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

JILL BAUMAN

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When Jill Bauman painted the cover for Alan Ryan’s The Kill she took a doll into the woods, shooting it in as many different poses as possible before draping it over a wooden fence like a corpse. Refusing to depict dead bodies in her paintings, she’s since painted dozens, if not hundreds, of dolls on book covers ranging from Elizabeth Engstrom’s When Darkness Loves Us to Edmund Plante’s Garden of Evil.

A self-taught painter from Brooklyn, New York, and now living in Queens, Bauman was working as a studio assistant for the painter Walter Velez when he lost his agent. He made her a deal: if she represented his work, he would teach her how to paint. His only condition: she couldn’t show her portfolio to anyone for two years. She agreed and two years later she was ready to rock. One of her first covers was for Charles L. Grant’s A Glow of Candles. “It was my birthday,” she remembers. “I thought everybody forgot it, and I was doing this cover, and no one was calling, so I put the candle on top of [the doll’s] head. That was my birthday present to myself.”

Deeply tied to New York’s horror community, Bauman has painted covers (and dolls) not just for Charles Grant’s books but for Harlan Ellison, Ramsey Campbell, and everyone in between.

The Only Good Magician Is a Dead Magician

Hating clowns is a waste of time because you’ll never loathe a clown as much as he loathes himself. But a magician? Magicians think they’re wise and witty, full of patter and panache, walking around like they don’t deserve to be shot in the back of the head and dumped in a lake. For all the grandeur of its self-regard, magic consists of nothing more than making a total stranger feel stupid. Worse, the magician usually dresses like a jackass.

Stephen Gresham’s Abracadabra (1988) manages to be about something even worse than the unholy child/clown alliance: the child/magician union. Meet eleven-year old Olivia Jayne Smith, known as Juice, who loves magic. Juice dances around like a beam of sunshine, dusting her sentences with adorable phrases like “Gosh o’Friday” and “Crime-a-nitly.” By the time her alcoholic mom calls her “little bitch mouth,” you’re kind of on Mom’s side.

Juice’s pa-nah (what normal people would call Grandpa) belongs to the Sleights-of-Hand, a group of elderly men who love magic so much they gather at one another’s homes every month and force their tricks on each other. Juice attends the meetings, showing the men her own pathetic, half-baked tricks, which they indulge because they’re too frail to hold a pillow over her face until she stops struggling.

One day, while milling around near the Wilner Theater on the local college campus, Juice stumbles into the basement and opens an old trunk with a skeleton key Pa-Nah gave her, releasing Robert LeFey, a sexy young man who, to cut through a lot of crap, was an evil magician back in the whenevers and got imprisoned in the trunk by the Sleights-of-Hand. He has come back to seek revenge and the Sleights must rally to defeat him.

The fact that the Sleights’ master plan to dispose of their dangerous enemy was to lock him in an unguarded trunk and shove it in the basement of the local college drama department gives you an indication of the masterminds we’re dealing with. Then again, LeFey can’t even lift Pa-Nah’s magical skeleton key off a simple-minded girl whose biggest dream is to wear fishnet stockings and wash dove shit out of top hats. This is hardly a battle of titanic intellects.

In the end, the Sleights are rendered helpless when they accidentally lock themselves inside a closet, or something, and Juice must confront LeFey alone. Does she conjure the spirit of Houdini to lend her strength? No. She calls upon the magic of the Rubik’s Cube, then she and Pa-Nah and the Sleights use the power of love to zap LeFey with a heavenly spotlight. He disappears into nothingness, leaving behind his clothes.

Because, as Abracadabra tells us, “Real magic is people.”

And please note, “people” does not include magicians, witches, witch marionettes, clowns, clown dolls, or children. We’d all be a lot safer without any of them.

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