If it ain't stiff - sex with dead people

[dem]

Cover painting Robert Gibson Jones

To recap:

The Pan Horror books are a hot-bed of corpse-fondling frolics. William Faulkner's brilliant Southern Gothic A Rose For Emily (#3), Walter Winward's supremely distasteful The Benefactor in #8, Gerald Atkins Midnight Lover in #12 .... Norman Kaufman's Awake, Sleeping Tigress from #13, is as close as makes no difference to necrophilia as one of the participants has just had a telegram from the Queen. A more recent effort, Philip J. Cockburn's first person account of his amorous encounters in Necrophiliac (the title is a give-away) from Dark Voices #4 (Pan, 1992). This guy first finds himself attracted to dead women as the result of a grisly car accident: not sure about the psychology of all that, but anyhow.

C. M. Eddy's The Loved Dead is pretty notorious, on the basis that it's inclusion in Weird Tales apparently saw that issue removed from sale. The resultant publicity is said to have saved the magazine from going under, although I'm sure I read somewhere that this is apocryphal. It's certainly a tasteless treat of a story, even if some passages, and the implausible ending, are laugh out loud funny today.

The hero of Thomas F. Monteleone's The Pleasure of her company (Dark Voices #2) deserves a mention for persuading Marilyn Monroes flaking skull to, uh, service him. As mentioned many times elsewhere, Thomas Tessier's poignant, but ultimately horrible Addicted To Love from Shock Rock sees a lonely man driven to distraction by a girl who shuns everything in his (quite frankly, impeccable) record collection in favour of the despised Robert Palmer CD his mum bought him.

There's a vile undertaker in Robert Lory's The Hand of Dracula (NEL, 1973) you'd not wish to entrust your dear departed to.

A couple of borderline cases: I often wondered what would have happened in Guy de Maupassant's beautiful The Tomb if the defendant hadn't been apprehended so soon after exhuming his wife, as he certainly seemed to be oblivious to everything going on around him by this point.

Ray Bradbury's The Handler maybe misses the cut because his protagonist, a kindly old undertaker, doesn't have sex with anyone, but he fiddles about with his customers something rotten if they were nasty to him when they were alive.

A nasty pair from Jeff Gelb & Michael Garrett's Hotter Blood: More Tales Of Erotic Horror (Pocket Books, Jan 1991).

Gary Brander's To Have And To Hold: Harry Croft finds sex with his wife a far more satisfying pursuit since the kids were killed by an axe murderer, even if the constant interruptions by the police - investigating the death of Mrs. Croft - are an infernal nuisance ...

R. Patrick Gates - A Hard Man Is Good To Find: Lisa discovers that dead guys last longer when she shacks up for the weekend with a coke-addled construction worker. He has a stroke mid-session, but she's kinda preoccupied and doesn't notice at first.

Gates is brilliant - see his Heavy Metal in Shock Rock and there is a cameo appearance by a cockroach which should guarantee you bring up whatever it was you last ate (and no, I don't wish to know what that was, thanks all the same).

Rock music's done pretty well out of the subject, what with Alice Cooper's I Love The Dead and Jimmy Cross's I Want My Baby Back, also covered by the Downliner Sect. There's also a gem by the New York Rock Ensemble on the Zacharia soundtrack ("Open it up, I have to touch her once again ..." etc.), and the dramatic close of Van Der Graaf's misery fest Still Life is pretty damn graphic.

Thats as far as we got with the thread before but I'm happy to report there's a rather spectacular addition on its way just as soon as I get through the final 40 pages!

[benedictjjones]

^ i think clive barkers 'haekels tale' would fit in well with this!!

[dem]

Hello benedict, welcome to Vault.

Whatever that "spectacular addition" was had me all excited, I guess it wasn't all that amazing because I've forgotten what it was! Anyhow, thanks to Cal who's just put me onto Poppy Z. Brite's open-letter to a recently departed William Burroughs, R.I.P.: "We never met while you were alive, but you shaped my way of thinking about everything from drugs to jism to prose style to loving my enemies.... Tonight you are dead at 83, and I figure the least I can do is pen a fantasy about f**k**g your corpse ...."

Mighty big-hearted of her, I'm sure ....

[Calenture]

Benedict, hi. I think you'll like it here.

admin said:

Anyhow, thanks to Cal who's just put me onto Poppy Z. Brite's open-letter to a recently departed William Burroughs, R.I.P.: "We never met while you were alive, but you shaped my way of thinking about everything from drugs to jism to prose style to loving my enemies.... Tonight you are dead at 83, and I figure the least I can do is pen a fantasy about f**k**g your corpse ...."

Mighty big-hearted of her, I'm sure ....

Poppy is such a sweet girl, and I love her writing dearly. No one else writes about homosexual cannibal serial-killers with such tenderness and beauty.

Do you know how she got her name, by the way? Of course you do. I'll tell you anyway. Her nickname at school was Popacatapetal, and naturally her friends abbreviated it. Obvious really.

Poppy did write other necrophile slanted short fiction. Her best horror leaves you imagining you can smell the charnel house and feel the cold sliminess of corrupting flesh under your fingernails.

Xenophobia:This one’s fun; Poppy’s mischievous exploration of the schoolboy’s belief about the difference between oriental and occidental women. Two young Chinese Americans get off the bus at the wrong stop, and find themselves in the porn district of Chinatown. They don’t have enough money for girls, and Robert wonders if what he’s heard about Chinese women is true, that their c**ts open sideways. An elderly man in a restaurant offers to pay them $5 and “unlimited use of a bottle of good cognac”. The old man is an undertaker, and he wants someone to sit up with a middle-aged woman’s corpse while he slips out to drink with another undertaker. For anyone familiar with Brite’s fiction, the possibilities of two slightly addled young men, a woman’s corpse and a bottle of cognac, are endless. And that’s before they find the opium pipe and the dried mushrooms. Wicked stuff.

I did think I had another fiction title for you, The Remains of Reindeer by Monica Lee in Pan Horror 17. This one is all but necrophilia except in... fact.

You'll remember that it's about the very plain woman with the beautiful hands, who requests that on her death, her hands are amputated and placed on display.

In the many pages which follow, her brother goes into a spectacular breakdown, keeping his sister "alive" in the form of a home-made dummy - which he keeps in his bed - with the face from her portrait stitched to it... and the beautiful hands.

We also have Robert Tralins' Ghoul Lover, for which see Paperback Fanatic 5 (and if you don't have this one, you should)

I'm tempted to post the brilliant cover, which, by the way, is by Gray Morrow - not Eddie Jones, as I said on another thread. But I guess posting it a third time would be pushing it?

Anyway, this one is based on the true story of radiologist Carl Von Cosel who became obsessed with tubercolosis patient Maria Elena de Hoyos. Death did not separate these two. Read it here.

Oh, and another film Riccardo Freda's
L'Orribile segreto del dottor Hichcock (The Horrible Secret of Dr Hichcock / Raptus, 1962) or Terror Of Dr Hitchcock:

Gorgeously filmed, totally insane Gothic pastiche from Riccardo Freda holds its marvelously overwrought tone through to the fiery climax. At the center of it is Barbara Steele's Cynthia, the neurotic second wife of the eponymous Dr. Hichcock, who, from the second she arrives in her husband's creaky and apparently haunted mansion, is picturesquely threatened by the hostile maid, by a mysterious figure in white, purported to be the maid's sister, and by her own increasingly mad husband, who was already predisposed to pseudo-necrophilia, but who really starts to tip over the brink as he begins to believe his first wife has come back from the grave. It's all both lavish and ludicrous, and profits from Steele's incredible screen presence and the weight of its own images. Spectacular use of color, as well. Essential viewing.

I'm sure I have this on tape. When I saw it I found it a little slow, but at the time I suppose I was one of the "popcorn eaters" mentioned on this IMDb page which the above quote's been lifted from. I know Clive Barker rates it highly.

There's another page devoted to it here.

[Johnlprobert]

Gosh! I haven't thought about 'The Remains of Reindeer' since I first read it about 20 years ago. What a weird bloody story.

Filmwise there are of course quite a few reprehensible ones, but the one I'll mention here is the lyrical/arty/bonkers/mental/strange/incomprehensible Lisa & The Devil by Mario Bava, that got recut by its producer as 'House of Exorcism' with Elke Sommer throwing up a lot.

[dem]

More good news, skeleton snoggers and cadaver chasers! How could I have overlooked this classic of jolly Jamesian necrophilia from Richard Dalby's Vampire Stories (O'Mara, 1992)?

Ken Cowley - The Last Sin: "The signpost that had been planted to keep Lolly quiet shuddered in the ground and tipped at a crazy angle in his path."

Lolly, jilted by the insatiable rake Lord Ruthwen, slits her wrists and dies vowing that she will lie with him on the eve of his wedding. Ruthwen promptly forgets she ever existed and merrily goes about his usual debauched antics until, for the sake of his diminishing coffers, he proposes marriage to thirty-something virgin Catherine Beddowes who eagerly accepts. As good as her word, Lolly, surprises the master in his four poster; she's a bit fangy and her bones pretty much shrink-wrapped now but, other than that, still a looker by walking corpse standards. Far from expiring on the spot, his lordship is well up for it. "Wasn't it only yesterday that he had bemoaned the fact that he had completed the catalogue of sins? And now here he was, about to go to his bride with the stains of the ultimate skin clinging to his body." Talk about a result! Give her one from me, etc!

The hordes of the shagging dead in Edward Bryant's decidedly unflinching A Sad Last Love At The Diner Of The Damned don't make the mistake of opting for an eager victim. The beautiful waitress Martha Malinowski may have successfully repelled their lusty advances once, but Pastor Beecham and his swinging wife are just two of several who form a disorderly queue to claim a piece of her when, by rights, they should be quietly settled in a mortuary drawer some place. Carl Crump, son of the equally lecherous (and dead) High School Principal, goes them all one nastier in an astonishingly nihilistic finale. This from Skipp & Spector's first Book Of The Dead collection.

Not quite as spectacular, perhaps, but there's certainly a hint of necrophilia in Bernard Donoghoe - A Night With Claudette, (David Sutton & Stephen Jones, Dark Voices 4, Pan, 1992: As mentioned in the initial post, Philip J. Cockburn's self-explanatory Necrophiliac features in the same collection). A touching tale, this, of a lover who regularly reassembles the corpse of the unfaithful wife he hacked to pieces for relaxed heavy petting sessions.

[carolinec]

Apr 7, 2008 12:25:03 GMT dem said:

Ken Cowley - The Last Sin: "The signpost that had been planted to keep Lolly quiet shuddered in the ground and tipped at a crazy angle in his path."

I remember reading this in his BFS collection Miscellany Macabre. A good story - all the more shocking in that it doesn't go into graphic detail and leaves the reader to imagine the worst.

Judging by Miscellany Macabre, Cowley can write a tremendous variety of different story types. Yet I haven't found much of his work around. Anybody know more about him? Maybe we need a separate thread for that if anyone has got any more info on him.

[dem]

I've lost contact with him now, but I used to buy books from Mr. Cowley on a regular basis and he was a lovely bloke, quite the most scrupulously fair dealer it's ever been my pleasure to do business with.

As to Ken as author, I only know of one other horror short, Dracula Reflects, a minor masterpiece which Brian Frost has described as the most controversial vampire stories of the 'seventies. It first appeared in Dark Horizons #18 and, when I found a copy years later, I asked Ken if I could try and find a home for it among the vampire 'zines. Chad Savage duly picked it up for Necropolis #7 ( Feb 1992: see the 'Vampy Crew' thread in small press section) but, to the best of my knowledge, it's yet to be anthologised which is little short of criminal!

I think The Ultimate Sin (as it was first known) had already been accepted for publication by Ghosts & Scholars just in case Richard Dalby was insane enough to reject it!

Ken may have written more in the Vault of Sci-Fi field but The Last Sin and Dracula Reflects are the only two horrors I'm aware of. Anyone else?

[benedictjjones]

^meant to say H P Lovecrafts 'the loved dead' as well.

[nwdavies]

Don't forget Steve Gerlach in both the short Cell Candy and the brilliant novel Lake Mountain.

[doug]

Hey all!
My bed time reading for the past week or so has been "The Black Gondolier and other Stories" by Mr. Leiber.



So last night I read "Lie Still, Snow White" and this has to be one of the greatest "WTF!" stories from a MAJOR writer that I've ever read. I did a little checking and discovered that it was originaly published back in 1964 in "Taboo: Seven Short Stories which No Publisher Would Touch from Seven Leading Writers"!



"Snow White" has to be the "best" Necrophilia story that I've ever had the "pleasure" to read! To be honest though, the only other ones that come to mind are Eddy's "Beloved Dead" and possibly Faulkner's "A Rose for Emily".
The story is so audaciously in your face that I had to laugh out loud. It goes so far that it almost slides into Richard Laymon territory.
Respect Mr. Leiber! Respect!

Is anyone elso familiar with this story?
And has anyone actualy ever seen/read the original anthology?

Take care.
Doug

UPDATE!!

Here's the complet contents to "Taboo"

Contents:
Second coming / Robert Bloch --
The neighbors / Charles Beaumont --
The daddy of them all / Nelson Algren --
Battle without banners / Harlan Ellison --
Take a deep breath / Ray Russell --
Lie still, Snow White / Fritz Leiber --
The lovers / Paul Neimark

[dem]

Thanks to The Sleazy Reader, am now aware of two relevant Ed Wood jnr. titles to seek out the next time I've a King's ransom to spare.

[dem]

Scared Stiff is among my all-time favourite single author collections, so stands to reason I'd overlook Ramsey Campbell's seriously unsettling Loveman's Comeback - necrophilia from the victim's POV.

[bobby]

    I've read "The Secret of Elena's Tomb", and I don't think there's any necrophilia in it. (But it does qualify for the "Body-snatchers & Grave Robbers" thread.)

[dem]

Sept 30, 2015 1:28:58 GMT bobby said:

    I've read "The Secret of Elena's Tomb", and I don't think there's any necrophilia in it. (But it does qualify for the "Body-snatchers & Grave Robbers" thread.)

Can't disagree it would be right at home on the BS&GR thread, but, while he doesn't come right out and say "and then I had sex with her delicious young corpse," still there's more than a whiff of necrophilia about the Count's turgid auto-hagiography. Even his account of their lovemaking while Elena was still alive is creepy.