The Horror! The Horror! Men's Adventure Meets Horror

The following column was originally printed in Justin Marriott's Paperback Fanatic 46, which was published in January of 2023. You can buy a copy of it here.

The Horror! The Horror! Men's Adventure Meets Horror

I've always been a sucker for a good genre mashup. Give me some sci-fi in my spy thrillers, or a serving of steampunk in my crime noir, or throw some heist elements into my sword and sorcery, and definitely mix some Kung Fu into my westerns. When done well, a new kind of genre is created as a result of the mashup. The 70s and 80s saw the proliferation of the men’s adventure novels overtake the paperback marketplace as every major (and minor) publisher tried to capitalize on the popularity of The Executioner, The Destroyer, The Penetrator, and all their various imitators. Soon we had imitations of the imitations, ad infinitum. So, a new angle was sought and for a handful of authors, the solution was to mix a healthy dose of horror into the manly mayhem.

While there had been examples of attempts to merge horror with various male-oriented fiction previously with the occult detective adventures of William Hope Hodgson's Carnacki series, Dennis Wheatley’s Duke de Richleau series, Seabury Quinn’s Jules De Grandin series, and even Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes adventure, The Hound of the Baskervilles, there was nothing that tapped the zeitgeist of the men’s adventure market with equal feet in both genres until the 1970s.

The Satan Sleuth by Michael Avallone

I was twelve in 1974 when I bought The Satan Sleuth #1: Fallen Angel by Michael Avallone, a name I was familiar with even at that age thanks to the many movie and TV tie-in paperbacks I was already reading. I read Fallen Angel in a mad rush, my pre-teen mind unprepared for its heady mix of Satanism, ritual murder, sex, action, and gory horror. 

Clearly inspired by the Manson family murders, the first book introduces us to Philip St. George, a playboy adventurer whose actress wife is sacrificially raped and butchered by devil worshipers. St. George’s response is to channel his wrath, using his wealth and his natural athleticism to essentially become an ant-Satanist Batman eradicating occult evil in any form, including a potential werewolf in volume 2: The Werewolf Walks Tonight, though St. George was back after Satanists again for volume 3: Devil, Devil. While 5 volumes were written, only 3 actually saw print. 

Looked at through the lens of modern culture, these books are horribly and somewhat shockingly dated in their views of women and homosexuality. But they certainly are filled to overflowing with action and bloody horror.

The Tomb by F. Paul Wilson 

Jumping forward a few years men’s adventure fans were treated to the debut of F. Paul Wilson’s classic antihero, Repairman Jack, in the novel The Tomb in 1984. Jack is a Manhattan-based fixer, not of appliances, but of situations. He lives completely off the grid, interacting with only a handful of trusted friends who provide critical resources, and helping people in bad situations resolve their problems in decidedly violent ways. 

In The Tomb Jack is tasked with helping an old East Indian woman retrieve an ancient necklace that has been stolen. The problem is, the necklace is cursed and things soon begin to go decidedly downhill as Jack is now being pursued by a rakosh, an ancient man-eating Hindu demon. What follows is a fast-paced adventure novel with a sardonic protagonist who has a nasty streak a mile wide and an arsenal of weapons to unload. There is a protracted confrontation on a container ship with battle against many rakoshi that is a real standout. 

This is good stuff—well written, excellent pacing, and a perfect blend of action and horror. Need another commendation? Stephen King is the president of the Repairman Jack Fan Club! To date, Repairman Jack has been featured in 16 novels, several short stories, a prequel series and a YA series.

Nightblood by T. Chris Martindale

Perhaps the most perfect blend I have personally experienced of mixing men’s adventure with horror comes via a paperback that was published in 1990. Nightblood by T. Chris Martindale could easily have utilized the tagline “What if Mack Bolan fought vampires?” 

This book is an absolute corker! In a perfect world, this book should have sold a ton and launched a series. It has an outstanding setup—Chris Stiles, a PTSD-addled Vietnam veteran with a whole host of special forces skills is regularly visited by the ghost of his brother, Alex, who was killed by some unknown monster in Central Park. 
Now Alex directs Chris to areas where evil is on the rise. In Nightblood, that area is Isherwood, a small town where a century-old vampire has been released and is amassing an army of the undead. The vampires are effectively rendered and genuinely scary and once the book hits its stride, the action is plentiful and intense.

Martindale does a good job of establishing the rules of his vampire world-building and then has a whole lot of fun within that world. By the time our protagonist is in a large senior citizen facility under siege by legions of vampires and resorts to a samurai sword after exhausting his  ammunition, I think you’ll be giggling in glee along with it all like I did. I recently re-read this book after a 30-year gap and was surprised to find it still packs a punch with smooth prose, great pacing, and stand-out action scenes. Highly recommended!

Other Notables

William W. Johnstone was his own private cottage industry in the 1980s, churning out multiple titles with variations on a single theme—Satan has come to Smalltown USA in some malevolent form and it’s up to a retired super soldier in his 40s to strap on his guns and become God’s holy warrior. They are all full of copious violence, lots of sex, and long on perversion.

Robert Walker, writing initially as Geoffrey Caine, authored a series of books focusing on Abraham Stroud, an occult detective with psychic powers. He’s also a Vietnam-vet, an archaeologist, an ex-cop, and a millionaire who goes up against vampires, werewolves, wendigos, and even Etruscan zombies. Stroud has a flair for the over the top dramatics and at times seems more like a globe-trotting spy. Although only the first 3 books were initially published in paperback there are a total of 10 books now available in ebook format collectively known as the Bloodscream series.

I’m sure there are other series and standalone books that incorporated elements of men’s adventure with horror that I have yet to discover. Sadly, when the men’s adventure series bubble burst in the early 90s, it did so simultaneously with the paperback horror boom that had blossomed so fruitfully in the 80s. The crossover between the two genres was an understandable casualty of that collapse. Yet for a short while two of my favorite types of books locked arms and did battle in the consumer marketplace for readers’ attention and dollars. And we were all the better for it!

Written by Steve Carroll