Paperbacks from Hell [N.F. - Literature, Art]

ROWENA MORRILL

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Isobel’s electrifying cover painting is the first horror art sold by Rowena Morrill, one of the all-time greats. Better known for her work in science fiction and fantasy, Morrill also painted covers for a freaky series of Lovecraft reprints from Jove. And she remains the only artist in the field whose work has graced not only the cover of Metallica’s greatest bootleg album (No Life ’til Power) but also the walls of one of Saddam Hussein’s love nests.

The Greatest Man in the Whole Entire World

Call him Troy Conway. Call him Vance Stanton. Call him Edwina Noone, or Dorothea Nile, or Jean-Anne de Pre, or any of the seventeen pseudonyms he used to write his more than two hundred novels. He was Michael Avallone, and by his own estimation he was the “King of the Paperback” and the “Fastest Typewriter in the East.” Avallone wrote detective fiction, and gothics, and Partridge Family tie-ins, and the novelization of Friday the 13th Part III in 3-D. And when Satan got hot, he wrote all three slim volumes of The Satan Sleuth series for Warner Books, published between November 1974 and January 1975.

Avallone’s protagonist Philip St. George III “makes even Robert Redford look vapid.” He is “one hundred and eighty-five pounds of whipcord muscles” with “a mind bordering on Einstein IQ.” St. George has “scaled Everest, mastered the Matterhorn, [and] located a lost tribe of headhunters in the Amazon,” but now he receives a phone call that his fiancée Dorothea Daley has been murdered. The killers? Three devil worshippers who are “really sick, demented, half-mad creatures from another universe. Some other planet. They were not human.”

When he sees the carnage (worse than “the Tate-Manson killing orgy of ’68”), St. George develops two white streaks in his hair. “The bastards!” rages his lawyer. “They should fall into Hell with no clothes on.” St. George knows who the culprits are: “Hippies, drop outs, draft dodgers, left-wing radicals, right-wing militants, Jesus Freaks, Devil worshippers, generation gappers, motorcycle weirdos—the whole shebang.” He balances the scales with these cultists (one of whom is “as gay as a green goose when the asses were down”) using LSD and hand grenades.

Avellone planned two more Satan Sleuth novels—Vampires Wild and Zombie Depot—but Warner Books never bought them, so he never wrote them. But Philip St. George III lives forever in our hearts, and in ourremainder bins.

The Satan Sleuth used karate to take on werewolves and dynamite to take out chic but satanic fashion designers obsessed with short women. Credit 13

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