In this state, the necromancer could do whatever it chose. It could manipulate the island's forces to its own ends. It could tap into the vast psychic buildup which was even now surrounding all of them.
It could kill.
William Schoell has his own entry in Grady Hendrix and Will Errikson's
Paperbacks from Hell, so I feel that Schoell's 1986 novel
Late at Night qualifies as one of the famed Ps from H. As followers of my account at the social media platform formerly known as Twitter--the world's most dangerous app!--may recall,
I recently purchased for one single solitary dollar a copy of
Late at Night at an antiques mall in Hagerstown, Maryland, a 1986 copy complete with embossed drops of blood on its cover and an ad for other
"blood-chillers from Leisure Books" on its final page. Our friends Grady and Will describe Schoell's six novels for Leisure Books as "C-grade," which doesn't sound good, but
Late at Night appears to be popular--it has been reprinted multiple times in our present 21st century (to which "C-grade" might also be applicable) and copies of the 1986 printing as well as the recent editions are not cheap on ebay. Well, let's crack open my little blood-encrusted bargain and see what
Late at Night is all about.
Late at Night has an introduction that details the geography and history of Lammerty Island, which lies off the coast of Maine; this intro, somewhat jocular in tone ("Lammerty Island had it all!...many people would like to go to Lammerty Island....God help them when they get there!") is mostly a catalog of pirates, Indians, colonists, gangsters and feuding families killing each other in the good ol' days and residents in more recent days committing suicide. Today the island is deserted, but students of the occult believe its history of bloodshed has left it awash in psychic energy and worthy of exploration.
After the Introduction we've got a Prologue. In a Boston restaurant a guy dumps his girlfriend because she is weird; he can't get over how much time she spends on her hobby--the occult--and her belief she has arcane powers. Back in her apartment she decides to distract herself from her sadness by casting the most dangerous spell she has ever attempted! As far as we readers can tell, she summons a dimly seen figure and an object which she seizes before it disappears. The text is intentionally opaque--we don't learn the woman's name nor the specific purpose of the spell, and both the figure and the object are described in only the vaguest of terms.
Then come our 55 numbered chapters, followed by an Epilogue. (My copy of Late at Night has like 360 pages of text, but the print is big so it is not terribly long.) The book as a whole is divided into six Parts, "Arrival," "Reverberations," "Morning," "Afternoon," "Night" and "Late at Night."
Part One: Arrival
Young Lynn Overman has inherited Lammerty Island and all the property on it. Schoell's clumsily written novel is full of contradictions--in the Introduction we are told people want to visit the island because of or in spite of its reputation as a center of psychic energy, but then in the very first chapter Lynn is told that nobody wants to buy it so it is valueless. Not for the last time readers have to say "whatever" and just read on.
Lynn is dating her wealthy lawyer, middle-aged John Evergreen and the two of them decide to spend a weekend on the island checking it out, and they bring with then a dozen of their colleagues and friends, so we end up with a cast of fourteen suspects/victims. We've got the lawyer's domestic staff: Eric the chauffer, Hans the handyman, Mrs. Plushing the cook, and two slim attractive servant girls. And we've got the middle-class goofballs and their hangers-on: Lynn's aunt Gloria, a fat middle-aged gossip columnist and her young boyfriend, failed actor Jerry; John's cousin magazine writer Ernie; Lynn's best friend, the shy and overweight Betty, and her college friends, Andrea the psychic and Cynthia the soap opera star; and Lynn's former boyfriend, Anton the Rumanian concert pianist. We have to hear about everybody's looks and personality; I guess trying to be funny, Schoell gives the characters silly personalities and reminds us again and again how fat the fat women are (one has "fingers thick as sausages" and "chunky arms and legs" and we witness another squeezing into tight clothes in front of a mirror) and how ugly the pianist is. The characters all make lame obvious jokes. More significantly, Schoell gives us reason to suspect that any of several of the educated young women could be the woman from the Prologue.
There is a lot of fat in Parts One and Two, before the real bloodshed begins. Schoell describes the rooms and furniture of the guest house in which they are staying, and who is assigned what room by John the lawyer and where each is in geographical relation to the others. None of this figures in the plot. Schoell does little to make the island or guest house seem scary besides having the characters think cliched things like "This place gives me the creeps" until the seventh chapter when one of the pretty young servant girls hallucinates blood in a bathroom and has a kind of mental breakdown and runs around the house naked. For some reason Schoell puts distance between this event and the reader--instead of witnessing it from the point of view of the servant girl herself or someone watching the girl, we hear about the episode in dialogue, that of Mrs. P the cook as she tells the other characters about it. After dinner and drinks, quotidian events which Schoell describes in boring detail (who is sitting where, why the main course is late, blah blah blah) Ernie the writer and Andrea the psychic go outside to look for the remains of a shipwreck reputed to be nearby.
Part Two: Reverberations
More unnecessary descriptions of people's faces, more people experiencing creeping feelings, more clues as to which of the young female characters might be the girl who got dumped in the Prologue. On their nighttime beach walk, Andrea tells Ernie about how the servant's hallucination of blood was probably the result of psychic echoes of a suicide attempt in the 19th century in the very same bathroom. This idea, that the island is haunted, is soon abandoned by Schoell in favor of the idea that an evil wizard is the cause of all gruesome supernatural events.
Back at the guest house, Ernie finds a horror paperback on a bookshelf--the novel is entitled Late at Night and is about a writer who goes to a haunted island with 13 other people--the people in this book within a book look like and do the same things as the people in Schoell's actual book. Oh, brother. The second servant girl hears voices and cannot sleep--she pees herself in terror (several characters urinate on themselves in this book) and then sees the ghost of a mutilated naked young woman.
Most importantly, Schoell indicates that one member of the party of 14 believes himself or herself to be an evil wizard--this individual feels he or she has transcended sex and become something like a god and Schoell refers to this individual with the pronoun "it" and the title "the necromancer." (Like in that
Van Der Graaf Generator song, "necromancer" is used as just a synonym for a generic magician here--this character's sorcery is not specifically concerned with or limited to communicating with or animating the dead.)
Part Three: Morning
Ernie can't find that paperback--did he dream it? Most of the 14 decide to explore a decaying 19th- century mansion on the other side of a woods--Schoell puts some effort into making this place seem scary, describing how the facade looks like a face, how it smells, how hot air seems to move in and out of the house, like it is a breathing beast. Gloria the middle-aged gossip columnist has remained at the guest house and Cynthia the actress leads the gossip columnist's young lover Jerry up to a remote room on the mansion's fourth floor and seduces him; their sexual congress is interrupted by the ugly pianist, Anton. The two servant girls explore an underground passage that leads to the mansion's cellar and the necromancer uses its powers to direct thousands of vermin to attack them. A legion of spiders devour one of the girls, reducing her to a skeleton (I don't think spiders actually eat that way, but whatever) while the other girl is skeletonized by white worms. Schoell informs us that the spiders will then devour the worms, and then the rats will eat all the spiders, and then bats will eat all the rats. Do bats in Maine eat rats? When the rest of the party can't find the servant girls, Ernie, remembering how in the now-missing book the girls died in the basement, enters the basement to look for them--he finds the skeletons, and Schoell makes clear that the spiders and worms not only ate the girl's flesh, but their clothes. (Ernie sees some rats, so I guess the bats didn't get them all.)
Part Four: Afternoon
Ernie doesn't tell the others about the skeletons, so search parties are formed and head out to look for the missing girls. Anton the pianist tells Gloria about Jerry's tryst with Cynthia, leading to a scene--the gossip columnist slaps the actress in the face. One example of Schoell's clumsy writing is the omniscient narrator's report that "The strike was so hard and so well-executed that it nearly took the younger woman's head off;" Cynthia doesn't act like she was nearly decapitated--on the next page we are told that the actress has "already chosen to ignore the whole thing" and is at the bar mixing herself a drink. What is the point of the absurd exaggeration? Is it a joke? A similar example comes when the necromancer goes to a shed to transform in private (into what, is left unsaid) and Eric the chauffer catches it in the act--the nonbinary wizard assaults and kills Eric with an axe:
Suddenly his hand wasn't there any more. Just a bleeding stump, discharging gallons of his precious bodily fluids.
Gallons?
Gloria runs out of the guest house alone and Jerry, whom we are told really really loves her even though he cheats on her all the time, goes after her but can't find her. Gloria decides to climb to the top of the lighthouse, and a demon summoned by the necromancer follows her up there and pushes her out a window, down to her death. Meanwhile, Cynthia has caught up to Jerry and they look for Gloria at the wrecked ship--they are eaten by red-eyed zombies. While all this is happening Ernie is searching for the book and Angela the psychic is beginning to sense the presence of the necromancer, coming to realize the danger the party is in.
Part Five: Night
The middle-aged lawyer John goes out into the dark alone to look for the servant girls; he gets lost and ends up at the ruins of an earlier, "original" mansion that burned down in the 18th century. Mrs. Plushing the cook is bedridden with delirium and fever and Betty the fat girl is having a nervous breakdown. Andrea endures a psychic attack from the necromancer, and senses that the necromancer has the power to create anything out of thin air and has used that power to kill the servant girls, Gloria, Jerry, and Cynthia. Andrea also senses where the book is, so Ernie, Andrea and Anton bust into Lynn's room and recover the book from where it is hidden under the bed. While the four are squabbling over the significance of the book and we readers are wondering if Lynn is the necromancer, the lights go out because the necromancer is "draining away the electrical energy" and in the dark the necromancer seizes the book out of the writer's hands. When the lights come back on the four people in the bedroom try to figure out which of them, or who among the other members of the party, must have snatched the book and is probably the necromancer.
John the lawyer is dragged down into the gaping hole that was the original mansion's basement by a vine and his blood is sucked out by carnivorous plants which then tear his dead body to pieces. This death scene is the most effective in the book; it is the least ridiculous, most importantly, and also the most moving because Schoell makes an effort to portray John responding to his imminent death in a way that reflects his personality. The demise of the cook is perhaps the most absurd and overwritten death in the novel. Mrs. Plushing's face swells up to double size while invisible blades cut through her limbs at the joints, and through her neck, dividing her body into individual parts. These parts take on independent lives of their own, the limbs crawling around and the head rolling around, and attack Hans the handyman, scratching and biting. There is a long scene of Hans fighting the animated body parts until they--and his injuries--disappear. It was all an illusion! Groan! But then the invisible blades start cutting the handyman into parts, so he commits suicide. The death of Hans brings to the fore the way how Schoell leaves ambiguous to what extent his silly monsters and outlandish psychic attacks are physical manifestations conjured by the necromancer and to what extent they are illusions that scare people to death or drive them to suicide.
Having neglected Betty the fat girl, Schoell suddenly gives her some background and personality and we get a scene in which Anton the pianist, drunk, humiliates her--he has been flirting with her and built up her hopes to the point that she expects to marry him, but now he insults Betty to her face and even unzips his fly and waves his genitals at her. Ernie punches the pianist's lights out.
With fewer than 100 pages to go we learn that Lynn is the woman from the Prologue; she has mostly been offscreen, which weakens the potential impact of this revelation. The spell Lynn cast in her Boston apartment was intended to give her a vision of one year into the future--she wanted to see if she would get another boyfriend! ("I know that's silly, pre-feminist thinking," she admits while confessing to Andrea, Ernie and Anton. Even the minds of psychic sorceresses are vulnerable to the ubiquitous oppressive influence of the patriarchy!) In the future she found that book, Late at Night, on her night table, and she had brought it back with her to the present. The identity of the shadowy figure remains a mystery.
Part Six: Late at Night
Andrea uses her powers to, again, determine the location of the book--it is at the 19th-century mansion. Ernie ventures into the dark alone (why are all the characters in this book doing that?) to retrieve it; as he makes his way across the island, he wonders which of the survivors is the necromancer--Lynn, an admitted psychic? Anton, who is always treating people like shit? Andrea, another psychic and the woman he has decided he wants to spend the rest of his life with? Anton appears and a tree falls on him, crushing his hands; this is supposed to be a big deal because he is a pianist, who creates his art and makes his money with his talented fingers, but the fact that Schoell never has Anton express or demonstrate a love for music or preoccupation with his career undermines this. And seconds later another tree falls on him, crushing his head, besides.
Ernie gets his hands on the book, but seconds later the necromancer shows up and chops his head off with an axe--and the necromancer is revealed to be Betty the fat girl! She is on a campaign of revenge against the world for being mean to her! Andrea senses Ernie's death and goes to the mansion for the final showdown. Betty takes on a demon form, all fangs and talons, but somehow Andrea outfights her with a pair of scissors, some matches, and lighter fluid. Seeing the necromancer, in reptilian alien form, who killed two men by hacking them with an axe, and slew nine other people by summoning monsters or projecting mind-bending illusions, bested by a girl who doesn't even have a gun or a knife, was pretty deflating and anticlimactic. As she lays dying, Betty the necromancer causes the mansion to explode in hopes of killing the psychic as well as herself.
The Epilogue takes place some 18 months later in Lynn's Boston apartment. It is the second anniversary of her trip forward in time to collect the book. Andrea, whom Lynn and the authorities have believed was killed in the explosion, shows up at her door. Angela has the book with her--she wrote it and got it published. Lynn's time travel spell, cast two years ago, was meant to send her forward in time one year, but in fact sent her forward two years, to today! She'll be showing up any minute now! After leaving the copy of Late at Night on the night table for past Lynn to collect in a few minutes, Andrea murders current Lynn with scissors to avenge Ernie--after all, it was Lynn's meddling with sorcery that ultimately got him and the others killed.
"C-grade" is too kind! Late at Night is bad in almost every conceivable way. None of the characters is likable or interesting, in particular the most important character, the necromancer, whose motives are a cipher and whose magic or psychic powers amount to the ability to do just any damn thing the author thinks of, meaning there is no consistent theme to the supernatural elements of the story. Schoell also sloppily conflates psychic powers and magic--sometimes the psykers are just using their natural born powers to manipulate matter, other times they are casting spells they learned through much study--as if they are the same thing. The book-that-is-coming-true gimmick is lame, and the book plays multiple roles in the story, none of them very well--the characters are all running around trying to find or hide or steal the book, for example, as if it is a powerful weapon or shield, but nobody ever uses the book to protect themselves or harm their enemies; people talk about how mystical or powerful or whatever the book is, but it is not like the necromancer needs any more power--she is already powerful enough to do whatever she feels like, including blowing up buildings and killing anybody she wants with trivial effort (except when the plot requires her not killing someone--then that person can just kill her with a pair of scissors. And what is up with the scissors? Schoell should have made the scissors significant, like a gift from Ernie or something Andrea or Ernie used in a hobby or at work, cutting out newspaper stories or typescripts or something.) The mysteries of the identity of the woman in the Prologue and of the necromancer, and the big reveals, are not compelling, in part because Lynn and Betty get little screen time compared to Ernie, Angela and Anton. And the gore scenes and sex scenes are more silly than scary, disturbing, or titillating.
So the way the story is put together is not good. And neither is the actual writing! The writing is lacking in style and full of cliches; the later parts of the novel move at a decent pace, but the first two Parts are larded with extraneous detail about stuff that is boring. Throughout the book we find sentences that seem to contradict earlier ones--for example, the handyman decides to take "the boat" off the island for help, as if he has seen one, and on the next page he is merely hoping that there is such a boat. Many sentences feature distractingly bad word choices that should have been fixed by somebody at Leisure Books; here are a few I noted:
They gathered outside the entrance to the house, and shook off the dust and smell of the mansion like dogs expelling water.
The comma is unnecessary, shaking off a smell makes no sense, a dog shaking off water moves its torso while a person removing dust moves his limbs, and "expel" is the wrong word. Argh.
The weeds were really high in the rear of the house, long green stalks the size of a small man's body.
Obviously this should be something like "the height of a short man" or just "four or five feet high."
He opened the door. Two rats came hurling up a staircase behind it.
Maybe this is a typo for "hurtling"? Not that "hurtling" is very good; "darting" is better for something small--we usually see "hurtling" for something large like a locomotive or a truck.
Pretty faces were, quite literally, a dime a dozen.
Abuse of "literally" is not new.
Thumbs down!
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It's back to science fiction short stories from before I was born for our next episode. Stay tuned, space cadets!
