The Groovy Age of Horror – Curt Purcell Interview

Curt Purcell owns and operates one of the coolest horror-related blogs on the Internet, The Groovy Age of Horror, which is devoted to (among many other things) horror books from the 1960s and 1970s. He was kind enough to answer a few questions for us.

1. Can you give our readers a rough estimate of how many paperbacks you own?

About 500 of the vintage collectible variety I’ve tended to cover on Groovy Age.  Beyond that, I’m afraid I couldn’t even hazard a rough estimate.

2. What’s the first paperback book you remember owning?

When I was in elementary school, every once in a while they’d pass out these book order pamphlets.  I always used to go crazy over those things, and always ordered something.  The first of those I ever laid eyes on offered The Pumpkin Smasher by Anita Benarde, and I had to have it.  There were others before it, of course, and it’s not the mass-market kind you’re probably asking about, but it’s the earliest “paperback” that stands out so vividly in my memory. I’ve always loved books.  I only became interested in collecting vintage horror paperbacks around the time I started the blog, and I’ve since lost interest in them, because mostly they weren’t very good to read.  But I still love books!

3. If I were going to start collecting paperback books, what advice would you give?

As with anything else, getting the books you want is basically a matter of figuring out where to look and being persistent.  The same is true of discovering new books for your “get list”–find the blogs and sites that cover the sort of thing that interests you, and check them regularly for ideas and recommendations.  Figure out who knows what they’re talking about, and correspond with them.  Developing your own taste, approach, and network is half the fun, so enjoy it.  I wouldn’t recommend getting too hung up on the “collecting.”

4. In your experience as a vintage paperback reader, is there any author who stands out as someone who never got the recognition they deserved?

A lot of stuff was written under pseudonym or house name back in the ’60s–and I mean it got to be a real spaghetti bowl in some cases.  Any author could have written under God only knows how many names shared with God only knows how many other authors writing under God only knows how many other names, etc.  In the sleaze industry, this kind of obfuscation was rampant and deliberate, partly to evade the very real threat of prosecution for obscenity.  A lot of this pseudonymous material is exactly the kind of hackwork you’d expect, but inevitably there are gems among the dross, and it’s a shame that it’s almost impossible to say with any certainty who wrote some of it.  Press Editorial Services is another notorious example.  Their records were supposedly such a Gordian knot that rather than make any attempt to unsnarl them, W. Howard Baker’s son simply chucked them in the fire.  So there’s a significant amount of really decent and even very good material where attribution is uncertain, and accurate records are unavailable to substantiate it.  Somebody‘s not getting recognized for that stuff.

5. What’s the best paperback book you’ve ever read?

Ever?–haha, I couldn’t even begin to answer that!  As far as meeting my groovy horror hopes and expectations, though, I’d say the series novels tended to be much better than the standalones–Kitty Telefair, Guardians, Mind Masters, and Lucifer Cove are among my favorites I’ve reviewed for the blog, in keeping with its original concept.

6. Any tips for those trying to track down hard-to-find books online?

In my experience, the number of books that are truly “hard-to-find” online is vanishingly small (unless you’re talking about books as artifacts–uniquely inscribed copies, numbered editions, etc.).  With very few exceptions, I can find almost anything I want online as easily as anyone else could, and the chief obstacle to acquiring it then is the price tag, which can indeed be prohibitive for some items.  Basically, though, if I’ve had no luck with any of my usual sources (in no particular order: abe, ebay, amazon, biblio, alibris, bookfinder, maybe one or two others but nothing particularly obscure), and a last-ditch google doesn’t turn anything up either, I’m stumped, and just have to keep checking every so often until someone, somewhere, lists what I’m looking for.

7. Do you have an all-time favorite paperback book cover?

Gray Morrow’s cover for Ghoul Lover is a gorgeous sentimental favorite.  I used it as the picture in the Groovy Age masthead way back before David Zuzelo (of Tomb It May Concern) designed the awesome logo I’ve been using for some years now.

8. You’ve stated before that authors and their families have contacted you due to your reviews.  Is this usually positive, or has an author ever taken exception to your review?

With families, it’s been uniformly positive.  John McNeilly deserves special mention here, for being so helpful and generous in answering my questions about his father Wilfred for an article I wrote for Justin Marriott’s outstanding magazine Paperback Fanatic.  Fortunately, nobody’s e-mailed yet to complain that I’ve besmirched the memory of a departed loved one.

I’m actually sort of reluctant to post a negative review if it could do any measurable harm to someone’s livelihood, for example if they’re a new author or independent comics creator.  I just don’t see any point in warning my readers away from something they’d probably never even find unless they were specifically looking for something like it.  And if they’re looking for something like that, you know, tastes differ; chances are they could like it more than I did, so why should I prejudice them against it?  If someone sends me a review copy and I can’t honestly post a review that’s more positive than negative, I usually just decline to review it at all and refer them to another blogger who I think might like it better.  Sometimes that blogger does like it better and posts a much more positive review than I would have, and for my part, I’m happy a fellow blogger got something enjoyable to read and a creator found an appreciative audience–we should all be so lucky!

The one time I really did rip into a recent independent comic was in my review of Black Diamond.  If it were merely an issue of quality, I wouldn’t have, but quality had nothing to do with it.  I had a vehement philosophical disagreement with a number of narrative choices and the aesthetic outlook behind them, and said so.  Naturally, that got back to writer Larry Young, who nicely contacted me to see what he could do to improve my experience as a customer.  That seemed to me like a great opportunity to give him a fair hearing and hash out our differences, and we had a very candid and lively exchange that I was happy to be able to post as a follow-up.  We didn’t reach much of any agreement, but I think we achieved some mutual understanding, and I came away from it with something positive, and certainly hope he did too.

9. Tell us about your novel, Night Falls on a Fairy Tale.

It’s me giving myself everything I want in gothic monster horror, all in one neat package.  My point of departure is groovy-vintage Eurohorror movies, and what I love about them is the way they combine a sense of the fantastic, rich in childlike fears and wonder, with very adult elements of sex, violence, and supernatural horror.  That’s something those movies have in common, to some extent, with fairy tales, so I’ve set it in a fairy tale world to intensify both tendencies beyond anything I’ve seen in any movie or anywhere else. Within that milieu, I condense everything I love with everything I’ve wished for but never quite gotten, to form my own personal ideal.  So, for example, Katia, my vampire heroine, combines Lina Romay’s “costume” from Jess Franco’s Female Vampire with the otherworldly blue-tinged pallor of the vampire women from Naschy’s Werewolf Shadow with the erotic bloodletting savagery of Larraz’s Vamypres with the wicked talons of Rollin’s Living Dead Girl, etc.   She encounters a Frankenstein-type monster, torch-wielding villagers, a bat monster, a vengeful specter, a reanimated graveyard, a fearless vampire killer, evil necromancers, a werewolf, the devil himself, etc.; essentially, she goes through every horrific battle and wild sexual encounter I’ve ever thought it would be cool to see a character like that go through.  It’s all monsters, all the time, cranked up to 11. The trick, of course, is to encompass all that in a strong story with strong characters who are both sympathetic and scary. Because it’s so personal and I’m so concerned to get it right for myself, it’s taking much longer than I’d like, but I can’t rush it, and I’m always happy when I finally post each new chapter–which doesn’t mean I don’t find room for improvement later . . .

10. I noticed you’re a member of the League of Tana Tea Drinkers, a blogging community dedicated to keeping horror and sci-horror alive.  Are there any LOTTD blogs which you’re especially partial to?

Sean T. Collins’s Attentiondeficitdisorderly Too Flat and CRwM’s And Now the Screaming Starts reliably post on topics that interest me, and they’re always up for a smart, interesting discussion/debate if I post a response.  At Love Train for the Tenebrous Empire, I get a kick out of Kate’s forays into the kinds of Eurohorror movies I mention above.

11. How would you compare horror of the ’60s and ’70s to modern horror, both in literature and film?

In literature, let’s bracket out the bestsellers of both periods, which don’t interest me much at all.  As far as what’s going on down in the trenches, the horror I’m reading today has a lot more vision and energy than what I’ve read from the groovy age.  The impression I got from a lot of those vintage horror paperbacks was that they were hacked out by people who had no interest in horror and no idea what to do with it beyond halfhearted cliches and camping it up.  The more current horror authors I’m enjoying seem much more engaged with the genre and much more interested in exploring its possibilities; they truly “get” horror and know what it means to deliver on its promises. With film, my feelings are pretty much the opposite.  The horror movies of the groovy age are what attracted me to it in the first place.  Even with the low production values that plague so many of them, and even at their most conventional and derivative, there’s usually a spark of life and joy animating them on some level.  Today’s horror movies rarely tempt me to even have a look at them.  If it’s not another retread of a movie I couldn’t care less about in the first place, it probably promises a non-supernatural kind of horror that doesn’t appeal to me in the least.  I actually enjoyed the Underworld movies, especially Evolution, but if I had to choose between them and Naschy’s monster mashes, I wouldn’t have to think about it even for an instant.

12. Any favorite horror actors or actresses?