Jim Harmon’s The Man Who Made Maniacs!

Armchair Fiction have re-issued a lot of obscure but extremely interesting science fiction and other mid-20th century genre novels. Their two-novel paperback editions are usually very much worth buying. In these editions you might get one excellent novel and one that’s not so good but it’s surprising how often both novels turn out to be highly entertaining. Science fiction and horror are their specialities but occasionally they come up with something so weird as to be almost unclassifiable.

That’s definitely the case with their double-header that includes Thorp McClusky’s Loot of the Vampire and Jim Harmon’s The Man Who Made Maniacs! I see Loot of the Vampire as fitting vaguely into the short-lived 1930s weird detective story genre. The Man Who Made Maniacs! was published in 1961 and I have no idea to what genre it belongs. All I know is that it’s deeply weird. It’s The Man Who Made Maniacs! that concerns us in this review.

Jace Reid is a Hollywood screenwriter. A couple of years earlier he had a big success with a book and a movie called Maniac. It was about murderous sex fiends. Naturally a lot of people assumed that a man who wrote about such subjects was most likely a sex fiend himself. One guy saw the movie and then committed a murder, claiming to be inspired by the movie. That was pretty upsetting to Jace.

Now something even worse has happened. Someone has accused him of running a sadistic satanic Hollywood sex cult. And the cops seem to be taking the accusation seriously. The cops come knocking on his door just as he’s about to engage in some serious bedroom fun with his agent Lisa, which is more than a little annoying.

Jace has worked in Hollywood so he, like everybody else, knows that most people in Hollywood really are involved in bizarre sex orgies. But mostly they’re harmless bizarre sex orgies. And Jace is not personally involved in any such goings-on.

Soon things become a lot more disturbing for Jace. He finds himself in a sanatorium where the staff are crazier than the patients. He is drugged, or at least he thinks he was drugged. There’s a girl named Doris MacNiter who accuses him of encouraging her sister Clara’s sadomasochistic tendencies. He has never met Clara. Now he gets to meet both sisters and they’re both rather worrying.

Then the dead body shows up.

The books gets much stranger. There’s a dead guy who may or may not really be dead. There’s a vampire, or at least there might be. There’s lots of sexual kinkiness. People are not who they seem to be, but then maybe they are. Disturbing things happen to Jace, or at least they might have happened. There are beatniks.

This is actually a book that would fit in well with the late 60s vogue for psychedelic freak-out movies and books, but you don’t expect that so much in 1961.

This might be a crime story of sorts. It might have been intended as horror. It may have been aimed at the sleaze fiction market. In fact I’d be fairly certain that was the primary target market but the author seems to have had other agendas going.

There are some amusing moments but it’s not quite certain that this is intended as a spoof, but it might be a spoof.

All of the women have very large breasts. That point is strongly emphasised. Not just large breasts but large thrusting breasts. There are lots of catfights. Those large thrusting breasts always seem to play a key role in the catfights.

It’s hard to say whether the book is well-written or badly written. A decision on that point depends on just how seriously you think the author was taking his story, and whether you think it’s all done with tongue firmly planted in cheek.

Either way it’s a wild crazy oddball book and for me that’s enough to earn it a highly recommended rating, as long as you realise that I’m recommending it for its very high weirdness quotient.