Drums of the Dark Gods by W. A. Ballinger

He did not know that now the girl was in a trance and that all the massive powers that lurked unknown even to herself in the subconscious reaches of her mind could now be tapped by Quintain.

The power of the virgin...But could it match the powers of the Lord of the Graveyards? 

As I have often told followers of my anemic twitter account, the Beaver Creek Antiques Mall and Antiques Crossroads on Route 40 in Hagerstown, MD, are great sources of vintage SF items and the fan of 20th-century SF and comics can find many bargains there.  Today we look at one such bargain, a paperback copy of W. A. Ballinger's "Black Magic Novel of Terror," Drums of the Dark Gods, for which I paid a dollar in December.  I bought this British 1972 printing of the 1966 novel largely because I liked the cover, the way it uses light and shadow, but was also curious enough about its contents to think I might actually read it, and this weekend I satisfied that curiosity.

W. A. Ballinger is, I find, a pen name of Irish journalist and editor W. Howard Baker, a prolific pseudonymous writer of genre literature.  According to isfdb and the Spy Guys and Gals website, Drums of the Dark Gods is the eighth volume in the Richard Quintain series; Quintain, it seems, is a British intelligence agent active during and after World War II, who, in some of the sixteen books in the series, is working as a private investigator specializing in uncovering insurance fraud--when we meet him here in Drums of the Dark Gods that is exactly what he is up to, but he quickly puts his insurance work on hold to take up a secret mission for Her Majesty's government. 

The first chapter of Drums of the Dark Gods takes place in Haiti, on a moonlit night, when an "octoroon girl" lies bound on a hill top by a cave entrance and the drums of the voodoo priests summon the populace!  The villagers, barefoot because they can't afford shoes, dressed in "rag-poor clothes," march up the hill, chewing narcotic leaves as they go; they are in a drugged stupor by the time they reach the top of the hill, where they participate in the gang rape and dismemberment of the helpless young woman, a monstrous ceremony led by a tall man disguised as a skeleton and clad in an old top hat and a moldy "long-tailed claw-hammer coat."  Drums of the Dark Gods is an exploitation novel that appeals not only to our fascination with twisted violent sex and sickening gory murder, but white people's fear of, and pity for, impoverished black people, whose ignorance and addiction to drugs leave them easy prey for charlatans, criminals and corrupt politicians.

In the next two chapters we meet a police detective in London, and Quintain and his secretary, Julie Wellsley.  That octoroon girl was British cop Marie Sainte and she was in Haiti investigating the source of a new super-addictive drug, goba, that is hooking the youth of the sceptred isle.  The British police can't send a team down to Haiti to investigate her murder because of "red tape," but they can spend any amount of money to hire Quintain to do so, and Quintain is just the man for the job, because 1) he is an expert on voodoo and has fought the evil of Africa-derived sorcery before and 2) his secretary Julie has psychic powers, powers which she possesses because she is a virgin!  Powers of which Julie has no conscious knowledge--to benefit from her mental abilities, Quintain has to hypnotize her!

In Haiti these two do detective fiction stuff.  Under the cover story that they are promoters looking to bring Haitian musical acts back to Europe, they hunt for clues, talk to people, find dead bodies and are suspected by the cops of being responsible for those deaths.  Quintain and Julie are never sure whether or not the people they meet are working for the voodoo cult, and to what extent people recognize the true purpose of their mission to Haiti.  At the same time Ballinger gives us this detective material, he offers us supernatural material.  For example, the forces of evil repeatedly try to take over Julie's mind and body, speaking through her at one point, and at another working her body like a puppet and almost getting her to step off a balcony to her death.  Luckily, Quintain has brought to Haiti not only the special pistol and holster he designed himself, but some amulets from the Far East that protect them from the worst of the black magic of the voodoo cult.  

By the middle of the book Quintain and Julie have joined forces with a local journalist who was educated in Europe; this scribbler fell in love with Marie Sainte and doesn't know she is dead.  The three investigators find a cottage in the countryside where they meet some of the leaders of the voodoo cult, a tall skinny guy and a grossly obese woman.  These diabolists try to hypnotize the journalist into eating parts of Marie Sainte, but Julie's psychic powers are a match for the voodoo couple and our heroes escape into the jungle, where they elude the relentless pursuit of a work party of zombies.

Back in the city, Quintain is captured by the Ton Ton Macoute, which Quintain compares to the Gestapo and the OGPU.  The English detective witnesses other captives being stripped, raped, castrated, and murdered, but before he is subjected to any of these fates himself, an honest Haitian police inspector comes by to spring him from the grip of the TTM.  

This whole Ton Ton Macoute episode feels like it was inserted into the story after the author had finished his first draft and slotted it in simply to increase the page count and supply more disgusting violative sex and gruesome torture.  The Ton Ton Macoute don't seem to have anything to do with the voodoo and drugs schemes, and this interlude in the torture cellar has no effect on the plot, ludicrously so--Quintain is beaten up with batons "until his whole body ached under the bruising" but an hour later he is climbing a building to get in a window, and the Ton Ton Macoute frisk him "intimately and expertly" but don't find his pistol and its fancy holster, which he will need in the final showdown.    

Quintain goes straight from the TTM torture cellar to the HQ of the goba manufacturers for that fina showdown.  He climbs in an upper story window to find the freshly murdered dead body of that journalist.  The body rises up as a zombie, and Quintain follows it to the mastermind behind the voodoo cult and the drug enterprise, a dwarfish man with all kinds of horrible birth defects, like phocomelia, which Ballinger calls "phocism."  The supervillain explains his origin story and why he invented the drug goba.  Ballinger is perhaps performing a little sly recursive meta-criticism on his own career when he has the physically disabled but super-intelligent criminal talk about how as a child he was sold to the circus and put on display: "I drew very good crowds, for there is nothing humanity prefers to being disgusted."

Julie is dragged in so the little freak can rape her, but before he can accomplish this dastardly deed the zombified journalist, who still retains a slight memory of what the voodoo cult did to his beloved Marie Sainte, interferes on Quintain and Julie's behalf, and Julie, in a trance, uses her psychic powers to overthrow the villain.  Then Quintain burns down the entire drug manufacturing facility, the zombies  along with it.     

Obviously, this book uses words you aren't supposed to use anymore (like "octoroon" and "Chingro") and has themes you are supposed to anathematize nowadays (like "the white savior" and the value of female virginity) and I am assuming 90% of everything it tells you about the religion, people and history of Haiti is just made up.  The writing style is mediocre, and the novel gets a lot of its oomph from depicting women being abused or confined or dominated (besides all the stuff the villains do to women, Quintain has to smack Julie in the face to get her to snap out of a bout of psychic possession and he has to hold her and cover her mouth when she sees a zombie so she won't panic and scream and run--and of course her powers, which save her herself and her friends from voodoo death and save the world from drug addiction, only operate when she is in a trance and under Quintain's control.)  But the pace is brisk and all the crazy stuff that happens is entertaining; I can't deny that I found Drums of the Dark Gods kind of fun.  Lots of what happened left me incredulous, but I was never bored or irritated.  I'm judging Drums of the Dark Gods on the high end of acceptable, maybe even worthy of a mild recommendation if you are into this kind of thing.  And I guess people like it, as it has been reprinted numerous times in multiple languages.