Terror at Seacliff Pines by Florence Hurd (Manor Books, 1976)

A large scary house in the background?  A pretty young woman in the foreground?  This has got to be a Modern Gothic novel.

HOUSE OF TERROR

When young Jennifer inherited an old and sprawling mansion on the rocky California coast, a whole new world opened up to her.  She planned to sell the house, to travel, to do what she had always dreamed of.

But when she arrived at Seacliff Pines, her dreams became visions of hell.  For the house was tainted with the touch of death and alive with the whispers of madness...

It's a slightly unusual cover, because Our Heroine isn't running away from her "HOUSE OF TERROR" so much as standing around contemplating running away from it.  Or maybe walking away from it very, very slowly...

(I won't go into to the plot.  Suffice it to say it is resolved with very bizarre twist!)

Three more books by Agatha Christie (Fontana 1976,1977 and 1980)

And one last set of books by Agatha Christie.  Last week I wrote about the same titles published in the late 1950s and early 1960s:

A Pocket Full of Rye (1976)

A sick joke brought the sharp-tongued Miss Marple to the Fortesque home...

     Sergeant Hay looked up at Inspector Neele from the bottom of the stairs.  He was panting. 

     "Sir," he said urgently.  "We've found her!" 

     "Found who?"

     "Gladys, Sir, the maid.  Strangled, she was, with a stocking around her throat—been dead for hours, I'd say.  And sir, it's a wicked kind of joke—there was a clothes peg clipped on her nose..."

Peril at End House (1977)

Accident Number One: the heavy picture that falls across Miss Buckley's bed

Accident Number Two: the boulder that thunders past her on the cliff path 

Accident Number Three: the car brakes that fail on a steep hill 

Accident Number Four: the bullet that misses her head by inches 

But the would-be murderer makes a grave mistake—he shoots at his victim while she is talking with Hercule Poirot!

The Labours of Hercules (1980)

A modern 'Labours of Hercules'...

The idea appeals to Hercule Poirot's vanity.  Before he retires to grow superb vegetable marrows he will undertake  just twelve more carefully chosen cases.

All of them will resemble the remarkable feats of strength performed by that brawny hero of ancient Greece, the first Hercules.  But when the fastidious Hercule Poirot faces his modern monsters, his only weapon will be his brilliant powers of deduction...

... And what a contrast!  The earlier editions of these books depict realistic, but rather generic Young Women in Peril on their covers.  These paperbacks are adorned with slightly surrealistic and very symbolic art.   And yes, the symbolism does tie in very neatly with the plots of the books.

The cover paintings on the later books were done by Tom Adams—an illustrator best known for the Agatha Christie covers he did for Fontana and for Pocket Books in America.  They were gathered together in a book (Tom Adams' Agatha Christie Cover Story published by Paper Tiger in 1981).  I'll admit to a soft spot for these covers; not only are they visually intriguing, but I first read Agatha Christie in these editions when I discovered the author as a teenager!

The Storm Lord by Tanith Lee (DAW 1976)

A few years ago, someone donated their entire fantasy and science fiction collection to the YMCA charity stall in Kingston.  Sadly the charity stall is gone now--the land sold off to developers--but while it remained I bought a few bags of books, including this:

Here we see a short, shaggy barbarian clutching an immaculately coiffed and made up (slave?) girl.  Between her blue eyeshadow and the generally murky brown colour scheme of the cover, it's easy to see that this was published in the 1970s.

THE STORM LORD is a big novel of an unknown planet and of the conflict of empires and peoples on that world.  It is the story of a priestess raped and slain, of a baby born of a king and hidden among strangers, and of how that child, grown to manhood, sought his true heritage.

It is a novel of alien gods and lost goddesses, of warriors and wanderers, and of vengeance long delayed.

It is an epic in every sense of the word.

The "priestess" in the back cover blurb isn't the only person in the book who is raped and/or slain--the victims pile up, chapter by chapter.  I don't think I've encountered this much rapine and slaughter in a fantasy novel since I read Game of Thrones several years ago.

The dragons had brought only women to their feast, planning to use them, when the festivities were at their height, in the orgiastic manner of the ancient feasts of Rarnammon.  And these women had struck simultaneously, with daggers, with knives from the table, with heavy stone drinking cups.  Thick blood ran on the flags and smeared the walls.

(Page 277)

 So the question I find myself asking, is: Which world would be worse to live in--Tanith Lee's Vis or George R.R. Martin's Westeros?