Gwen, in Green

After coming into family money, George buys a plot of undeveloped land on an island on the Cape Fear River; nearby a nuclear power plant is being built (George’s research shows the danger of radioactivity is apparently nil). Now in come the developers, the earth movers, the bulldozers, and the crewmen to clear away the muck and brush and undergrowth and wild animals to build the Ferriers’ new dream home. Gwen and George have terrific Seventies sex, sip gin-and-tonics looking out over their luscious landscape from their balcony while listening to records on their hi-fi. This is living!

Gwen is what I consider a comfort read: its isolated, forested setting is cozy, inviting, relaxing even. George works his land, swims every morning, the perfect picture of hale and hearty Seventies manhood. Gwen begins paintings of trees and caring for lush African violets, becomes enamored of the Venus fly-trap plants she finds at the nearby lake, starts feeding them raw hamburger. But creeping into this calm domesticity come her grotesque nightmares of pain, dismemberment, death: “the mass roared down on her, huge teeth snapping at her. The mouth closed, clashing metal teeth, and she screamed once before she felt the tender flesh being punctured and rendered. Her upper body fell, being ripped from her legs and stomach and hips . . .”

And things get worse: their dog dies mysteriously, the family cat attacks her, she has suicidal thoughts, and, oh yeah, she sleeps with the meter man. As Gwen begins to suffer fugue states, these dalliances get more graphic, more illicit, more, shall we say, neighborly. Sex, and a connection to the rich, lush earth itself, are the only things that take away the pain of her nightmares.

When she tells her husband of her bizarre, morbid, aching dreams he chides her, “You are one spooky broad.” Gwen gets thee to a psychiatrist, Dr. Irving King, who’s in his 80s and one nap away from retiring, and he says to her, “You are much too pretty to be eaten by nightmare things.” (Paternalistic chauvinism is rarely absent from this era of paperback horror). But Dr. King turns out to be a kind of Van Helsing in the story, fascinated by Gwen’s fugue states, her obsession with the flesh-eating Venus fly-traps—why, he’s positive he once treated a similar case many years before . . .

It may not surprise you to hear that, occasionally, Gwen has some less-than-enlightened passages about gender, sexuality, and race. Pulpy popular fiction wasn’t written to challenge the status quo; it was written for a mass audience, often an uncritical one, and sometimes it shows. Gwen’s momentary offenses seem mild and so dated that any experienced reader will know these words and ideas are the thoughts, musings, and words of characters that Zachary has created within various timeframes, and not the author’s own views. I’ve certainly read more famous and more popular—and more recent—works that trade even more deeply in these uncomfortable notions.

Perhaps what endears the novel to me most is that, simply, it seems like Zachary had a good old time writing it: as he put it, he writes “as if I were watching a movie on a big screen. That’s not really living it myself but watching it—observing it.” The obvious pleasure he takes in his scenario, his confidence in his creation as he eases us into his tale, allows the reader to trust the author. Characters, even those who appear briefly, have specific natures and interior thoughts that ring true, all sketched out with a professional pen, and dialogue that, even at its crudest, sounds like it is sprung from people’s mouths. The many “intimate moments,” hinted at by the cover art, are delivered with aplomb, a wink, even when they veer ever so slightly into Penthouse Forum territory. In those days of Deep Throat, Xaviera Hollander’s Happy Hooker, and Sylvia Kristel’s Emmanuelle, Gwen is a natural fit. In other words, Gwen, in Green could only have been written in the early Seventies, and I’d have it no other way.

Will Errickson

September 2021

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.