Winifred Wolfe - Never Step on a Rainbow (1970)

[Calenture]

Never Step on a Rainbow by Winifred Wolfe

First published 1955; this Panther edition 1970

Is this the most badly misjudged cover and title ever for a horror novel?

The pity of it is, there’s actually a superbly-well written and critically acclaimed book behind that cover. But I have so far found no match for the title or author’s name on the net.

I almost passed the book by, thinking it was one of the ‘Confessions’ series, but then noticed the Rosemary’s Baby reference on the cover.

So I thought I was taking home another cash-in novel.

When I got home, I found these quotes inside:

“Gripping, ghoulish, hard to put down. If you want a chiller this is it.”
Irish Times

And:

“To keep atavistic, magical terrors pleasingly agog against a modern New York background, with your heroine a pleasant, practical, decent striptease girl takes some doing. Winifred Wolfe does it so well in Never Step on a Rainbow that no ‘rational explanation’ is necessary. A rare treat.”
Punch

There’s even a Hugh Walpole reference:

“The tarot-telling, witch-like figure of Alice Molland is a character worthy of the pen of Hugh Walpole. The end is startling and yet inevitable, and readers who cheat themselves by even glancing at the end are missing a taste of the truly macabre.”
Illustrated London News

Over the past two evenings I’ve read almost half of its 200 pages. It really is difficult to put aside. The character of Jenny Frye is an enormously likeable one. There is no sexual content so far aside from brief references to her work. Whether the book lives up to the Illustrated London News review, time will tell.
The book has the feel of a Seventies or Eighties thriller, so I was surprised when I saw that the earliest copyright date is 1955 – renewed in 1965, published by Gollancz 1966. This was an unexpectedly good find, bought as a joke; and I’m puzzled that there seems to be no trace of the author's name on the net, or even an eBay sale of this book. Write-up to follow.

[weirdmonger]

calenture said:

This was an unexpectedly good find, bought as a joke; and I’m puzzled that there seems to be no trace of the author's name on the net, or even an eBay sale of this book.

Absolutely fascinating, Rog. Thanks for finding it and then telling us about it so compulsively.

I wonder how many other good books sunk without trace in the uncharted waters of pre-Internet days...

des

[jkdunham]

Winifred Wolfe (1923-1981). Began writing for radio soap operas, later wrote for TV. Also produced short stories for magazines such as Cosmopolitan, two plays, and several novels - two of which were filmed.

(info gathered from New York Times obituary)

Original copyright for Never Step on a Rainbow was 1955, as you say, but doesn't appear to have been published until 1965 by Harper & Row. First US paperback wasn't until 1975 from what I can make out. No sign of it since. British editions may be quite scarce by the look of it.

[sean]

There's a tiny snippet on the IMDb:

uk.imdb.com/name/nm0938170/

[Calenture]

Many thanks for the above, everyone. I'm feeling cheered-up by that IMDb page and information - at least this book wasn't Wolfe's sole literary appearance. The book's style is quite sophisticated, completely at odds with the cover. I'm prepared for a quieter ending than the reviews suggest - after all, written in 1955... but it's certainly a good read, anyway.

[Calenture]

“There was all that blood over broadway, so thick she could almost taste it. Jenny wondered why she had ever called sunset beautiful.”

Jenny Frye’s take on the world is a dramatic one. She’s particularly afraid of The Beard. She believes he wants to kill her and goes to her agent to get a booking in another town, away from him. She’s afraid when he passes her on the stairs, and she hates the way his coughing keeps her awake. He has the room next to hers in the brownstone boarding house run by Mrs Keefer. Jennie works each night as a stripper, so she needs her sleep.

She isn’t afraid of Alice Molland, who she’s christened The Glob; but right now she wishes Alice would just get off her bed and go to her own room. Jenny finds her on the bed when she returns from shopping. She needs rest, but there’s not much chance that she could move Alice, as she’s a gigantic woman. So instead she has to watch her sitting on the bed eating doughnuts and listen to her explain how she could interpret Jenny’s dreams and read her tarot cards.

Jenny’s just succeeded in getting rid of her – Mrs Keefer invites her down to her room for some Danish cheese and prunes - when her husband Charlie arrives, full of the club he’s planning in Texas. It’s going to be a very small place, so everyone will have to sit real close together, but they’ll only invite the best people, so it’s bound to be alright. She hasn’t seen Charlie in months but as soon as she’s reassured him that he’s doing the right thing and it’ll work out this time, he leaves for Texas again.

Finally Jenny visits next door to see if the man needs a doctor.

The Beard’s name is James Connor, a name he said he picked out of a phone book. He has a weak lung and had caught a chill. He paints faces on dolls for a living. Jenny’s impressed that he’s an artist. He can even tell her about Leonardo and the Mona Lisa. When he was a child, Mr Connor remembers his grandmother burning his new shoes because he’d put them on a shelf higher than his head and selling chickens’ claws and bags of graveyard dirt to people who came asking her for help. He’s ashamed of the memory.

But Mr Connor is an artist. He doesn’t paint now because the last time he painted a portrait, two faces appeared in the picture, one of them a skull – one of it’s eyes made by the shape of a girl’s hand - and the girl was murdered. An enquiry had cleared Mr Connor, but Mrs Keefer and Miss Molland believe that he was responsible. Mr Connor believes it, too.

After she nurses Mr Connor back to health, Jenny persuades him to paint her portrait. He gives her a present, a hand painted doll which looks exactly like her. A needle in the doll’s clothes pricks her finger when she takes the gift. Someone slips a sheet of paper under Jenny’s door – written on it is an ancient Babylonian incantation, a prayer for the protection of her soul. Alice Molland and Mrs Keefer keep warning her to stay away from him; Alice Molland believes that he’s evil and that more than Jenny’s life is at stake.

The story is driven by characterisation and dialogue more than incident, and the characters drive it intensely and remorselessly to a tense and riveting conclusion. Preconceptions are constantly challenged; the characters never seem to be quite what they appear. Small details from the past impinge on the present and add depth to an already gripping narrative. The book does live up to comparisons with The Collector and Rosemary’s Baby, and the Illustrated London News reviewer is right when he says that readers who skip ahead to the end will cheat themselves of “a taste of the truly macabre.” When I turned the last page I felt convinced that I’d read a neglected classic, in the true sense of that overused word.

[dem bones]

Great find, Rog. Fantastic cover, ropey title and what sounds like an excellent weird horror story to boot. It doesn't get much better than that.

Just started on Ray Russell's Incubus which also references Rosemary's Baby on the cover: in fact it is "More terrifying than The Exorcist and Rosemary's Baby combined!" Perhaps that's overstating the case, but it's certainly a nasty one. Be that as it may, it does strike me as a little odd that in two and a half years we've barely mentioned either Blatty or Levin considering the huge influence they had.

[Calenture]

Apr 6, 2008 23:03:19 GMT dem bones said:

Great find, Rog. Fantastic cover, ropey title and what sounds like an excellent weird horror story to boot. It doesn't get much better than that.

Just started on Ray Russell's Incubus which also references Rosemary's Baby on the cover...

it does strike me as a little odd that in two and a half years we've barely mentioned either Blatty or Levin considering the huge influence they had.

I've read two of Levin's books, The Stepford Wives and Sliver, and just found a brief review of the latter (sorry, no time to post it now). So far I haven't read Rosemary's Baby - the film was so good it seemed unnecessary - and I have another one, The XYY Man, which might or might not belong at the Vault, not sure.

I was put off reading The Exorcist - again by the brilliant film, and Stephen King's comment that the book was a "thumping great humourless tome". Still have to read the shorter Legion.

Very recently I got three Ray Russell books, including Incubus (which I once gave away). Bearing in mind how good Sardonicus is, it's probably time to read them as soon as I finish the one I started last night, Hugh Zachary's Gwen, In Green - which begins to look like it might fit on either the Vegetation or Animals thread!

[David A. Riley]

I was put off reading The Exorcist - again by the brilliant film, and Stephen King's comment that the book was a "thumping great humourless tome". Still have to read the shorter Legion.

I was quite shocked to read that criticism of The Excorcist. Granted, it isn't high on humour, but I have never thought of that as a point of criticism for any book, much less one dealing with as dark a subject as this. I remember reading The Exorcist some years ago and being very impressed with it. If anything, I preferred it to the film, brilliant though that is.

As for Legion, I liked that too, though it is very different book, even if it does deal with some of the same individuals, perhaps because the main character is the police detective who for some reason or other always reminded me of Columbo.

I would certainly recommend both books.

David

[dem bones]

Yeah, I agree. Surely the power of The Exorcist derives from the solemnity with which Blatty approaches his subject matter. Had he adopted the Frederic Brown or Henry Kuttner approach - you know, all shaggy devils and/ or wisecracking demons - it wouldn't have been anywhere near as effective. A very frightening novel!

Legion bored me rigid, although it's fair to say I was very young when I read it and even less patient with deep and meaningful fiction than I am now. My impression was of a philosophy debate masquerading as a horror story but then I probably thought that about anything more challenging than Seabury Quinn at the time.

I thought Rosemary's Baby was terrific although, as with The Exorcist, have never felt any pressing need to re-read it. Maybe it's down to the fact that there's nothing of any worth I could possibly hope to add to the bulk of measured and enlightened criticism already available in regard to Rosemary ... , The Exorcist and other heavyweights. But you don't find too much on The Man With Mad Eyes or indeed Never Step on a Rainbow which makes them far more rewarding (and fun) to babble about IMO.