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

Berserker gave us the mummified corpse of an ancient Viking on the loose in modern-day Manhattan, but it took Egyptian-born Ehren M. Ehly to bring a mummy to the big city. Born Moreen Le Fleming and named Miss Egypt in 1949, Ehly lived in Cairo and married a U.S. marine guarding the American embassy. She and her mother fled the Black Saturday riots in 1952 and wound up in London, trapped in immigration limbo. Ehly reached the United States courtesy of the game show Truth or Consequences (her husband was asked to judge a beauty contest on the show, and Ehly popped out of an oversized can of condensed milk).

After an injury forced her to retire from her department-store salesperson job, Ehly took writing classes at a community college. Influenced by Dean Koontz and Stephen King, she abandoned plans to write romance novels and sold four horror novels in quick succession to Leisure. Her first was Obelisk, a charming fish-out-of-water scenario featuring an undead cannibalistic Egyptian high priest causing chaos in Manhattan.

Millions of Americans visited the touring Treasures of Tutankhamun museum exhibition at the end of the ’70s, so Egypt was in the air. Ehly capitalized on the trend, starting Obelisk in Cairo, where Steve Harrison and a cultural attaché rob a pharaoh’s tomb. Steve is stabbed with an artifact and becomes a were-Egyptian: by the light of the full moon he turns into the ancient priest Menket. Retracing Ehly’s real-life path to the United States, Steve vomits blood on a British Airways flight to London and then heads to New York City, where he meets up with his long-suffering girlfriend, Sara Fenster. Instantly she knows something’s wrong because Steve goes nuts over the Egyptian obelisk in Central Park and starts decorating it with severed penises and hobo guts, like a tourist.

King Tut’s golden face was a familiar museum exhibit. Credit 136

Steve tries to tell Sara his problems, but she doesn’t want to hear how he murdered two people and ate a dog. All that happened over there, in the Middle East. He’s home now. Unfortunately, Steve’s problems will take more than denial and a prescription to solve. We know, before Sara does, that Steve’s fetid breath means he may as well turn in his U.S. passport. As one guard at the Metropolitan Museum of Art says to another when Steve runs past, “Funny thing about foreigners. They smell different. I mean, this one really stank, you know?” Steve demonstrates his true foreignness when he sets fire to the Met’s Egyptian wing (no respect for our cultural institutions), eats all the orangutans in the Central Park Zoo (no respect for our monkeys), and impregnates Sara with his half-undead Egyptian baby. In the end, he stabs a cop and then slashes his own throat in front of the obelisk as the baby rustles ominously in Sara’s womb.

Along with updated vampires, mummies, and werewolves (The Changing), the great rainbow of inhumanoids includes all-purpose shape shifters (Darker Than You Think), aswangs (The Bamboo Demons), Middle Eastern shape-shifting djinn (The Djinn) and the Eluthi, a 6,000-year-old super-race (Birthpyre). Credit 137

Credit 138

Horror Goes Native

Despite the drippy, be-tentacled, foul-smelling foreign monsters that slimed into America from overseas, riding over in the museum shipments, rucksacks, cocaine deliveries, and wombs of its citizens, the worst monsters came from our own shores. Let’s face it, the Amityville Horror house wasn’t built on an old Korean deli. It was built on an Indian burial mound.

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In 1975 a Scotsman named Graham Masterton published his first novel, a short book called The Manitou, about a young lady suffering from a slight swelling on the back of her neck. Turns out it isn’t just a swelling: Karen’s neck is pregnant! With Misquamacus, a 300-year-old Native American medicine man who’s out for revenge against the Dutch who wiped out his tribe. Misquamacus is the most evil and powerful medicine man in pretty much forever. He’s such a pain in the neck (sorry) that he returns in a sequel with a whole convention of medicine men to inaugurate a new holiday, which guarantees “24 hours of chaos and butchery and torture, the day when the Indian people have their revenge for hundreds of years of treachery and slaughter and rape, all in one huge massacre.” Maybe we could call it Reverse Columbus Day?