Gwen, in Green

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Even to diehard readers of the obscure and the forgotten, the name Hugh Zachary will mean little. Perhaps it’s because he used so many pseudonyms, like many a prolific author; or perhaps because he never really wrote that one great novel—jack of all, master of none. Despite his having written and published dozens of books in virtually all genres for decades, none of his works is in print today. Until, I am thrilled to say, now. His 1974 novel, Gwen, in Green, joins Valancourt’s lauded reprint series of titles featured in my and Grady Hendrix’s Paperbacks from Hell. For my money, Zachary’s novel is almost a perfect example of its type, a paperback original featuring an eerie yet undeniably gorgeous cover illustration, complete with dated social mores, iffy sexual shenanigans, and a paranormal concept ripped right from a New Age pseudoscientific bestseller.

Born in 1928 in Ohio, Hugh Zachary wrote some in high school and spent his summers reading Edgar Rice Burroughs and working in a movie theater. Growing up while the romance of Hemingway and Fitzgerald still held sway, Zachary thought being a writer “would be neat,” that it meant romance, money, and travel, not alcoholism, debt, and suicide. He served in the Army, attended college at University of North Carolina–Wilmington, then worked in radio and television for years, till the Sixties, when his struggle—after almost 300 rejections—to become a full-time professional writer finally paid off. One Day in Hell, his first novel, appeared in 1961, a low-rent cheapie paperback with cover art of a greasy, hairy-armed brute manhandling a scantily clad woman in a grimy-looking midnight wasteland. “It wasn’t a bad book,” he said years later on his webpage. “It was a terrible book.”

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