. The use of any part of this publication reproduced, transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, or stored in a retrieval system, without prior written consent of the publisher, constitutes an infringement of the copyright law.

Cover text design by M. S. Corley

INTRODUCTION*

Even to diehard readers of the obscure and the forgotten, the name Hugh Zachary will mean little. Perhaps it’s because he used so many pseudonyms, like many a prolific author; or perhaps because he never really wrote that one great novel—jack of all, master of none. Despite his having written and published dozens of books in virtually all genres for decades, none of his works is in print today. Until, I am thrilled to say, now. His 1974 novel, Gwen, in Green, joins Valancourt’s lauded reprint series of titles featured in my and Grady Hendrix’s Paperbacks from Hell. For my money, Zachary’s novel is almost a perfect example of its type, a paperback original featuring an eerie yet undeniably gorgeous cover illustration, complete with dated social mores, iffy sexual shenanigans, and a paranormal concept ripped right from a New Age pseudoscientific bestseller.

Born in 1928 in Ohio, Hugh Zachary wrote some in high school and spent his summers reading Edgar Rice Burroughs and working in a movie theater. Growing up while the romance of Hemingway and Fitzgerald still held sway, Zachary thought being a writer “would be neat,” that it meant romance, money, and travel, not alcoholism, debt, and suicide. He served in the Army, attended college at University of North Carolina–Wilmington, then worked in radio and television for years, till the Sixties, when his struggle—after almost 300 rejections—to become a full-time professional writer finally paid off. One Day in Hell, his first novel, appeared in 1961, a low-rent cheapie paperback with cover art of a greasy, hairy-armed brute manhandling a scantily clad woman in a grimy-looking midnight wasteland. “It wasn’t a bad book,” he said years later on his webpage. “It was a terrible book.”

For a while, Zachary wrote under the name Peter Kanto, publishing dozens of books for the erotic sleaze market, with not-quite-titillating titles like A Man Called Sex, Make the Bride Blush, The World Where Sex Was Born, Moonlighting Wives, and for no particular reason, my favorite, The Girl with the Action. Untangling his publication history seems a fool’s errand, but Zachary—often helped in the writing of “intimate scenes” by his wife Elizabeth and the occasional bottle of grapefruit brandy—churned out paperback originals for various publishers into the Nineties. “I’ve written in every field except bestseller,” Zachary quipped. Indeed: he and Elizabeth produced historical fiction, westerns, romance novels, sea adventures, Civil War tales, a post-apocalyptic series, even a regional cookbook, from his home on Oak Island, North Carolina.

Long a fan of the golden age of science fiction, he used the name Zach Hughes for more than a dozen books in the genre (“If you run into a book that you see ‘Hugh Zachary’ on, you know that I liked it”), beginning with The Book of Rack the Healer from Award Books in 1973. Most of what he wrote in the Eighties would be SF titles such as Killbird, Sundrinker, Gold Star, Thunderworld. Some of these books were nominated for the Nebula Award, which is given out by the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America. Zachary mingled a bit with SF royalty: Theodore Sturgeon, Bradbury, up-and-comer Alan Dean Foster. (Not the mighty Asimov, however: “He was the ‘King,’ and he didn’t have much time for the science-fiction world or for fans or anything else.”)