Jeff Gelb & Lonn Friend - Hot Blood

[dem bones]

Jeff Gelb & Lonn Friend (eds.) - Hot Blood: Tales of Provocative Horror (Pocket Books, 1989)

Richard Newton

Graham Masterton - Changeling
Richard Matheson - The Likeness of Julie
Robert R. McCammon - The Thang
F. Paul Wilson - Menage a Trois
Chet Williamson - Blood Night
Mick Garris - Chocolate
Richard Christian Matheson - Mr. Right
Ramsey Campbell - Again
Lisa Tuttle - Bug House
Theodore Sturgeon - Vengeance Is
J. N. Williamson - The Unkindest Cut
Michael Garrett - Reunion
Harlan Ellison - Footsteps
Mike Newton - Pretty Is
Gary Brandner - Aunt Edith
Dennis Etchison - Daughter of the Golden West
John Skipp and Craig Spector - Meat Market
Rex Miller - The Voice
Robert Bloch - The Model
Steve Rasnic Tem - Carnal House
Jeff Gelb - Suzie Sucks
Les Daniels - They're Coming for You
Ray Garton - Punishments
David J. Schow - Red Light

The First in a long-running series. At the time, "erotic horror" was deemed ultra-marketable and a number of sex-horror anthologies were published including Ellen Datlow's I Shudder At Your Touch mini-series, Pam Kesey's Daughters Of Darkness: Lesbian Vampire Stories and Nancy A. Collins & Edward E. Kramer's Forbidden Acts (to name but some).

I stuck with these through the next two, Hotter Blood and Hottest Blood, and when last I looked they were up to #10. The first seems to me to be the most fun, with a number of outstanding stories, Sturgeon's Vengeance Is reprint achieving some kind of unwanted award for precognition as it predates the AIDs virus.

David Schow's Red Light is Leiber's classic The Girl With The Hungry Eyes in reverse. Consumers as psychic vampires, feeding off images of a particularly beautiful cover girl, Tasha Vode. Eventually, the camera steals away her soul - and everything else. Gelb's Suzie Sucks features a vampire call-girl who, like the female lead in Ray Garton's Live Girls, prefers to take blood from somewhere other than the neck. Ramsey Campbell's Again is one of his creepiest, featuring the phantoms of an aged couple with a taste for S & M. Graham Masterton, certainly no novice in the kinky terror stakes, contributes the memorable spontaneous sex-change adventure. In Richard Christian Matheson's Mr. Right, a psychiatrist listens to her client, Mrs. Schubert's tales of the abuse and degradation she's suffered at the hands of her domineering husband. And makes sure she gets his phone number. Richard's father, 'Logan Swanson', scores with the particularly nasty 'sixties date-rape creeper, The Likeness Of Julie.

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Les Daniels - They're Coming for You : Mr. Bliss arrives home early to find his wife enjoying a steamy session with her podgy lover. The plump non-entity is disposed of with a single stab to the back of the neck, but Mr. Bliss takes his time with his wife, repeatedly slamming the sharp steel "into every place that he thought she'd like it least". When, finally, she dies in agony, Mr. Bliss gives her corpse one for old time's sake. But the sexed-up dead can't rest and, some nights later, when the decomposing pair return the scene of their murder, they have only one thing on their minds ...

John Skipp and Craig Spector - Meat Market: Tom Savich is still moping over Doreen, so pal Jerry takes him to a notorious Manhattan pick-up joint to encourage him back into the game. Tom pulls, cannibal sex ensues.

Ray Garton - Punishments: As a child, Jayne inadvertently outed her father as a paedo. Now she demands that her lover brutalise her in the most wince-inducing manner to make good her 'sin'.

[dem bones]

Once you recover from the initial disappointment - just because it says 'erotic horror' on the cover ain't no guarantee that reading it will leave you walking around like you've an embalmed squid stuffed down your jeans - these Hot Blood collections can make for a pleasantly unpleasant diversion. This, the début, is far the 'best' of those i've read. As the series progressed, the emphasis shifted to all original material which, depending on your point of view, is either highly commendable/ murder on the reader.

Theodore Sturgeon - Vengeance Is: A highlight of Kirby McCauley's Dark Forces, pre-AIDS, though we'd not have long to wait.

The vicious Grimme and his halfwit brother Dave are two hairy yokel serial rapists. Mostly they prey on the women and girls of their own valley community, occasionally, for variety's sake, they'll venture to the highway and grab some teenage hitcher or flag down some city folk. Then it's back to the bar to boast of their sexploits. The locals are too terrified to interfere, even after what they did to poor Marcy Fannen, who never recovered from the ordeal and died a vegetable. But this latest skit was the best ever. A small college professor type and his wife, car-jacked and brutalised in the hills. The old guy must've been kinky or yellow or something, because he kept screamin' at her to give it to them before Grimme had even hit him. That gal struggled like a wildcat. It was only after Grimme dragged all these paintings from the boot and destroyed 'em one by one that she gave in, 'fact, the way the boys tell it, she came over awful willing all of a sudden ....

Rex Miller - The Voice: A Be Bop DJ on ghosters at a Dallas station finally persuades regular caller, Patricia of the lovely, sexy velvet voice, that they should meet up the next time her husband is out of town. Their tryst is not a success. Voice of a siren she may have, but a house fire has seen to it that Patricia has the face of Lon Chaney in The Phantom Of The Opera. A laudably ghastly five-pager from the Slob man.

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Robert Bloch - The Model: As told to Bloch by George Milbank, 32, a former ad agency hotshot, now the long-term inmate of a lunatic asylum. Milbank's current plight is the souvenir of a Carribean cruise where he fell for peerless fashion model Vilma Loring and spent the entire fortnight trying to bed her. On the last night of the voyage he comes to his senses, realises he was never in with a chance and sets about getting drunk. That's when Vilma announces she's made a decision. He has the right credentials to father her child, and if he'd just like to drop by her cabin they can get down to business. The first inkling he's given that things may quite be not be quite as swell as they seem is when Vilma removes her head ....

This reads like an instance of The-Man-Who-Wrote-Psycho dreaming up a killer pay-off line and tailored a story to suit it.

Robert R. McCammon - The Thang: Dave Neilson, a sex-starved young Okie, withdraws his savings and travels to New Orleans, desperately seeking a voodoo practitioner who can do something about his underwhelming manhood. Miss Fallon obliges. One jar of her unspeakably foul potion and his thang is transformed into an absolute monster - lap-dancers faint dead away at sight of it. A life of sexstasy guaranteed until, in his eagerness to test-drive his whopper, Dave disregards the conjure woman's strict instructions ....

Gary Brander - Aunt Edith: All kinds of rumours persist about Edith Calderon. She's a vampire. She's a madwoman. She's an evil crone, bent on cheating Audrey, her beautiful nineteen year old niece, of her inheritance. Aunt Edith is none of the above but she is a witch, a very glamorous one at that, and her speciality is soul transference. She also has a flair for handicrafts, as evinced by her impressive assortment of home-made vibrators. Contrary to the gossips, Aunt Edith's loyalty to her ward is absolute, as her latest boyfriend, one Skip Dial, the bed-hopping banker, will soon discover to his cost ....

[ripper]

After reading Dem's comments on 'Hottest Blood' and not being able to find it in my collection for a re-match, I decided to try, instead, the original 'Hot Blood.' I have read it before, but most of the stories are blanks in my memory, apart from Matheson's 'Likeness of Julie.'

The Thang: Played for dark laughs, it strayed too far into humour for my liking. It seemed a little out of place in this anthology, though it is still enjoyable on its own terms.
Menage a Trois: I liked this one quite a bit. Taking over someone's body with the power of the mind is hardly original but I thought the author did justice to this sub-genre. I wasn't entirely convinced about Jerry's reaction to the situation once he realised that Stephanie was not acting willingly. I suspect many men would be tempted by the prospect of an endless supply of girls. I liked the scene where Jerry sees Stephanie dancing alone while her aged, crippled employer is slumped in her wheelchair. I thought this captured well the sheer joy that someone who could never walk would have in the simple pleasure of dancing.

The Likeness of Julie: This is the only story that stayed in my mind from previously reading it, first in one of the Mayflower Black Magic anthologies. It is a superb story imo. It un-nerves me in a way that I find hard to explain, and I often find it difficult to read. Perhaps it is the way the author turns the story on its head: initially we are rooting for Julie to get revenge, but later Matheson pulls the rug from under our feet and our sympathies waver, but I think it goes deeper than that. A top quality story.

[ripper]

Bug House: Slightly confusing. I couldn't understand what Aunt My got out of her relationship with Peter, apart from companionship, but that came at a high price. The fight between wasp and spider foreshadowed what was to come later on in the story but I wasn't sure what exactly Peter was supposed to be. Also, Aunt May was able to walk around, but for some reason her niece appeared to be paralysed when the same thing happened to her.

Vengeance is...: I wanted to see the two hillbilly scumbags suffer greatly, so was a bit disappointed when it wasn't described more fully and graphically. The author could have piled on the grue, and I was expecting that, but it was fairly restrained in the end.

Blood Night: I thought this had the most erotic imagery of the three stories I read last night. A nice blending of fantasy and reality, where the fantasy for the protagonist seems far more real and satisfying than reality. It was not really explained how he came to have this power of creating a pseudo-reality from his fantasies. I wondered if these fantasy figures were tulpas, given temporary substance by mind power. Probably the most enjoyable of the three tales.

[ripper]

The Voice: Short and nasty. Sympathies are with poor Patricia.

Meat Market: I had to read the ending over again to realise just what had been going on, and the revelation came out of the blue.

Again: A good one, with creepy setting, isolated and decaying. The ghosts, if ghosts they be, are corporeal and able to cause harm. Also nice to have a story set here in England, just as a change.

[dem bones]

Excellent stuff, Rip. It's funny how so many from Hot Blood have stayed with me whereas revisiting Hotter Blood was like coming upon an entirely new book.