FRIGHT FEST #5: The Night of the Wolf - Frank Belknap Long

So far in this Fright Fest of supernatural mystery reviews we've had ghosts, demons, vampires and zombie kittens (sort of ), haunted houses, animated skeletons, and macabre murders.  It was only a matter of time before I found a werewolf novel.  This one comes from the pen of Lovecraft acolyte and Arkham House refugee Frank Belknap Long.  Last time I reviewed a novel by Long it was Journey into Darkness that I whipped through while I was waiting for my panel to be called for jury duty back in 2011. That book is a weird, rambling, science fiction/horror novel that spent several pages discussing Jungian archetypes and the collective unconsciousness as well as the work of psychoanalyst and sexologist Wilhelm Reich.  So I was prepared for yet another rambling book from Long that would no doubt be filled with tangential or superfluous passages.  I was pleasantly surprised that it is a straightforward B movie on paper.  The entire story takes place within a single day (beginning around noon and ending in the hours after midnight) and easily could have served as the treatment for a 1970s TV movie.

The Night of the Wolf (1972)  opens with an over-the-top depiction of the slaughter of nearly an entire household.  Someone or some thing has beaten and clawed Margrave (no first name ever given), an archeologist colleague of our narrator John (no last name given). Later four more victims are found in various places around Margrave's home. Anne the maid, one of the victims, manages to utter a few bone-chilling sentences before succumbing to her gruesome wounds: "It was --it was not human.  I saw--it.  It  was--some kind of animal..."

The survivors --two men and two women--band together to find this "some kind of animal" and kill it.  In the meantime the sheriff is called to start a murder investigation and gather up all the corpses. His police department is too small of staff to handle such a grisly case with several murders he is sure are the work of an escaped madman. Therefore, he promises to deputize as many men as he can and set up a dragnet surrounding Margrave's home. This of course will provide Long with more victims to be mauled with gallons of blood sure to spill before the final pages.

As the back cover blurb already gives away one of the surprises I'll mention that Margrave and John are responsible for unleashing this beast.  Margrave is in possession of an artifact that John was unaware of his bringing back from their dig at a Bulgarian cave several months ago. Doris Margrave, the dead archeologist's daughter, tells of a visit from a mystery man who claims to have known her father. Two days prior to her father's murder this visitor had a heated argument with her father. The visitor named Ruschna vowed that the house will go up in flames and all will perish if the artifact which belongs to him is not returned. One of the women then spends much of the book (offstage and we only learn of this second hand in the final chapter) tearing apart the house looking for this artifact. You'd think John and Dan Shields, a house guest of Margrave's, would immediately look for the artifact and return it to prevent further violence and death, but they have to rescue Doris who is abducted by the wolf-like creature.

Before the climax involving the rescue of Doris from a cave by the seashore, there will be a near drowning, two more beast attacks, the recovery of a wolf-headed staff that most likely was used as a murder weapon, an arson attempt, a road accident involving a weasel, and several sightings of a half man/half wolf creature whose lower body looks like dwarfish human. It sounds like it an action oriented thriller, but sadly most of the book consists of long dull passages of talk, talk, talk.  John enjoys ruminating about everything from his love of Doris (often) to the psychic manifestations of Eastern Europeans. Exchanges between Dan and John are often inexplicably repetitive. This I ascribe to Long's past life as a penny-a-word "fictioneer." Old habits dies hard, for sure. Those pulp writers learned to drag out their stories with overly descriptive passages and circuitous dialogue just to pad out the story in order to make more money.

The Night of The Wolf is part of a series of nine paperback originals published by Popular library between 1972 and 1973 that supposedly pay homage to the Universal Pictures classic monster movies of the 1930s and early 1940s. Populated with vampires, reanimated corpses, zombies, Central American mummies, witches, she-demons and other supernatural creatures the "Frankenstein Horror Series" books are cult collectibles now. Many of them are incredibly hard to find. Those that are available for sale from online dealers tend to be exorbitantly priced.  But if you dig deep you may find a handful of these titles for under $15 which is the only sane price for any of these somewhat mediocre 70s horror novels.

FRIGHT FEST #4: The Shadow Guest - Hillary Waugh

In the 1970s there was an explosion of Gothic suspense novels mostly appearing in mass market paperbacks. You didn't have to go to a bookstore to find any of them, you could buy these book in Woolworth's, local drug stores, newsstands and train station book stalls. They were ubiquitous. To some extent they still are as I find them by the dozens at library fundraising sales, used bookstores and estate sales.  The stories were even more formulaic than traditional detective novels with the exception of the addition of supernatural or quasi-supernatural incidents. In the better neo-Gothics the supernatural events are genuine but in the majority of them they are always rationalized.  The formula can be summed up in a quip that is attributed to Donald E. Westlake (or was it Elmore Leonard? or Mike Avallone? or who?) that goes like this: "A gothic is a book where the girl gets the house."

In The Shadow Guest (1971) Hillary Waugh inverts the entire formula by first making the lead character and narrator a man. Howard Whelan, a successful architect, finds himself in charge of a large building project in England. He takes his new bride Angela with him to London. He hopes her odd depressive persona will come to life in a new setting. Back in New York she was under the care of a psychiatrist who approves of a new setting as part of her recuperation. Angela is the woman in peril of the novel, but as she is not the narrator  and we see her only through her husband’s eyes the story is unusual and rises above the standard neo-Gothic.

Waugh even starts his book with an homage to a HIBK narrator. Many sentences in the opening paragraph start "If only I had..." The terrible things we are about to read about might never have occurred if Howard had seen everything the way it really was. I smiled at this opening paragraph and dismissed it as a semi-parody of the entire genre. Big mistake. Howard was telling the truth and the reader really should be paying attention to how the story unfold.

Cliffside home reminiscent 
of the Whelan's house
(© William Dax/SWNS)

Shortly after they arrive in England Howard has a heart attack. His doctor tells him he has been working too hard and stress led to his attack. He loses leadership over his project, is told to take a hiatus from work. It is even suggested that he leave London and find a home far away from hectic urban life. Angela is excited to look for a new home and she finds one in a lonely house built by a forlorn seacoast. With much cajoling and prodding Howard gives in to her desire to move in to Heather Cottage. The girl gets the house, just as we expect, and very early on. But not without a load of trouble.

Because -- of course -- Heather Cottage is a house with a past. Soon Angela is seeing visions, hearing horrible sounds, and is drawn to a ghostly apparition that appears in the yard outside. But Howard also sees the apparition and hears the terrible sounds. He does his best to assuage her fears.  But if he is also seeing and hearing these supposed hallucinations is there a real ghost at work? One night they hear what sounds like a car crash but when they go out to explore they find no sign of a car wreck.  All the more disturbing because they know that a few years ago a car came careening down the hill above their house and smashed through a guardrail plummeting over the cliff and ending in a fiery crash on the rocky shore below. Are the Whelans being haunted by that crash and is the apparition a ghost of one of the crash victims?

Waugh tells a creepily effective and engaging story loaded with suspense.  Nearly everyone they meet has some inside dope on Heather Cottage's previous occupants or something about the horrible car crash. Slowly but surely we are provided with just enough information to keep reading in order to find out what actually happened. Questions were flooding my mind as I tore through this book. Did someone survive that crash? Is there a bizarre vendetta taking place? And why?

Added to the weird haunting and the riddle of the car crash is Beverly Gaines, the Whelan's young housekeeper, who may have a psychic power. The first day at Heather Cottage she is frightened by a vision in the sitting room and flees in terror. It takes some time to calm her down and when she re-enters the house it's as if nothing ever happened. She has no memory of being frightened or seeing anything strange. When Howard questions some of the locals about Beverly he discovers she is shunned because of her deadly premonitions. She had a similar vision on the road where the car crash happened. Howard is warned that if Beverly saw something in their house they should be careful because it is a sure sign that someone will die there soon.

Then there is the mysterious painter who lives in a house on the hill above the Whelan’s new home. He is reclusive, distrustful of almost everyone, and won't allow anyone in his home. Howard meets him in an odd scene that leaves the reader thinking something very strange is up with the hermit-like artist.

The rear cover of my paperback edition of The Shadow Guest  quotes a newspaper review that states "...At no point does the enthralled reader have the slightest suspicion about the horrendous climax." For once, that's no exaggeration. When the utterly unexpected twist occurred I shouted aloud, "WHAT?!" It is a near brilliant achievement.  Although the ending seems rushed and overloaded with twists and double twists, all is explained cleverly and succinctly. It was all there if we -- like Howard -- had only been paying attention to what was actually happening.

As the only example I know of a neo-Gothic told from a male viewpoint that simultaneously subverts and pays homage to all the conventions and motifs of this genre The Shadow Guest succeeds magnificently. I was truly impressed with this book. Waugh was so successful with this book he went on to write a small batch of true Gothic novels that were published under his female pseudonym "Elissa Grandower."  I also read The Secret Room of Morgate House (1977) to see if he was as innovative with the genre. Sadly, it's too much of a clone of the hundreds of books that cling to the Gothic suspense formula. The Shadow Guest because it basically is an inversion of a neo-Gothic is far more original, innovative and --dare I say it?-- ingenious in its conception.