Familiar Spirit

INTRODUCTION

“The image of the house resurfaced in her mind, and with it a pang of longing. She wanted to live there. The house might have been made especially for her.”

I don’t know about you, but that third sentence really strikes an uneasy chord in my heart of horror. Every character who has ever bought—or even just rented, as the case may be—a house in a horror novel has probably had a similar thought and pang. But as everyone from Burnt Offerings’ Marian Rolfe to Pet Sematary’s Louis Creed could tell you, it is not true, those feelings will undo you, and moving into and living in such a house that causes you to think that way is not a wise decision.

But you, fellow horror fiction fan, with this book in hand, have made a wise decision, by patronizing the esteemed publisher Valancourt Books and purchasing their Paperbacks from Hell series reprint of Lisa Tuttle’s first novel, Familiar Spirit. (I hope you have added her stellar short story collection A Nest of Nightmares to your library as well, also available from Valancourt).

It is our protagonist Sarah who has those innocent-­sounding thoughts. She’s just been dumped by her boyfriend for another woman, after putting off his suggestions of marriage and domestication. Heartbroken, Sarah’s been living with fellow grad student friends, a married couple, in a cozy bohemian-lite setup. Now she is ready to move out on her own, into an unkempt, weathered green frame house on a corner lot in a quiet part of an Austin neighborhood (based on a real house Tuttle lived in with the late poet and short story writer Steve Utley; it was demolished not long after).

Details of the cultured Austin class that these grad students belong to pepper Familiar Spirit: visits to the Drag, a hangout strip near the University of Texas, listening to the Popol Voh score from Herzog’s Heart of Glass, reading Flannery O’Connor, studying Faulkner, musing on Southern Gothic literature—is there anything new to say?—and all are welcome. Readers get a sense of lives being lived, of the author having experienced this world, not just setting words down on the page on a whim. Tuttle dedicated the novel to friends Bill and Sally Wallace, part of her Austin circle, with whom she enjoyed Arkham House books, “Tales from the Crypt” comics, expeditions to supposedly haunted locales, small ghost story writers’ groups, and giant Halloween parties. Many years later, when Tuttle first saw a copy of Paperbacks from Hell, it would be on the Wallaces’ coffee table.

Tuttle says that in 1979 she “made a few false starts on a novel I called The Ghostwriters.” She saw it as a sort of roman à clef based on one of her favorite books, Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House. “It would be set in Austin, where I lived, and the characters would all be twenty-somethings loosely based on myself and my group of friends . . . young people who were writers, musicians, artists, journalists, grad students, etc., with an interest in ghosts, the occult and psychic phenomena . . . Now that I think about it, I wish I could have written it.”

While that book was never to be, a germ of it resides in Familiar Spirit. As for the actual origins of the novel, Tuttle states that “it began as a very long short story that I tried to sell to Charles L. Grant.” Grant, who died in 2006, was a quiet giant in horror fiction, an author and editor whose ten-volume anthology series Shadows (1978-1991) has long been considered a high point of the genre’s heyday. Encouraged by Grant to turn “The Familiar Spirit” into a full-length novel, Tuttle says she “went on past the ending of the original story [and] my ideas about it changed . . . dropping the idea of writing about my own thinly-disguised friends, lovers, and ex-lovers freed me up.”

First published by Berkley Books as an unassuming paperback original in February 1983 bearing the tagline “A novel of love and terror,” Familiar Spirit was one of many titles from that publisher who had had enormous success with science fiction. They began adding horror titles around 1980, with a lineup that included bestselling big guns Dean R. Koontz, Peter Straub, F. Paul Wilson, and eventually the first American publications of Clive Barker’s Books of Blood. Tuttle recalls her book “was rejected by seven or eight publishers—most of them saying they did not think it was ‘strong enough . . . to stand out against all the other occult/haunted house type novels.’ ”

But one Berkley editor, Victoria Shocket, did like it, and after a few happy revisions, Spirit reached the bookshelves. Two months later, it was published in the U.K. by New English Library, her publisher for the science fiction novel she’d written with George R.R. Martin, 1981’s Windhaven. That edition of Spirit boasted a lovely cover by noted British artist Steve Crisp—and its own apt tagline: “Her mind, then her body, were being invaded, perverted, destroyed.”

April 1989 saw Spirit reprinted by Tor Books, after Tor published Tuttle’s second novel, 1987’s Gabriel, which editor Melissa Singer had acquired. Tuttle’s tireless agent Howard Morhaim tried to interest Singer in A Nest of Nightmares, but Singer wanted a horror novel. Morhaim made a wise decision of his own, sending Singer the now out-of-print Berkley edition of Spirit, which the editor was “wildly enthusiastic” about. Although Morhaim secured Tuttle a two-book deal with Tor for both Spirit and Nest, only the former was published; the end of the horror boom was nigh, and Tor cut back their horror output. “I got to keep the advance,” Tuttle notes.

Tor, founded in 1980 by former bookseller Tom Doherty, is one of the most prominent science fiction and fantasy publishers in the world. In the Eighties and Nineties, Tor put out plenty of horror, its distinctive spine icon of a rock-faced monster—designed by Carol Russo and actually used as cover art for Scare Tactics, the 1988 collection of short stories by John Farris—instantly recognizable to serious fans of the genre. No doubt you know the authors: the aforementioned Grant, Robert Bloch, Ramsey Campbell, Elizabeth Engstrom, Graham Masterton, Kathryn Ptacek, T. M. Wright, and dozens more. Tuttle fit right into this august cadre.

This cover is a good example of the era’s style, with the title in vibrant green and orange, with a huge hand and a dancing jade-like figure showing off her feminine wiles, illustrative of events in the novel. Artist Lee MacLeod painted distinctive work not only for Tor but also Pinnacle, Pocket, and Avon Books (do look up his cover for the 1989 Western horror anthology Razored Saddles!). The Tor tagline, “Even a broken heart has a heart’s desire,” gets right at the very essence of the tale within . . .

Familiar Spirit is a story about heartache, desire, and plain old horniness, topics which so many horror writers were eager to write about but, let’s be honest, which so few were equipped to. Tuttle eschews the intensity of many Eighties horror novels in favor of the restrained and the intimate. Just as in many of her chilling short stories, Tuttle uses quiet, unassuming prose to navigate her protagonist’s interior life, revealing turmoil beneath placid waters. Sarah has hardly settled into her new home before the odd and the uncanny begin, and then one night, a ghostly voice from the darkness: “I can give you whatever you want, whatever you most desire. Your lover. I can tell you how to win him back . . .”

Sarah is determined not to be frightened out of the house (the rent’s so cheap!), and we see that her sexual longing is a perfect entry point for the supernatural to creep in. Doing her requisite research about the house’s history, Sarah comes into possession of the owner’s diary from decades before. For one long chapter, Tuttle switches over to these diary entries, one of the most fascinating parts of the novel: “I was flesh, I was alive, and the pleasure I felt beneath his hands frightened me. I felt his breath on my face, and then his tongue in my mouth, flickering like a snake’s. But the venom was so sweet . . .”

Tuttle’s approach is more mature than the usual glut of juvenile, generic horror, and therefore more convincing: as Spirit progresses, Sarah’s sexual appetite comes to the fore. Tuttle does not shy away from almost uncomfortably graphic sex scenes, which add an earthy depth and believability to the proceedings. These elements of ecstasy, violence, and even humiliation are not simply tacked on as exploitative cheap thrills. No, these elements need to be here, they are motivation; they power the engine of occult doings that upends Sarah’s life and sanity, illuminating the characters we’re reading about, right up to the delicious final line.

“Nothing waited for her there,” Tuttle writes, as Sarah returns to the house she’s run from after a particularly nasty encounter there with an enraged feline. “No cat with glowing eyes, no evil, supernatural rat, no diabolical spirit. Because such things didn’t exist.” Oh, Sarah. You’ve spent too much time reading Flannery O’Connor and William Faulkner, and not nearly enough reading Eighties horror paperbacks, where those things—and worse—not only exist, but thrive, and will not be denied.

Will Errickson

July 2020

Will Errickson is a lifelong horror enthusiast and author of the Too Much Horror Fiction blog, where he rediscovers forgotten titles and writers and celebrates the genre’s resplendent cover art. With Grady Hendrix in 2017, he co-wrote the Bram Stoker Award-­winning Paperbacks from Hell, which featured many books from his personal collection. Today Will resides in Portland, Oregon, with his wife Ashley and his ever-growing library of vintage horror paperbacks.