5/10/26
Happy Mother’s Day to all of you who are mothers. I spent Thursday and Friday with my grandmother and mother, and yesterday and today with Mary. She leaves for New Jersey later this afternoon, and will be gone a week. That will give me some time to get caught up, because last week’s unplanned trip has put me very much behind on stuff.
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This week’s newsletter is now available.
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Women In Horror Year: Day 32
The Living Evil by Ruby Jean Jensen
Heather was young and beautiful, but had ongoing man trouble. She decided to allow her older sister to care for her two daughters from a previous marriage. As a parting gift, Heather gave the girls a beautiful doll . . . Zenoa. The doll, with those penetrating brown eyes, was a reminder of a mother's love--wasn't it? The doll that seemed to have motives of its own . . . and would persist for decades to come. The doll that surprised and overpowered those no longer useful to her. In the dark the deadly doll could pass for ... a human. But it sought power to seal the transformation. It needed the legitimacy that came from home ownership. The current owners should beware.
Anyone who was alive in the heydays of the first great Horror fiction boom is familiar with the books of Ruby Jean Jensen — even those who never read her stuff. An absolute cornerstone of the Zebra Books horror line (along with Ronald Kelly, Rick Hautala, and William W. Johnstone), the books in her lengthy bibliography formed a sort of bridge between the modern gothics of VC Andrews and the pulp style of Hugh B. Cave and Manly Wade Wellman. Indeed, her first few books, published by Warner, were all straight up gothic romances. As her career continued, she leaned more and more into horror (with a few titles published by Tor and Leisure Books). By the time she landed at Zebra, she was writing full pulp horror, and was considered the queen of both the “creepy children” trope and the “evil doll” trope that have since gone on to become staples of the genre.
The Living Evil, one of my personal favorites by her, is the fifth such “evil doll” novel. It is a stand-alone work. No knowledge of the others is required to read it. Here is the original cover, as popularized by Grady Hendrix, Midnight Pals, and others.
Jensen’s contributions to the genre often get overshadowed by the works of her peers such as the aforementioned V.C. Andrews and Anne Rice. Maybe it’s because of the pulp trappings. But no horror education about the women of this genre is complete without at least sampling her work.
Luckily, unlike a lot of those old Zebra classics, Ruby Jean Jensen’s works have been slowly coming back into print, thanks to her family. A new edition of The Living Evil is available in paperback, hardcover, and eBook thanks to Gayle Jensen Foster.
