Bizarre (and Kinda' Hot) Love Triangle

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As Difficult to Put Down as it is to Stomach

 Trigger Warning: This is plantation porn, so there’s a lot of stuff that’s going to offend a lot of people, though I’d be more concerned if you’re not offended at all.

I thought I was done with plantation porn,
until I learned the identity of “Ashley Carter.”

In the opening chapters of the 1976 “Lance Horner novel by Ashley Carter,” MASTER OF BLACKOAKS, set in the antebellum South, we meet Baxter Simon, a Mississippi slave breeder traveling with Gree, a 14-year-old slave boy whose tongue has been cut out as punishment for lying. Simon, searching for one of his escaped slaves, stops at the Blackoaks plantation in Alabama, where he suspects she might be hiding. The plantation owner, Ferrell Baynard, takes an immediate dislike to Simon and insists the escaped slave is not at Blackoaks, yet permits the slave breeder to look around. During Simon’s tour of the plantation, he sees the Baynards’ “pureblood Fulani” slave Blade hard at work castrating hogs and immediately makes an offer to buy him. Ferrell Baynard refuses to sell Blade but allows Simon to thoroughly inspect Blade (Simon worked Blade’s foreskin back and forth several times. Blade’s…rod stiffened, blood pulsing into it so it stood thick and rigid in the breeder’s fist.), arousing—and outing—Ferrell Baynard’s arrogant son-in-law Styles Kenric while doing so. Simon’s visit to Blackoaks concludes with the slave breeder finding his escaped slave, Vinnie, who was indeed hiding on the plantation. When she attempts to flee, Simon kills her and, to the horror of the Baynards (and reader), throws her corpse into the hog pen, her value reduced to nothing more than food for swine.

And we’re not even 60 pages in yet.

So, yeah, Master of Blackoaks is not for the delicate, full of cruel acts and vile language, with characters using the N-word so frequently and so casually you’d think you were on Twitter. Yet, as difficult as Master of Blackoaks is to stomach, it’s just as difficult to put down, delivering everything a reader would want from plantation porn. If you’re not that reader, you probably backed out during the first paragraph of this post. For the rest of you, let’s continue.

After Baxter Simon departs, Blackoaks is visited by a slave trader who is just as despicable, Eakins Shivers. Shivers arrives with a coffle that “looked diseased, half-starved, exhausted. The ankles of every man, woman, and child bled from the unrelenting bite of their shackles with every step they took.” Though the Baynards find his treatment of his property distasteful, Ferrell Baynard invites Shivers into his home, where the two men talk within the confines of Ferrell’s office. Shivers is allowed to camp on Blackoaks property for the night. The next morning, Shivers is gone, and with him, two of the Baynards’ slaves.

Ferrell admits to his mistress, house slave Jeanne D’Arc (often addressed as Jahndark), that the missing men were sold, but tells his family that the slaves ran away, mostly to hide the truth about the plantation’s shaky finances. His oldest son Ferrell-Junior deduces what happened, however, and he does not approve. His father insists he had to. “That’s what Baxter Simon said, Papa,” Ferrell-Junior replies. “He cut out a slave child’s tongue because he had to.”

Even before the sale of the slaves, Ferrell’s son-in-law Styles intuits Blackoaks has a cash flow problem. Ferrell’s side hustle of distilling his own blend of corn liquor is what keeps the plantation afloat now that the over-farmed land only yields low-grade cotton. Styles, who heard the high offers Baxter Simon was making on Blade, thinks Blackoaks should turn its attention to slave breeding, becoming more resentful each time his father-in-law rejects the idea.

Meanwhile, his wife Kathy is driven to tears by Styles’ physical neglect. We know why he won’t touch her, and I might’ve spared a little bit of sympathy for him if he was merely a closet case, especially when coming out is not an option, but Styles is a sadistic, social-climbing asshole, who only married Kathy for her family’s position in Southern society. When he forces himself to have sex with his wife, he can only get aroused by causing Kathy pain. Kathy’s mother, Miz Claire, is concerned by her daughter’s unhappiness, though she totally misjudges the situation, worrying that Styles is too sexually demanding. “The ugly, depraved things men demand of women. I thanked God when I became ill—yes I did!—when your father moved out of my bedroom,” Miz Claire tells a disheartened Kathy.

The arrival of Hunter “Hunt” Campbell, a young, attractive Yankee hired to live at Blackoaks and tutor 15-year-old Morgan Baynard, provides a distraction, as well as an outsider’s point of view. Hunt has little interest in living in Alabama, but it’s crucial he put as many miles as possible between himself and Massachusetts since his cousin found out Hunter had been fucking his wife. To the Baynards’ credit, even though they don’t understand their new employee from the North, they are fairly accepting of him—provided he understands his place. Namely, that he keeps his abolitionist views to himself. Hunt rebels against this requirement in small ways, though not always successfully. His attempt at ingratiating himself with the kitchen slaves is merely awkward, with Jeanne d’Arc politely but strongly encouraging Hunt to take his white ass out to dining room with the other white folk and leave the kitchen slaves be.

Hunt makes greater inroads when teaching Morgan. Morgan is, in today’s parlance, intellectually disabled and struggles with his lessons, but Morgan’s “body slave” Soapy (a.k.a. Sophocles) is a quick study. Ferrell is none too pleased, telling Hunter that he’s wasting his time and Ferrell’s money. “I won’t tolerate it. There is a law against teaching Negro slaves to read. The state legislature passed that law upon deliberation. In many ways it’s a good law,” Ferrell says.

Not wanting to be sent back to Boston, the Yankee tutor acquiesces. Soapy is distraught, as there was one book (never named) that he wanted to continue reading. Hunter tells him not to worry. “Maybe I could lose it, Soapy. Somewhere you can find it. Only, you’ve got to be careful. If anybody finds you got it, they might fire me—but it’ll be much worse for you.”

But Hunter Campbell isn’t exactly a hero. When his employer extends the offer of a bed wench (“I’ve never believed it was healthy for a man—young or old—to be too long denied a sexual outlet”), Hunt balks, knowing the woman offered him would be forced to do so. But when he retires to his room and finds a nervous 15-year-old(!) slave girl, Sefina, waiting for him, Hunt takes full advantage, his principles no match against his blue balls.

‘I Must Test You…for Viscosity’

The text on the back of the book teases an affair between Hunt and Kathy (“He found solace and torment with Kenric’s wife”), but beyond a make-out session in the final chapters of the book in which Kathy seriously considers an affair with the hunky Yankee, the pair never hook up. The teaser text on the back also suggests Styles Kenric’s homosexuality would be featured more prominently, but it’s not addressed again until the last few chapters, though it does so in a most spectacular fashion, when Kathy spies her husband through her dressing room door “inspecting” Blade’s teen-aged brother, Moab.

“Lawdy, Masta Styles, you keep whipping my snake like that, it gonna be mighty easy to get that juice you wants.”

Styles nodded. His fingers tightened and he slowly stroked the boy’s penis until Moab’s hips tightened and writhed in helpless reflex. “Do you like that, Moab?”

“Lawdy, masta…lawdy…”

The stroking motions increased in intensity and Styles gripped the pulsing penis tighter.

Trembling with horror and outrage at war inside her, Kathy saw that Styles was shaking visibly, like a young boy with his first lover.

She heard Styles mumble something unintelligible about “fluid.” His breathing quickened and he sank to his knees before Moab. Moab’s eyes widened in disbelief at the white man on his knees before him. Moab was almost deranged with overwhelming passion. He could only stand, legs apart, as Styles caught him about the hips and pressed his face against his thighs. Styles gasped, “Viscosity.”

“What masta?”

“Viscosity, Moab.” Styles mumbled fanatically, his face pressed into the boy’s crisp black pubic hairs. “I must test you…for viscosity…. Do you see, Moab? Oh my, God, Moab, do you see?”

“I see, masta,” Moab whispered helplessly as the white man crammed the dark and distended penis between his lips, nursing it furiously.”

So, yeah, that happens. When Kathy confronts him, Styles alternately tries to blame her for spying then gaslight her, apologizing that she’s so upset about what she thinks she saw. But Kathy isn’t having it: “Think I saw! I saw you on your knees, Styles—sucking—that Black boy’s—cock!”

Kathy lobs the expected epithets at her husband (“Homo! Homo! Homo!”) before adding: “Being a homosexual is not nearly as rotten as your lying—your pretense.”

But Styles is unmoved. Since divorce isn’t an option, the pair split in the only acceptable way: Styles moves into a separate bedroom, just like his father-in-law had so many years ago.

Road to Tragedy Paved with Boners, Bored Rednecks

Kathy’s oldest brother Ferrell-Junior has his own issues. FJ knows Lorna June Garrity is not of his class, hers being in the lower-middle, but her social standing has no bearing on her beauty. Lorna’s mother, Lucinda, bitter ever since her husband was cheated out his inheritance by his conniving cousin Leander (all these L names!), is determined to claim her place in Southern society and is not above whoring her daughter out to get what she wants. (Mr. Garrity just drinks.) Lucinda gives her daughter advice that should be familiar to fans of Bobbie Gentry (or Reba McEntire or Orville Peck): “You be nice to Mr. Baynard now, Lorna June. You want him to come back again, so you be nice to him.” 

British publisher Pan Books’ cover
for Master of Blackoaks emphasizes
the book’s cruelty over the sex.

Lorna June is indeed real nice to the Baynards’ hot oldest son, making sure FJ is good and hard when she starts negotiating a more prominent place in his life, and by extension high society. Ferrell-Junor ultimately reasons that “the exchange was totally fair—her beauty was worth far more than all the dull parties his mother and her friends would ever throw.” Also: the power of boners.

His post-nut bliss later turns to regret when he sees his odious “friend” Gil Talmadge at the local watering hole. The book makes clear that FJ doesn’t really like Gil but goes along with his antics—like having a mentally disabled slave girl masturbate for the guys’ amusement—just so he’s not shunned by the group. Gil tells FJ that Lorna June is the town lay. “Hell, if you didn’t screw her the first time out, you’re in a new minority, old pal,” Gil says. “Every white guy in Calvert County has had ole Lorna June Garrity—at least once.”

FJ later confronts Lorna June about the rumors. She confesses he’s not the first man she’s been with (“I might have made a couple mistakes, but that’s all they were—mistakes”), but she quickly silences Ferrell-Junior’s concerns, as well as get him to again promise to invite her to an upcoming party at Blackoaks, with a blowjob. Girl knows how to negotiate!

The day of the party arrives, but the Garritys don’t. FJ had pleaded with Kathy to invite her but learns later that Kathy “accidentally” lost the invitation, conveniently finding it the morning after the party. A guilty FJ rides to town to apologize to the Garritys. Though her mother is royally pissed about the snub, Lorna June is forgiving and suggests she and Ferrell-Junior go for a ride out into the country. FJ doesn’t understand why she still wants anything to do with him, but it seems Lorna June finds him as hot as he finds her. Like they have on all their previous buggy rides, the couple pulls off the road to bang. But, as we’ve seen time and time again, the road to tragedy is paved with boners and bored rednecks:

They were so engrossed in each other they did not hear the rustling in the underbrush. It was not until they reached a driving climax, almost struggling off the blanket in their frenzy, and Ferrell fell away from her exhausted, that he saw Gil Talmadge and the others standing just inside the small clearing.

“Get out of here,” Ferrell said to her. “Get in that buggy and get the hell out of here. Dress on the road. Anything. Get the hell out of here.”

Lorna June isn’t quick enough. FJ is beaten and tied to a wheel of his buggy, powerless as Lorna June is gang raped. In the aftermath, Lorna June marries homely bank clerk Luke Scroggins and FJ, who heretofore has shown zero interest in his mother’s Catholic faith, becomes a motherfuckin’ priest.

A Steady Stream of Depravity, Debauchery and Dicking

I thought my days of reading plantation porn were behind me. I had waded into the slaveploitation cesspool in the latter half of the aughts, first with Kyle Onstott’s Mandingo, then its early sequels, Drum and Master of Falconhurst. I was drawn to their lurid content, the books being in questionable taste only increasing my fascination. I was offended by the subject matter, sure, but then I should be. Slavery is offensive. I take greater issue Gone with the Wind, which is, to quote director and What Went Wrong co-host Chris Winterbauer, “Civil War fan fiction.” At least plantation porn doesn’t try to romanticize the antebellum South.

It was when I sampled some slaveploitation lit outside of the Falconhurst series that I began reconsidering my interest in the genre. Richard Tresillian’s The Bondmaster (“Harder than Mandingo! Louder than Drum!”) was OK, even if it’s basically a retelling of Mandingo, re-locating the story from the American South to sugar plantations of the Caribbean, but its implying that slavery wasn’t that bad so long as the slaves knew their place (a.k.a. the DeSantis narrative) did not sit well with me. Worse was Dragonard, a book I learned about through The Colbert Report, of all places. By virtue of focusing his novel on its repugnant main character, who aspires to be a slave master, author Rupert Gilchrist downplays the plight of the slaves. I also got the distinct impression while reading it that Gilchrist relished every N-word he typed. When I came to the end of Dragonard, I came to the end of my exploration of planation porn.

But then I learned “Ashley Carter” was yet another one of Harry Whittington’s pseudonyms. Whittington had been signed to continue writing the Falconhurst series in the early 1970s after the death of Lance Horner, who’d been writing the series after originator Onstott’s 1966 death. This accounts why some “Ashley Carter” books from this period include the credit “A Lance Horner Novel,” though Master of Blackoaks has nothing to do with the Falconhurst series.

Anyway, I sought out Master of Blackoaks because of its author, not because of its genre, and I was not disappointed. Whittington again proves he was good at his job, giving readers what they wanted, no matter the genre. Still, this book’s not for everybody. If you do pick it up, maybe don’t break it out while waiting in line to see a performance at the Apollo (or anywhere in public, really).

Master of Blackoaks is still trash, and Whittington cranks it up to 11, making it the best kind of trash, the book delivering a steady stream of depravity, debauchery and dicking. Whittington adds some redeemable touches, however. He makes sure that the plight of the slaves is known, and that while some, such as Jeanne d’Arc, are able to achieve some modest privileges (one of the perks of banging her master), they will always be denied the ultimate privilege of freedom, as Jeanne d’Arc discovers near the end of the novel. The Baynards may be “good” slave owners (i.e., they prefer their field boss Bos not whip their property, thank you), but Whittington doesn’t let readers forget they’re still slave owners all the same. The Baynards’ slaves are thought of as part of the family—until money’s tight, and then they’re chattel that Ferrell Baynard has no compunction about selling to a heartless slave trader like Eakins Shivers.  

As the book goes along, Whittington focuses more on sex than servitude. In addition to detailing Hunt Campbell’s night with a teen slave girl (yeah, that’s all kinds of wrong), FJ’s romps with Lorna June and Styles blowing Moab, he devotes several chapters to the field boss’s sexually frustrated wife Florine finding satisfaction with a very eager Moab (he’s a slave, but he’s also a horny teenager). While these chapters increase the novel’s prurient content, they add little to the narrative and reduce Moab to little more than a walking hard-on long before Styles tests the viscosity of his load.

The novel’s story is told in an episodic fashion, making for a fractured narrative. It’s about Ferrell Baynard—no, wait, it’s about Hunt, the Yankee tutor. Nope, now it's about FJ and Lorna June. Hey, why don't we check back with Ferrell Baynard.... It’s not hard to follow, though, just a bitch to synopsize. More frustrating, Master of Blackoaks doesn’t have a fully satisfying ending, leaving several storylines up in the air, with an implied “to be continued,” likely because Whittington knew they would be. There are three additional books in the Blackoaks series. I own two of them, meaning my plantation porn reviews are…

To be continued…

The fourth book in the Blackoaks series, A Farewell to Blackoaks,
was published in 1984 and is difficult to find today. The few
I found online had price tags of $70+, so, no, I won’t be reading it. 

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 Vincent’s 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 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 their 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.