Short Takes: ‘Murder by Phone’ (1982) ★★ ½

The days before caller I.D. were
indeed terrifying.

While there have been plenty of thrillers and horror movies built around scary phone calls (Sorry, Wrong Number; When a Stranger Calls; Scream) and a few where the phone is a conduit to an evil force (976-Evil and The Ring-with-a-wireless-plan One Missed Call), to my knowledge the Canadian-made Murder by Phone (a.k.a. Bells) is the only movie to feature, well, murders by phone. And there may be a reason why there have been no other killer phone movies afterwards: Phones just aren’t all that scary, especially when potential victims can simply hang up.

Despite a silly concept, director and co-writer Michael Anderson (Around the World in 80 Days, Logan’s Run, Orca) managed to turn out an engaging-in-spite-of-itself thriller. Helping sell the story is the late Richard Chamberlain at peak fuckability (it’s bearded Richard Chamberlain, which is the best Richard Chamberlain), who stars as a college science teacher/environmental activist Nat Bridger. While attending a conference in Toronto Bridger investigates the death of one of his former students at the request of her father. The former student’s death was ruled a heart attack, but Bridger and the girl’s father aren’t buying it since she was only 19. We know from the movie’s opening scene that what killed her was her answering a ringing pay phone [link for younger readers] that then emitted a high-pitched whine that, apparently, immobilized her while she bled from her nose and eyes before a blast of electricity is shot directly into her ear, sending her flying across a subway platform and onto a nearby escalator.

Several more people die this way, with some of the kills being unintentionally hilarious, such as a very Mac and Me scene in which an executive is sent flying through an upper floor window of an office high rise, still seated in his desk chair. Bridger pieces together that the calls are being perpetrated by a person who has somehow devised a way to send high-voltage blasts through the telephone lines (just go with it), but phone company execs stonewall him when he goes to them with his concerns, turning Murder by Phone into an awkward conspiracy thriller. Bridger’s trip to the phone company isn’t for naught, however. While there he meets R.T. (Sarah Botsford), an artist creating a mural in the lobby of the phone company’s headquarters, who assists him in his investigation as well as becoming his love interest.

I first learned about this movie when the Glorious Trash blog reviewed Phone Call, Jon Messmann’s novelization of this movie’s script published a full year before the movie was filmed in 1980, and three years before its release in the U.S. Glorious Trash described the book as “sluggish” and “more deadening than thrilling,” before launching into a tirade about Bridger being written as a hardcore environmentalist <sigh>. Even dismissing the right wing complaints, the book sounds like a chore to read. The movie, though, is well-paced and entertaining. Chamberlain and Botsford, besides being easy on the eyes, keep things grounded by playing it straight, while supporting actors John Houseman, as Bridger’s pompous mentor, and Gary Reineke, as a skeptical police lieutenant, give more outsized performances befitting a B-movie. Anderson’s stylish direction also helps, even wringing (or is that ringing?) some genuine tension from the goofy premise.

Though I’d be among the first to buy this movie if Vinegar Syndrome ever got ahold of it for a Blu-ray release (hint, hint), I’d also be the first to admit that it doesn’t fully work. The movie’s story would’ve been easier to buy had there been a supernatural/paranormal cause behind killer phones. No matter how much science-y sounding dialog the movie throws at us, it just can’t convince us someone could kill via landline. Even more far-fetched: Bridger, who has a Ph.D., allowing people to address him Mister Bridger without once correcting them. I call bullshit.

Short Takes: ‘Swallowed’ (2022) ★★★

Not to be confused with Swallow [NSFW].

A body horror movie written and directed by the same man who gave us Jamie Marks is Dead and The Passenger, with full frontal male nudity and featuring the star of Nightmare on Elm Street 2: Freddy’s Revenge as a vicious queen? You don’t have to ask me twice.

Making Carter Smith’s Swallowed even more intriguing—for me, at least—is Smith makes his story decidedly queer. When we first meet one of its protagonists, Benjamin (Cooper Koch, recently in Netflix’s Monsters: The Lyle and Erik Menendez Story), he’s celebrating his impending escape from his dead-end hometown in rural Canada, his joining an L.A. gay porn studio’s stable being his all-expense-paid ticket to a more exciting life. His best friend Dom (Jose Colon) thinks Ben is naïve (“Those guys are going to want all that money back, man”), but celebrates with him, nevertheless. Dom is supposedly straight, yet it’s obvious he’s not that straight. Just as obvious is Ben very much hoping tonight’s the night they take their friendship up a notch, or at the very least, Dom consents to a farewell BJ. Alas, despite pointing our minds in that direction, the movie’s title is not an oral sex reference.

On the drive home Dom takes a detour to check on his cousin, DiDi. He and Didi had worked out a deal to smuggle some drugs into the U.S, the money from which Dom was going to give to Ben as a going away present (dude, you could’ve just agreed to let Ben blow you). Except, Didi is now too stoned to act as the go-between, so Dom now must deal with her girlfriend Alice (Jena Malone), who is neither congenial nor compromising, pulling a gun when Dom balks at having to swallow condoms stuffed with product. That gun also comes in handy when Ben needs to be convinced to swallow some condoms as well.

Crossing the border into Maine is the easy part, it turns out. Complications arise when Dom attempts shitting out the contraband and discovers it’s not a drug—but its bite can induce a high. By the time Alice arrives to retrieve the product, she finds Dom catatonic and pants-less and Ben freaking the fuck out. Her boss Rich (Mark Patton) isn’t going to like this.

Though Swallowed is labeled a body horror, don’t go in expecting Cronenberg (David or Brandon) wrapped in a rainbow flag. It feels more like a homoerotic crime thriller, with the tension derived from the unpredictable situation Ben and Dom find themselves in, without any grotesque physical transformations (you can expect some blood and shit, however, as well as one prosthetic dick* that’s almost convincing). Smith has shown in his other films that he can get a lot from a limited budget, and he gets more than his money’s worth with Koch, Colon, Malone and Patton, all great in their roles. Unfortunately, Smith tacked on a silly epilogue that’s tonally at odds with everything that came before it and dismisses all Ben has gone through. It doesn’t ruin the movie, but it did leave a sour taste in my mouth.

*Not counted as the movie’s full-frontal male nudity.

The Horrors of Tacky Jewelry

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Artfully Blending Gothic Seriousness with Camp Silliness

I probably would’ve never picked up a Graham Masterton novel if I hadn’t read Grady Hendrix’s fantastic Paperbacks from Hell: The Twisted History of ’70s and ’80s Horror Fiction. I was aware of Masterton’s best-known title, 1975’s The Manitou, but only because I’d seen its cheesy/awesome 1978 movie adaptation. Even then, though I knew it was based on a book, I couldn’t have told you who wrote it.

Paperbacks from Hell covers The Manitou, of course, and several other Masterton novels get name checked as well. However, the Masterton novel Hendrix chose to highlight was 1988’s cannibal cult novel Feast (published as Ritual in the U.K.). “Wherever you think this book won’t go,” Hendrix writes, “Masterton not only goes there, he reports back in lunacy-inducing detail.” I was sold, and immediately sought out the novel, thrilled I could find the Pinnacle paperback with the die-cut cover.

Die-cut covers excite me.

Though I didn’t find Feast to be as over-the-top as Hendrix did, it’s a fun ride. It’s the literary equivalent to watching a B-grade horror movie from the same era (kind of a Phantasm vibe, but with cannibals), with Masterton keeping me guessing where the book was going and usually surprising me when he got there. Sure, it’s kind of silly in places, but Masterton’s writing ability makes the book such a fun read you don’t care.

Masterton’s 1985 novel PICTURE OF EVIL (a.k.a. Family Portrait) has a more serious tone than the pulpy Feast, yet it maintains an undercurrent of camp that becomes more overt as the story progresses. The campiness is perhaps fitting given it’s a riff on Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray, even going so far as to make a pun of that book’s title.

Vincent Pearson, a well-to-do New York art dealer, is the owner of the titular picture of evil, a portrait of 12 people—all hideous—painted by Walter Waldegrave, a mediocre talent at best, who was reputed to have an interest in the occult. Not only is the painting unpleasant to look at, the painting smells as well: A thick sweetish smell, like chicken skin that has decayed and gone green, only more pervasive, more cloying.

Vincent has no intention of selling the painting, telling his young executive curator Edward that it’s part of the Pearson private collection, explaining the painting was his grandfather’s. “He used to say it was like a family charm—that as long as we kept it, it would keep us safe.”

But on the same December day Vincent leaves the gallery early, a mysterious woman— well dressed, beautiful, very pale—visits the gallery. She introduces herself as Sybil Vane (the Dorian Gray references aren’t always subtle), and she’s interested in a specific painting, and it’s the one Edward can’t sell her, the Waldegrave. She doesn’t take no for an answer, but Edward, though entranced by the woman’s beauty, stands his ground, shaky though it is. Sybil Vane promises to return the next day to speak with Vincent.

Meanwhile, the gum-chewing sheriff of Litchtfield County, Conn., Jack Smith, whose job usually consists of keeping an eye on properties owned by wealthy New Yorkers, suddenly has a killer on his hands, and a very nasty one at that. The corpse of a young man has been fished out of a Connecticut reservoir, with all the skin peeled from his body. The coroner tells Jack that the skin was removed with surgical precision, mostly likely while the victim was still alive. “Otherwise, what on earth would have been the point of doing it! This is torture, in my view,” says the coroner, one of many characters whose dialog will have readers wondering if the Connecticut in Picture of Evil is a little talked about region of Great Britain.

The woman seeking the Waldegrave painting and the skinned corpse are not unrelated. “Sybil Vane” is really Cordelia Gray, who, after several decades of exile in Europe, has returned with the rest of her family to the United States to reclaim the Waldegrave painting, and with it, return fully to the life they had when the painting—a family portrait—was first completed in the late 1800s.

The Grays are undead, but they are not vampires. It’s more like they’re immortal but not ageless and are prone to decay without Waldegrave painting in their possession. To keep up their appearances the Grays must steal a new skin suit, usually taken from whatever unfortunate hitchhiker Cordelia’s brother Maurice can entice into his old Cadillac Fleetwood. Maurice then takes them back to the family home in Darien, Conn., drugs them (if they’re lucky), then carefully and expertly removes his victim’s skin. As described by Masterton, it’s the removal of skin that’s the hard part. The recipient of the new epidermis can slip into it like it’s merely a very bloody onesie. Once the skin has “settled” onto its new body, the recipient is almost good as new—on the outside at least.

Cordelia, still quite rotten on the inside, returns to Vincent Pearson’s gallery, only to again just miss him. Vincent has gotten an early start on the weekend, heading to his house in Connecticut with Charlotte, the “the youngest woman board member of the Metropolitan Museum of Modern Art. Also, by far the most beautiful.” Charlotte is literally Vincent’s lady friend, for even though they have kissed and cuddled, they are not fucking (yeah, I had a hard time buying that, too). Vincent does have a girlfriend, a 21-year-old, large-breasted editorial assistant named Meggsy, a moniker more befitting a Bichon Frisé than a person. Meggsy has absolutely no bearing on the narrative and seems only to exist to assure the reader that Vincent is a heterosexually active man, despite what might be inferred by his sexless relationship with Charlotte.

Edward and Cordelia fuck, however. Under the guise of hiring the executive curator to help her seek out other pieces for her art collection, she makes a date for lunch, after which the pair return to Edward’s apartment where Cordelia wastes little time seducing her mark. Masterton isn’t terribly graphic (a minor disappointment as I expected more smut from the author of How to Drive Your Man Wild in Bed and The High Intensity Sex Plan), but he makes it clear that Cordelia is an incredible lay, and that maybe Edward is well-hung, or at least thinks he is:

She was yielding but cruel, continually biting his neck and his nipples, continually scratching him, but then parting her thighs widely and wantonly, or twisting around so she could take him in her mouth, so deeply he couldn’t imagine why she didn’t choke.

Once Edward drifts off into a post-nut slumber, Cordelia slips out of his apartment, taking his keys to the gallery on her way out. Once she’s gone, we learn she’s done more than drain Edward’s balls. Here, Masterton is much more graphic:

As Edward slept, a small off-white maggot emerged from the warm, sweaty crevices around his testicles and slowly made its way up his hairy thigh, its brown-tinged, sightless head weaving from side to side. Soon it reached the crest of his flaccid penis where it rested against his leg. The maggot crawled over the top of it, and then underneath it, until it found the crevice of his urethra. It waggled its way gradually inside and disappeared.

Yeah, Edward’s not coming back. Vincent does, however, discovering that the door to his gallery unlocked and his executive curator nowhere in sight. Nothing is taken, though. The Waldegrave, the one painting that was of interest to the thieves, was already gone, taken to Aaron, the “big and gingerbearded” art restorer who lives in Lichtfield County, Ct. Vincent, equal parts concerned and pissed off, goes to Edward’s apartment. When Edward doesn’t come to the door, Vincent badgers the concierge into letting him inside, where he discovers his employee’s body is now home to a million maggots. The police, understandably, don’t believe Edward was still alive when Vincent saw him three days ago and consider him a suspect. 

An Eviscerated Cat, a Clairvoyant Housewife
and a Punchable Art Expert

Vincent continues to find himself at the periphery of strange and disturbing events. After discovering the maggot-riddled corpse of Edward, he learns that Edward’s ex-fiancée Laura has disappeared and that Aaron’s cat Van Gogh was killed, found skinned and hanging from a tree. Bizarrely, the cat’s likeness has suddenly appeared on the lap of one of the women in the Waldegrave portrait. Then Vincent learns that Ben, the adult son of his God-fearing housekeeper, paralyzed after a fall suffered during a roofing job, has attempted to slice off his own face with a piece of broken glass.

Jack has heard about Ben’s self-mutilation as well, and rushes to the hospital when he learns that Ben was terrified that someone or something wanted his skin. It’s here that Picture of Evil becomes kind of goofy. Like, climactic scene of The Manitou goofy. Enter Pat, the clairvoyant housewife. Pat is a friend of Jack’s wife, and while he’s skeptical of her “gift,” he’s also desperate. His only lead has been a young hitchhiker named Elmer, who managed to escape Maurice Gray, but the sheriff's attempt—with an assist by the Darien police chief—to question Maurice go nowhere, with Maurice smugly insisting on seeing a warrant first. Upon learning that Ben has only hours left to live, Jack decides to ask for Pat’s help, never mind that it’s 3 a.m. when he does so.

It's at the hospital that Jack and Vincent finally meet. Jack is initially resentful of Vincent, put off by “the lord-of-the-manor way in which Vincent had walked into the observation room and taken over the situation as if he had some kind of royal authority.” However, upon hearing about all the events that have surrounded Vincent—Edward’s death, Laura’s disappearance, Aaron’s skinned cat—the sheriff begins to believe that Vincent might be useful in prosecuting the Grays. Furthermore, Vincent is on board with using Pat to communicate with Ben via a séance.

Pat arrives at the hospital with curlers in her hair (a detail the reader will be reminded of throughout the chapter), annoyed by the inconvenient hour she was summoned and doubtful a séance will do much good. Interestingly, she’s the only one to express any real skepticism. Even Ben’s doctor is willing to give this psychic shit a try. The séance, conducted in the doctor’s office, gets off to a slow start, but dramatically kicks into high gear, with the participants plunged into complete darkness even though the lights are on, voices heard through static, showers of white specks, and ghostly howls (it’s really hard not to visualize this scene through the eyes of the late William Girdler, clumsy composites and all). Ben dies during the séance, but not without imparting one cryptic message, because of course any message was going to be cryptic: Lichtfield Cemetery…Johnson…next to the oak.

Everyone immediately goes to the cemetery, only to be disappointed that there is nothing about the grave that implicates the Grays. Except, Vincent realizes later, there is: the Johnson grave is a tomb, a walled grave. Waldegrave.

While Jack and Vincent are participating in séances and visiting cemeteries, Cordelia and Maurice have been busy eliminating Sheriff Smith’s sole witness, Elmer, gaining access to his cell by claiming to be relatives. After they left, Elmer’s body was discovered, consumed by maggots. The Gray family also dispatch the Darien police chief, George Kelly, whom they catch snooping around their house in the early morning hours. 

Meanwhile, Vincent and Charlotte become lovers (better late than never), their afterglow dimmed by the arrival of Vincent’s neurotic bitch of an ex-wife, dropping off her and Vincent’s tween son, Thomas, a day early to spend Christmas with his father. Luckily for them, the boy is easily pawned off on family friends, allowing Vincent and Charlotte time to do research into Vincent’s family history and the Grays, making the connection that readers made before chapter five: the people depicted in the Waldegrave portrait are the Grays.

Pat’s services are enlisted once again, this time to communicate with spirits through the Waldegrave portrait, which now has a new addition: Laura, wearing a black maid’s dress, the skirt hiked up to reveal her cooch. If the description of the first séance suggested B-movie cheese, or at least an episode of Ghost Hunters, the second one is more akin to John Carpenter’s In the Mouth of Madness. Laura appears in the room and Jack tries to communicate with her, to ask where she’s being held, but Laura’s vaporous image only does a sexy dance in response. They realize too late that Pat hasn’t summoned Laura; she’s summoned the Grays’ toxic psyche. Before it’s all over, Pat is will be brought to death’s door, twice. Once when she appears to have been stabbed, and again when she vomits up copious amounts of blood. Both instances are illusions. The scars from the experience are very real, however, and Pat urges Vincent to destroy the Waldegrave portrait.

Except, destroying the portrait could mean destroying Laura. Hoping to find an alternate way to stopping the Grays and save Laura, Vincent, Charlotte and Jack pay a visit Dr. Percy McKinnon, who, per Charlotte, “knows everything anyone would want to know about art and magic.” He’s also a pompous asshole; however, he doesn’t dismiss Vincent’s claim that the Waldegrave portrait is what allows the Grays to live eternally. While his validation is gratifying, it doesn’t make the punchable art expert’s lecturing any more palatable, and when Dr. McKinnon offers a theory that things imagined by artists and writers can become real, Vincent begins to suspect this expert is talking out his ass.

While Vincent, Charlotte and Jack are trying to wrap their heads around the magical properties of art, Thomas returns early from visiting a friend. Parked in front of his father’s house is an old black Cadillac, and waiting beside it are a man and a woman, claiming to be family friends…

Nitpick? I Daren’t, but Let’s

I found Picture of Evil to be almost as enjoyable as Feast. Masterton’s writing is strong, vividly evoking a mood with his descriptions and use of spooky metaphors (“the lapels lifted up to enclose her face like the petals of a black tulip”). There are several moments that instill dread, such as the skinned body being fished from the Connecticut reservoir and Cordelia and Maurice coaxing Thomas into their confidence. The final chapters, in which Vincent enters the world of the Grays’ impressive art collection, are particularly fun, though how Vincent gains entry into this fantastical realm—via a hastily painted portrait and repeating some Latin phrases—is eye-rollingly silly. However, the artful blending of the serious and the silly is part of the book’s charm.

I do have some notes, however. For starters, Meggsy has no fucking reason to exist in this book and wouldn’t be missed if cut. I’d also argue that Laura should have been Edward’s fiancé rather than his ex, just to raise the stakes. I mean, how many bosses are going to care that much about an employee’s former girlfriend or boyfriend? They don't care about employees’ current partners. Or lose Laura completely, have Vincent and Charlotte already be lovers in the book’s early chapters and then have the Grays take Charlotte. That could really crank up the tension.

I’d also argue Picture of Evil’s story starts at the wrong point. The first chapter introduces us to Maurice and Cordelia while they are still living in France. It’s not a bad chapter, illustrating Maurice’s M.O. of picking up hitchhikers and skinning them, but it reveals too much too soon. The book’s third chapter, when the skinned corpse is dredged from water, would’ve made a stronger opening, leaving a little bit of mystery. As it is, when that body is discovered, we already know the who and the why, diminishing some of the book’s suspense.

More of an issue is the book’s setting, or rather, Masterton’s failure to portray it. For all his strengths as a writer, Masterton—born in Edinburgh, now living in Surrey, England—nails the American voice about as successfully as Kevin Costner nails a British accent. Sounding British works for the Grays, but you will never believe Vincent, Charlotte, Edward or Sheriff Jack are from the United States. The author’s “Rules for Writing” article on his website notes the importance of believable dialog and using correct idioms, yet Vincent twice uses the contraction daren’t, which isn’t exactly a common part of modern U.S. speech (my spell checker sure has a problem with it). The characters of Feast sounded British as well, but not as distractingly. Pictures of Evil’s story would’ve worked just as well, if not better, had it been set in the U.K., even if it would be at the expense of a pun revealed at the novel’s ending.

Pictures of Evil may not be in the running as my favorite Masterton novel, but it’s still pretty damn entertaining, solidifying Masterton as another reliable writer to seek out when I’m shopping for paperbacks of a certain vintage. I daren’t pass up another opportunity to read another one of his books. 

Homeschooling Can Really Fuck Some Children Up

Way back in 2020, when I reviewed Stephen Lewis’ novel The Love Merchants, I mentioned that I planned on reviewing his 1982 gothic horror Buried Blossoms someday. Well, that day has come.

When I first teased this eventual review, I referred to Buried Blossoms as a “Flowers in the Attic knock-off,” an observation I based solely on the book’s cover. There are some similarities between Blossoms and V.C. Andrews’ mega-hit Flowers—a wealthy, fucked-up family, children living in isolation, incest—but it’s not a direct rip-off. In Blossoms, the children of the wealthy Hazeltine family aren’t the victims of evil adults but rather corrupted by their domineering father, who uses his money to isolate himself and his family from the New England town in which they live.

That town is Eastfield, Massachusetts, the founding of which we learn far more than is necessary to the story. All you really need to know is the town has planned a bicentennial celebration July 4, 1896, and Paul Hazeltine, owner of the Hazeltine Buggy Works, the town’s largest employer and responsible for Eastfield’s current notoriety and prosperity, has been tapped to be the event’s keynote speaker.

His acceptance of the gig is something of a surprise as Paul Hazeltine has made it abundantly clear that he gives not one shit about the silly residents of Eastfield. He keeps his family sequestered in a palatial estate outside the city limits, his beautiful, compliant wife Olivia and their children only venturing into town for infrequent shopping trips. The kids don’t even attend school, Paul Hazeltine insisting that they be home schooled instead, not for religious reasons (he’s a staunch atheist) but because he doesn’t want his children mingling with the lowly town folk.

His son, Paul, Jr., buys into the belief that their family is superior. When he’s taunted by one of the local boys during one of those rare shopping trips, Paul, Jr., calmly tells him to stop.

“Why?” the boy who started [sic] teased. “What are you gonna do about it? Fight?”

Paul Hazeltine, Jr., shook his head. Instead of the reaction his tormentor had expected, his face was set in a superior smile.

“What then?”

“I’m going to tell my father,” Paul said. “And then your father won’t have a job. And you won’t have any food. And you’ll die.”

Unlike her brother, the oldest Hazeltine daughter Francine isn’t interested in being superior to other kids, she wants to be one of them, to have friends. She wants a friend so badly she later invents an imaginary one named Jane. Her mother wants the same thing, and even summons the courage to ask her husband if they could, perhaps, host a party at their house. His response is immediate and harsh: “Certainly not!” Olivia demurs, because it’s 1896.

The day of the bicentennial arrives, and the Hazeltines make their grand entrance driving to the event in an electric car developed at the Buggy Works. Paul Hazeltine touts it as a sign of things to come. Electricity, he tells the crowd, will power carriages and power homes. This being a time before people worshiped the rich and took their word as gospel, the crowd is skeptical, some of them mocking Paul Hazeltine for suggesting such a ridiculous idea. Eventually, he wins residents over, selling them on the idea that Eastfield, currently benefitting from the success of Hazeltine Buggy Works, will soon grow exponentially when the Hazeltine Electric Car carries them into the 20th century.

The novel doesn’t really get hopping until it jumps to 1903. Olivia’s fifth child (besides Paul, Jr., and Francine, there’s Margaret and Constance, the youngest) is stillborn, and so deformed it’s barely recognizable as human (Its mouth and nose were one. There were gill-like slits at its throat and rigid flaps of skin where its arms and feet might have been.) The Hazeltine Electric Car has stalled and died, losing out to gas-powered cars. Rather than live with his failure, Paul Hazeltine, locked alone in his study, kills himself by drinking ink, of all things.

It’s Olivia, deciding to surprise her husband with a midnight visit to his study, who discovers his body and promptly loses her mind. Refusing to admit the reality of his death, Olivia tosses Paul’s suicide note into the fire and then drags her husband’s corpse out of the house, which sort of strains credulity. Olivia is described as having a slender build and, at this point in the story, has a growing dependence on morphine. It seems unlikely she could drag her husband’s dead ass through the house by herself without drawing the attention of one of her children or their maid, Brigid. But no one ever hears her, and so Olivia drags Paul’s body out to the ice house and buries him there.

No one hears Olivia as she disposes of Paul’s body, but her teenaged children Paul, Jr., and Francine see her from their bedroom windows. Her children don’t confront her the next morning, however, even when Olivia announces that their father has been called away on business. “But we have a man of the house all the same,” she tells her children, referring to her son. Paul, Jr. The little fucker immediately embraces his new role, asking if he could take his father’s place at the head of the table until his father returns, knowing he never will. Olivia agrees, before drinking a glass of morphine-spiked water, because ladies don’t mainline.

Jove Books gave Buried Blossoms a snazzy keyhole cover

Incest, Madness and Murder

Paul Hazeltine was cold and domineering. His son, on the other hand, is a little psychopath. He overhears Francine telling her imaginary friend Jane that Olivia is mad and confronts her, slapping her and pinning her to the floor.

Paul’s hand covered her mouth, then his face pressed against hers and his hands were all over her at once, along her legs, under her dress.

When she tried to pull away, he pinched her, butting his head against her face. He forced his hand between her legs, laughing to himself as she shook with terror. Then, as suddenly as it had begun, the attack was over.

“I’m the man of the house now,” Paul told her, standing up, smiling, leaving.

Buried Blossoms is better edited than the typo-riddled Love
Merchants, but a copy editor clearly lost his/her place when 
copying and pasting sentences in this paragraph.

It’s not long before Paul, Jr., is sexually assaulting Francine on a regular basis (though Francine is sometimes aroused when her brother forces himself on her, which adds another layer of shame). But Francine isn’t the only one of his sisters that Paul, Jr., assaults. The maid, Brigid, checks on Margaret and Constance taking a bath, only to discover Paul is with them, coaxing his little sisters into mimicking the acts from a pornographic illustration found in one of their late father’s books (“We’re playing French ladies,” one of the girls announces).

The maid is horrified further when Paul takes a cross from his pocket—a cross that Brigid had given Francine earlier—and slips “the chain over his penis, so that the cross dangled from it.”

Brigid flees the bathroom, intending to flee with the girls, but making no effort to get them away from their brother at that very moment. Paul, Jr., doesn’t remain in the bathroom, instead following Brigid, taunting her with his cross-festooned dong. Were it not for what transpired immediately prior, the mental picture of Brigid fleeing in terror from a teenager brandishing his hard-on is kind of funny. The laughter ends when Brigid is at the top of the stairs and Paul throws the crucifix at her, sending a startled Brigid tumbling down to the first floor, to her death.

Francine realizes escape is necessary if she’s the avoid the fates of Brigid or her mother, who is now floating through her days zombified on morphine and wine. During a trip to town to collect the family’s mail from the post office, she’s offered a ride from a young traveling salesman named Ned. Ned’s motives are sus, but Francine doesn’t give a shit. Not only is the salesman cute, but he’s also a potential savior. So what if it takes a blowjob and a quick fuck to convince him to take him with her?

One of the bigger surprises in Buried Blossoms is that Francine’s planned escape with Ned goes off without a hitch. I really expected Ned not to show up to their planned meeting at the train station, or for Paul to stop her from keeping the date, but Ned does, and Paul doesn’t. Ned does ditch her not long after (turns out he was already married; I knew he was a piece of shit), but Francine doesn’t care. She’s out of Eastfield and away from her fucked-up family.

While it’s great that Francine got away from her horrible life in Eastfield, we’re only at the novel’s midpoint, making it a little soon to dismiss her awful family from the story. The author evidently realized this, as he returns Francine to Eastfield 20 years later.

In those 20 years, Francine became an actress. Now known as Francine Le Faye, she travels the country in touring productions of Broadway plays, which is how she ends up in Eastfield. She’s understandably nervous about being there—she has, in the past, turned down roles in plays that would take her in the vicinity of her family home—but she’s also curious about what’s happened to her family, her mother and sisters especially. So, against her better judgment, she pays them a visit.

She’s alarmed to discover that the Hazeltine estate has fallen into disrepair, its once-cultivated gardens overgrown with weeds, the house itself overgrown with vines. Margaret and Constance answer the door, and though they are grown women they act like little girls, and they behave as if they’re members of a religious cult. Their answers to her questions are cryptic: their mother has “gone away”; their brother is “the same.” Creepy as they are, visiting with her sisters is reasonably pleasant. That changes when her brother. enters the room.

Paul, Jr. coldly indulges Francine’s visit, giving equally evasive answers to her questions about their mother. Margaret and Constance then give her a cup of tea. “You wanted something of Mother’s,” Paul said. “So now you have her favorite. Her medicine.”

Francine’s visit becomes imprisonment, during which her brother and sisters cut off all her hair and repeatedly sexually assault her. It should be mentioned here that although Lewis’ writing career was primarily made up of porny “exposés” about prostitution (Massage Parlor; Teenage Hookers; Housewife Hookers) and novels about the sexploits of the rich and famous (The Best Sellers; Expensive Pleasures), and the 1980s still being a time when the marketplace rewarded graphic descriptions of sex, no matter how repugnant the circumstances, the descriptions of sex acts in Buried Blossoms are relatively restrained. In fact, Lewis or whoever (see below) adopts an almost stream-of-consciousness style as Francine struggles to make sense of what’s happening to her, thinking it’s a dream. 

It’s not a dream, but it’s not a nightmare from which she’ll wake up anytime soon, even after she escapes, burned, battered, bald, and batshit. For the rest of the book, Francine will remain hospitalized, in a catatonic state and unable to tell the investigators her name, let alone what happened to her.

The remainder of the book concentrates on Paul, Jr., Margaret and Constance, detailing their lives in the early1940s as an incestuous throuple, Paul, Jr. hunting game (and killing a kid who dared knock on their door), with Margaret cooking their meals with assistance from Constance. Rather than any great dénouement, however, they merely get old and die, one by one.

Was Blossoms Ghostwritten? Let’s Speculate!

Horror was not usually Lewis’ thing. When I first wrote this review in May 2024, I speculated two titles in his bibliography, Something in the Blood and Natural Victims, sounded like they could be horror novels, but admitted I could find nothing online to verify their genre. However, both books recently showed up on eBay, and now I know that both are sexy, Harold Robbins-style potboilers, though the synopsis for Something in the Blood suggests its more of a cash-in on the late ’70s trucking/CB craze, sort of a serious Smokey and the Bandit if you will (but I won’t).

Stephen Lewis’ author photo from
the back of his 1973 book, Sex
Among the Singles.

Lewis himself still remains largely a mystery. That’s not surprising. He wasn’t exactly the type of author that got profiled in Publishers Weekly, though the Glorious Trash blog found this 1974 profile in the Detroit Free Press. Among its revelations: Lewis never went to college, he watched game shows while he wrote, and at the time he raked in $250,000 annually cranking out paperback originals.

So, given Lewis’ history of writing sleaze and not putting much effort into doing so, I had my doubts he’d be as adept at writing horror, yet Buried Blossoms is actually pretty effective. It’s superior in many ways to the other Lewis novel I’ve read, The Love Merchants. As much as I enjoyed The Love Merchants, I could fully believe that it was cranked out while he kept one eye on his game shows. But Buried Blossoms reads like it was written with a bit more care, like Lewis was interested in doing more than just getting paid and left the TV off. However, Blossoms was published a year after his death, with the copyright belonging to a George Kuharsky. At first, I naively thought Kuharsky was a family member or partner who inherited Lewis’ unpublished manuscript, but I'm now more inclined to believe he was a ghostwriter hired to complete Lewis’ unfinished book.

Adding credence to that ghostwriter suspicion is the uneven quality of Blossoms, which never adds up to a satisfying whole (mitigating factor: The Love Merchants wasn’t exactly a fully satisfying read, either). It either needed to be a lurid family saga told in 400-plus pages, or a more concise gothic horror, told in under 200. Instead, it’s a meandering 297 pages, not really getting to the creepy stuff until nearly 80 pages in. I’d be tempted to blame this on Lewis trying to reach a specific page count, except some of the chapters seem a little too fussy, like the five pages detailing Eastfield’s founding. Beyond being four more pages than Lewis would ordinarily supply, this chapter includes way more research of Massachusetts history than I’d expect from an author more inclined to detail the sexual adventures of hookers while he watched The Price is Right. But, who knows, maybe Lewis took an interest U.S. history before dying in his early 30s. 

Despite its uneven storyline, and regardless of who ultimately wrote it (but most likely not Lewis), Buried Blossoms is worth checking out, and usually pretty easy to find for sale online, at affordable prices, too. I may still pick up a few more of Lewis's ’70s potboilers that he actually wrote, though not Natural Victims, which is listed on eBay at an exorbitant $179.56 (!!!!). However, I’m more tempted to read and review his other posthumously published novel from the gay publishing house Alyson, if only because it is possibly the one book—if not the only one—Lewis wrote as his authentic self:

Stephen Lewis’ (?) last published novel.