Gwen, in Green

Zachary may have been the only writer in existence to have a book fail because of the success of Jaws. In 1974, when he presented his publisher Putnam with Tide, about mutated fish, they loved it and were eager to make it into a bestseller—“Bestsellers are not written; they’re made,” Zachary noted—but then Peter Benchley’s own monster fish story came out. Putnam changed their mind, telling Zachary there couldn’t be two “marine peril” books on the bestseller list at the same time. Tide came out as a Berkley Medallion SF/thriller paperback a year later, marketed in the Michael Crichton mold, and “went down the drain.”

He ventured into horror territory rarely, last with The Revenant (Onyx, 1988), complete with a banger of a cover adorned by a bloody, skeletal Confederate soldier. My horror cohort Grady Hendrix reviewed his 1981 paperback Bloodrush some five or six years ago for Tor.com; Grady notes it is “ostensibly a procedural mystery but that’s dripping with so much blood and gore and weirdness that it crosses the line into straight-up horror.” But it’s 1974’s Gwen, in Green that I am here to praise, a work of ecological terror and otherworldly mind control—and more than a smidgen of Seventies anything-goes sexiness.

Let’s take a moment to appreciate that cover, from the brush of the incomparable George Ziel (written about at length in Paperbacks from Hell). Our Gwen is mesmerized by something beyond human ken, gazing in wild wonder, naked but perhaps not afraid, her hair held aloft by clinging vines. The luscious red of her lips and icy blue of her eyes stand in stark contrast to the sickly grey-green—a Ziel trademark—snippet of landscape. As she stands hip-deep in creeping flora and murky water, a white flower floats just below Gwen’s belly button, an oh-so-demure symbol of fecund femininity. But what our lady of the swamp will bring is not life, but death, and plenty of it. Possessed by the spirit of some ineffable lifeforce, this young wife will wreak havoc on the men—always men—who rend the earth asunder in the name of electric power, quarterly gains, and golf courses.

Even the publisher should be noted: Gold Medal was established by Fawcett Publications out of Greenwich, Connecticut; the imprint hardly needs introduction to any vintage paperback collector. In 1949, Gold Medal began putting out mass-­market paperbacks of original fiction—up till then, the format was almost solely used for reprints of hardcovers. Filled to the brim with action and thrills, disposable but satisfying two-fisted tales, these books upped the ante on the all-but-dead pulp clichés of yore. The early authors would become icons of popular fiction, in numerous genres: Jim Thompson, Louis L’Amour, Elmore Leonard, Richard Matheson, Robert Bloch, John D. MacDonald, even Kurt Vonnegut. The book designers knew that readers might not judge a book by its cover, but they’d certainly pay for one: with their immediate success, Gold Medal’s paperback originals upended the entire publishing industry.

The impetus of the novel was the building of a power plant near Zachary’s home on his beloved Oak Island. Bulldozers and constructions crews were all over “the most beautiful part of the island. The nicest trees and everything else; I’m not a ‘tree hugger,’ but . . . they were up there just tearing up the trees, right and left.” Fusing this outrage with a bit of pseudoscience then popular from a bestseller called The Secret Life of Plants, as well as the zeitgeist of women’s liberation and sexual empowerment, Zachary concocted a kind of revenge thriller against the encroachment of crass civilization on blissful nature.

Gwen and her husband, electrical engineer George Ferrier, both in their late twenties, have been married for seven years when the novel begins. Early chapters give the couple’s background in North Carolina, their rocky start, their college years, their newlywed days. Gwen, whose childhood was one of neglect and misfortune, still feels shame from it: her widowed mother was a promiscuous woman who wasn’t careful about keeping the bedroom door closed. A complex grew, encouraged by the teasing of Gwen’s schoolmates, and so as an adult Gwen considers herself a prude, an uptight nut even—in the parlance of the era, frigid. But with George’s eager ministrations, marital bliss (mostly) erases her past sexual hang-ups.