Hell Hound Read online

  Ken Greenhall

  HELL HOUND

  with a new introduction by

  GRADY HENDRIX

  VALANCOURT BOOKS

  Hell Hound by Ken Greenhall

  First published by Zebra Books in 1977

  This edition first published 2017

  Reprinted from the British edition published by Harrap in 1977

  Copyright © 1977 by Ken Greenhall

  Introduction copyright © 2017 by Grady Hendrix

  All rights reserved. In accordance with the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, the copying, scanning, uploading, and/or electronic sharing of any part of this book without the permission of the publisher constitutes unlawful piracy and theft of the author’s intellectual property. If you would like to use material from the book (other than for review purposes), prior written permission must be obtained by contacting the publisher.

  Published by Valancourt Books, Richmond, Virginia

  http://www.valancourtbooks.com

  Cover by Henry Petrides

  INTRODUCTION

  I need to introduce you to Ken Greenhall because a) he’s dead and can’t introduce himself, and b) few authors have been so completely erased. His six novels are out of print. He has no Wikipedia page, there’s barely any bibliographic reference, and the handful of online mentions he rates can’t even agree on whether he’s a man or a woman. Is Greenhall the author and Jessica Hamilton the pseudonym? Or is Hamilton the writer and Greenhall her creation?

  Greenhall’s literary light isn’t guttering, it’s extinguished. His entire output survives as a handful of faded mass market paperbacks found on musty swap shop shelves, passed between true believers, occasionally sold online for a penny plus shipping. He is horror fiction’s invisible man. He is also one of its greatest stylists.

  ‘When I was younger I saw James, my father’s brother, look from our dog to me without changing his expression. I soon taught him to look at me in a way he looked at nothing else.’

  —Elizabeth (written as Jessica Hamilton)

  ‘There was a time when my life was like yours. I ate veal occasionally, and avoided people who had a serious interest in God. I smiled at clients during the day, disappearing beneath the black velvet hood from time to time to steal their souls.’

  —Childgrave

  ‘They are deranged. They are pale, their country is flat and wet, and they have no souls. I believe they are being punished for having only one god.’

  —Lenoir

  The blockbuster successes of Rosemary’s Baby, The Exorcist, and The Other between 1968 and 1971 launched a publishing gold rush, carpeting bookstores with paperbacks embossed with foil, eye-melting cover art, and tabloid titles: Satan’s Love Child, Queen of Hell, The Desecration of Susan Browning. The rush lasted into the early Nineties when a combination of too many cheap books, too many collapsing imprints, and publishing house merger mania popped the bubble and horror died like a dog.

  In the midst of these roaring white water rapids, Greenhall was hard to hear. When other authors shouted, he whispered. Where other authors reached for the grotesque, he strove for understatement. The most popular books of the day were bulging slabs of wood pulp dripping with shock effects. Greenhall’s books were precise and trim. They didn’t gross you out, or send you reeling, or destroy your mind, they simply and methodically unstrung your nerves. He didn’t aim to terrify, he wanted to undermine your sense of comfort. It’s a harder trick, but it lasts longer.

  Born in Detroit in 1928 to parents who had just emigrated from the United Kingdom, Ken Greenhall graduated from high school at the age of 15 and went to work in his father’s record store until he joined the army and was stationed in Germany. On his return, he moved to New York City and got a job editing the Encyclopedia Americana and the Columbia Encyclopedia. He’d stay on their staff for the rest of his working life. In 1977, he married his second wife, Agnes, and decided to write a book, just to see if he could.

  Standing 6’3”, with strawberry blond hair, Greenhall was driven by challenges. Lots of people play jazz trumpet and love Charlie Parker. Few of them go on to build a harpsichord by hand and teach themselves how to play. When Greenhall got a Rubik’s Cube for Christmas he refused to sleep until he solved it, which took him until 5 a.m. that same day. Writing was another challenge for Greenhall, something he did in longhand after work, another puzzle-solving exercise, this one aimed at understanding the mysteries of the human mind.

  Voices seduced Greenhall, and every book he wrote was an attempt to see the world through alien eyes. Told from the point of view of a fourteen-year-old girl who believes she’s the descendant of a witch, Elizabeth is delivered in the clipped, passionless tones of the truly insane. Greenhall’s agent, Oscar Collier, sold it quickly and, for reasons no one remembers, it was published under Greenhall’s mother’s maiden name, Jessica Hamilton.

  Fascinated by a sinister-looking Bull Terrier, Greenhall almost immediately set to work on Hell Hound, this time determined to see the world through animal eyes. ‘The ways they deceive themselves are endless,’ Baxter, the titular canine says, and our familiar world seen through his pale blue eyes becomes bizarre, unlinked from emotion or context. Babies are defective because they’re helpless (‘The child is not normal . . . they feel guilt for having produced it’), the human body is a disadvantage (‘The only admirable part of the human body, I think, is the hand’), and self-restraint is the same as self-deception.

  Every sentence is a tab of lysergic wordplay as Baxter forces us to see things we consider good—the elderly, people who love their pets, childbirth—as pitiable. But Baxter’s is only one of the multiple points of view on display. Mrs. Prescott, the woman who is his first victim, Carl, the 13-year-old Nazi who adopts him, Mr. Best, the next door neighbor who is barely glimpsed, each of them obligingly opens their skulls to share their thoughts. Greenhall doesn’t show us how they present themselves to the world, or how they want to be seen, instead he shows us their unvarnished innermost selves, completely free of vanity. The book feels like a machine gun aimed at polite society, unleashed in short, sharp declarative sentences and brisk chapters that fly like bullets.

  Hell Hound (or Baxter, as it was called when director Jérôme Boivin released his acclaimed French film adaptation in 1989) was to be Greenhall’s favorite of his books (besides Lenoir). Despite coming onto the market at the peak of the killer animal trend (Jaws and The Rats in 1974, and a million imitators until Cujo in 1981) every single publisher rejected it until it wound up at Zebra Books, a bottom of the barrel paperback publisher who slapped a cheaper-than-usual cover on an even-cheaper paperback and tossed it out onto shelves. The cover art appalled Greenhall, but nobody cared.

  After the darkness of Elizabeth and Hell Hound, Greenhall wanted to write something lighter. Inspired by a photograph of R.D. Laing’s four-year-old daughter, he wrote Childgrave, about a photographer who seems to be taking pictures of spirits. Written almost entirely in the middle of the night, it’s not quite the breath of fresh air Greenhall intended, as it explores the fact that, as one character puts it, ‘Maybe God is not civilized.’

  Next came The Companion about a serial killing angel of mercy who is a paid companion to the elderly, then Deathchain, a trifle that feels like the beginning of a series about a dissolute cognac salesman who becomes, in the most accidental way possible, an amateur sleuth. It’s not his best work, but even so it’s still swift and sure-footed, full of the deft observations and a deceptive simplicity that had become Greenhall’s style.

  After he retired, Greenhall decided to write the book he’d been pondering for years. Lenoir is the story of a black slave in 17th-century Amsterdam who winds up modeling for the Rubens painting, Four Studies of the Head of a Negro. Instead of trying to hide h
is blackness, Lenoir is convinced that it makes him the most handsome man in the Netherlands. He is not the freak, it’s the pale people around him who are the outsiders, and he pities and patronizes them in a breathtaking reversal of expectations. Lenoir is very close to a masterpiece. It also killed Ken Greenhall’s career.

  By the time he started to write Lenoir, Greenhall had been abandoned by his agent. He went looking for new representation, but was told again and again that he was too old. The research for his book was intense, and writing it consumed him. When he was finished he sold it directly to the small publisher, Zoland Books, best known for its literary fiction. He was 70 and he was exhausted, but happy. Lenoir received favorable reviews in the trade publications, Publisher’s Weekly and Kirkus, but Michael Pye, another writer, weighed in for the New York Times.

  Needlessly snarky, picking irrelevant nits, Pye ignored the impressive act of historical ventriloquism Greenhall accomplished to carp over whether Greenhall accurately depicted the speed of the 17th-century mail service, and whether a song Lenoir sings was anachronistic. Cruel and snide, the review cut Greenhall like a knife. He never wrote again. He died sixteen years later in 2014.

  But a book is a life an author leaves us. The reprint of Hell Hound that you hold in your hands is a part of Ken Greenhall, and as long as a writer has readers he can never truly die. Greenhall’s books have slept for decades, resting beneath the dirt, longing to burst forth and bloom again, waiting for a pair of new eyes. Waiting for you.

  Grady Hendrix

  February 2017

  Grady Hendrix is a novelist and screenwriter and the author of Horrorstör and My Best Friend’s Exorcism. His latest book is Paperbacks from Hell, a nonfiction exploration of the horror publishing boom of the Seventies and Eighties, out in Fall 2017.

  PART ONE

  One

  Each afternoon as I lie amid the odors of dryness and age I begin to think of the couple, and my excitement grows. I feel the warm patch of sunlight move slowly over my body. My legs twitch, and the delicate hairs in my ears begin to bristle. Soon, from among the gentle sounds of the late summer day, I’ll hear the approach of their automobile.

  I concentrate on the sporadic drone of distant traffic. One of those sounds will suddenly become distinctive and un­mistakable. At that instant I will be fully awake. I will run to the window, push aside the limp, dusty curtains, and wait for the couple to appear.

  I have been close to them only once. The woman’s foot was bare, and she touched my head. Her scent was exquisite; a subtle blend dominated by an acrid aroma related somehow to sexual readiness. I have seldom known such pleasure.

  The sound of their automobile dominates all others now, and in a moment I shall be able to see them. The man ma­neuvers the car unerringly into the driveway, and for a moment there is life in the neighborhood. Curtains part in other windows, revealing old, resentful faces.

  Soon the neighborhood is quiet again, but I stay at the window, staring at the couple’s tall, neglected house. What are they doing? How do they live? If I stand rigidly and give their house all my attention I can hear the woman’s voice occasion­ally. But that is not enough. I want to be in their house. I want to be close enough to hear the hiss of fabric against skin as they remove their clothes. I want to put my nose against those discarded garments and distinguish the faint traces of fear and pleasure left by their bodies.

  Instead I wait for the old person. She will be home soon, exhausted and uninteresting. She will carry a small package of unpalatable, stale-smelling meat, which she will make even less appealing by frying it in bland grease. Later she will dial the telephone and murmur endlessly into the mouthpiece, pausing occasionally as a tiny, equally weary voice murmurs back at her. It is one of her most puzzling activities. Then, even more strangely, she will turn on the television set and sit staring as it flashes and squeals.

  She will invite me to sit with her, and she will stroke my body. Her hand is dry and virtually odorless in itself, smelling only of the things she has touched. After a few minutes I find her unbearable, and I go to the window. Across the dark street I see shadows move past the windows of the couple’s house. I hear their laughter.

  There is never laughter in this house; only the dull sounds of age and weakness. But I am not weak. I have a strength and resourcefulness that the old woman probably never had.

  What are the possibilities of my strength? That is a thought I have never had before. What if some morning as the old woman stood at the head of the staircase she were suddenly to feel a weight thrusting against the back of her legs? What if she were to lunge forward, grasping at the air, striking her thin skull against the edge of a stair? What would become of me if she were found unmoving at the bottom of the stairway?

  Someone else would love me, as she has loved me. I’m certain of that. People have a great interest in love. They see it everywhere; probably even in me.

  2

  There’s such love in him, thought Mrs. Prescott. He’ll be waiting impatiently in the window, his strange head pushing between the curtains.

  She had not been convinced of that love immediately. She had lived for sixty-three years without a pet. And then, six months ago, her daughter had come to visit and presented her with Baxter. Mrs. Prescott recalled the panic she felt when her daughter drove off, leaving her alone with the dog for the first time.

  Such an unlikely looking animal. A bull terrier, her daughter had said: a recognized breed. Why would anyone want to perpetuate such ugliness? A head like a hatchet. Malevolent blue eyes, too small and misplaced.

  She remembered how she had sat rigidly on the edge of the sofa as the dog wandered through the house, sniffing. She was deeply offended. This was the house in which she had been born, had raised a family, and in which she would die. She would have been offended if a stranger had even looked at the house with such selfish intensity. To have this odd animal insanely smelling the objects that were so much a part of her life was intolerable.

  The dog had gone upstairs. He was probably in her bed­room. Tears came to her eyes. And then he was next to her on the sofa, his stiff-haired body pressing against her arm. She began to sob, and then felt his sharp-clawed paws pressing against her thin shoulder. His tongue was on her cheek.

  She shuddered, remembering something that had happened more than fifty years before. She had been in a sunny grade-school classroom. Plump Miss Rosen was peering through thick-lensed glasses and saying, ‘Never put money in your mouth. Money is covered with germs. And never let a dog lick you. A dog uses its tongue as toilet paper.’

  It was the first time Mrs. Prescott had consciously recalled the teacher’s words, but she realized that she had told her own children the same thing about money, and she had never allowed them to own a dog.

  Her vision still dulled by tears, she put her hands on Baxter’s body and tried to push him away. She could feel his rapid heartbeat, and her hand accidentally brushed against his genitals. She stopped struggling with him. She put her hands against her face and leaned limply against the back of the sofa. The dog settled in her lap. Gradually her tears subsided as she felt the animal’s warmth spreading across her thighs. She lowered her hands. ‘Baxter,’ she whispered.

  From that moment an accommodation existed. She could not refuse the dog’s simple love, but she could not return it. She would tolerate it, as she had tolerated affection throughout her life: occasionally with appreciation, but never with trust.

  And yet recently there had been evenings such as this one when she moved more eagerly than usual along the street; eager not so much to see the dog as to let him see her.

  She was in her own block now. The thick foliage of old elms arched above her, forming a shadowy tunnel and obscuring the upper stories of the tall, ornate houses.

  She had been born in one of these houses, when the trees were no taller than a man; when full sunlight could reach the asphalt of the road, softening it on summer afternoons. She remembered August days when she
and her friends had walked barefoot on the asphalt, feeling it yield slightly against their weight. The other children would move quickly across the road, lifting their legs high as the heat stung the pale flesh of their feet. She was the only one who would stand motionless, defying the heat. It was then, perhaps, that she began to recognize the attraction discomfort held for her.

  She understood Hawley Street in a way she had never understood her husband or children. These two rows of houses seemed to her to have an importance that their in­habitants never quite achieved. The night Mr. Raymond’s house burned, she had stood in the cold darkness, weeping before the flames. Years later, when Mr. Raymond died, she stood dry-eyed at his graveside.

  The block was a challenge that its people could not avoid. They would adapt to it as she had, or they would leave. Did the new young couple across the street realize that? Perhaps. They had chosen it over the suburbs and the city. But their principal interest was still themselves. They thought they could sustain that interest. They weren’t aware of mortality or adversity. That awareness would come.

  Mrs. Prescott smiled. I’m home, she thought. I’ll fry a lamb chop, telephone my daughter, and perhaps watch television. And Baxter will follow me about in his fond, mindless way.

  She would sleep contentedly, feeling the strength of the old house surrounding her, not expecting the morning to be in any way exceptional.

  3

  I am not comfortable in the night. I sometimes envy the old woman, who sleeps so complacently. The hurrying footsteps, the outcries, and the dozens of inexplicable sounds that disturb me do not affect her.

  At first I found it hard to believe that a creature could be as insensitive as she is. She can detect only the most obvious sounds and odors. She spends a remarkable amount of time looking at things, and she murmurs pointlessly and almost continuously at me and at the people we meet.