Paperback Library in a Parallel World

Picture it:  Fairview, Montana, in the mid-1980s.  A young boy with a growing obsession for vampires, werewolves, long-leggedy beasties, and things that go bump in the night discovers two scrapbooks and two ugly green-gold paperbacks from two decades in the past belonging to his best friend's mother.  The scrapbooks are a collection of articles and photos from 1960s teeny bopper magazines focusing on an old soap opera called Dark Shadows, full of pictures and scenes replete with a variety of fanged and furry-faced men and women; the novels, Barnabas Collins and The Secret of Barnabas Collins, showcase "America's grooviest ghoul" or "the vampire you love to hate!"  For a kid like me (you guessed it!), just diving into the Universal and Hammer ouevre, Dark Shadows was a gold mine; a few years later, my budding interest bloomed full force when NBC debuted the 1991 Dark Shadows revival, and the bargain video bin at the local KMart began to boast MPI Video's contributions to my mania, The Best of Dark Shadows, The Scariest Moments from Dark Shadows, and The Best of Dark Shadows 2.

But it was those two slim novels that caught my attention; I was allowed to borrow them, and it was only with not-so-subtle prodding that I ever returned them.  Not that they were particularly well-written; one doesn't read the Ross novels for great prose.  Or dialogue.  Or even plotting.  But for eight year old me, they were a window into the world of Dark Shadows, showcasing a vampire who could be as scary as Lugosi or as sinister as Lee's Count Dracula, but with an added soupcon of misery and suffering.  This appealed to me.  Especially in the first of the two novels, Barnabas wasn't really a terribly nice guy, throttling clingy maids and leaving seductive social workers to freeze to death in winter-time cemeteries. 

 Paperback Library eventually published thirty-five Dark Shadows-related novels; thirty-three of them were written by a Canadian gentleman named Dan Ross, who wrote under the pen-name "Marilyn Ross."  For many Dark Shadows fans, particularly those born after the original series left the air, these novels were a gateway that led, inevitably, to an interest in the mad, mad, mad world of Dan Curtis' soap opera brainchild.

One of the novels' more maddening aspects for some fans is their only tenuous connection to the continuity established on the series; hell, the world of the novels themselves is held together by only the most spiderweb-thin strands of continuity at best.  Ross never watched Dark Shadows, and so he created his own Collinsport, peopled with characters bearing only nominal resemblances to their television counterparts (observe the Chris Jennings werewolf in The Foe of Barnabas Collins, or an incarnation of Angelique with "olive skin" and jet black hair, described by Barnabas as looking exactly as he remembered her from 1795!).

Fans can be nutty, and fans can be demanding, and for the sci-fi/horror genre in particular, they seem to like novelizations.  Witness the Buffy the Vampire Slayer series of novels from the late 90's/early 2000s, which were a mixture of original material and adaptations of actual series episodes.  Ross never adapted actual Dark Shadows storylines; the closest he ever came was his novelization of the 1970 film House of Dark Shadows (its sequel, Night of Dark Shadows, was never adapted). 

Here, then, I offer evidence from a parallel world, perhaps, one where "Marilyn" Ross was pushed by Dan Curtis Productions to create adaptations of each of the Dark Shadows storylines in as faithful a manner as possible.  In this perfect world, these hypothetical novels would continue to feature publicity stills from the series against that hideous green-gold background for which they are so well-known, and each would bear the same ridiculous-sounding titles and breathless blurbs as their actual counterparts. 

Heck, I'd read 'em!  (Note:  for two novels of the series, The Origin of Barnabas Collins and the Night of Dark Shadows adaptation, Parallel World Paperback Library seemingly published multiple editions with differing covers ... collect 'em all!)