SILENT NIGHT, DEADLY NIGHT

MURDER BOOKS YOU MIGHT HAVE MISSED

Ever since human beings started putting pen to paper, or chisel to rock, we’ve been writing stories about killing each other. I’m one of those writers who likes to read as much as I possibly can around the same subject when I’m working on a book, so when I wrote The Final Girl Support Group I read more books about murder than should be strictly legal. Since my tastes run more toward books from the past that shaped the genre, I tend to ignore what got published last week and bigger books like Thomas Harris’s amazing Red Dragon or Ann Rule’s The Stranger Beside Me. So here’s a quick tour of a poorly lit basement where you can find a few obscure but worthy books that are a little harder to find.

THE SHADOW KNOWS (Diane Johnson, 1974): Whenever a new technology appears it doesn’t take long before we start using it to kill people. The seventies and eighties were full of books about killer telephones, like Phone Call (1979) about phones that melt people’s brains, Night Calls (1986) about a serial killer who forces a chandelier salesman named Chad to listen to him murder people over the phone, and Tandem Rush (1978) about hackers plotting to destroy Ma Bell, but there’s nothing like The Shadow Knows. An unnamed narrator (shades of Daphne Du Maurier’s narrator in Rebecca) lives in a dumpy condo after her divorce, raising her four children, and trying to get a graduate degree so she can find a job that pays enough to support them. Someone begins to call her, explaining quite clearly that they will soon murder her. Stylish and sharp as a straight razor, it quickly gets into some surreal David Lynch territory and becomes a kind of working-class nightmare. Stanley Kubrick was so impressed by this book that he hired Johnson to write the screenplay of The Shining with him, and once you read it you’ll understand why.

IN A LONELY PLACE (Dorothy B. Hughes, 1947): There’s a certain kind of murder book that’s entirely told from the killer’s point of view. Jim Thompson wrote the classic of this mini-genre in 1952 with The Killer Inside Me, a fantastic novel that’s highly recommended, but of course a woman did it first. Dorothy Hughes’s 1947 thriller, In a Lonely Place, got made into a swank Hollywood film starring Humphrey Bogart and Gloria Grahame that has absolutely nothing to do with the book, which is far too unsavory for the big screen. Trapped in the point of view of Dix Steele, a World War II veteran who floats around Los Angeles at loose ends after the war is over, it seems like a portrait of the Greatest Generation as Steele hangs out drinking with his wartime buddy who’s now a cop. Slowly, the reader begins to realize that the women showing up strangled all over the city are Steele’s work, and the fact that he’s murdered some of them right under the reader’s nose gets even more unnerving as his cat-and-mouse game with his cop buddy slowly makes him come unstrung. The harder he tries to convince the reader that he’s perfectly fine, the sweatier your hands get.

BRAINCHILD or PIN (Andrew Neiderman, both 1981): He’s most famous as V.C. Andrews’s ghost writer, but Andrew Neiderman wrote a lot of great potboilers under his own name (besides authoring sixty-eight as Andrews). I couldn’t decide which I liked more so I’m recommending both Brainchild and Pin. The former tells the story of Lois, a brainy high school student who views everyone as data points on a graph. When she gets obsessed with behavioral science and her dad gets confined to his bed after suffering a stroke, she decides to turn her entire house into an experiment in conditioned behavior, with her own family as the subjects. Needless to say, this doesn’t go well and no one gets extra credit on their year-end grade. Pin is an even stranger beast, focusing on a brother and sister whose distant, controlling doctor father was so uncomfortable with human sexuality that he explained the facts of life to his children by throwing his voice into the mouth of one of his life-sized anatomical dummies. Now that he’s dead, his children believe that the dummy, named Pin, is still alive and Pin doesn’t want anyone to interfere with the happy little family they’ve formed. Both books are fantastic pulpy fun.

BLACK AMBROSIA (Elizabeth Engstrom, 1986): One of the writers who bloomed during the seventies and eighties paperback horror boom, Elizabeth Engstrom wrote an absolutely blood-chilling pair of novellas that were published under the title When Darkness Loves Us. She followed them up with Black Ambrosia, which seems to be about Angelina Watson, a young girl who’s sexually assaulted and discovers afterwards that she’s a vampire. Unable to connect with other human beings, Angelina takes to the road, making her way through the impoverished, rural underbelly of Reagan’s America, wandering chilly highways and hooking up with lonely people living far from their neighbors, all the while feeding