It’s tempting to see hidden depths in these books; however, no one in these stories does much self-analysis and the authors rarely, if ever, engage with the dubious morality of, after wiping out the original Native Americans, now wiping out the few traces of their ghosts, however bloodthirsty, that remain. Skeleton Dancer (1989) is one of the few to engage with bigger issues, such as, “Why would skeletons want to take our son?” Good question.
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The aforementioned skeletons are naked, gay, and undead; as usual, they’re also unaffiliated with any known tribe, instead calling themselves the Brave Men-Boys. Acquiring eternal life by sucking the blood (or sperm—the author is hazy on this point) out of their male sacrifices, they come back to life when their leader, cleverly called the Leader, is awakened by twin brothers with ESP, just like he and his twin used to have. In fact, the Leader is a nice skeleton Indian—he wants to bring the twins into his immortal tribe so they can live forever and never be separated, unlike he and his brother. He also plans to resurrect the rest of his Brave Men-Boy tribe to murder all the white people, so you can see he exists in a sort of gray area. In this book, however, the white men do not acknowledge gray areas, and they murder all the skeleton Indians with a SWAT team. The last paragraph reveals that not all the Brave Men-Boys are dead; some are sleeping in an underground cavern, waiting for more psychic twins to reawaken them. It’s an apocalypse paused, which was a hallmark of the subgenre.
The ’70s and ’80s were a time of growing unease about apocalyptic global destruction, and no one spoke the language of annihilation better than H. P. Lovecraft. He was the first horror writer to discuss the end of the world in a nonreligious context, spawning a brand of horror that posited the extermination of the human race in purely secular terms. It’s no mistake that The Manitou’s Misquamacus is not trying to kill humanity on his own, but instead plans to summon Lovecraft’s Great Old Ones to do the job for him.
For decades, readers had been weaned on a steady diet of Armageddon, whether it was the environmental collapse predicted in Rachel Carson’s 1962 best seller Silent Spring or the end times in 1970’s best seller The Late Great Planet Earth. The greatest threat to humanity in the ’80s was nuclear war, of course, which hung over the planet like the sword of Damocles. Men’s adventure paperbacks of the era were full of tough warriors striding through postnuclear wastelands, leading a resistance against the invading Soviet army (C.A.D.S., 1985), fighting horrible mutants (Phoenix, 1987), or battling an oppressive American government (the thirty-four-volume Ashes series, starting in 1983). But, oddly, the closest thing we get to nuclear apocalypse in horror paperbacks are Native American curses.
Capable of massive destruction, dreaming peacefully beneath the earth’s surface until they’re disturbed, these curses are depicted as forces that modern man cannot control and that he unleashes at his peril. At the end of Chumash, when the Malibu coastline is destroyed by an Indian curse, 30,000 people wind up dead and a massive “blast zone,” unsafe for human occupation, is established. It resembles nothing so much as the irradiated wasteland left in the wake of a dirty bomb.
The endings of these books often occur in some kind of underground tomb or chamber where the forces of aboriginal destruction are contained, but never destroyed, usually at great sacrifice on the part of the Anglo heroes. And so, like underground silos containing weapons of mass destruction, Native American curses are sealed away to lie dormant for now, resting uneasily in the darkness, capable of awakening at any moment and destroying us all.
What do vengeful native spirits want? Maybe some company (Skeleton Dancers), maybe an apocalypse (Chumash). Credit 142
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Stories of North America’s homegrown inhumanoids offer madness-inducing hallucinations (Bearwalk), shapeshifting spirits (The Chindi), half-melted giants (The Shaman), dream-dolls (Kachina), golden-eyed mini-killers (Shadoweyes), Aztec alchemists (The Silver Skull), cannibal dwarves (Ten Little Indians), and silver-coated rabbit gods (When Spirits Walk). Credit 144
The Man behind the Manitou
Seventeen-year-old Graham Masterton started out as a newspaper reporter in his native Scotland. He soon became the editor of Mayfair, a men’s magazine, and then moved over to Penthouse. At the tender age of twenty-five he wrote the sex instruction book Acts of Love; since then he has written close to thirty more lovemaking manuals. In 1975 he took a break from nookie advice to write The Manitou, the novel that launched his fiction career. He has written more than seventy books, including historical sagas, humor collections, and movie novelizations.
Critics write reviews of Masterton’s books in a stunned, slack-jawed daze. “Be warned,” a still-reeling reviewer for Kirkus wrote of Master of Lies in 1992, “Masterton’s newest…opens with what may be the single most sadistic scene in horror history….The excruciating detail here seemingly acknowledges no bounds and culminates in a soul-draining depiction of a giant mutilating the penis of a renowned psychic.”
But Masterton isn’t out simply to shock. He is obeying his one commandment, stated in “Rules for Writing” on his website: “Be totally original….Invent your own threats.” And so he wrote Feast (1988), about gourmet cannibal cults. The story opens with the immortal line: “‘Well, then,’ said Charlie, his face half hidden in the shadows. ‘How long do you think this baby has been dead?’” Turns out the baby is a schnitzel served at the Iron Kettle, a crummy joint in upstate New York that Charlie is reviewing for a food and lodging guide. His three-week trip is ostensibly designed so that he and his teenage son Martin can spend time together. But Charlie is a lousy dad—selfish, hapless, and loaded to the gills with failure. By chapter 4, Charlie’s obsessed with Le Reposoir, an exclusive French dining club in the middle of nowhere that refuses to book him a table. After picking up a floozy and spending a very dirty night at his hotel, he returns to his room to find Martin is missing. Most books hoard their plot twists, but Masterton has more twists up his sleeve than the average bear. I am spoiling nothing by revealing that Le Reposoir is a front for a cult of devout cannibals named the Celestines and Martin is in their clutches. The first big wrinkle: the Celestines regard being eaten alive as the holiest of acts, and Martin has joined them because he wants to undergo this peak religious experience. Compared to his dad’s grubby, pointless life, participating in a transcendent autocannibalism orgy doesn’t sound so bad, and the Celestines maintain the moral high ground throughout the book.
Wherever you think this book won’t go, Masterton not only goes there, he reports back in lunacy-inducing detail. By the last page we’ve seen amputee dwarf assassins, flaming dogs, one of the most harrowing scenes of self-cannibalism ever committed to paper, one death by explosive vomiting, and an appearance by Jesus Christ himself. Throughout, Masterton enjoys himself immensely. He cares about his characters. His dialogue is funnier than it needs to be, his gore is gorier, and his sex is more explicit. His books may not be the most tasteful, or consistent, but you feel that Masterson will gladly hang up his hat the minute they’re not the most original.