Cornell Woolrich - Vampire's Honeymoon

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Cornell Woolrich - Vampire's Honeymoon (Carrol & Graf, 1985)

Cover design by Richard Chittenden

Vampire's Honeymoon (Horror Stories, August 1939)
Graves For The Living (Dime Mystery, June 1937)
I'm Dangerous Tonight (All-American Fiction, Nov. 1937)
The Street Of Jungle Death (Strange Detective Mysteries, July 1939)

Blurb:

"His stories are psychological thrillers, powerful in their atmosphere of terror and suspense—often ending in a whiplash of surprise... the great master of the emotional thriller."—Ellery Queen

"No one has ever surpassed Cornell Woolrich for sheer suspense or equaled him for exciting entertainment:'—Robert Bloch, author of Psycho

Old as time is the wickedly seductive legend of the Vampire. Yet, never will you find a more vivid, irresistible telling than this tale of the dark Priestess of the ancient cult who took a modern husband that she might satisfy her hellish thirsts.

Vampire Honeymoon: Sleep is so merciful to humankind. Dick Manning and Sherry are the happiest young couple alive and to prove it they're going to get married. Their engagement party is in full swing, Dick slips out to the garden to get away from the noise and there, perched precariously high up on the terrace, waits the beautiful, black-clad stranger. Fearing a suicide attempt, Dick joins her on the ledge. She assures him she's perfectly fine, kisses him with those irresistible red lips and goodbye Sherry, hello Faustine.

Five days of whirlwind romance later and Dick and Faustine are on their honeymoon in New Jersey. All is bliss - or it would be, if Dick hadn't have passed out in the elevator. Dr. Lane, having established that no, Dick hasn't recently been involved in a bad accident, has undergone no serious operation and doesn't suffer a permanent nosebleed, then gets to ask after his wife's habits - her hatred of the daylight, fondness for black clothing and general Goth demeanor: before they go out nightclubbing, does she spend hours before the mirror like other young women? No? Didn't think so. Finally, clearly appalled at what he's learned, he prescribes an evil-reeking ointment for Dick to rub on his neck during full moons as that should prevent any more "big mosquito bites" eating away his neck. Thanks doc, you lunatic, how much do i owe you? "Money? I don't take money from the damned".

As the bite marks clear up and Dick regains strength, he begins to worry that Faustine is having an affair. Why is she always sneaking off in the night when he's asleep? A newspaper report of an attack sustained by a local man which left him with less blood than a rock, decides Dick to shadow her. That night, as Faustine effortlessly breaks into the flat of a sleeping young man and makes straight for his jugular, her husband witnesses the entire episode.

She was there, ahead of me, rigid on the bed, so beautiful, so vile. There was a smile on her face that seemed to mock me. That broke the last thread of my self-control. I knew then that I was going to kill her.

But will he be able to bring himself to do it, and how?

Bar one grim interlude, this is pure vampires-by-numbers, but that's never been a problem for me. My one slight disappointment with Vampire's Honeymoon (sometimes reprinted in revised form as My Lips Destroy) is that it would have slotted comfortably into Weird Tales but Horror Stories? No way! Where are the rich, drooling geriatrics and misanthropic circus freaks who get their kicks from watching innocent chorus girls whipped and disfigured? Where's the amiable town mayor who's really the evil bastard manufacturing the grisly, apparently supernatural, manifestations implausibly explained away at the tale's conclusion? It's as though The Molemen Want Your Eyes and Revely In Hell had never been written. That said, it's a page-turner and i'm expecting great things of the remainder of the book. On reputation alone Graves For The Living sounds much more like weird menace material and that's up next.

Borrowed from the indispensible Galactic Central site, the cover of Horror Stories for August 1939. Pretty blasé of them to include Woolrich among the "and others"!

Thanks, Sev

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Graves For The Living: Begins with the arrest of Bud Ingram, a young man who has spent the night desecrating several new graves in search of his lover who he swears is still alive. At first, Bud doesn't even believe they're really cops but "them" up to their usual devious tricks. It's clear from the first that Bud is not quite the common or garden ghoul they had him figured for and, under interrogation back at the station, he blurts out his story, of how he's had a morbid fear of being buried alive ever since childhood when it happened to his father. Nobody would have known were it not for the despicable funeral company who disinterred his coffin when ma couldn't keep up payments. Having caught a glimpse of her husband's corpse, the panic etched on his face, the blood under his broken fingernails, Ma's sanity gave out the same night. She was the lucky one.

Bud's big break comes in early adulthood when he disturbs the mourners at a funeral by beseeching them to check the man they're about to bury is really dead. One of their number, the young, beautiful Joan Blaine, waits for him after the party have departed. She provides a sympathetic ear and decides "I'll have to take you in hand, try to get rid of this morbid streak in you." Yeah, good luck with that one!

Bud falls in love with Joan and for the first time in his life he's as contented as any man can be who is constantly fixating on premature burial. But one afternoon, while passing along a little used country road, he comes upon an immaculately tended private cemetery and can't resist it's pull. As he explores the graves, he spots first one, then twenty rubber tubes sticking out of the graves and watches behind a bush as the cemetery-warden studiously inspects them, seemingly for blockages. Mystified and not a little frightened, Bud returns to his car to find the ignition wire has been slashed. A sinister gent with a luger escorts him back inside the cemetery to a concealed room where Bud learns the appalling truth about top live burial fetishists, the Friends of Death!

Phew! still thirty plus pages of this extraordinary gem to savour and, even if it's all downhill from here - which i doubt - this would be up there with anything tasty i've read all year. The obvious reference point is Edgar Allan Poe but there's more than a hint of Guy De Maupassant at his cemetery skulking best (The Tomb, Was It A Dream), all shot through with Woolrich's own brand of misery. To be continued!

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Eyes everywhere. Ears everywhere..... The Friends of Death, it transpires, are the Fight Club of the premature burial scene with members in high places - including the police force - and chapters in every major US city. They trade on the promise of eternal life and, once involved, their more influential members are blackmailed into doing their bidding on pain of slow, painful suffocation. Bud Ingram's night of cemetery desecration is not the work of a budding Sgt. Bertrand but a frantic search for Joan who the Friends have buried alive in place of her husband! All seems lost until the Police Captain, having decided that Bud's story is so insane it has to be true, hauls in his colleague and cult member Crow for questioning. Faced with the dilemma of how to extract information from a man with no fear of death, his solution is so outrageously sadistic it's clear that Woolrich had certainly acquainted himself with the Weird Menace pulps! This is confirmed by Graves For The Living's one slight but significant weakness for this reader; the ending conforms a little too rigidly to the genre's tradition of pulling away from the edge when you're longing for a headlong plunge into the abyss. But what horrible fun getting there and totally recommended!

[helrunar]

This sounds juicy. Thanks for the link! And of course, the posts from long ago.

Best, Steve

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Cornell Woolrich - I'm Dangerous Tonight: (All-American Fiction, Nov. 1937).

Artist uncredited, All-American Fiction, Nov. 1937.

One night during "the blue hour," the Devil pays a visit to the apartment of Madame Maldonado, the famous Parisian fashion designer with a proposition. Indicating his beautiful black, red lined cloak, he entices: "Why don't you create a dress like this, Maldonado, and dedicate it to me? Something that will turn whoever wears it into my servant. Here, I'll leave it with you." And does.

Madame screams fit to raise skeletons from the tomb. Rajah the cat goes crazy. The servants break down the door.

On discovering an empty syringe by the bed, Maldonado's secretary insists Madame hallucinated the entire episode and serves her right, but how to account for the cloak, which neither she nor the underlings can bring themselves to touch?

Now recovered, Maldonado, dismisses all from her room. As she fondles the fabric, Rajah throws another fit. Of a sudden, Maldonado realises how stupid she must be to dote on the bone idle, ugly little fleabag. Why, he is really quite the most hateful creature! Sometimes she could throttle him!

Afterwards she sets to work sketching a rough of her next creation, I'm Dangerous Tonight, "a dress to bring out the Devil in you!"

Cut to her studio some time later. Mimi Brissard has spent a long afternoon playing mannequin to the flame red gown, an arduous session made more-so by these sudden overwhelming urges to plunge the fabric shears into Maldonado's heart. Strange that they should pass each time she doffs the dress. Mimi needs something chic to wear for tonight's date with American fugitive Steve Belden at notorious underworld hangout, The Bal au Diable, so ... why not? She can put it back first thing tomorrow with no-one being the wiser. But the frail old night-watchman, whose Solange needs him so, just has to interfere.

The Bal au Diable. Mimi has been stood up. Back in the States, Belden is wanted for the cold-blooded murder of a narcotics agent, whose brother, Frank Fisher, has trailed him to Paris. On leaving the club, Mimi is intercepted by Fisher. The prospect of the man she loves frying in the electric chair is too deliciously thrilling to resist! Mimi sells him out.

The sequence in Belden's room is devastating.

"Get away from the window! I told you to put the light out, didn't I? And take that damn dress off too, while you're about it. Every time I lamp it on you, it throws a shock into me all over again. I think I'm seeing things -"

It's only when Mimi discards her gown that she comes to her senses, realises what she's done. She confesses all to her lover, implores him to make a run for it, but it's too late. Fisher leads him away at gunpoint, but not before disclosing his opinion of the fugitive's woman. Until tonight, Fisher would have believed it impossible that he could hold anyone in lower regard than Steve Belden. He knows better now.

No sooner have they left than Mimi takes the only option left open to her.

The dress seeks out its next victim.

[To be continued]

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"Men's loyalty to his women dies hard - and almost always too late."

The next hapless recipient of the dangerous dress is an American tourist, Sarah Travis, 40, devoted wife of Hiram the portly lawnmower millionaire. Maldonado gifts her the gown shortly before she and her husband board the ship home to New York, though Sarah doubts she'd dare wear in it public for fear of causing a scandal. The dress has other ideas.

Sarah débuts her dress in a bar aboard ship whose fellow passengers include Frank Fisher, his prisoner, and, very briefly, a canary. The evil vibes emanating from her gown empty the room of all - save Fisher: Belden is cuffed to the bedposts - in seconds flat. She spikes his drink and frees the killer on the understanding they enter a partnership to murder both the detective and her humongously insured husband. "I hate everyone there is in the world tonight, but him most." Belden duly puts a round of bullets through Fisher at point blank range, while his accomplice feeds Hiriam to the fishes. Belden now assumes the late millionaire's identity.

Sarah thinks it wise to change outfit before the ship docks. On stepping out of the dress, clarity returns, and with it, the ghastly realisation that she has murdered the man she loves. It is too much for her mind to bear. Sarah Travis spends the rest of her days in an institution for the terminally gaga.

If the Devil is going to play dirty, I guess it's only fair God pulls a few strokes, too. Inexplicably, Frank Fisher survives, but failure to deliver his prisoner into custody costs him his job (Woolrich is adept at conveying despair as he is claustrophobic paranoia. "That was my whole life. This is my finish now.") Resolved to drink himself to death in a violent 3rd Avenue bar, the fallen detective is rescued by the house chanteuse, Joan Blaine, who offers him a roof while he dries out, gets back on track. Fortunately for both, he accepts.

Frank is now focused on winning back his badge by taking down evil nemesis Belden. A lucky break sees him mistaken for a dope fiend. He trails the pusher to Chanticler, a new Roadhouse in Westchester. Joan is beginning a residency there this very evening! It's the big break she's been working for all her life. Large venue, good pay, a shot at stardom. Only drawback is, she's expected to provide her own costume ....

Absolutely loved this one from start to finish. If you're a stickler for plausibility, might be best you give Woolrich's novella the widest berth, as nobody is ever going to accuse I'm Dangerous Tonight of playing fair with the reader. The rest of us can settle back and enjoy a thrill ride of epic proportion.