Some horror paperback covers are notoriously awesome: Garrett Boatman's Stage Fright, Shaun Hutson's Spawn, Hector Garrido's cover for John Christopher's The Little People. Counted in that august company is this cover for Playing with Fire which sears itself into the soft pink brains of everyone who sees it. A half-baked gingerbread atrocity that looks like it crawled out of the slimier end of the Uncanny Valley, a pre-digital Photoshop mutant that might be wearing sweatbands but maybe that's also icing and it kind of looks like a racist caricature too, but also no wonder it's screaming and screaming as it's licked by hellfire because if I was this gingerbread gorgon I'd scream all day and night until someone put me out of my misery. Truly, Hell has a cookie preference and it's on this cover.
What you don't know is that this cover accurately depicts a scene in the book, except for one detail: in the book it's a Jewish gingerbread man.
Stephen King's 'Salem's Lot came out in 1975 and inspired a ton of writers. Some read King's novel about vampires taking over an entire town of deeply unpleasant people in Maine and felt inspired to write their own big tapestry novels, with F. Paul Wilson in particular deciding to go international, rather than local, and write The Keep, his own massive monster story. Other writers read King's book about a town of hateful people simmering with bile and prejudice, a town where even the milkman hates milk, and figured, "Readers want the exact same thing, only nastier." And so we got Playing with Fire.
The tiny Catskills town of Fallsview, NY is populated entirely by assholes. As Veder writes, “The town was an oozing chancre sore. The people were maggots. They infected and infested and festered every piece of clean flesh in existence.” The preacher is sexually repressed, everyone is sleeping with everyone else, the local Italian is of course mobbed up, and there's an entire King's novel worth of vomiting and nose-picking on display. Unfolding over one oppressively hot summer, the book begins with a firebug burning down an empty hotel. At first people wonder if it's a real estate scheme (there are a LOT of real estate schemes in this book), an insurance fire, or just plain nastiness. As more and more houses, businesses, mobile homes, and lumberyards get set on fire, the population turn on each other like weasels in a sack, neighbor accusing neighbor, neighbor sleeping with neighbor, neighbor putting dead flies in neighbor's bread dough, and neighbor setting killer dogs on neighbor until you, the reader, really need a nap.
A 35 year veteran of the advertising business, Bob Veder only ever published this one book in 1980 (the paperback came out in 1983) but he has indicated that he "desires to release 20 unpublished novels that he has worked on over the course of his career." Veder seems to have left the advertising business when, in 2009, he stumbled across a portfolio of around 50 World War I posters in a field and sold them at NYC's Swann galleries for a handsome profit. That inspired him to open Class Menagerie, an antique store in Bolton Landing, specializing in prints and posters.
I have questions.
Given his interests, it's no surprise that Veder excels at depicting the details of the complicated relationship between Ethel Gibb, an antique dealer trapped in a co-dependent relationship with the morbidly obese antique queenpin, Rose. Ethel became Rose's caretaker and slowly fed her and fed her, increasing her bulk one sweet roll at a time until Rose could no longer get out of bed and had to let Ethel handle the details of her empire of crap, which Ethel liberally skims from. Like many toxic employer-employee relationships, it only ends when Ethel sics the attack dog they got to protect Rose's dragon hoard of antiques on both Rose and her developmentally disabled son, tearing out their throats. As the scene concludes, the arsonist springs out of nowhere and sets Ethel on fire, destroying all her pretty pretty knick knacks in the process. Maybe HR should have gotten involved earlier?
Veder loves writing about the antique business and real estate scams, but he truly lives for giving guided tours of the gallery of psychological grotesques who make up the citizens of Fallsview, NY. The plot inches forward in herks and jerks while readers are given exhaustive (and exhausting) access to the inner lives of horrible people. Think Peyton Place only with more racial epithets and explicit sex, and if everyone in town's psychological profile were paint-by-numbers.
The sexually repressed priest catches two teens having sex in his church after hours and beats their sinful bodies with the first thing he can grab: the heavy gold cross off the altar. Needless to say, he has a stroke in the process and dies. The only Italian resident of Fallsview might as well be named Mr. Rigatoni, although his real name is Rico and he has the diction of Chef Boyardee. The angry, bickering married couple are named George and Martha Fuchs. They're so mean that when a horse kicked George in the face he sliced off its leg with an axe and let it bleed to death, screaming in its stall, for hours. The local lumberyard owner, Bill Teef, is short and has a speech impediment, so he compensates by turning himself into a totally jacked bodybuilder with a hair-trigger temper. The repressed schoolteacher is named Mrs. Snuutch (the names in this book are as ridiculous as the personal psychology). A deranged Sheriff Ronsocks believes he's a cowboy and enters a bar firing his gun at random and bragging about "stringing up rustlers". A housewife named Cheryl Enjuss fears sex, especially from her effeminate husband whom she loathes, but craves it from a mean, Cro-Magnon dude.
If you thought Rico was as bad as the racial stereotyping was going to get, allow me to introduce you to the local German, Heinz. A former Nazi who worked in Dachau, his experience running the ovens has made him perfectly suited for his new position as town baker. He loves baking sheets of "gingerbread Jews" as he calls them, drawing little Stars of David on their arms and wolfing them down alone. There's also Willie Spode, a poorly educated Black man who lives in a squalid but valuable lot and seems to be simple-minded. When the town decides that he's the most likely arsonist they form a...well, a lynch mob sounds a bit too polarizing. Why don't we just call it a citizens' council? They descend on his house and terrorize him to the point where he has to be sent to what they sensitively refer to as "the loony bin."
I would bet money that Veder is absolutely not a racist, he just thinks making every single character as vile as possible is powerful, not predictable. So it comes as no surprise when the book ends with the postman...going postal. Harold Banner, local mailman, steams open everyone's mail and salivates over their secrets. His Daddy was also the mailman but he froze to death while delivering the mail and this psychological hook sunk deep into Harold's brain, compelling him to fill Dad's shoes. It would have been fine except one day he took a vacation and came back to find his post office in disarray. Pathologically unable to take a vacation ever again because it would mean symbolically letting his Dad down, the unrelieved pressure has built up over the years. When Harold discovers that Cheryl Enjuss, the woman he idolizes, is having sex with a man who's not her husband he gets a cause...
“...and his cause was the cause of letting the town, the world, know that Harold Banner was a man.”
Over the years, Banner has acquired a large number of grenades, submachine guns, landmines, and bazookas (mail order, of course) and now he goes on a killing spree. When he starts, the town is half-burned to the ground, 9 people are already dead, and poor Willie Spode is in the "loony bin." When Harold finishes letting everyone know that he "was a man" the numbers are a lot worse than that.
It turns out that Banner isn't even the arsonist. After the massacre, Sheriff Ronsocks gathers the survivors at church for an end-of-the-murder-mystery moment when he'll explain the dastardly plot and reveal the arsonist's name, but God apparently finds them all as awful as we do and he strikes the church with lightning and it catches on fire and every single character dies. As they charbroil we learn that all of them did it. Every fire was set by some other horrible person for their own horrible personal reasons.
Not a bad book, just an ugly one. And nothing in Playing with Fire lives up to that hideous, awful, amazing for all the wrong reasons cover. But it certainly tries.