Schoolhouse by Lee Duigon

Schoolhouse
by Lee Duigon
1988, Pinnacle

The best part of haunted house stories is the unveiling of the evil history of the site.  The second best part is when the spirits influence the living, possessing them with madness.  The dumbest part is the actual ghost, because ghosts are always stupid.

Good thing here that there are no ghosts, just alien brain worms.  This is spelled out pretty early, so no big reveal on this.

The titular schoolhouse is built on the site of a meteor crash.  An armored husk buried underground sticks worm tentacles up people's noses, causing them to go insane and create a separate psychic projection.  This is not explained well, and the better for it.

The actual prose is a bit clumsy and juvenile, but I got used to it after a couple chapters.  The school has always had a high turnover rate, and there is a little bit of the cursed history of the location.  The best parts involve the teachers who slowly lose their minds.

A woman becomes violently possessive of her former sancho, who in turn is obsessed with losing weight.  The Mandingo reading nurse flips out after seeing naked ghost children, and the school bully is getting more violent than usual.  The gym teacher cusses at the kids and makes them do push-ups, so he was clearly unaffected.

I like the build up, the slowly mounting insanity, so I was especially disappointed when things just kind of stopped there when the alien gets set on fire with floor wax.  Duigon seemed to try to make up for it a little in the epilogue, but this is a strictly low-stakes book.  If it wasn't for the cussing, it could pass for R.L. Stine.

If this was a proper ghost story, it could have kept the low-stakes in exchange for atmosphere, but when you're going with alien brain worms you need to ramp it up a bit.

Special thanks to Ron Clinton (@ron_clinton) for the book!  Follow him on twitter and read his article Collecting The Macabre: 30 Years of Pursuing Books of Wickedness & Wonder in Strange Stories

I wouldn't bother with the paperback on Abebooks unless the prices have moved a digit or two since this writing.

Tie-Ins: The Equalizer

The Equalizer was an 80s TV series about a former secret agent turned vengeance-for-hire-an-episode operator.  Seemed stuffy to me as a kid, but I might enjoy it more now.  Like everything else from the 80s there was reboot movie, this one with Denzel Washington.

There were three tie-ins to the original TV series written by David Deutsch:

1987: Equalizer
1988: To Even the Odds
1988: Blood and Wine

Two more recent books written by series creator Michael Sloane:

2014: The Equalizer - novelization
2018: Killed in Action - novel reboot

TM Gallery: VHS Covers

Driller Killer

An artist slowly goes insane from struggling to pay his bills, work on his paintings and care for his two female roommates. This leads him to the streets of New York after dark where he randomly kills derelicts with a power drill. 

On Amazon Video

Born Invincible

On Amazon Video

Bloodfight aka Uppercut Man

In order to prove himself to his girlfriend's father, a young man takes up boxing professionally. The father becomes his trainer and a sleazy promoter gets interested in him, but the road to the title won't be easy. 

On Amazon Video

TM Gallery: Science Fiction

Dwellers in Space by Van Reed

Paperback from AbeBooks

Echo X by Ben Barzman

Paperback from AbeBooks

Flow My Tears, The Policeman Said by Philip K. Dick

Jason Taverner—world-famous talk show host and man-about-town—wakes up one day to find that no one knows who he is—including the vast databases of the totalitarian government. And in a society where lack of identification is a crime, Taverner has no choice but to go on the run with a host of shady characters, including crooked cops and dealers of alien drugs. But do they know more than they are letting on? And just how can a person’s identity be erased overnight? 

Kindle ebook from Amazon

Bangkok Revenge (2012)

Bangkok Revenge (2012)


Boy's parents are killed, boy grows up being trained in the martial arts, boy seeks revenge.  There might have been an interesting angle in the lead being a compassionless sociopath, but I just couldn't, it's so badly put together.  Bad performances, bad direction, bad editing.  The real shame is that the action choreography looks like it was probably really good, and John Foo has some moves, but they're completely lost in poor camera angles and incompetent editing.

On Amazon video.

TM Gallery: Vintage Sleaze Paperbacks

Lana by Joan Ellis

The Face of an Angel...the Morals of an Alley Cat

Deprived and Depraved...Lana Became the Youngest Member of the World’s Oldest Profession

Paperback from AbeBooks

Willing Women by Connie Sellers

Paperback from AbeBooks

Sex in the Shadows by Randy Salem

Paperback from AbeBooks

Darker Than You Think by Jack Williamson

Darker Than You Think
by Jack Williamson
1948 (expanded from a 1940 shorter version)

Drunken reporter Will Barbee falls under the spell of witch reporter April Bell after an elderly explorer dies after announcing a mysterious box contains the means to fight an ancient evil.

Bell and Barbee have the genes of an ancient exterminated race of witches, and as such can kind of astrally project themselves in animal forms to cause fatal accidents by manipulating probabilities, exactly like the Scarlet Witch.  Yes, April is a redhead.

April is trying to get Barbee to kill those protecting the box, while Barbee spends way too many pages wondering if it's all a dream or an hallucination, which is especially ineffective given that there is no dream-like atmosphere at all, what with April talking (while in wolf form) about carbon atoms and Duke University studies.

Near the end things pick up a little, with some paranoia about how a race of half-witches may be secretly controlling the world's institutions, but that goodwill is immediately wasted by the rushed, goofy ending.

Not sure what the big deal is with the contents of the box, seeing how the half-witches can be killed by conventional means.  Barbee dies, and hangs around in astral form in a sequence that makes no sense, is now a vampire, the kind of vampires that are really ghost pterodactyls that don't drink blood, and he can grab the box and throw it into the sea.  Something a human thug could have done for like $20. 

Urania always has deceptively honest covers

I haven't read the original magazine version, but this felt padded out to novel length with incessant adjectives.  Other than the paranoia section this doesn't approach horror, and spends a scifi length of time explaining away the supernatural.

Kindle ebook from Amazon