You see here the front and rear covers for House of Evil, a thriller published in 1954 and written by the wife/husband team of Clayre and Michel Lipman (you’ll see them as Clayre and Michael on some sites, but that’s an incorrect spelling of his name). It’s a crime novel, but horror-adjacent as the plot develops. Basically, it deals with an everyman named Roman Laird who gets tangled up in a macabre mystery when he walks into a murder scene in his girlfriend’s San Francisco apartment. His girlfriend is out of town, so the initial elements of the puzzle are: why kill in her apartment, and did the killer get who he was really after?
When the body seems to vanish, only to reappear, the puzzle deepens. As Laird begins to feel observed and the killer goes after another woman, answers continue to be in short supply. The few uncertain eyewitnesses are unhelpful with identification. Later Laird and the police uncover a set of oil paintings depicting terrors such as women hung upside down on hooks and strange beasts assaulting terrified victims. The Lipmans don’t make direct comparisons to existing artists, so the choice of what the art looks like is up to the reader’s imagination. People often go to Bosch or Goya when it comes to dark art, but we decided the paintings probably looked like those of Francis Bacon. In any case, the riddle in the story is what they might mean.
House of Evil is bold, and it’s well written and interesting, however because iterations of the book’s central gimmick have appeared quite a bit since 1954 (click only if you want to find out about a book—and movie—with an identical twist), you may guess what’s happening a few chapters in. That’s no fault of the Lipmans, but it means for modern readers that the mystery may not scintillate, the ending may feel too drawn out, and the final shocker may not hold sufficient impact. But even so, it’s a deft, dark, deeply psychological, outside-the-box thriller. We had to appreciate it.
