Chill

Chill aka The Sepulchre
Chill 02
by Jory Sherman
1978 Pinnacle

"A psychic investigator discovers a sleeping beauty in a coma...an incredible tale of cold terror"

"There was the green slime...

There were the creeping vines...

There was a Louisiana mansion, haunted by a malevolent and vibrating force, more powerful than the inhabitants, whose terrifying history remained buried in eighteenth-century France.

There was a young girl, or virginal beauty, who slept...some called it a coma...in that mansion, and in her dreams she was possessed by the demonic ancestors who plagued the house, the land, and the sepulchre.

There was Chill, who had come for a birthday party and stayed to perform an exorcism.

Dr. Russell V. Chilldres (Chill) is a psychic investigator whose special lady, Laura Littlefawn, is a "sensitive."  Their beat is the supernatural.  This is the second of their spell-binding explorations into the realm of psychic phenomena."

The daughter of a TV producer falls into a coma in their Louisiana mansion.  As luck would have it, psychic investigator extraordinaire Russell "Chill" Chilldres just happened to be a guest for their birthday party.  And as thrilling as comas are, it pales in comparison to reading about people speculating about comas.

It might have something to do with her being either possessed by and/or reincarnated as either Oliver Reed or Vanessa Redgrave from the Devils.  Or something to do with a will, or the oil that's running under the property.

But our hero never gets around to figuring it out.  Instead, he spends most of his time describing his vegetarian snacks.  We get a several lines on the this new thing called herbal tea from Celestial Seasonings, and a whole paragraph on cilantro.

Aside from some crawling vines and creeping algae, the only thing that happens in the book is courtesy of Moses, the African-American servant.  Who's written in dialect.  And is ascared of just about everything.  And is greedy, cowardly, and treacherous for good measure.

 "Mistah, you steppin' into somethin' mighty bad here."

Even the characters lose interest in the whole daughter in a coma thing.  The father talks about his career in the television industry, Chill flirts with his secretary.  There was a chance things would get seedy with an incestuous love triangle between a stuffy old man, his drunken wife, and his amorous daughter, but it gets tamely resolved into a cry for attention.  (Sherman wrote two non-fiction books on the subject of incest).

There was so much talking over drinks in the drawing room I was surprised to learn Sherman wasn't British.  He appears to be a beat poet that turned to westerns, with the Chill series in the middle.