William Johnston - Asylum

William Johnston - Asylum (Bantam, Dec. 1972)

Novelisation of the Amicus classic adapted from Robert Bloch short stories.

See Vault of Evil’s Bloch at Amicus thread

Thanks to Andy for the cover scan.

Robert Bloch - Torture Garden

Robert Bloch - Torture Garden (Four Square/ NEL, 1967)

Amicus dramatised a lot of Bloch’s work. All the stories in Torture Garden and Asylum are adaptions of his stories, as is The Skull and everything in The House that Dripped Blood. The Torture Garden tie -in proudly boasts on the (terrific!) cover “The story on which the Columbia film is based”, referring to the opener, Enoch. Of course, this is a bit of a cheek, as the film was also based on Terror Over Hollywood, The Man Who Collected Poe and Mr. Steinway too, but none of them make the book.

What you get is:

Enoch
The Strange Flight Of Richard Clayton
The Opener Of The Way
Return To The Sabbath
The Mandarin’s Canaries
The Shambler From The Stars
The Secret Of Sebek

For the record, these are the stories that became the basis of Mr. Subotsky’s movies:

Torture Garden has Enoch, Terror Over Hollywood, Mr. Steinway and The Man Who Collected Poe.

The House That Dripped Blood has Method For Murder, Waxworks, Sweets To The Sweet and The Cloak.

Asylum has Frozen Fear, The Weird Tailor, Lucy Comes To Stay and Mannikins Of Horror

And The Skull is a feature-film based on his short The Skull of the Marquis de Sade.

Peter Saxon - Scream And Scream Again

Peter Saxon - Scream And Scream Again (Paperback Library, Dec. 1967. Previously known as The Disorientated Man)

I couldn’t make sense of the film on one viewing and I also struggled with the novel first time around, so lets see if I’m any the wiser after a rematch.

London. Detective Chief-Super Dale Keene is investigating a series of gruesome murders. The victims are young women whose throats have been slashed and all the blood drained from their bodies. On the wrists of the deceased, twin puncture marks which suggest that the killer is a vampire. One of the girls was employed as a maid by mild-mannered Dr. Browning, so he’s obviously our number one suspect. A plan to capture the murderer using P.C. Helen Bradford as bait backfires when the bloodsucker kills her on Tooting Common and effortlessly toughs up her colleagues when they race to her rescue after hearing sucking noises over their tracking device.

Elsewhere Ken Spartan, Olympic athlete, collapses while out jogging. He wakes up in hospital with a silent nurse feeding him something through a straw. His arms and legs are systematically amputated over a period of …. days? months? Spartan has no way of knowing as he’s kept permanently stoned.

Meanwhile in East Germany, the sadist Konrath has risen through the ranks of the Secret Police, disposing of any immediate superiors with the patented Vulcan death grip whenever they question his methods of obtaining information.

That brings us up to the halfway mark. Seems to me as though 70 pages is not gonna be enough to bring all these strands together satisfactorily which is maybe what baffled me last time. And the back cover blurb promises Black Magic - we’ve not had a hint of any of that yet.

What happens next? “Review” continues on Vault of Evil!

Thanks to ade for top cover scan!

Angus Hall - Devil Day (Basis for ‘Madhouse’)

 

Angus Hall - Devilday (Ace, 1969: Sphere, 1969: Severn House, 1986)

Angus Hall - Madhouse (Sphere, 1970)“Could you tell us what your mission in England is?”
“Why, I’ve come to play the devil!”

Paul Havard Toombs, a Hollywood star whose career was ended in the US after he was implicated in an unsolved murder, arrives in England to revive his hit show, The Adventures Of Dr. Dis. Reporter Barry Lambert is hired to keep an eye on him in the capacity of personal assistant, but soon finds himself out of his depth. Toombs’ interests - which include reincarnation, drug abuse and participating in Black Magic Rituals and orgies - lead to murder, but is he really responsible.

The novel is very different to the movie based upon it, and it’s as much a whodunnit? as a horror although there are several Black Magic and supernatural props. The murders are ultra-gruesome, with the police drawing comparisons between the state of one victim and that of Jack the Ripper’s barbaric attack on Mary Kelly.

Pop culture references include namechecks for The Saint, Danger Man, Perry Mason, Bardot, hairy student demonstrators, and Green Shield stamps, and Lambert’s fiance, Julia is, of course a “dolly girl.”