mysterious figure who preys on children. In Califor-
nia Gothic(1995) a successful man and his family
find themselves in danger when an old girlfriend
shows up, apparently not having aged a day since the
last time he saw her many years previously. Double
Edge(1997) is a deliberately confusing story about a
woman trying to recover from a tragedy who is
plagued by a mysterious stalker and the unsettling vi-
sions of a psychic. Etchison’s remaining three novels,
two as by Jack Martin, are film novelizations. He has
also edited several anthologies of horror fiction and
won the World Fantasy Award for his work editing
the anthology The Museum of Horrors(2002).
Eulo, Ken (1939– )
By its very nature most horror fiction does not lend
itself to the possibility of sequels. If the monstrous
evil is thwarted, it is anticlimactic to bring it back
for another battle, since the reader already knows
that it is vulnerable. If the monstrous evil has tri-
umphed, it is unlikely that any of the heroes are
around to try again, and if an author is going to
create a new cast of characters, there is going to be
little continuity anyway. That has changed some-
what in recent years, mostly because of the flood of
novels about benevolent and/or misunderstood
vampires, but most of these, while supernatural,
are probably not, strictly speaking, horror stories.
In any case, a series about the same haunted house
seems improbable even now, and in the early 1980s
it was almost unheard of, which makes it that
much more surprising that Ken Eulo started his ca-
reer with a trilogy using a variation of the haunted
house story.
The Brownstone(1980) was the first and best
of the three, all of which are probably better de-
scribed as stories of “bad places,” although they
read like haunted house stories, particularly the
opening volume. A young couple moves into an
aging brownstone mansion with a slightly odd rep-
utation. Their landlady begins to behave strangely,
and there are other warning signs that gradually
escalate into a confrontation with a resident evil
force. The young woman from the first novel es-
capes the doom planned for her, but the monstrous
evil reaches out and invades her mind in The
Bloodstone(1981), compelling her to return for a
fresh round of thrills and chills. There is some rep-
etition, however, which becomes even more preva-
lent in the final volume, The Deathstone(1982).
Eulo changed gears for his next novel, Noctur-
nal(1983), one of many stories in which a clair-
voyant acquires psychic knowledge of the activities
of a killer and must identify him before the killer
learns her identity. The novel is competently writ-
ten but holds few surprises and only minor thrills.
The Ghost of Veronica Gray(1985) also uses a fa-
miliar plot—a child’s imaginary playmate is actu-
ally an angry ghost using her to avenge herself on
the living, but this time the author produced a
livelier plot and considerably more suspense. The
evil being in The House of Caine(1988) is a kind of
vampire, but sufficiently out of the ordinary to sup-
port a rather long and convoluted story. Eulo
seemed at this point to be on the verge of produc-
ing a major horror novel, but the genre imploded
in the late 1980s. He was one of many promising
writers whose career was suddenly disrupted and
uncertain.
Eulo did publish two more novels with fantas-
tic content, although both were marketed as gen-
eral thrillers. Manhattan Heat(1991) is a police
procedural mystery, except that the case at hand
involves the walking dead. Claw(1994) is a sci-
ence fiction horror story in which an escaped tiger
displays unusual intelligence thanks to some secret
genetic manipulation by the government. Al-
though Eulo did not manage to produce a break-
through novel during his brief career, he wrote
solid, entertaining stories of suspense. He will
probably be remembered primarily for his initial
trilogy, but Manhattan Heatand The House of Caine
are his best novels.The ExorcistWilliam Peter Blatty(1971)
Horror fiction enjoyed mild popularity in Europe
from the early 20th century onward, but in the
United States it existed only as a novelty, some-
times lumped with science fiction, sometimes with
mysteries and suspense novels, sometimes with
general fiction. That held true until the late 1960s,
when the first of two influential novels appeared.
ROSEMARY’S BABY(1967), by Ira Levin, was a hit
both as a novel and a movie, and William Peter110 Eulo, Ken