This cover is a good example of the era’s style, with the title in vibrant green and orange, with a huge hand and a dancing jade-like figure showing off her feminine wiles, illustrative of events in the novel. Artist Lee MacLeod painted distinctive work not only for Tor but also Pinnacle, Pocket, and Avon Books (do look up his cover for the 1989 Western horror anthology Razored Saddles!). The Tor tagline, “Even a broken heart has a heart’s desire,” gets right at the very essence of the tale within . . .
Familiar Spirit is a story about heartache, desire, and plain old horniness, topics which so many horror writers were eager to write about but, let’s be honest, which so few were equipped to. Tuttle eschews the intensity of many Eighties horror novels in favor of the restrained and the intimate. Just as in many of her chilling short stories, Tuttle uses quiet, unassuming prose to navigate her protagonist’s interior life, revealing turmoil beneath placid waters. Sarah has hardly settled into her new home before the odd and the uncanny begin, and then one night, a ghostly voice from the darkness: “I can give you whatever you want, whatever you most desire. Your lover. I can tell you how to win him back . . .”
Sarah is determined not to be frightened out of the house (the rent’s so cheap!), and we see that her sexual longing is a perfect entry point for the supernatural to creep in. Doing her requisite research about the house’s history, Sarah comes into possession of the owner’s diary from decades before. For one long chapter, Tuttle switches over to these diary entries, one of the most fascinating parts of the noveclass="underline" “I was flesh, I was alive, and the pleasure I felt beneath his hands frightened me. I felt his breath on my face, and then his tongue in my mouth, flickering like a snake’s. But the venom was so sweet . . .”
Tuttle’s approach is more mature than the usual glut of juvenile, generic horror, and therefore more convincing: as Spirit progresses, Sarah’s sexual appetite comes to the fore. Tuttle does not shy away from almost uncomfortably graphic sex scenes, which add an earthy depth and believability to the proceedings. These elements of ecstasy, violence, and even humiliation are not simply tacked on as exploitative cheap thrills. No, these elements need to be here, they are motivation; they power the engine of occult doings that upends Sarah’s life and sanity, illuminating the characters we’re reading about, right up to the delicious final line.
“Nothing waited for her there,” Tuttle writes, as Sarah returns to the house she’s run from after a particularly nasty encounter there with an enraged feline. “No cat with glowing eyes, no evil, supernatural rat, no diabolical spirit. Because such things didn’t exist.” Oh, Sarah. You’ve spent too much time reading Flannery O’Connor and William Faulkner, and not nearly enough reading Eighties horror paperbacks, where those things—and worse—not only exist, but thrive, and will not be denied.
Will Errickson
July 2020
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.
For Bill and Sally Wallace and the rest of my ghost-hunting, spirit-raising, table-rapping friends,
and
for Harlan Ellison, a few years late, but still with gratitude and affection. Forget the one about Texas under water; it was a dumb idea.
Prologue
After a long while Valerie rose from her slumped, broken position like a puppet whose dangling strings have at last been gathered and pulled. She looked down at herself, running hands over arms, legs, breasts, stomach, and a triumphant smile stretched across her face. Without haste, she walked down the short hallway from the bedroom to the bathroom, and stared into the soap-spotted mirror above the sink.
The smile grew harder and brighter. But although the triumph in it doubled, shining out of the mirror, the odd golden gleam in Valerie’s eyes, almost like a glimpse of flame, had no reflection.
“Yes,” she said, testing her voice. “Yes, you’ll do. You’ll do for now. A temporary home.” She leaned closer to the mirror, intent upon the reflection, studying her face. “I’ll make some changes, of course. I’ll take better care of you, Valerie, than you ever took of yourself.” She laughed, a rich, satisfied chuckle, all the while watching the face in the mirror to see how she looked when she laughed.
Her hands had been resting lightly on the porcelain rim of the sink, unneeded and unnoticed as she concentrated on face and voice. Now, still unnoticed, they moved. The right arm lifted and reached in an old, familiar gesture, and the right hand took hold of the drinking glass that hung on the wall. That hand then brought the glass down, cracking it against the side of the sink with a deft flick of the wrist. Half the glass sheared away and fell to the floor, leaving behind a curved glass dagger in a heavy base.
Hardly more than a second had passed; the tinkling crunch of breaking glass had not yet registered on the mind of the woman who spoke to herself as to a stranger.
Left hand turned over, presenting the pale, veined throat of a wrist to the sacrificial knife. Right hand brought the glass blade jabbing down hard, then ripped inwards, towards the body, tearing the skin and letting a blood-river halfway to the elbow. Only then did Valerie look away from the mirror, down to see what her hands were doing.
“No!” she roared in someone else’s voice, and flung the broken glass away. It smashed to fragments against the hard side of the bathtub and flung out tiny jewels of crimson against the flesh-colored floor.
She clutched her left arm with her right hand—they were hers again—and tried to push the edges of skin back together. Her lips drew back from her teeth and she hissed in frustration as she fumbled about in the tiny bathroom, unable to find tape, gauze or bandages of any kind.
Blood continued to run in rivulets down her arms, dyeing her clothes and spattering walls and floor. She lurched into the bedroom and began jerking open bureau drawers. She found only heavy jeans, sweaters, nothing that would do, nothing she could tear easily.
“Tell me!” she roared in that other voice. “Find something! I won’t let you die, damn you, not yet!”
The next drawer yielded T-shirts. Valerie snatched up one and tore it down the seams. She managed to make a rough bandage of it, wrapping it tightly around the wounded arm. It was blood-soaked already, as she knotted it, but that didn’t matter; she had stopped the worst of the bleeding and Valerie would not die just yet.
But the moment she relaxed her vigilance the right hand was busy again, plucking at the knotted fabric, trying to let loose the blood.
Furious, Valerie slapped the left hand, then the right. Then her eyes rolled up in her head, her eyelids fluttered, and she collapsed on the floor.
Painfully, Valerie opened her eyes and saw the dirty floorboards. Her head hurt and she ached all over. Why was she on the floor? When she tried to move she felt as if someone had stabbed her. She gasped with pain, sitting up, then saw that her arm was wrapped in a blood-soaked cloth.
Quite suddenly the pain and dizziness turned to nausea. Valerie managed to move just enough to be sick on the floor rather than into her own lap, but afterwards she had not the strength to move away and remained staring dully into a pool of vomit, retching dryly every now and then.
Later—how much later? She only knew that the room had filled with shadows—Valerie managed to stand, the puppet miraculously moving without strings, and stumble into the bathroom to rinse her mouth. A sharp new pain made her look down, and she saw that she had gashed her bare foot on a piece of broken glass. Broken glass, and blood, littered the floor. She stared dully, unable to make any sense of it.