Gwen and her husband, electrical engineer George Ferrier, both in their late twenties, have been married for seven years when the novel begins. Early chapters give the couple’s background in North Carolina, their rocky start, their college years, their newlywed days. Gwen, whose childhood was one of neglect and misfortune, still feels shame from it: her widowed mother was a promiscuous woman who wasn’t careful about keeping the bedroom door closed. A complex grew, encouraged by the teasing of Gwen’s schoolmates, and so as an adult Gwen considers herself a prude, an uptight nut even—in the parlance of the era, frigid. But with George’s eager ministrations, marital bliss (mostly) erases her past sexual hang-ups.
After coming into family money, George buys a plot of undeveloped land on an island on the Cape Fear River; nearby a nuclear power plant is being built (George’s research shows the danger of radioactivity is apparently nil). Now in come the developers, the earth movers, the bulldozers, and the crewmen to clear away the muck and brush and undergrowth and wild animals to build the Ferriers’ new dream home. Gwen and George have terrific Seventies sex, sip gin-and-tonics looking out over their luscious landscape from their balcony while listening to records on their hi-fi. This is living!
Gwen is what I consider a comfort read: its isolated, forested setting is cozy, inviting, relaxing even. George works his land, swims every morning, the perfect picture of hale and hearty Seventies manhood. Gwen begins paintings of trees and caring for lush African violets, becomes enamored of the Venus fly-trap plants she finds at the nearby lake, starts feeding them raw hamburger. But creeping into this calm domesticity come her grotesque nightmares of pain, dismemberment, death: “the mass roared down on her, huge teeth snapping at her. The mouth closed, clashing metal teeth, and she screamed once before she felt the tender flesh being punctured and rendered. Her upper body fell, being ripped from her legs and stomach and hips . . .”
And things get worse: their dog dies mysteriously, the family cat attacks her, she has suicidal thoughts, and, oh yeah, she sleeps with the meter man. As Gwen begins to suffer fugue states, these dalliances get more graphic, more illicit, more, shall we say, neighborly. Sex, and a connection to the rich, lush earth itself, are the only things that take away the pain of her nightmares.
When she tells her husband of her bizarre, morbid, aching dreams he chides her, “You are one spooky broad.” Gwen gets thee to a psychiatrist, Dr. Irving King, who’s in his 80s and one nap away from retiring, and he says to her, “You are much too pretty to be eaten by nightmare things.” (Paternalistic chauvinism is rarely absent from this era of paperback horror). But Dr. King turns out to be a kind of Van Helsing in the story, fascinated by Gwen’s fugue states, her obsession with the flesh-eating Venus fly-traps—why, he’s positive he once treated a similar case many years before . . .
It may not surprise you to hear that, occasionally, Gwen has some less-than-enlightened passages about gender, sexuality, and race. Pulpy popular fiction wasn’t written to challenge the status quo; it was written for a mass audience, often an uncritical one, and sometimes it shows. Gwen’s momentary offenses seem mild and so dated that any experienced reader will know these words and ideas are the thoughts, musings, and words of characters that Zachary has created within various timeframes, and not the author’s own views. I’ve certainly read more famous and more popular—and more recent—works that trade even more deeply in these uncomfortable notions.
Perhaps what endears the novel to me most is that, simply, it seems like Zachary had a good old time writing it: as he put it, he writes “as if I were watching a movie on a big screen. That’s not really living it myself but watching it—observing it.” The obvious pleasure he takes in his scenario, his confidence in his creation as he eases us into his tale, allows the reader to trust the author. Characters, even those who appear briefly, have specific natures and interior thoughts that ring true, all sketched out with a professional pen, and dialogue that, even at its crudest, sounds like it is sprung from people’s mouths. The many “intimate moments,” hinted at by the cover art, are delivered with aplomb, a wink, even when they veer ever so slightly into Penthouse Forum territory. In those days of Deep Throat, Xaviera Hollander’s Happy Hooker, and Sylvia Kristel’s Emmanuelle, Gwen is a natural fit. In other words, Gwen, in Green could only have been written in the early Seventies, and I’d have it no other way.
Will Errickson
September 2021
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.
* Hugh Zachary died in 2016. All quotes by him are from a 1998 interview with Sherman Hayes, University of North Carolina–Wilmington, Archives and Special Collections, and are used by permission. – W.E.
1
She knew about being ugly and unloved. The knowledge made her a soft touch for four-legged beggars and created a housing problem in a small development home of two bedrooms, one bath, combination kitchen and dining room, and a small living room. With the house a way-station for appealing strays, she skimped on grocery money to pay for mange treatments for a cowed mongrel pup and often passed up her own milk to nourish transient tomcats and the house regular, a great, black ex-tom named Satan. She hoarded every table scrap for the two outside dogs, Sam, a happy, funny part-Airedale, and Mandy, a doleful part-hound. In return, all animals loved her immediately, recognizing open, adoring gentleness, and the neighbors laughingly called her Marsha, the Enormous Mother. Although she was childless, her kitchen was open house for kids, with cookies always available on demand. Birds had a permanent feeding station in her back yard. Squirrels spoke to her by first name, barking from the oak trees, and took peanuts from her fingers.
So she was puzzled by the behavior of the ugly animal. His actions, she knew, were quite uncharacteristic.
George and the real estate salesman were ahead of her, pushing through dense second-growth brush to the bank of the tidal creek. On a by-path, she was threading her way along what seemed to be an animal trail when she came upon a small clearing where a mossy air plant had taken advantage of the sun to cover the ground. A dead, fallen longleaf pine showed its gray skeleton of resin-rich dead wood which, when split, burned torchlike and made excellent kindling for a fireplace. From the distant shore, across the wide marsh and the Intracoastal Waterway, heavy equipment growled like distant thunder, the low mumble-rumble coming and going on the shifting breeze. In the woods around her birds dug in the leaves and made a dry, crackling sound.
An opossum is a housecat-sized marsupial. What hair it has is dirty, gray, and always seems to be threatening to molt, to leave an even uglier creature, bald, graceless, vaguely repulsive. A needling snout contains a set of fifty sharp, tiny teeth, six more teeth than in the closest competing placental mammal, teeth which gnaw and tear at anything from insects to carrion, teeth which almost never threaten, however, except when shown in a hissing, cringing snarl when the animal is cornered.