This is my favorite novel by the late Hubert Selby Jr., who’s best known for LAST EXIT TO BROOKLYN and REQUIEM FOR A DREAM. THE DEMON occupies a unique place in Selby’s oeuvre, being (I think) his most interesting book but also his most problematic.
Contrary to what you might have heard, this recently interred pulp relic is not a very good book, much less the “neglected classic” some have proclaimed it, but it is engagingly nutty. A fast moving and often (intentionally?) funny account of medical madness in a creepy California mansion, DELIVER ME FROM EVA reads like a transcription of a Stuart Gordon movie set within a 1940s-era pulp fiction framework.
To be sure, a lot of crap was published during the horror boom of the 1980s, but some real gems also made their way to publication during that period, and were inexplicably lost in the shuffle. Examples of the latter include the early novels of Jack Ketchum, which have only recently gotten the attention they deserve, and Michael Talbot’s THE DELICATE DEPENDENCY, an unassumingly packaged paperback original that has yet to receive its full dues.
The traveling-into-dreams trope has long been a prominent, and problematic, staple of horror and science fiction. This French novel, originally published in 1992, is a stellar example of the format–and, I feel, an overall standout in the field of imaginative fiction. Kudos to Melville House, and translator Edward Gauvin, for putting out this better-late-than-never English language version.
Ambitious and indisputably well written, as you’d expect given that thhe co-author is K.W. Jeter, but only puddle deep.
These days it’s common for would-be filmmakers to turn their unproduced scripts into novels, although I’m not sure how prevalent that practice was back in the seventies. Yet reading David J. Michael’s DEATH TOUR, a largely forgotten but fairly potent seventies horror fest, I couldn’t help but picture it as a low budget movie: it’s extremely action heavy and has a tightly contained setting, not to mention a distinct three act structure.
An interesting entry in the dream craze of the eighties, when it seemed every other horror-themed book and movie involved dreams
In this, his second publication of 2011, Calvillo has created a bold and idiosyncratic fictional riff on the concept of female empowerment. DEATH AND DESIRE very nearly equals its forerunners, and just about any other recent novel, in provocation and manic invention.
A bizarre refashioning of PROM NIGHT as an allegory of post-9/11 America, this novel is either terminally loopy or some kind of satiric tour de force.
Much of the THE DEADLY PERCHERON’s critical attention has tended to focus on the opening chapter, but I believe the focus should instead be on the novel’s middle section, which is as mind-bending in its audacious twisting of reality as anything written by Philip K. Dick.