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GWEN, IN GREEN

With a new introduction by

WILL ERRICKSON

VALANCOURT BOOKS

Dedication: For May, who planted the seed

Gwen, in Green by Hugh Zachary

Originally published by Fawcett Books in 1974

Republished by arrangment with the Estate of Hugh Zachary

Published by Valancourt Books, Richmond, Virginia

http://www.valancourtbooks.com

All rights reserved. The use of any part of this publication reproduced, transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, or stored in a retrieval system, without prior written consent of the publisher, constitutes an infringement of the copyright law.

Cover text design by M. S. Corley

INTRODUCTION*

Even to diehard readers of the obscure and the forgotten, the name Hugh Zachary will mean little. Perhaps it’s because he used so many pseudonyms, like many a prolific author; or perhaps because he never really wrote that one great novel—jack of all, master of none. Despite his having written and published dozens of books in virtually all genres for decades, none of his works is in print today. Until, I am thrilled to say, now. His 1974 novel, Gwen, in Green, joins Valancourt’s lauded reprint series of titles featured in my and Grady Hendrix’s Paperbacks from Hell. For my money, Zachary’s novel is almost a perfect example of its type, a paperback original featuring an eerie yet undeniably gorgeous cover illustration, complete with dated social mores, iffy sexual shenanigans, and a paranormal concept ripped right from a New Age pseudoscientific bestseller.

Born in 1928 in Ohio, Hugh Zachary wrote some in high school and spent his summers reading Edgar Rice Burroughs and working in a movie theater. Growing up while the romance of Hemingway and Fitzgerald still held sway, Zachary thought being a writer “would be neat,” that it meant romance, money, and travel, not alcoholism, debt, and suicide. He served in the Army, attended college at University of North Carolina–Wilmington, then worked in radio and television for years, till the Sixties, when his struggle—after almost 300 rejections—to become a full-time professional writer finally paid off. One Day in Hell, his first novel, appeared in 1961, a low-rent cheapie paperback with cover art of a greasy, hairy-armed brute manhandling a scantily clad woman in a grimy-looking midnight wasteland. “It wasn’t a bad book,” he said years later on his webpage. “It was a terrible book.”

For a while, Zachary wrote under the name Peter Kanto, publishing dozens of books for the erotic sleaze market, with not-quite-titillating titles like A Man Called Sex, Make the Bride Blush, The World Where Sex Was Born, Moonlighting Wives, and for no particular reason, my favorite, The Girl with the Action. Untangling his publication history seems a fool’s errand, but Zachary—often helped in the writing of “intimate scenes” by his wife Elizabeth and the occasional bottle of grapefruit brandy—churned out paperback originals for various publishers into the Nineties. “I’ve written in every field except bestseller,” Zachary quipped. Indeed: he and Elizabeth produced historical fiction, westerns, romance novels, sea adventures, Civil War tales, a post-apocalyptic series, even a regional cookbook, from his home on Oak Island, North Carolina.

Long a fan of the golden age of science fiction, he used the name Zach Hughes for more than a dozen books in the genre (“If you run into a book that you see ‘Hugh Zachary’ on, you know that I liked it”), beginning with The Book of Rack the Healer from Award Books in 1973. Most of what he wrote in the Eighties would be SF titles such as Killbird, Sundrinker, Gold Star, Thunderworld. Some of these books were nominated for the Nebula Award, which is given out by the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America. Zachary mingled a bit with SF royalty: Theodore Sturgeon, Bradbury, up-and-comer Alan Dean Foster. (Not the mighty Asimov, however: “He was the ‘King,’ and he didn’t have much time for the science-fiction world or for fans or anything else.”)

Zachary may have been the only writer in existence to have a book fail because of the success of Jaws. In 1974, when he presented his publisher Putnam with Tide, about mutated fish, they loved it and were eager to make it into a bestseller—“Bestsellers are not written; they’re made,” Zachary noted—but then Peter Benchley’s own monster fish story came out. Putnam changed their mind, telling Zachary there couldn’t be two “marine peril” books on the bestseller list at the same time. Tide came out as a Berkley Medallion SF/thriller paperback a year later, marketed in the Michael Crichton mold, and “went down the drain.”

He ventured into horror territory rarely, last with The Revenant (Onyx, 1988), complete with a banger of a cover adorned by a bloody, skeletal Confederate soldier. My horror cohort Grady Hendrix reviewed his 1981 paperback Bloodrush some five or six years ago for Tor.com; Grady notes it is “ostensibly a procedural mystery but that’s dripping with so much blood and gore and weirdness that it crosses the line into straight-up horror.” But it’s 1974’s Gwen, in Green that I am here to praise, a work of ecological terror and otherworldly mind control—and more than a smidgen of Seventies anything-goes sexiness.

Let’s take a moment to appreciate that cover, from the brush of the incomparable George Ziel (written about at length in Paperbacks from Hell). Our Gwen is mesmerized by something beyond human ken, gazing in wild wonder, naked but perhaps not afraid, her hair held aloft by clinging vines. The luscious red of her lips and icy blue of her eyes stand in stark contrast to the sickly grey-green—a Ziel trademark—snippet of landscape. As she stands hip-deep in creeping flora and murky water, a white flower floats just below Gwen’s belly button, an oh-so-demure symbol of fecund femininity. But what our lady of the swamp will bring is not life, but death, and plenty of it. Possessed by the spirit of some ineffable lifeforce, this young wife will wreak havoc on the men—always men—who rend the earth asunder in the name of electric power, quarterly gains, and golf courses.

Even the publisher should be noted: Gold Medal was established by Fawcett Publications out of Greenwich, Connecticut; the imprint hardly needs introduction to any vintage paperback collector. In 1949, Gold Medal began putting out mass-market paperbacks of original fiction—up till then, the format was almost solely used for reprints of hardcovers. Filled to the brim with action and thrills, disposable but satisfying two-fisted tales, these books upped the ante on the all-but-dead pulp clichés of yore. The early authors would become icons of popular fiction, in numerous genres: Jim Thompson, Louis L’Amour, Elmore Leonard, Richard Matheson, Robert Bloch, John D. MacDonald, even Kurt Vonnegut. The book designers knew that readers might not judge a book by its cover, but they’d certainly pay for one: with their immediate success, Gold Medal’s paperback originals upended the entire publishing industry.

The impetus of the novel was the building of a power plant near Zachary’s home on his beloved Oak Island. Bulldozers and constructions crews were all over “the most beautiful part of the island. The nicest trees and everything else; I’m not a ‘tree hugger,’ but . . . they were up there just tearing up the trees, right and left.” Fusing this outrage with a bit of pseudoscience then popular from a bestseller called The Secret Life of Plants, as well as the zeitgeist of women’s liberation and sexual empowerment, Zachary concocted a kind of revenge thriller against the encroachment of crass civilization on blissful nature.