Blood-Sex (1985, Charles Necrorian)

 

When people tell you that you can't judge a book by it's cover, they sure weren't thinking of this book. Blood-Sex was the 5th in the 'Gore' series of books published in France by the Fleuve Noir imprint from 1985 to 1989. Distinguished by some of the most revoltingly eye catching covers you're ever likely to see, the series began with a severely abridged version of John Russo's Night of the Living Dead novelisation. Subsequent entries in the series included Herschell Gordon Lewis' novelisations of Color Me Blood Red, Blood Feast and 2000 Maniacs, as well as French editions of books by Shaun Hutson, Guy N. Smith and John Halkin. Flying the flag for France were authors like Christian Vila and Charles Necrorian, whose contributions to the series don't ever appear to have been published outside of France. Presumably because places like the UK and American had enough of their own trashy horror paperbacks to contend with. None of these books have to my knowledge ever been officially translated into English, but I've been fortunate enough to read a few of them recently, with the help of a website that converts foreign language PDFs into English. 

'Nightmare on Staten Island' (1986) is a likeable, unpretentious slice of 1980s pulp horror about an ex-cop trying to alert the authorities to the existence of cannibalistic fishmen on the shores of Staten Island. 'Wild Camping' (1989) sees Hells Angels rise from their graves, 15 years after being massacred by vigilante locals. 'Blood-Sex' though really gives the likes of Hutson and Guy N. Smith a run for their money when it comes to extreme content, and manages to pull off the monumental achievement of actually living up to its title. Delivering two twisted stories for the price of one, Blood-Sex combines elements of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and Russ Meyer's Up, whilst anticipating American Psycho by a number of years. The first storyline concerns the aptly named Stephen Murderren, a spoilt, sociopathic, trust fund heir who is putting the finishing touches to a horror novel called Blood-Sex. In order to get the creative juices flowing, Stephen has to also get the blood of others flowing as well. Teaming up with his lover/sister Vanessa ('only she could understand him, help him in his long quest. Other women were nothing but smelly genitals') the duo sadistically kill everyone from a black streetwalker to a nervous rich kid who wants to swing with Vanessa and Stephen...and pays dearly for it. The second storyline, is in fact the story that Stephen is attempting to write, and finds two redneck brothers abducting women and chopping up their menfolk with meat cleavers. Sam is the smarter, mustachioed of the two. Willie is the Leatherface of the duo, with an unfortunate penchant for letting his dick hang out of his pants. As a child, Willie was accidentally shot in the head with a pellet gun, causing him constant headaches, which his mother attempted to relieve by jerking him off on a regular basis...it didn't help much. The influence of Russ Meyer appears in the form of the square jawed sheriff, who when not trying to solve the murders that the brothers are committing, has a hard-on for the big titted waitress who works in the local redneck bar. The waitress tips the Sheriff off about the two brothers "The eldest has a hick mustache, hick clothes, a hick dick... The other one, the nutcase, he makes me uncomfortable sometimes. When he's here, he's always playing with his dick and I don't know a single girl who would go and polish it for him, even for money, assuming he had any". Only for the Sheriff to then effectively tell her that such behavior is all her own fault, since her body excites men too much.

Blood-Sex, and in fact the entire 'Gore' series, illustrates the influence that US grindhouse cinema had on France, leading to the likes of Meyer and H.G. Lewis being recognized as auteurs there. As well as French cinema catching the splatter movie bug in the form of Devil Story, Mad Mutilator and Revenge of the Living Dead Girls. What's surprising about the 'Gore' books that I've read so far is that they sidestep the chance to put a French perspective on the horror/exploitation genre and instead have an American obsession going on. Blood-Sex's characters are an outlandish collection of amplified American stereotypes...the Stetson wearing sheriff, the horny hitchhikers, the beer guzzling truckers, the Chicano hating old timer, the do-gooding female journalist who ends up renouncing her liberal ways. Everyone lives on a diet of hamburgers, but given the nature of the book, usually ends up vomiting them up at the sight of mangled corpses. The jury is still out on whether all the Americana in these books is a case of the French paying homage to their influences, or the French not wanting to take a shit on their own doorstep. I can't help but recall Bill Landis, who became quite anti-French towards the end of his life...seemingly due to the fact that a couple of Joel M. Reed movies had been released on DVD there...and his accusation that France was 'a nation obsessed with anything making America look ridiculous from Jerry Lewis to Blood Feast'.

Author Charles Necrorian, real name Rene-Charles Rey, also devised the gore scenes for the Jess Franco film 'Faceless'. Judging by what he was getting up to in print, his contributions to the Franco film were a model of restraint. In one revolting scene, one of the captured girls goes along with the two brothers' insistence that she help them make a handbag for their mother as a birthday present, until she realizes that they require her to provide the raw materials to make the handbag. In the other storyline, Stephen opens a man's chest up, plays about with the entrails, before thoughtfully tossing the man's liver at Vanessa, which practically causes her to have an orgasm.

Overall I'd say that the 'story within a story' is the more entertaining of the two parallel storylines, and in a wise move is the one that rightfully dominates the book. The antics of the dimwitted brothers providing some much needed comic relief, given the morbid and nihilistic tone of the Murderren storyline. Needless to say, strong stomachs are required for Blood-Sex. It's a worthy French entry into the bad taste Olympics, that leaves other extreme horror novels looking like nothing but 'smelly genitals' in comparison.

Dracutwig (1969, Bernhardt J. Hurwood)

 

The quest to read Dracutwig has been something of a personal cause of mine for the last few years. The allure of an eccentric sounding, swinging sixties relic -in which Dracula's daughter embarks on a Twiggy like modeling career- calling out to me from the groovy past. At the same time I was never under the illusion that Dracutwig would be a good book in the traditional sense...which is just as well.

Dracutwig began life as a screenplay, allegedly penned by the writer of several Broadway musicals, but when plans for the movie fell by the wayside, the script was retooled and Dracutwig rose from the grave in book form. The book version is credited to Mallory T. Knight, a pen name for Bernhardt J. Hurwood, whose bibliography includes horror fiction, sexy paperbacks and nonfiction occult titles, possibly explaining the uneven qualities of Dracutwig. Hurwood would also go on to the write novelisations of 'Kingdom of the Spiders' and the Linda Blair TV movie 'Born Innocent'.

Dracutwig is initially set in 1950 where Count Dracula has aligned himself with the communist party, who provide him with a regular supply of political undesirables to drink blood from. In return Dracula leaves the local Transylvanian peasants alone, who make their money by shipping their virgin daughters off to the big city to work as prostitutes. Everything is hunky dory until local nympho Charmaine Skakowski, whose 'monumental breasts bounced with every step she took' forces herself on Count Dracula 'instead of blood, Dracula now thought only of the exquisite sensations raging through his long dead body'. After Charmaine becomes pregnant, the disgruntled villagers force their way into Castle Dracula, assaulting Dracula's club footed majordomo Klaus, whose entire purpose in the book seems to be to get kicked in the ass or in the balls. Dracula is forced into a shotgun marriage and the result of his and Charmaine's union is a daughter... Dracutwig, or 'Draculine' as she is actually called in the book. Upon her 18th birthday, young Draculine is dispatched to London to get the best education that money can buy, with all the culture clash, fish out of water comedy you'd expect. Draculine gatecrashes a funeral, and having been raised among the undead, causes an outcry when she tries to help the corpse out of the coffin. While at a fashion show being held at a trendy nightclub called 'The Well Dressed Nude', Draculine accidentally ends up on the catwalk, causing fashion model Petruska to vengefully tear off Draculine's clothes. This results in onlookers getting horny and embarking on a mass orgy. 'For poor Draculine, who pressed herself in agony against the platform where it all had begun, the spectacle seemed like a wild battle scene, but where semen was spewing instead of blood. But she knew one thing for sure as she deliberately kicked a would-be rapist in the groin: Transylvania never offered anything like it!'.

Draculine also becomes an instant fashion sensation due to her pale skin and undead appearance. At which point the book could almost lay claim to have anticipated Goth culture with the masses copying Draculine's look, a fashion trend dubbed 'new morbidity' within these pages. The fact that Dracutwig is essentially a romantic comedy doesn't prevent Draculine from occasionally wandering away from the in-crowd to murder a more diverse section of Londoners. Her victims including a randy priest, an old drunk she meets in Soho, a cross dresser and a stoned hippy. Drinking the contaminated blood of the latter causes Draculine to have an LSD trip in Trafalgar Square 'nothing seemed more natural than for Lord Nelson's statue to slowly turn around on it's sparkling pedestal, unbutton it's fly and begin to urinate in a fantastical iridescent rainbow'. The initial Transylvanian section of the book invites comparisons with The Fearless Vampire Killers, but once we hop over to London, the 'not quite as hip as it thinks it is' sensibility and level of humour is more in the territory of the David Niven 'Vampira', or Son of Dracula (the Harry Nilsson one). Draculine falls for a dandy photographer called Harry Brockton, who is a severe hemophiliac. His confession "I'm a hemo" causes a confused Draculine to question his sexuality "you mean you're like your agent, no that can't be".

As Dracutwig was written by a lifelong New Yorker, the book's version of Swinging London is the type that probably never really existed outside of German Krimi movies. The geography of Dracutwig entirely consisting of well known tourist spots... Belgravia, Trafalgar Square, Soho, and where the sound of Big Ben is never too far away. The book is also fond of absurdly double-barreled English names, we get Sarah Fardley-Butticks, Lady Dorcas-Brockton and Ms. Ponsonby-Smithe's School for Young Ladies.

If you're expecting a wacky, campy romp, then your expectations are only going to be partly met here. Dracutwig gets surprisingly sour and cynical at the halfway point, as Draculine's beau Harry Brockton, cheats on her, exploits her for fame and money and has a disturbingly over affectionate relationship with his mother, the aforementioned Lady Dorcas-Brockton. The book then gets hit with the silly stick again, as Dorcas-Brockton keeps dressing up as a Nun in order to kill Draculine, only to then tonally switch back for an incredibly downbeat ending. Even more so, given that...without trying to give too much away.. it's the kind of ending that makes you think that they'll be some kind of last minute, get out cause that will lead to a happy conclusion, only for the book to instead double down on the darkness.

I suspect that average person will find this book to be an unfinishable, insult to the intelligence. However if, like me, you're a sucker for any ol' Swinging London nonsense, then a date with Miss Dracutwig is difficult to turn down...even if she is difficult to get a hold of these days. As far as I'm aware the book was only ever available in America and Germany, where it was published in 1971 as Dracula's Tochter/Dracula's Daughter. Such was my desperation to read the book that I downloaded a German language ebook of it from a dodgy website, had that converted to a PDF using another dodgy website, then used a further dodgy website to translate the German PDF into English. Meaning that the version I read was an English translation of a German translation of a book that was originally in English. The German edition also includes a dissertation on vampires the gives the main text a run for it's money when it comes to strangeness, and concludes with what inadvertently doubles as a fitting epitaph for Dracutwig 'a completely senseless undertaking, but they didn't know any better'.