Paperbacks from Hell [N.F. - Literature, Art]

Variations on this formula buried bookshelves for over a decade and had an enormous impact on the first wave of paperback horror covers. Women in diaphanous gowns holding candles, dark houses, stormy skies, and a reliance on the more ominous end of the color spectrum became trademarks. Hair, clouds, gowns, and landscapes dissolved into abstract swirls, light was luminous, darkness was tangible, compositions were dynamic.

Gothic romances seeded readers’ imaginations for the horror boom that was on the horizon. Brooding, shadowy mysteries were relocated to the domestic sphere, turning every home into a haunted castle and every potential bride into a potential victim. The blood of the resilient gothic heroine would flow in the veins of ’70s and ’80s heroines fighting to save their souls from Satan, or were-sharks. And were-sharks were coming. Because over on the other side of the bookrack, pulp fiction was getting interested in the occult.

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A Mod Approach to Demon-Fighting

The Guardians were pulp adventurers right out of the ’30s, juiced with the trendy occult fascination of the late ’60s, when suddenly everybody wanted to know your sign and Parker Brothers was selling Ouija boards in toy stores. Anton LaVey’s Church of Satan opened its doors in San Francisco in 1966; a year later the Rolling Stones released Their Satanic Majesties Request, and the year after that came their song “Sympathy for the Devil.” By 1969, the cover of Time magazine was talking about “Astrology and the New Cult of the Occult.” Pulp was ready to cash in.

The totally macho moniker “Peter Saxon” was a group pen name for a bunch of British authors (W. Howard Baker, Rex Dolphin, and Wilfred McNeilly, among others) who churned out ersatz pulp novels with fully painted covers that looked like all the other pulp reprints on the stands. Baker had used the Saxon pen name to write some popular installments of the Sexton Blake detective series, and by many accounts he was the mastermind who ensured that his cabal of Guardian ghost writers hit their quota of nubile flesh, gratuitous violence, and sexy swinging.

The six Guardian books were about square-jawed, tweed-and-blackbriar-pipe types investigating haunted houses, underwater vampires, voodoo cults, and Australians. Sort of like Scooby-Doo, only with more orgies. Occult detectives had been literary superstars in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, but this was their first major upgrade to Swinging London, and the books read like Hammer horror films gone mod.

On the frontlines of the fight against “Black Magic, Satanism, Necromancy, Witchcraft, Sorcery, Voodoo, Vampirism” was Steven Kane, the square-jawed occult expert and judo master. He was joined by hypochondriac private investigator Lionel Marks, Anglican priest Father John Dyball, and the exotic and alluring miniskirted psychic Anne Ashby, whose silver wrist cuffs gave her heightened psychic perceptions.

The Guardians logged their adventures in the Journal of Evil while their enormous cat, Bubastis, lurked about lapping up sherry. They discovered where evil dwelt by dowsing a road map, then zipped off in their Jaguars and Land Rovers to battle Scottish Death Dwarves, voodoo caverns located beneath the streets of London, and sinister covens of Glasgow beatniks. In The Vampires of Finistere, their best adventure, a young bride-to-be is abducted from under her boyfriend’s nose during a mysterious pagan fertility festival in Brittany. Underwater vampires are to blame, and Steven Kane has to battle wolves and were-sharks and even lead an army of dolphins against the Drowned City of Ker-Ys before the climactic storming of an ancient castle.

The Guardians were transitional figures between pulp and horror, running around socking Satan worshippers in the jaw. But underneath their adventures runs a disquieting river of occultism that delivers moments of true horrific frisson. The Guardians were training wheels, getting readers used to horror as something everyday city dwellers might encounter rather than an outside force from another country, softening them up for the birth of the big demonic baby to come.

JEFFREY CATHERINE JONES

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