Lancer Books 1969
Cover art Lou Marchetti
I recently did another Guide to Gothics episode with my pal Eric from the Paperback Warrior on my YouTube channel where we discuss this book. We had a special guest this time around, Chris from the Youtube channel Liminal Spaces. Here is the video but if you just want the quick written review, it is below.
The book starts off with a prologue chapter from the perspective of a young boy with “a big head, round pale eyes and a mouth that was too wide.” He stumbles upon a ceremony of what could be described as a coven of witches out in the woods who are surrounding a black kettle.
So, not a good start. The visual is so cartoonish. They might as well have had green skin, pointy black hats and giant warts on their nose. This really took the wind out of my sails almost immediately. A nail in my tire. Getting hit with the ball at my first at bat. My new fish dying in the bag on the way home from the pet store.
The boy realizes he has seen something he shouldn’t have and runs through the woods in a panic. Neither we nor him know if he’s being followed. The woods open to a lone house. The boy recognizes it as his doctor’s house who he regards as a very kind man.
Before he gets to the house a man in a robe with a hood drops from the tree in the front yard. He creeps up to the doctor’s door. He places something on the porch, rings the bell and runs back to the tree.
The doctor answers the door, sees the mystery package, picks it up, gets angry and throws it into his front lawn near where the boy with the big head is hiding.
The boy sees what it is.
It’s a doll with pins in it made to look like a lady he once saw the doctor with.
The man from the tree jumps back down, the boy grabs the doll and starts running but not fast enough because he suddenly feels a pain in his back like someone threw a rock and passes out.
And scene.
We now meet our protagonist Archeologist Joan Lambert. She is driving to Glen Oaks, Kentucky to visit her fellow Archeologist slash museum manager boss slash protective boyfriend Dr Wilfred Allen. But this isn’t just a weeklong lover’s getaway with her man. Dr Allen has invited an internationally renowned psychiatrist, a psychical research scholar (a ghost hunter), an anthropologist whose focus of study was East African tribal shaman incantations and a Doogie Howser type young psychologist. Now, to what purpose would this grouping of experts on the paranormal and human mind need to be assembled?
Sixteen months prior Joan was on an archeological expedition in Pyrenees mountain range straddling the border of France and Spain. While exploring a cave she was attacked by something that is described or insinuated as organic but then she believes that it followed her and is connected to her in a mental capacity, so it is supernatural. It’s very ambiguous.
In the cave she found not only ancient cave paintings that proved witchcraft was practiced in ancient times but she also found a defiled fertility statue called the Aurignacian Venus.
So, as limp as this story is I will say Frank Belknap Long did some research here. The Pyrenees Mountains were renown for witchcraft and satanism. The area was known as the Land of the Goat. There was a book just released in 2024 called Land of the Goat: Witchcraft in the Pyrenees by Julia Carerras-Tort which looks into the history of witchcraft in that area. So, the fact that FBL hit on something that is just now having books written about is pretty impressive.
So far, I am into this book. It’s an interesting premise incorporating real world historical witchcraft and a malevolent supernatural force straight out of a Weird Tales story.
After the exposition backstory we get some action. While Joan is driving a black monstrous figure appears in the middle of the road. Joan swerves to avoid it and wrecks her car. This part kind of reminded me of the scene in the Mothman Prophecies.
She climbs from her wrecked car, gasoline dripping everywhere, glad to be alive but then she remembers that she is out in the middle of nowhere, alone with a monster. She looks up to see it standing there. Its face is skull like. It has a hood on and even though the robe covered it she was sure it still had its taloned hands. With the gasoline leaking she thinks about lighting a match as she would rather take her own life than let this creature get ahold of her.
And that’s when the creature started coming for her. She gets up and panic runs through the dark forest. She can hear the thing pursuing her. Eventually she runs into a man. It’s the local sheriff out a-huntin. She passes out in his arms.
Hope you guys enjoyed that excitement. That’s about it.
There is an interlude chapter jammed in here where a newlywed couple are traveling through. They run out of gas. See a man in the forest with what looks like red hunting gear on. They walk through the woods to a clearing and see two cloaked men and a woman near an open grave. They do a ritual and then throw a dead woman in the grave. The couple runs back to their car in shock. Another car happens upon them so they can go get gas. Twenty min later both cars are at the bottom of a ravine. This chapter seemed kind of unnecessary as it just rehashes the prologue. In fact, the first three chapters have a character running through the same exact woods.
Speaking of reiteration. Joan wakes up inside Dr. Wilfred Allen’s home. Her she retells pretty much the second chapter over again. Isn’t that one of the rules of writing? Don’t rehash something you’ve already covered?
Later that night she hears a noise outside her windows. She looks out to see 12 naked men and women circled around a figure twice the size of a man but looked like an impaled frog. The people start banging it out. She thinks, she would be all right with this if it was just a regular orgy but she knows that its part of a witch worship so she feels queasy.
The Sheriff shows up to check on her. He tells of the murder of the big headed boy from the beginning. He also pulls out the voodoo doll that we now know is Joan.
Wilfred tells of how the doll was left on his porch and he threw it away. The sheriff is like, ok, why didn’t you tell me? Which, yeah that’s fishy, Wilfred.
Sheriff infers that Joan has something to do with it. Wilfred takes sheriff to the porch to go off on him.
While the two are outside the guests come up and introduce themselves to Joan. The first is a women who tells her she is Wilfred’s half sister...oh and also that she spent a year in prison after being falsely accused of murder but as recently been exonerated when the real killer confessed.
Wilfred never even mentioned he had a sister let alone one in prison even though they are very close. Hmmm.
Oh ho ho the plot thickens!
At the end of the day, the ideas, themes and ambience in this are wonderful but FBL likes to circle around the cool stuff at arm’s length. There is a lot of unnecessary talking in this and what’s even worse is they are talking about what has already been shown in the story. The part that I found most interesting, the creature from the Pyrenees caves, is all but forgotten once she gets to Kentucky. It is never explained or concluded.
I’m putting this one down as another miss from my boy Frank here. I really need to go back and read his golden era Weird Tales stories. These later novels aren’t doing it for me.
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