Rockabilly Limbo

Rockabilly Limbo
by William W. Johnstone
1996 Zebra

A quick recap - ex-cop Cole Younger and friends investigated a haunted roadhouse which got dropped from the story in favor of a child snuff porn ring which got abandoned for Satan causing non-Christians to go on a murder spree and a contagious zombie plague.

The following year, the murder sprees begin again, this time worldwide.  We're promised the Devil template (people who don't shower sodomize and murder each other) on a global scale.  And, thanks to his meticulous plotting, Johnstone is a writer who always follows through with his premise.

The end of most Devil books happens in the first couple chapters.  Cole and gang defend their home against waves of Satanists and zombies.  Across the country, terrorists of various stripes attack government facilities, while previously normal citizens gang up and murder each other.  So we're told, not so much shown.

Cole and company gather up supplies and head to the hills.  I hope you didn't think this sequel to a horror novel was going to be a horror novel.  Because it isn't.  It's a survivalist/post-apocalyptic novel.  Johnstone makes a half-hearted effort to cling to his original premise by having a disembodied voice play old rock music, which will certainly be relevant to the story and be fully explained by the end.

Unwashed Satanists fight far-right religious zealots and not-quite-as-far-right militias who have carved out Arkansas and Tennessee.  Cole has a rough plan to head to the Rocky Mountains, but mostly just drives through various checkpoints because I loved reading that so much in the Ashes books.

Cole's gang picks up some journalists to have someone to pick on for a while.  When asked what Cole has against journalists, he finally explains:  Journalists are liberals and therefore against assisted suicide, but a rancher he knew would shoot coyotes and wolves, and people eat meat.  Crystal clear political philosophy there - a John Locke for our generation.

I hope you didn't think this would be a survivalist/post-apocalyptic novel, because things settle down pretty quickly.  No, this is all a soapbox for Johnstone to proclaim his Tri-State philosophy.  That's right, America finds its way back to stability by embracing the ideas expressed by the fictional character of Ben Raines in the Ashes series, which in this alternate reality had the same effect that Ayn Rand did on the Tea Party.  I don't know which is worse.

That philosophy is that some people are bad.  Those people should be killed.  Then you just have good people left.  Government should stay out of people's lives, except for when it executes half the population for the slightest rule infraction.  This is not genocide, since you're murdering millions across various demographics evenly.  Still more coherent than Objectivism.

But what about Satan and ghost voices and the whole Rockabilly thing.  We're just told that it's not really Satan causing all the violence, it's aliens.  But we're constantly reassured that aliens have the same God and Satan as Earth, so Satan could still have something to do with something.  The voice is maybe an alien voice, or maybe Satan, or maybe an alien Satan.  That would have been interesting, so it doesn't happen.

Either way, the voice says that they're not controlling anybody anymore, and the violence in the world is just people being violent.  Which is a good thing, because people can finally murder all the bad people without the liberal government getting in the way.  And murder the bad people's families.

As we lurch to a close, Johnstone toys with the idea of there being a conclusion or a plot or something before throwing in the aliens.  Jumpsuited humanoids straight out of Plan 9 From Outer Space tell the President that there are other bad aliens causing all the violence and they made them stop.  Everyone suddenly stops fighting and doesn't remember the previous year, so I guess it wasn't Satan or bad people being bad people after all, just aliens.

The aliens let us know that they believe in the same God and that they don't have anything to do with the haunted roadhouses from the last book.  The country is broken into militias, the IRS is abolished, the FBI is not allowed to investigate innocent people, the end.

The end to Johnstone's rapidly declining horror writing career, and the end of this increasingly burdensome chore of a project.  You've let me down, America, so I'm hopping the pond and moving on to a real writer.  Goodbye Johnstone 26, hello Guy N. Smith 10,000,000.

Click here if you hate yourself enough to read this on Kindle from Amazon

Rockabilly Hell by William W. Johnstone

Rockabilly Hell
by William W. Johnstone
1995 Zebra Books

Retired cop Cole Younger joins up with journalist Katti to investigate a series of haunted roadhouses that materialize off the freeways of Arkansas.  The clubs were host to the scum of the Earth for decades, and they now house their damned souls and are linked to the disappearance of hundreds over the years.

Add to that a material conspiracy - former club-goers turned pillars of society led by multi-millionaire Victoria Staples discovered they could lure their enemies to the haunted spots and the ghosts would kill them and dispose of the bodies, forming the basis of a criminal empire.

Said pillars hope to stop Cole and Katti's investigation, while the two join forces with private detectives, FBI agents, and a cussy priest.  Ghosts, in the form of sparkly dots, murder witnesses before they can talk.  Cole figures since ghosts are just made of electricity, he can kill them with a stun gun.  The stun gun zaps parts off the ghost until they comically run around and turn into rotting corpses.

Cole decides that ghosts are not allowed to kill anyone, despite them doing so throughout the novel.  Since the ghosts aren't killing people, they must be just distracting the victims until Victoria's gang can kill them in child snuff porn.  That's just deductive reasoning, but to prove it they order a copy of every snuff film and watch them for clues.

For a while, Johnstone doesn't want to do a ghost story anymore, so we have the FBI halfheartedly investigating Victoria's child snuff angle, which is detailed in some of the nastiest child sex scenes Johnstone has written to date, just to get in the sodomy quotient.  Out of sheer coincidence, two rapists dump two dead teenage girls on Victoria's property for a subplot that goes nowhere.

The investigation, such as it is, grinds to a halt, and the plot founders.  Time to bring in the true villains - the press!  They hear about the haunted roadhouse and hold a barbeque on the side of the road.  Cole and Katti team up with some trusted Republican reporters, presumably because Democrats don't believe in ghosts.

I was expecting the haunted roadhouse (you know, the one the book was supposed to be about) to make a big reappearance and be relevant again for the conclusion.  It doesn't.  What does happen is that it rains urine and hails poop over the reporters.

Meanwhile, back in town, folks are acting funny.  People are less friendly, etc.  We get a condensed version of the Devil books, with all the townspeople who aren't the right kind of Christian raping and slaughtering each other.

Five percent of the book left, just enough time to introduce a contagious zombie plague.  The FBI arrest everyone in the child snuff ring who wasn't killed by zombies, the end.

Far and away the most unfocused of the Johnstone horrors.  It was good to see him try a new premise, but it was clear he had no idea where to go with it.  Of course there's a sequel.

Available in Kindle from Amazon.

Click here to read a sample.

Night Mask by William W Johnstone

Night Mask
William W Johnstone
1994 Zebra

A California radio station is sending out subliminal messages while the DJs complain about their annoying boss. Meanwhile, the admittedly unimaginatively named serial killer The Ripper is killing women, removing their faces, and storing them in jars.

Two local sheriff detectives, funded by the wealthy father of one of the victims, go cross country researching the killings, using methods of questionable legality.

They don't find much, except that there are a pair of evil twins that everybody hates.  They come back home to another killing, a high priced call girl that counted the station owner as a client.

The owner is arrested based on planted evidence and is gang raped by Black prisoners his first day in lockup.  One would think to blame the sheriff for failing to have a secure jail, or for failing to prosecute the offenders.

But, no, it's the fault of the FCC and the liberal media because you can't say the N word on the radio.  At this point the douchebag station owner is written as a sympathetic character and Johnstone's mouthpiece for all kinds of irrelevant right-wing babbling about the IRS and such.

Not sure the reasoning behind this train of thought.  Maybe that liberals are too PC to arrest black people, which runs counter to reality, as well as beg the question as to how the rapists were in jail in the first place.  I'll be charitable and say Johnstone wasn't so much being racist as complaining about political correctness, which was still a new thing at the time.  You know, that horrible liberal agenda, that if you act like a bigot people will treat you like one.

One would think the incident would teach the value of due process to the detectives.  That the police can make mistakes, and those mistakes can have life altering consequences.  Taking that lesson to heart, the detectives decide to just forget about evidence and just murder whatever Ripper suspect looks good.  Because the Bill of Rights is for pansies.

Johnstone awkwardly gets back on track by having a civil rights protester get raped by the Ripper, instant karma I suppose.

Meanwhile, the detectives hit the gay bars.  While some of the cops are intolerant, our leads are relatively accepting, just as long as they are properly shameful and don't expect to be treated like normal people.

The gang rape has sent the station manager around the bend, and he goes postal in a gay bar while our heroes don't particularly try to stop him.  The scene is played for laughs, because some of them dress like ladies and they touch each others butts, so their mass slaughter is hilarious.

The next development has the station manager's promiscuous daughter and gay son be the masterminds behind recruiting pretty much the whole town's teenage population into a murderous satanic cult.  The police bust them up, but liberalism rears it ugly head again and prevents the police from summarily executing everyone under the age of 18, while Johnstone jumps back on his soapbox complaining how parents don't know how evil their spawn are.

There are some threads that go nowhere regarding subliminal messages being broadcast, but our detectives main strategy is to make up random stuff which sometimes ends up being true.  Those twins that they suspect?  Maybe they were triplets, or had half-siblings, or one got a sex change.  That one DJ is a lesbian, maybe she's related to them for some reason.

While Johnstone fills pages, he presents a parable against liberalism in the form of an obnoxious reporter who shows up every few pages screaming "fascist" at everybody.  She becomes the target of our station manager, now a teen murdering vigilante, and learns the error of her ways when she needs to use a gun to protect herself.

I don't like to criticize the politics of a book, but Johnstone pretty much breaks the fourth wall in places to jump on his soapbox, so he's asking for it.  As far as I can manage to figure out, rich people deserve better access to public services than poor people, and people that complain about this natural order deserve bad things to happen to them.  One should never complain about the police, you should be able to drop N bombs on a pop radio station without social consequences, and everyone should have a gun.  Except for poor people, they're just dumb hillbillies.  And all children should be preemptively smothered in their crib.  If you think your children haven't murdered dozens of people you're living in a fools paradise.

Bats by William W. Johnstone

Bats
by William W. Johnstone
1993 Zebra Books

Giant killer bats with super-rabies attack Louisiana.  They cling onto faces and eat out eyeballs, and if the victims live they turn into murderous psychotics along with the wild boars that feast on the dead.  We get about twenty pages of that.

The rest is people talking about how serious people should or shouldn't be taking all this.  The police withhold details from the hated press to avoid a panic, then complain when the townspeople don't take steps to protect themselves.  Most of the book is just this back and forth.  Interminably.

The killer bats get killed by regular bats, the end.

Kindle ebook from Amazon

Them by William W. Johnstone

Them
by William W. Johnstone
Zebra Books 1992

Alien brains with tentacles land on Earth and communicate with Jake Silver, a nerd who is teased around town and beaten by his ignorant father.  After a few pages of Jake's snide pedantic attitude, I'm rooting for the dad, but we're told early on that Jake is evil, so it's OK.

The leader brain, named Cag, gives Jake telepathic powers, which he uses to have sex with his teacher and wreak revenge on his tormentors.  He makes one masturbate in public while two others sodomize each other in a grocery store (box ticked).  I was thinking there would be more in this direction, but Johnstone loses interest in Jake pretty quick.

Other alien brains take over Earthling brains with unhappy results.  Some humans go a little slow and turn to baser instincts, committing acts of violence and incest.  Others have their brains explode out their eye sockets.

This leads to the best part of the book, as an already deranged town idiot goes on an ax murdering spree.  Those segments may be the most horror novelish of anything Johnstone has produced.

Cag is communicating with Jake's Mom and some scientists and has a mind laser war with the other alien brains.  The last chunk of the book is Cag bemoaning how humanity values sports over intellect, and how he decided humanity doesn't deserve to be conquered.

Over pages and pages of this, it slowly dawned on me that Cag is supposed to be the good guy, and that his exposition is the clearest form of the worldview that runs further in the background of Johnstone's other books.  Cag's plan is to murder half the population of Earth - those that break the slightest rule or don't produce enough.  Everyone left will be reasonable and productive, so there will be an end of conflict.

As long as you can manage a looooot of skimming, the good parts of Them are some of Johnstone's best.  The bad parts (college vocabulary insults and repetitive soap-boxing) are probably the worst.

Available in Kindle ebook from Amazon.

Click here to read a sample

Paperback from AbeBooks

The Devil's Laughter by William W. Johnstone

The Devil's Laughter
by William W. Johnstone
1992 Zebra Books

Something funny was going on in Louisiana's backwoods, but the devil was the only one laughing.

Less of the same.  People are acting funny in town, nobody's showering, etc.  Our hero, former CIA operative and reporter (?!) Link Donovan is at the center - the Balon family is mentioned but doesn't appear, along with Satan, sodomy, and everything else that made the Devil series sleazy fun.

Donovan takes care of wounded animals at his ranch home and is harassed by violent rednecks who he just guesses are Satanists.  Everything's small scale here - only a couple hundred Satanists instead of the whole town, God and his "mercenary angel" Michael don't show, and Satan is said to barely make an appearance.  We're teased with beasts, but their just an illusion, and the undead only appear in a comedic epilogue.

This one's more action packed than the rest, with Link spending his time tossing grenades and mowing down rednecks in the woods with a MAC-10.  At least Johnstone's action scenes are improving.

There are no evil clowns.

Available in Kindle ebook from Amazon

Click here to read a sample

Watchers in the Woods by William W. Johnstone

Watchers in the Woods
by William W. Johnstone
Zebra Books, 1991

What the Ashes series did for Libertarianism, Watchers in the Woods does for animal rights.  It's as bad as that.

Johnstone's pantser tendencies are in full effect here.  We start off with five different couples going on a hiking trip after their joint 20 year school reunion.  Good enough set up for a horror novel.  But wait, one of the reunioners is a CIA contract assassin!  Let's go with that for a while.

On a mission that is never made clear, the CIA agent is ordered to the middle of the woods to do something with the Unseen, also called the Sataw and a dozen other names.  These are the same creatures from A Crying Shame, only more vague.  They're homo sapiens, but haven't evolved as much as the rest of humanity.  They've lived in isolation in the American woods, except for the several generations who have integrated into American society.

They are woefully underdescribed.  Some look like humans, some are hairier and have big teeth.  The only one that gets any description is a tribe leader who has a regular human body and full-on wolf's head.  Most are peaceful, but some are cannibalistic, gone mad by water pollution.  If they bite regular people, those people go mad under a full moon.  So we're told, it doesn't come up.

The reunioners go in the woods, fight the Unseen and some neo-nazis, then fight to get back out of the woods.  The plot is a mess, but we eventually get the full force of the US government involved.  Peaceful Unseen are put into camps, violent ones out in society go feral and kill thousands, and people yell at reporters for existing.

More action than horror, but mostly talking.  Lots and lots of talking.  By then end, Johnstone's giving us a monologue about the mistreatment of greyhound dogs.

Not to be confused with The Watcher in the Woods.

Available in Kindle from Amazon

Click here to read a sample

Darkly the Thunder by William W. Johnstone

Darkly the Thunder
by William W. Johnstone
1990 Zebra Books

"DO BOP DE DO BOP DE DO BOP, DE DO."

The 80's are over, and so is the fun, if this lifeless slog has any indication of the rest of the 90s.

So far the worst things about Johnstone horror novels are disembodied sarcastic voices, endless discussion of cosmic rules that he refuses to explain, and interminable padding of characters repeating things back and forth to each other.  That's all this book is.

The Fury is a neutron star that evolved into pure evil and lives off the souls of the recently departed.  It manifests itself as a disembodied voice that yells racist taunts and sings doo-wop.  The Fury is stuck in the 1950s and doesn't understand modern technology.  It has closed off a Colorado town in a secular re-tread of the well worn path of the Devil novels.

There's a little bit of folks not being friendly anymore and a little public masturbation, but not of the bacchanalia of the Devil books.  Bodies are found torn apart and anyone who tries to leave town is killed by the Fury's psychic force.  Not sure what the Fury's endgame is other than killing people, why he doesn't just kill everybody day one, and what 50's music has to do with anything.

On the side of good we have the Force, which doesn't sound too far off from the Jedi stuff except for its love of vigilante murder.  The Force is embodied by the spirit of a James Dean type named Sand who died decades ago after killing the frat boys who killed his wife.

Sand tells his story via a television set, which is recorded by the town's 10-year-old computer genius.  The Fury also tells his story to a reporter who interviews him for hours.  None of that is shared with the reader.

Pretty earlier on, the President is made aware of the situation and plans a strike with a neutron bomb, while the press and some snake handlers show up in town.  The kid hacker is able to figure out where the Fury is in town by tracing him on the telephone, and Sand communicates via modem until Johnstone forgets this device and has him just be telepathic.

Some good carnage in the beginning, and a quick zombie attack in the middle, but almost nothing happens the entire book.  The townspeople and CIA and the White House plan things and the Fury calls the Sheriff burrito-breath and nothing happens for page upon page.  The only interest is Sand's back story of vigilante justice, which has nothing to do with anything.

The plan is finally revealed and executed.  The President drops a neutron bomb on the town.  They blame aliens because if America knew the truth about the afterlife Las Vegas would close down and the liquor industry would collapse.  The townspeople blow up the entire town to create a smokescreen, because the omniscient Fury can't see through smoke.  They use the cover to run through a portal that Sand creates to teleport to safety.

Epilogue: Everyone gets married and the crater that the bomb made is now filled with all the souls that the Fury had taken over the years.  None of this book makes enough sense to even tell if there are plot holes.  Johnstone gets as preachy here as he does in the Ashes books, only now it's about feeding the homeless and being kind to animals.  Like a damn hippy.

Available in Kindle ebook from Amazon

Click here to read a sample

Carnival by William W. Johnstone

Carnival
by William W. Johnstone
1989 Zebra Books

In the 50s some rich kids rape some girls and carnies get blamed.  The town sets the carnival on fire and covers it up.  The dead carnies make a deal with Satan to return for revenge.  The townfolk either turn evil or mindless, ala the Devil series.

The few who maintain their sanity try to stop the carnival's plan to have the evil townspeople kill each other.  They do this by killing the townspeople.  They didn't really think this one through.

For once, Johnstone actually sticks to his gimmick, and fully half of the story takes place in the carnival as the townsfolk alternate between Stepford Wives banality and crazed cannibalism.  An avenging revenant rises from the grave with the truck his was buried in, and then proceeds to have pages of discussion with law enforcement about what will happen if the cross an invisible barrier surrounding the carnival.  Chills!

Johnstone manages to have a little fun here without getting too bogged down in cosmic rules.  His last book of the 80s.  If you're already sick of Johnstone, now's a good time to hop off.

Available in Kindle from Amazon

Click here for a sample

Cat's Eye by William W. Johnstone

Cat's Eye
by William W. Johnstone
Zebra Books 1989

A sequel to Cat's Cradle, this installment mostly abandons the original premise and brings the story in line with his other Devil books.

A quick recap of that series (Devil's Kiss, Heart, Touch, Cat, Laughter) - Satan periodically picks a random American town and seduces almost all of its inhabitants.  The teenagers start being rude to the elderly, talking back to their parents, having orgies, killing babies, etc.  Then Beasts (stripped down werewolves) and the Undead (stripped down vampires) roam the town, and a hero ordained by God and a small handful of pure souls fight back with machine guns and grenades to a convoluted finish.

We start off with a bodyguard (the son of the hero in the first book, who evidently went through a lot in three years) being hired to protect his author daughter by a rich developer.  Unexpectedly, the rich guy is a conservationist, which is a good thing here.  And the town Sheriff is corrupt and worthless, also a big switch for Johnstone.

Johnstone does not work from an outline, and it shows here.  It shows real bad.  We start off with some bad slapstick.  Animated corpse parts kick people in the butt like an Army of Darkness schtick, and Satan himself catcalls characters with a disembodied voice.

The incoherence becomes an asset as Johnstone picks up steam.  Satan frees some prisoners who go on a raping spree.  Their rape victims become lizard women.  At some point Johnstone tries to shoehorn in a lot of the Satanic Panic nonsense floating around at the time.  There are over 100,000 satanic covens in America, about five times more than Catholic churches.  Almost the entire town is part of a coven, but they hide their heavy metal posters when the police get a search warrant.  It's not really a conspiracy anymore if 90% of the town is part of it.

Parenting advice: If your child listens to hard rock music, kill them and burn the corpse.

The bodyguard and few remaining non-Satanists mow down coven members, living dead, flesh eating maggots, etc, with a cache of grenades and flame throwers, the end.  This is the best book ever.

There is no cat baby.

Available in Kindle from Amazon

Click here to read a sample

Sandman by William W. Johnstone

Sandman
by William W. Johnstone
1988 Zebra Books

"What the hell!  Was this county filled with mysterious monsters?"

An evil kid meets evil ghost Jamaicans and gets the power to create blood-filled sand people.  The sand can dig it's way through people's pores and turn them into sand people who are also satanists.  The sand people eat people-people, stuffing roped intestines into their mouths.

That is, until Johnstone gets bored with it.  "The sand people are merely a distraction."  The kid influences others around him to do evil and we've got yet another Devil book, only on a smaller scale.  His sister gets another It inspired kid-power gang together and we get discussion of cosmic rules, this time in dialect.

"Ma mon, you too little to be speakin' to me lak dat.  I'm a big black mons.  You just a little white boy."

Unfocused, small scale, and phoned-in.

Available for Kindle from Amazon

Click here for a sample

Toy Cemetery by William W. Johnstone

Toy Cemetery
by William W. Johnstone
1987 Zebra Books

"Grown men and women are thrust in to near-incestuous relationships with their kids; creatures roam the night; toys come alive; and the personalities of nearly everyone in town have been altered."

Johnstone lightened up a little for this one and let himself have a little fun.  A single father returns to his hometown to move into the house left by his recently departed Aunt.  She was a doll collector, and pretty much right out of the gate the dolls come to life in front of the police.

The townfolk are acting funny yadda yadda yadda, though this is one of the books where most of the town are oblivious and only some are actively evil.  We also revisit some of the Nursery in the form of a hospital doing secret experiments and an Ancient One figure.

It was the best selling book of 1986, so this time around (and the next book) we've got a bunch of kids running around like vigilante Boxcar Kids.  By the end we have a complete cluster: ceramic people, tiny headed mutants, satanists, machete wielding kids, evil toys, and good toys all slaughtering each other in the streets.

Not as nasty this time around aside from when our hero finds a cache of Satanic kiddie porn and proceeds to show it to everyone.

Available in Kindle from Amazon.

Click here to read a sample.

Baby Grand by Joseph E. Keene and William W. Johnstone

Baby Grand
by Joseph E. Keene and William W. Johnstone
1987 Zebra Books

"You look like a retarded penguin."

Bill Elliott is a soldier of fortune who retires and moves home to Tennessee to be a private detective.  His first case: investigate a haunted piano for his old friend Joe Conrad.  The piano plays music by itself and occasionally talks.

Meanwhile, someone is kidnapping and raping local virgins.  We never find out who or why, something about a ceremony.  This is the closest this book comes to the sleaziness we're used to from Johnstone.

Elliott hangs around town for a hundred pages or so, spending a lot of time with teen Carol.  He finds a book about local pianos at the library but some pages are torn out.

A zombie shows up in Conrad's house and hits Elliott over the head with a chair, and the piano chases him around the house, snapping it's lid while playing the theme from Jaws.  Elliott and Carol visit the haunted house next door.  There are eyes following them in paintings, flying candlesticks, the whole Haunted Mansion treatment.

Meanwhile, folks around town seem to be getting rude, and they stop bathing.  You know the drill by now.

For once, Johnstone doesn't lay all his cards on the table all at once.  Though once he finally does, he's got a seven high.

The piano belonged to the Wellingtons, a rich family who owns the town.  Old man Wellington got mad because nobody came to his kid's piano recital, so he sold his soul to Satan.  That's it.  That explains the possessed piano, why the town is full of evil people, and why folks are coming back to the dead as werewolves.

Not Beasts like the other books.  Actual dogs.  You sell your soul to Satan and you can be killed once, and you come back as a zombie who can turn into a dog.  A dog who can be easily killed a second time with conventional weapons.

Which Bill Elliott does by the score, while blowing up everything around with C4.  He sets the piano on fire, the end.

Epilogue:
No consequences for murdering half the town, and tons of loose ends.  The librarian's mom may or not be a witch.  There was a ghost of a priest who does nothing.  Some business of Conrad's dead wife being possessed as a teen and Carol getting local rednecks to break his hands.

Speaking of Carol, Elliott remembers the he hooked up with her Mom nine months before she was born and finally puts things together, working that private detective mind of his.

Too long, too padded, too tame.  It may be all downhill from here.

Why is the skeleton man not wearing shoes?  And there are no children in the entire book.

Currently not available for Kindle, likely complicated by the dual authorship.  I'm curious about Keene's contributions - the only other book I could find by him was about songwriting.

Used paperback from Amazon.

The Devil's Cat by William W. Johnstone

The Devil's Cat
by William W. Johnstone
1987, Zebra Books

Sam, Nydia, and Little Sam travel the country looking for towns that Satan has taken over.  They drive back to Whitfield, Nebraska, the scene of the first book to pick up a dog.  Does the dog have fleas?  He doesn't - Nydia just knows. He has no collar - none that earthly eyes can perceive.  Johnstone gets this out of the way early and thankfully doesn't spend a lot of time laboring over cosmic rules and people just knowing things.  Unfortunately, he also got rid of everything else the Devil series was good at.  Less violent, less gory, less rapey, more talky.

There are a couple of subplots that don't amount to much, such as a man turning into a panther and a couple of escaped mental patients, but otherwise it's a less focused version of the last book.  Sam's devil daughter Xaviere wants to have sex with him to breed some super witch or something and Sam wants to kill all the satanists.

Little Sam is a reverse Damien and Xaviere and her fcoven get forgotten about at the end of the book, the tablet is mentioned just once, and the conclusion is a completely disjointed mess, with way too many survivors to keep track of

Not the last Devil book, but the last to have the Balon family.  It ends with a jokey little sequence of the President making a joke about Democrats.

Jack-in-the-Box by William Johnstone

Jack-in-the-Box
by William Johnstone
1986, Zebra Books

Jack-In-The-Box centers around nine-year-old Nora and is part Omen knock off (666 birthmark, ability to cause accidents around her), part Exorcist rip-off (she does the owl imitation three times and spits out slime twice), and all Johnstone.

Nora's father Phillip and brother Phil mistrust young Nora, but her mother Jeanne protects her, though she has secrets of her own.  Phillip is compelled to buy Nora an evil Jack-in-the-Box which plays the funeral march and has human teeth.  Like the rockinghorse in Rockinghorse, it doesn't do much more than show up on the cover.

The box was used by a Nazi officer in the concentration camp, though it's evil is more satanic than Naziish.  Phillip learns that his daughter is either possessed or born pure evil, and works with a child psychologist and priest to try an exorcise her.

Rockinghorse

Rockinghorse
by William W. Johnstone
Zebra, 1986

"Some little voice tells me my formerly liberal husband has now changed into a hardline conservative"

A New York lawyer and his family spend the summer in the mysterious Georgia plantation mansion he has inherited.  We've got a creepy caretaker, strange going ons in the woods, and a creepy wooden rockinghorse.  There's only one road in and out of town, the townsfolk have been acting strangely, and there's word of devil worshiping and, yeah, this is starting to look more like another Devil series installment.

This is what happens when you don't plot things - your haunted house story starts becoming like every other book you write.  The lawyer gets knocked unconscious and tattooed with a rockinghorse.  The family gets attacked and the daughter almost raped.  But, hey, we've got the whole summer, let's stick around and see what happens.

There's some kind of coven nearby, some bigfoot creatures called Rejects, and ghost children.  How are we going to tie all this together?  How about a siege by Satanic cultists?  But first, let's add twenty more characters.

The coven turn out to be friendly college professors.  A state trooper with his psychic wife join up, and for good measure let's have two entire families come to visit.  An international devil cult called the Brotherhood are interested in the house.  They want to perform a ceremony with the lawyer and the psychic and they needed other people to be there - not too well spelled out.  Luckily we have a psychic lady, and now all the kids are psychic, so they just "know" stuff.  My favorite Johnstone device.

There's like fifty people in the house now - I thought Johnstone was stocking the plot with victims, but I think only like one dies.  I suspect the real purpose is so he could have people explain the same things to each other to fill word count.  It's like this old chestnut...


...except instead of saying "Doctor", there's two pages of a character not believing a supernatural phenomena and gradually coming to accept it.

Just when the book had me skimming through page upon page of the same Rockinghorse being chopped up and burned for the fourth time, the Brotherhood attacks!  Dozens of cultist set up a perimeter and start torturing off-page - sorry, sodomy fans, only one off-page sodomy this time around, just barely enough to fill Johnstone's sodomy quota.

To even the score, God disables electricity and firearms.  Combustion engines still work, include CHAINSAWS BABY!  The lawyer spins one around like he's in a Peter Jackson movie and makes everything worthwhile.

Johnstone then proceeds to piss this goodwill down his leg and completely ruins the pace by having a lengthy sequence of the State Police divining that something is going down at the mansion because some officers have called in sick.  The cops find all the residents in the town asleep and their weapons useless, but just to make sure they try firing them about a dozen times.  This unnecessary insertion of a couple extra cops at the end is repeated later in Sweet Dreams.

The twelve year old that the text has been perving on the whole book gets raped and then forgives the floating corpse of the rapist.  This causes the rockinghorse to hide in the attic and the remaining Brotherhood members to run into the woods to be slaughtered by bigfeet off-page.  The kids set fire to the house, which for some reason they couldn't do before, the end.

Well,almost the end.  A couple more chapters of the Governor and State Police scratching their heads and comically being befuddled.  But it was all worth it for the CHAINSAW!

Available in Kindle from Amazon.

Click here for a sample.

Sweet Dreams by William W. Johnstone

Sweet Dreams
by William W. Johnstone
1985 Zebra

Alright, strap yourself in.

Our jumping off point is the phenomena of ghostly lights seen around Missouri.  I don't know if this is specifically the Missouri Headlights, I mean, Spook Lights -



There's also an archaeological dig at an Indian burial site.  A Manitou, or Indian spirit thingee, uses the light to travel in and rape women.  He rapes a doctor's wife and explodes her head with electricity, but it's ok because she was an evil harpy because she didn't like that he was cheating on her with his secretary.  Dames.

Said doctor performs an autopsy on his own wife then sleeps with his new psychiatrist girlfriend the same night.  This is our hero.  The two doctors befriend a couple of little kids who are special.  Special how?  Maybe we'll find out later, if Johnstone remembers (he doesn't).

We move into the Devil series template here.  The town is isolated, with people getting amnesia if they cross the border in either direction.  The townspeople inclined towards evil get superevil and work for the Manitou.  Of course, this includes all the teenagers.  A handful (the kids, the doctors, a preacher, and a couple of cops) stay normal.  Everyone else becomes a zoned out zombie, shuffling through a semblance of normal life.

The kids' parents have incestuous orgies while they're trying to sleep and the kids' toys come to life and start banging each other.  What's going on?  Luckily, there's a magic Indian man to explain everything.  And, yes, he's a drunk.

The Manitou is very dangerous and can't be stopped by Western Jesus magic.  Only another Manitou can stop it, or maybe the kids, or the medicine man's magic, or maybe he can't be stopped, but definitely not by anything God can do.

So, something something about being between two worlds.  We have to go to the haunted house!  The drunks, kids, doctors, and cops force their way through a storm to get to the haunted house.  The woman cop gets blown away by the wind, raped some, then teleports back to the house with a sore tush.

Yeah, the raping.  There's a lot of rape in this book.  Like, twenty or something.  Every character's backstory involves rape.  Child rape, monster rape, ghost rape, all the rape is in this book.  Never seen so many anuses get "bulled" into.

So the group gets to the haunted house and hit a time warp to 1890.  Their clothes change to old timey clothes, but they're invisible spirits so it doesn't matter, and they run into the evil man that lived there in 1890 who is also a ghost at the same time.  He rapes a bunch of kids.

They befriend a ghost dog and the Manitou starts confronting everyone with illusions of their darkest fears.  The evil man that is also a ghost says he works for Satan, who might be teaming up with the Manitou, but let's not go anywhere with that.  The cops fight a living wall of human flesh with pointy sticks.

We're three fourths of the way through, so let's introduce a bunch of new characters.  Some cops figure out how to get into town and keep their memories.  They team up with a priest and go to the haunted house.

There's a running subplot about a teacher (yes, she gets raped) who get's possessed by the Manitou, wears Indian clothes, and skins men alive.  The skinned men still live and she joins the evil rapey people on a raid on the haunted house.

The rapey people get shot, and the skinned people melt under holy water and crosses, because that works now.  That thing about Jesus magic not working?  Never mind, it works fine.  God just opens up an earthquake, the Manitou falls in, the end.

But wait...EPILOGUE !!!

The Manitou crawls out of the ground into a lake a couple days later.  So much for Jesus magic.  Only a few pages left, can we squeeze in a couple more rapes?  Because the Manitou babies grow fast, and in one year they'll be full grown and the Manitou will strike again.

How are the kids doing?  They're apprehensive, because they've got the feeling that in one year this will all happen again.

Johnstone was nice enough to even list all of his own plot holes and lost threads there at the end:

• The kids were supposed to be special, didn't do anything.
• The magic Indian was supposed to be special, all he did was give wrong information and die somehow.
• The spook lights got forgotten.
• So much was made about God not being in the same world as the Manitou, yet this couldn't be more of a deux es machina if it got wheeled down on ropes.
• None of what anyone did mattered.  God could have zapped the Manitou whenever he wanted and saved the town a lot of rape.

But don't worry, all these loose threads will be tied up in one year in the sequel that Johnstone is shamelessly plugging that never happened.

There were no dreams, sweet or otherwise.

The Kindle edition was done by the Lyrical Press imprint of Kensington Books, an ostensibly real publishing company.  They evidently had an intern just scan in a paperback, complete with OCR errors and the original back matter.  I just sent Zebra my 50 cents for their catalog.

The Nursery by William W. Johnstone

The Nursery
by William W. Johnston
1983, Zebra Books

"What is this preoccupation with anal sex?"

You been liking those Devil books?  Good, here's pretty much the same thing, but with fewer werewolves and even more butt rape, if such a thing was possible.

Macho retired military man Mike Folsom returns home to Butler, Louisiana to find that folks aren't too friendly anymore.  He hooks up with small town girl Rana Carter, who slowly fills him in with the details.  The town has been taken over by millionaire philanthropist John Becker.  Folks attend his satanic church, he controls the police, the phone lines, and the roads.  Children are sent to re-education camps and come out different.

Oh, and by the way, they'll kill you if you try to leave.  Kind of buried the lede there.  Mike collects Rana's foul-mouthed daughter and his old high school friends who haven't turned to the dark side yet.  People hang out in the house and recap the same information to each other for a couple of hundred pages, with the occasional incestual butt rape scene to keep you awake.

Things pick up quickly when Mike figures out he's God's Warrior and starts mowing down teenagers in the street with an AK-47.  He attacks the titular nursery, which is a laboratory where stolen fetuses are grown in stolen uteri and brainwashed to hate God.  He heads out to Becker's mansion and kills the Old One, a semi-immortal demon type who has to go into Odinsleep wrapped up with a bunch of bodies to feed on.

The townsfolk become semi-comatose and have forgotten the last ten years.  The military moves in, and we're left with the chilling notion that brainwashed children are spread out through the country.

This is like the Mexican flea market version of the Devil series, and better for it.  Pretty much the same, with just enough differences to separate it from the series.  We've got yet another cowardly Catholic priest who ends up being centuries old.  There's a double agent working for the government who ends up being a ghost or an angel.  We've got Mike just knowing stuff, and even though he keeps it to a minimum he still manages to screw it up.  "This all ends in seventy two...I mean, twenty four hours."

No beasts this time around, and the undead are different.  Instead of being mindless vampires, they're more like spirits with extensive powers, such as the ability to teleport anywhere within the state lines of Louisiana.  The undead are more independent and split from Becket's control, using their newfound abilities to (altogether now) buttrape.

Happily, there are no scenes of God and Satan whining to each other, or much talk about cosmic rules.  Doesn't mean there isn't too much meaningless talking.  Johnstone could have had 300 pages of teenagers torturing old people and Mike Folsom shooting off crotches and I don't think anyone would complain.

The story is bookended with a page about children who can bring their stuffed animals to life, which is maybe setting up a sequel.  He does use the living stuffed animals idea again in Sweet Dreams, and from what I remember it involved buttrape.

The Nursery is only one of two Johnstone horror novels not to be re-released in Kindle.

Cat's Cradle

Cat's Cradle
by William W. Johnstone
Zebra, 1986
(review previously published 1/13/14)

Anya and Pet are a little girl and cat who were created by a Egyptian cult thousands of years ago.  Every 25 years they awaken, eat a few people, then go back into hibernation.  A mining crew disturbs their hiding place and when they are attacked they become mummies.  And the mummies attack other people and they become rapist mummies.  And the woman the mummy rapes come back to life and, well, Johnstone kind of loses track at this point.

A severed mummy arm at first starts sprouting a new body, then instead spits out flesh eating maggots that fill an entire room.  Cats start attacking people en masse, and demonic Old Ones crawl out of bleeding gashes in the ground and set people on fire with their eyes.

That's the good stuff.  The blah stuff is Sheriff Dan, the Johnstonian hero.  His children obedient, his wife strong but knows when a woman should shut up.  He spends half of his time complaining that the federal government is lying and covering things up, and the other half lying to the press and covering things up.

Most of the wordage is Dan and his crew dealing with multiple government agencies that involve the FBI, CIA, KGB, corporations, and religious groups.  He also is harassed by a liberal muckraking reporter who doesn't trust the government.  You'd think she'd make an interesting ally, but she's shut away in a cell and mostly forgotten about.

The Devil's Touch by William W. Johnstone

The Devil's Touch
by William W. Johnstone
1984 Zebra Books

"Who cut off your father's testicles and penis?"

Some quick beast rape and some teen deflowering with a Lucifer dildo for a prologue and we're catching up with the Balons.  It's three years later.  Sam and Nydia are married and still half-siblings.  Their child Sam Jr. is two years old, and we don't know yet if he's the spawn of Satan or just the product of inbreeding.  They live in Logandale, New York, and attend Nelson College.

The local Satanic coven is plotting against the Balons.  Janet Sakall, the child sleeper agent of Satan from the last book, is now a teenager and the babysitter of the Balons.  She plots to sleep with Sam, while forces conspire to have young teen Jon Le Moyne seduce Nydia.

Things get moving pretty quickly.  The coven has taken over Logandale and the Balons gather up the select to fight them.  This time it's a couple members of the local police, some church leaders, and an author who went mad investigating the occult.

We get a little more time spent with the coven this time around, showing their recruitment methods, ceremonies, and incestual orgies.  Under the influence of Satan, Sam sleeps with Janet and another satanic moll Desiree Lemieux, while Nydia sleeps with Jon.  Satan lifts his influence, the two forgive each other, and go on as normal, unlike all the other Christian teens of Logandale who turn evil after being raped.

The good guys take over a fortified house and Balon runs around town sniping Satanists and starting fires.  One of the priests may be an immortal ancestor of the Balons.  Balon's demon child is now a teenager, Princess Xaviere, and wants to sleep with her father, and this must happen on Friday between 6 PM and midnight because of those rules everyone is constantly breaking.  This was the goal of the witch characters every book, every book it happens, and nothing ever seems to come of it.

The tablet is back, and for the first time we kind of know of why it's important.  If the tablet is destroyed, the person destroying it "will have some control over the actions of Satan."  And again, the tablet just gets teleported away by Satan.

The fires kill everyone, Xaviere sneaks off, and the Balon's ride off into the sunset.

Perhaps the first time I've seen this in a book - there are looooong excerpts from the last installment.  Pages of them.  We also find out that Sam Jr. was part of the Dog Teams, the fictional unit of another, non-horror series of Johnstone's.

Available for Kindle from Amazon.

Click here to read a sample.