Product Description: Born in darkness, they arise. Seductive angels of murder, madness, and horrors beyond imagining.
COVEN
Bathed in moonlight, they feed their darkest hungers in a festival of perversion and death, demented orgies that serve a cruel, unspeakable will...
COVEN
They are irresistible sirens in black, corrupting the living and raising the dead. Now the silent town of Exham will surrender to their loving embrace, their haunting beauty, and their ravenous need for human flesh. Surrender--and die...
COVEN
Beauty is only skin deep.
More like a revved-up gross-out ‘70s B-movie, COVEN revels in its ultimate editorial no-no: it’s science-fiction dropped into a contemporary horror plot, something that horror editors seem to never buy. Maybe this one sold...because it works. Originally entitled THE WOMEN IN BLACK, this "turgid," original take on the There’s Something Fucked-Up At The College plot highlights Lee’s gross-out skills early on and demonstrates that pulp horror writers really can create fresh, well-developed, easy-to-realize characters. Cameos of Lee’s then-favorite beers--during his beer-snob days--appear in abundance, and Lovecraftian symbols abound (it’s fun just picking them out), but wait till you meets the gals in this book. This is the only existing novel that Lee wants to sequelize.
Oldschool Edward Lee Coven was originally published in 1991 and re-released by Necro in 2005. This is Edward Lee's second book -- his first was Ghouls (1988) -- and you can easily see how he began writing extreme horror with this one.
For the most part, it's an awesome book; I loved the setting of a college campus and the town Exham. The story unfolds at a fast pace and is full of twists and turns. Although I lost a bit of interest in the third act because it veered a tad too much into sci-fi. I would've preferred the sci-fi element to be kept to a minimum. The characters reminded me of me and my friends when we were in college, drinking beer and partying. The H.P. Lovecraft references are numerous and fun to spot. There's a lot of technical discussions pertaining to forensics and scientific issues which felt a bit forced at times.
Overall, Coven is a good read and one that I would recommend to any Lee fan. If you like sci-fi as well as horror, then you'll probably enjoy it even more than I did.
Maybe you REALLY have to be into Lovecraft & Imported Beer Just did not enjoy this book. I finished it to see what he was going to do with these characters. The characters are very one dimensional, and I just do not buy how Lee plays things out. There is no story here, just some provocative scene sketches. This particular tale seems to have a lot of RAPE obsession thrown in, yet written so that the victims LIKE it. Yeah. Great. Lots of gory goo- but not scary, not creepy. Just gross. Did someone say Lee is the heir to Stephen King's throne? I think not.
The Novel that introduced me to the master Let me start off by saying that it's about time that this book was re-released.
I read this book about 10 years ago. I ended up getting a first printing for about 50 cents, in a second hand bookstore. At the time, I thought the owner of the shop was getting the deal. The art work was horrible; but, the description on the back page got me interested.
I would have gladly spent $50 bucks for this book.
I know that the majority that are reading this have already read Lee's other works (ie: Bighead, City Infernal, Incubi...etc), however, for that small few that have never read one....Start with this one!!!
With the exception of King's "Tommyknockers", this is the only horror book to combine science fiction into its plot, and actually pull it off.
Just remember....Lee has no boundaries. For the faint of heart...look to the left on the bookshelf---you'll find King and Koontz.
My favorite Lee novel Of all of Lee's many fine horror novels, Coven is far and away my favorite. It is gruesome, horrifying, demented, perverse, and, very often, hysterically funny. As another reviewer indicated, the cover of the old mass-market edition is quite misleading and not indicative of what awaits the reader. Scenes of depravity are written with gleeful gusto. This is gonzo horror writing, sort of a mad synthesis of 70's and 80's b-horror movies, the sensibility of a Hunter Thompson or Douglas Adams, Animal House, and more. I also enjoyed the references to many of Lee's favorite imported beers of the time. Mr. Lee published three novels before Coven (two under the pseudonym Philip Straker), but I consider this the true beginning to his career--this is where his reputation as the king of "extreme" horror began. Used copies can be costly, but it's worth seeking out. Or you could hold out for the new limited edition hardback due from Necro Publications in 2003.
Not really a COVEN, but.... Together with Patrick Gates, Edward Lee is -- for me -- the ultimate gore/ extreme horrorwriter. His stories ooze with nasty sexscenes and brutality, and COVEN is no exception.
Don't let the cover fool you. It shows a woman in a black cape with a pentagram on her chest and holding an axe, but this book isn't about witches. An evil force is trying to take over the world and it's up to a slacker student and an ambitious female deputy to stop them, and they do fall in love halfway through! Without spoiling to much; Lee pulls no punches, from people who get sliced in half by a enormously large axe, to gruesome alien experiments and a zombie that can't be killed, COVEN has it all. Also worth mentioning is Lee's quirky sense of humor and his knack to create characters, which are most of the times stereotypical, but also make you laugh out loud because of their human traits. An example is the way he sends up rich, spoiled collegestudents, with their expensive cars and their taste in foreign beer.
This book is very hard to find (like most of Lee's older books) and I myself paid a ridicously large amount of money for it. But it was totally worth it and if you can find it I recommend it to any fan of extreme horror!
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