William Schoell - Bride of Satan

1887. Sumara in Asia. Sister Venicus is a young sister of the Holy Messianic Church, sent by her obscure order to help the poor. She absolutely hates it. On her train-ride, all passengers vanish into thin air.

1940. Greenwich Village. Young wannabee actress Desiree is sharing a room with equally successless friends Janice and Paul. Paul is black and can´t be seen by the landlady. For fun they do a séance. Dumb idea. Paul gets possessed by a demon, his arm is changed into a claw and he kills his friends. Of course nobody believes him and he lands on the electric chair.

1963. New York. Director Anthony Winteroth has made a movie out of the story. It is called Vicious. And it will be shocking, the bedroom murder, the axing of the girl, never seen like this before on the screen. After the premiere his young son goes crazy and stabs his mother to death before dying, his hand looking like a claw. For the police the case is clear; the impressionable boy watched his fathers movie and went nuts.

1987. New York. Dorothy Hunter is a young freelance writer for magazines like Woman Now. There is a sequel to Vicious in the making called Vicious Two and she is asked to cover it. Because she thinks those violent movies are misogynistic crap. But Dorothy has a reason to be that sensitive. Not only were her parents victims of the serial killer called The Slicer when she was fifteen, she herself was raped a few years later.

Her boyfriend Jimmy on the other hand lives for horror movies. He is a writer for the movie magazine Frames and Directions, and he also shall write about Vicious Two. So the couple travel to California to interview the film-crew, doing articles grounded on their different opinions. Shortly after their arrival a killer is stalking the film-crew slaughtering the actors in bloody inventive ways. And Dorothy and Jeremy are in the thick of it. But things gets even weirder when Dorothy meets self-styled ghostbuster Brian Asquith who believes the murder possessed by a demon, who is wreaking havoc since the mysterious train wreck in 1887. Who´s trademark is a claw …


William Schoell wrote 8 horror novels for Leisure from 1984 to 1990 and never came to real prominence in the field. This is a shame as he mostly tried not to tell the same story countless times - as especially so many Leisure writers did -, was original in his plots and had an easy accessible style. I had never heard about him before reading a few nice recommendations in the late Mike Bakers great fanzine Afraid in the mid-nineties. Bride of Satan – which original title was Vicious according to the writer – is an interesting take on the horror movie crew in peril, coupled with the then hot topic of the public reception of slasher movies.

The novel tries to establish a kind of epic possession story, told with original set-pieces. The question is if it succeeds as the writer tries to cram too much different topics into the a bit too long tale. So you get an awful lot of discussions about the evil of (then) modern horror movies and the "horror is the new pornography" meme of the feminist mindset while a few pages later there is another bloody murder right out of an Argento film. Schoell captures the typical giallo atmosphere quite well.

But the different parts often don´t always gel, the story doesn´t end at the movie set but goes ahead to the nun order which is worshiping a pagan deity complete with a kind of orgy in their underground lair. The novel often feels fragmented, the curse of the claw and the real demonic possession seems out of place at the movie-set, while the heroes are arguing about the pro and cons about violent horror films. This often is a bit too much soap-box on both sides and hasn´t aged always well.

Still it is well written and suspenseful, and even the over the top pulpish ending is a lot of fun, complete with nude swimming in the college pool followed by a death by meat cleaver done by a nun.