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 copyeditor 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 his late father’s books (“We’re playing French ladies.”)

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.

But 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!

Buried Blossoms was not Lewis’ first foray into the horror genre, at least judging by titles in his bibliography. He previously published Something in the Blood and Natural Victims, though I couldn’t even find a cover of either online, let alone synopses, so their being horror novels is an assumption on my part.

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

I couldn’t find much about Lewis, either. 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 really 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, Buried Blossoms is worth checking out, and usually pretty easy to find for sale online, at affordable prices, too. Reading it made me tempted to check out one of Lewis’ other (presumed) horror novels, which are also for sale online. However, I’m more tempted to read and review his other posthumously published novel from the gay publishing house Alyson:

Stephen Lewis’ last (?) published novel.

A Paperback Mockbuster

The cheesy cover for Pinnacle’s
1978 edition of The Love Merchants.

 

THE LOVE MERCHANTS by Stephen Lewis, first published by Ace in 1974 and republished in 1978 by Pinnacle (the edition I have), is of a genre I love but has been out of vogue for a while: the Hollywood novel. Used to be you could count on the New York Times Best Seller list featuring at least one novel about the sleazy underbelly of glamorous Tinsel Town—and the sleazier the better. Of course, these books were popular at a time when Hollywood tried harder to sanitize its stars’ images. Then the Internet came along and that all went to shit.

But before celebs were showing more than they intended or sharing more than we wanted to know on Twitter, we had authors like Jacqueline Susann, Jackie Collins and Harold Robbins revealing, in XXX-plicit detail, the sordid goings on Hollywood tried so hard to keep under wraps. Their books were fiction, but it was understood they were roman à clefs. Half the fun in reading the books was figuring out a character’s real-life celeb counterpart. 

Stephen Lewis was much lower on the literary ladder than his trash fiction contemporaries, a writer who appears to have been more concerned with making a quick buck than earning a solid reputation. I first learned of Lewis on the Glorious Trash blog, which reviewed Lewis’s Massage Parlor and its creatively titled sequel Massage Parlor, Part II, both books published under the pseudonym Jennifer Sills. But Lewis did not restrict himself to providing the pornographic “exposés” of the rub-and-tug biz. He also cranked out novels inspired by other bestsellers, the literary equivalent of mockbusters. 

Such a novel is The Love Merchants. Even its title is derivative of other bestsellers, a mash-up of Susann’s The Love Machine and Robbins’ The Dream Merchants. Its storyline, however, has more in common with another knock-off in the Hollywood sleaze genre, Burt Hirschfeld’s 1970 novel The Love Thing, written under his Hugh Barron pseudonym. Like Love Thing, The Love Merchants is largely told from the point of view of a Hollywood publicist, and as in Love Thing, publicists are portrayed as wielding as much power as any studio executive. 

Hollywood publicist Laura Chesnay still remembers when she was starting out in 1942, when she was still known as Lola Cheifitz and working for Milton Sakowitz in New York, trying to “take second rate actors from one of the second rate shows Milt handled and plant an item that had them ‘spotted’ at a second-rate restaurant, also one of Milt’s accounts.” Ever ambitious, she changed her name to “rid herself of her obviously Jewish heritage,” and with the new name came a greater reputation. After being hired away by the much more prestigious Baker and Hammond firm, she not only scored a publicity coup for screen goddess and walking scandal machine Faye Reynolds but befriended the star as well, assuring Laura’s ascension to the top of her field. 

Now running her own P.R. firm in early 1970s Los Angeles, Laura does everything from advising her clients on which projects will best benefit their careers to smoothing over marital spats lest the couple jeopardize their successful husband-and-wife act (and Laura’s income). 

The 1974 cover was better
yet still missed the mark.

Aiding Laura are her two assistants, the oily Bob Siberling and young Karen Hewitt, who was recently hired away from the publicity department of the declining Wolfe Studios. Though Karen finds Laura’s mood swings tough to navigate she enjoys having access to the glamorous life, primarily via arranged dates with one of Laura’s biggest clients, Les Thomas, an aging screen stud and closet case. Karen enjoys the Hollywood glitz but, being a simple girl from Stockton, Calif., she is just as content going to cheap burger joints—and having hot sex—with Keith Stephens, a struggling actor who lives in her apartment complex. She might even be in love with Keith. However, when she’s forced to choose, she takes her chances with Les because, despite the reader being told Karen is smart as a whip, she thinks her love will change his proclivities. That goes about as well as one would expect—anyone except Karen, it turns out.

Jack and Betty Martin also require a lot of Laura’s attention, the couples’ image as, per the back-cover copy, “Hollywood’s Mr. & Mrs. Wholesome” constantly being threatened by Jack’s fucking every woman who steps within three feet of his dick and their teenage son Denny’s drug busts. A more closely guarded secret than Jack’s infidelities is his abuse of his wife Betty, which she forgives because the make-up sex is oh, so good. 

It would seem Laura would be plenty busy with these train wrecks for clients, but she’s always on the prowl for new business. When the smoothly confident Ray Cummings, a media mogul specializing in the teen market, meets with her and proposes working together to make Denny Martin the Next Big Thing, she jumps at the opportunity. The partnership proves profitable, yet Laura finds herself becoming increasingly suspicious of Cummings, though she’s unable to pinpoint exactly why. 

Maybe she’d be able to figure it out if she wasn’t suddenly busy with Faye Reynolds, who has returned from several years of exile in Europe following her firing from Worldwide Studios. Faye has been surgically restored to her youthful prime and is now ready to get back into the Hollywood scene. If Laura helps her buy the rights to the movie she made in Europe, Faye just knows she’ll once again be the reigning queen of the big screen. 

Let Me Ruin ‘The Partridge Family’ for You 

Per his bio in the back page of the book, Lewis used to be a gossip columnist and it shows in his characterizations of the celebrities in The Love Merchants. Though Faye Reynolds most closely resembles Elizabeth Taylor, I thought she was more of an amalgamation of several different movie stars (I detected shades of Bette Davis and Joan Crawford in her as well). Les Thomas, on the other hand, is so obviously based on Rock Hudson that he might as well have been named Hock Rudson. Lewis not only includes a flashback to when Les was coerced into marrying his agent’s secretary to quell gay rumors, just like Rock Hudson, he also incorporates a plot point in which Ray Cummings has doctored photos sent to media outlets showing Les marrying county comedian Grant Holmes, very similar to a joke gone awry involving Hudson and Jim Nabors. 

The real-life family of entertainers that Jack, Betty and Denny Martin immediately brought to my mind were Jack Cassidy, Shirley Jones and David Cassidy. Once that association got stuck in my head it put a whole new spin on some of the book’s more lurid passages, such as when Jack enters the bathroom while Betty is taking a bath: 

[Jack] dropped his pants slowly, enjoying her reaction. 

“I have to take a piss,” he said softly. “Want it?” 

Before she could answer, the hot yellow stream was flowing out of him into the tub. She felt it splash over her breasts and shoulders, then onto her neck and face. It happened so quickly that she had no time to react. 

“You bastard!” she shouted. “You son of a bitch!” 

Jack laughed as she hurriedly opened the drain and stood up, turning on the shower. She scrubbed at herself furiously, then Jack reached for her. Betty thought she was going to slip in the wet tub as she tried to pull away from him, but Jack’s arms went around her, lifting her out of the tub in one movement.

Before Betty could stop him, he had lowered her onto the bathroom rug. 

“Now,” he said heatedly, “now you’re going to get what you want.” 

Or when Betty walks in on Denny taking narcissism to a whole new level:

David Cassidy in his 1974 prime.

She gasped at his nakedness. He was sprawled on the bed, hard and swollen, leafing through a magazine. For a time neither of them moved. Betty was amazed—at seventeen, Denny was as large as his father. She blushed, realizing it had been years since she’d seen her oldest son totally nude.

“I—I’m sorry,” she said as Denny slowly brought the magazine down to cover himself. She noticed that it was a copy of Teentime, an issue that had a big story on Denny himself. There was a glimmer of amusement in the boy’s eyes as he watched her growing discomfort. 

“That’s okay,” he said.

And, finally, when Betty hires a hustler:

[When] he returned, the drinks in hand, she was waiting for him. He paused at the edge of the bed, and she swung herself around, her hands reaching for him. His testicles were heavy and swollen. Betty lifted them and released them, then her fingers moved to his penis, sliding it up and down until he was erect.

She moved faster, taking him in her fist, and what she found most enjoyable was not her own action but the passion she provoked in the boy. His eyes were closed and his head back. For a moment Betty thought of her son—was this what Denny and his girlfriend did? Had he ever—

The boy’s legs began to quiver, and a splash of scotch fell on his arm.

“Careful…” she said softly as he climaxed on her breasts. “You don’t want to spill the drinks.”

Then, taking one of the glasses, she used her free hand to guide his lips to hers, then downward. She leaned back as his eyes met hers, then he bent his head, understanding.

Betty smiled, watching him. It would be a long time before anyone came home—and next week she’d see they were all out again.

Rock on, Mrs. Partridge, you kinky bitch.

I’ll never view The Partridge Family the same way again. And if I’m reading the above scene correctly, I believe it’s implying Mrs. Partridge’s Betty’s call boy is lapping up his own load. Of course, I may be reading it that way because the Glorious Trash review mentions that a man gets a similar protein fix in Massage Parlor, Part II.  (Or maybe I’ve just seen too much gay porn.) It could be that Betty’s call boy was just going down on her, I but I think she’d do more than just watch him if he were. My husband thought Betty was just discouraging the hustler from kissing her, which tracks but seems a little too polite for this book.

Easy to Digest, Not as Filling

Lewis’ easy-to-digest style was just what I needed after Gaywyck’s fussy prose. He didn’t elevate the genre above itself like Herbert Kastle did, but he was a better writer than some of the established authors he was ripping off (Jackie Collins and Harold Robbins, specifically). The writer he reminded me of the most was another 1970s sleazemeister, William Hegner, though Lewis is neither as outrageous nor as quotable.

As easy as the The Love Merchants goes down, its story isn’t that filling. I suspect Lewis was trying for a specific word count, because by page 300 he seemed more interested in wrapping the story up than fully telling it. Several dramatic moments happen largely off-page (Faye confronting and assaulting Laura’s ex-business partners) or in flashback (Denny discovering his mom with a call boy), and we don’t get proper endings for several characters’ arcs as Lewis rushes to bring the book in at 341 pages. Usually readers can expect a lot of padding when publishers mandate writers keep to specific word counts, but Lewis could have really used an extra hundred pages or so to flesh out his novel. He also deserved more careful editing. The Love Merchants is riddled with typos and misspellings. Evelyn Grippo, who’s credited with editing the book (yes, this book has production credits), should be embarrassed.

The Love Merchants may not be fully satisfying trash, but it was enjoyable enough to whet my appetite for more of Lewis’ work. I recently bought Buried Blossoms, Lewis’ posthumously published (he died in 1981, in his 30s) Flowers in the Attic knock-off, which I fully intend to review. Eventually.