Without one word of a joke, I purchased Patrick Billing's TOR horror
paperback “The Quiet” in 1994 – to finally read it twenty-three
years later. This novel survived 10 moves, one of the cross-country
and one of them completely off of the continent. It not onlhy
survived, but remained in very good condition, as would most of the
paperbacks in my collection, nearly fifty percent of them sitting in
the same scenario “The Quiet” had been in – loved yet unread
for years. Some, like “The Quiet”, for decades.
Patrick Billings' horror novel is a whip-snap tale set in the wilds
of Yosemite National Park and concerns a park ranger protagonist who
tries to figure out why the park's bears are suddenly killing the
tourists. And brutally killing, at that – it seems that the bears
are almost acting like serial killers. And this is where the story
goes into the bizarre, because it looks like there is in fact a
serial killer at work here. This novel was such the page-burner that
I was suddenly overwhelmed with the idea of consuming all things in
the nature-horror sub-genre, and so I immediately called one of the
last video stores in Vancouver – Videomatica – and
requested that they order a very rare blu-ray edition of William
Girdler's cult film Grizzly for me, which I had thoroughly
enjoyed when I was in my early twenties.
In the meantime, since 1994, Patrick Billings had passed away.
Billings being the author's pseudonym, it was hard for me to track
down information about him right away, but eventually I discovered
that his real name was Earl Patrick Murray, a prolific crime and
western novelist who had also written three horror books, “The
Quiet” seemingly the only one under the Billings pen name. Earl
Patrick Murray died “suddenly”, according to online obits, in
2003 at the age of 52.
Prior to relieving “The Quiet” from its dust-gathering spot on
the bookshelf, I had also freed the late Robert “Psycho” Bloch's
1989 novel “Lori” (purchased by me in 1992 from the discount bin
in a U.S. bookstore). Robert Bloch passed away two years after I
first purchased his paperback, and again this book moved around with
me, unread, for decades. When I finally did crack open this
outrageous supernatural mystery-thriller, I became hooked on Bloch
and immediately found myself in a used bookstore with a handful of
his old TOR paperbacks (some of which I'll talk about in later blog
posts on the subject). “Lori”, though, is one of his best, I
think, at almost a breakneck pace Bloch takes us through his dark
world where doppelgangers, murders, deceit, and nightmare
misconceptions abound.
Most recently, I came across a novel titled “The Devouring” in a
second-hand bookstore. Again the force of a horror novel consumed my
imagination and I proceeded to zealously research the author F.W.
Armstrong – only to find out the “The Devouring” was actually
the middle book in a short horror series, and that Armstrong was
actually a pseudonym for author T.M. Wright, whose cult novel
“Strange Seed” is perhaps his best known work. I was a little
saddened to see that T.M. Wright had passed away in 2015.
Horror and surreal crime author Tom Piccirlli, who had published
several mind-bending experimental horror novels with Leisure Horror,
had also passed away from a brutal battle with cancer in 2015 (he was
50). I'd been a big fan of Piccirilli's, having read a lot of his
earlier works and horror shorts; and he'd also been the screenwriter,
very early in his career, of the underground-independent
direct-to-VHS vampire film Addicted to Murder. However, the
short novel that had been released four years before his death,
“Every Shallow Cut”, was one of his best and most memorable
works; the still-experimental narrative now more defined and refined
as Piccirlli takes us through an emotionally wrought journey via an
emotionally wrought protagonist; almost as if Bukouski had
inadvertently wandered into Piccirilli's world of nightmarish noir.
“Every Shallow Cut” was the last book I'd read of Piccirilli's,
although there is still one more of his on my bookshelf, purchased
roughly ten years ago. Maybe I should go and check the dust level on
it.
--V.
No comments:
Post a Comment