Eric C. Higgs was born in Sarasota, Florida, but raised throughout the United States, Japan and Europe, his father being a career Army officer. Eric's early education was received in such diverse venues as a small military schoolhouse in Okinawa and a boarding school in Switzerland.

After graduating from the University of Georgia, Eric worked as a general assignment reporter for the Aiken Standard & Review, Aiken, South Carolina, and then enlisted in the Navy. Eric served throughout the Pacific during his active duty Navy days and became qualified as a Surface Warfare Officer and Combatant Craft Officer-in-Charge.

Eric then affiliated with the Naval Reserve, and worked full time in the aerospace industry, first for General Dynamics and then Lockheed. It was during this time that Eric wrote and published PT Commander (Zebra Books), Doppelganger (St. Martin's Press) and The Happy Man.

The Happy Man by Eric C. Higgs

Charles Ripley has a good job as an engineer, a pretty wife, and an expensive house in a fashionable San Diego suburb. But it isn't until Ruskin Marsh moves in next door that Ripley realizes how passionless his life really is. Marsh, a connoisseur of the arts, high-powered lawyer, model husband and father, and effortless seducer of women, is so supremely alive that Ripley finds himself irresistibly drawn to him.

But after Marsh's arrival, local girls begin to vanish, marriages end violently, nights are split with endless, desperate screams, and horribly mutilated corpses are found. Soon Ripley becomes caught up in an accelerating maelstrom of sex, drugs, violence, and ghastly, unimaginable rites . . . and begins to see the beauty of life.

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From its profoundly unsettling first pages, Eric C. Higgs's The Happy Man (1985) reveals the nightmare underside of the American dream and brilliantly echoes the Gothic horror tradition of Edgar Allan Poe and Roald Dahl. This new edition features an introduction by the author.

CURATOR'S NOTE

Revived from the much-beloved era of "Paperbacks from Hell," this wry narrative of art, affluence, sadism, and murder opens a darkly satirical window on the American Dream. – Mike Allen

 

REVIEWS

  • "[A] macabre little gem ... The juxtaposition of horror with such California artifacts as Jacuzzis and Levelors is very effective in this promising debut."

    – Publishers Weekly

  • "De Sade himself wrote nothing quite so horrible as this."

    – Los Angeles Times

  • "The Happy Man is an essential '80s horror read: smart, sharp, unforgiving, unlike anything else in the genre."

    – Too Much Horror Fiction
 

BOOK PREVIEW

Excerpt

One

The Marshes rotted in their house two full days before they were discovered by a deliveryman from Sparklett's.

He had been giving the doorbell its third and final buzz when he noticed a certain odor. As he would later tell a reporter, it was a smell he had become acquainted with in Vietnam. He put the plastic jug down and went around back, looking for a way to get in. At the rear of the house, facing the Jacuzzi deck, the big sliding glass door was wide open. The smell was so strong he had to clap a hand to his mouth.

He lost his breakfast shortly thereafter, although he neglected to mention this to the reporter. But I saw it happen. I saw him stagger backward until he fell from the Jacuzzi deck and into the bushes, which is where he gasped and retched. I observed the scene from my breakfast nook, masked by the partially open Levolors.

By late afternoon the property was roped off. Two police cars were parked out front, light bars pulsing with yellow warning beacons, amplified radios squawking loud enough to be heard two blocks away. A beige panel truck was backed into the driveway, the black lettering on the door of which read coroner. A brightly painted Action News van had its side doors swung open, and I could see a technician inside adjusting a knob underneath some kind of oscilloscope. The van's double-pronged trans­mitter was ratcheted to the limit of its telescopic pole, pointing back toward town.

A dozen or so neighbors were gathered around the spectacle, whispering to each other, shaking their heads, passing the latest rumor. Housewives mostly, but also a few men and a scattering of some quiet, solemn children. Everyone was there who had a reason to be home at this hour of the afternoon.

Except, of course, for me. I chose to stay inside, even though the Marsh house was right next door.

I watched a young woman in a business suit talking with a wide-shouldered cop. Next to her a slender guy in jeans chewed gum impassively, a Minicam casually balanced on his shoulder. The deliveryman stood in the background, a pained expression on his handsome, weather-beaten face. The cop walked away from the woman, shaking his head in what looked like an obvious "no comment." The young woman looked at her watch and said something to the cameraman. He swung the lens down and squinted into the eyepiece. She straightened her shoulders and brought the microphone to chin level.

I looked at the little portable on the breakfast counter, which was tuned to the same channel. The gray-haired anchorman said it was time to go to a live remote from Mesa Vista Estates, and then the girl was on—looking, I thought, a little plumper than in real life. She scowled like a Methodist deacon as she gave a brief rundown on what she knew about the murders, which was just about nothing, and as she spoke she slowly eased her way toward the deliveryman. When he was finally in the camera's field of view, she thrust the microphone at him so abruptly he recoiled. The name patch on his workshirt read Pete.

I took another sip from the half-full tumbler of bourbon, grimacing at the taste.

". . . then I called the police soon as I could," the deliveryman was saying. "Let me tell you, once you smell something like that you don't ever forget it. Back in 'Nam, me and this corporal had to go down this tunnel we fragged 'cause you always had to count the VC bodies, and lady, that is just about the way it smelled back of these poor folks' house. . . ."

Then something interesting happened, a bit of providence I imagine cameramen pray for. The first of the covered stretchers came out, and the picture on the little television wobbled as he cut away from the deliveryman and hurried over. Just as he panned down for a close shot, the corpse's arm slipped from underneath the white sheet.

The stretcher bearers must have been flustered, for rather than stopping to tidy things up they started a mad little dash for their truck, anxious to get away from the cameraman. The television showed the hand dragging along the grass, utterly slack, skittering as the knuckles caught and bounced across the carefully tended lawn.