​Paperbacks From Hell #3: The Reaping BY Bernard Taylor

“How incredibly slight, I said to myself, with the present trend for small families, was the chance of finding a seventh son of a seventh son. Almost an impossibility. Therefore it had been necessary for one to be created.”

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Following the 2017 release of Grady Hendrix’s seminal history of the horror boom of the 1980s, Paperbacks From Hell, Valancourt Books set up its Paperbacks From Hell line last year. Curated by Hendrix and Too Much Horror Fiction’s Will Errickson, it brings many of the classics of horror’s heyday back into print, sometimes for the first time, with the original cover art lovingly restored. Given the inflating prices that the originals go for on the internet these days, this is a valuable service, bringing long out of print or hard to find books to a new and enthusiastic audience. This column will go through the series and review each title.
Bernard Taylor’s The Reaping (1980) is a more quiet, subdued kind of horror compared to the previous two Paperbacks From Hell, but no less effective for it. Rather than the gore overload of Gregory A. Douglas’ The Nest or the baroque gothic majesty of Elizabeth Engstrom’s When Darkness Loves Us, Taylor goes for a more measured, painstaking approach. The Reaping carefully develops its characters and their concerns, nudging them further and further into the Weird from the mundane English setting, all the more for the novel’s intense climax to hit home. The Reaping makes excellent use of its character dynamics and realistic, lived in setting, its horror slowly emerging from domestic tragedy in a manner reminiscent of classic 70’s horror films such as Nicholas Roeg’s Don’t Look Now (1973).

Tom Rigby is a painter who has settled down with his children and his stable job in a shop, and following the death of his wife is trying to make his relationship with the flighty Ilona. However after exhibiting his work in a local exhibition, he finds himself offered a life-changing sum of money to paint the portrait of Catherine, a young woman at Woolvercombe House in the countryside around Bath. The house is full of strange characters – the eccentric ancient Miss Stewart, her assistant Mrs. Weldon, the gruff Dr McIntosh, Carl and Hathaway, the servants, not to mention the nuns stationed on the grounds. Tom starts work on his portrait, only for things to get gradually stranger, until he finds himself unwillingly the tool in Miss Stewart’s sinister plans.

With its sinister country house, an old family hiding dangerous secrets, and Catherine as the damsel in distress, The Reaping plays with gothic tropes to great effect. The inhabitants of Woolvercombe House are delightfully creepy, and contrast well with Tom’s groundedness. All this however is part of them playing him. Tom is a seventh son, and with family sizes dwindling, seventh sons of seventh sons are something of a rarity, so Miss Stewart, in order to regain youth and immortality, hatches a sinister plot to breed her own. The Reaping questions the role of sexual repression in the gothic and in English culture – it is Tom’s own repression that allows him to be so easily manipulated into sleeping with Catherine in the first place, and the cult, despite being run by Miss Stewart, is more than willing to reduce women to mere vessels to produce more children, which is contrasted with Ilona’s and Tom’s sister Emma’s relatively increased sexual liberation.
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However The Reaping is ultimately more interested in delivering effective chills than fully interrogating the genre’s attitude towards sexuality, and in this it succeeds in spades. Taylor captures the allure and the threat of the English countryside, the creepiness of old country mansions, and the cult-like behaviour of particular insular communities, all of which is brought together for a shocking twist ending and an intense climactic sequence that repays Taylor’s careful build up by holding nothing back. The end result is another satisfying ride from the golden age of horror paperbacks.
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Review by Jonathan Thornton 

When Tom Rigby is commissioned to paint a young woman’s portrait at Woolvercombe House, the offer is too lucrative to refuse. But from the moment of his arrival at the secluded country mansion strange and inexplicable events begin to transpire. Soon he is drawn into an impenetrable maze of horror, and by the time he discovers the role he is intended to play in a diabolical design, it will already be too late. For the seeds of evil have been sown, and the time to reap their wicked harvest is nigh!
The classic third novel by ’70s and ’80s horror master Bernard Taylor, The Reaping (1980) returns to print at last in this edition featuring a new introduction by Will Errickson and the original cover painting by Oliver Frey.
‘Move over, Stephen King!’ – New York Daily News
‘Draws the reader into a web that grows gradually tighter with each turn of the page!’  – Booklist
‘Taylor works wizardry again!’ – Publishers Weekly

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