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Devil Girls
Hopped-up and strung out, pumped full of hate and sticky with delinquent desires, they cruise the red-light gutters of Nowheresville, USA in a desperate search for Kicks—the slash of the switchblade—the prick of the needle—sick sex-orgies—neon-lit joyrides down the Highway to Hell. Juvenile junkies… hot rod tramps… teenage killers with the morals of sewer rats… in the sordid and deprived world of the Devil Girls, the law is for squares and decency the only obscenity.
191 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1967
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About the author
Ed Wood
70 books49 followersEdward Davis Wood, Jr. (October 10, 1924 – December 10, 1978) was an American screenwriter, director, producer, actor, author, and editor (often performing many of these functions simultaneously). In the 1950s, Wood made a run of independently produced, extremely low-budget horror, science fiction, and cowboy films, now celebrated for their technical errors, unsophisticated special effects, idiosyncratic dialogue, eccentric casts, and outlandish plot elements, although his flair for showmanship gave his productions at least a modicum of commercial success.
Wood's popularity waned soon after his biggest "name" star, Béla Lugosi, died. He was able to salvage a saleable feature from Lugosi's last moments on film, but his career declined thereafter. Toward the end of his life, Wood made pornographic movies and wrote pulp crime, horror, and sex novels. His posthumous fame began two years after his death, when he was awarded a Golden Turkey Award as Worst Director of All Time.[1] The lack of conventional filmmaking ability in his work has earned Wood and his films a considerable cult following.
Following the publication of Rudolph Grey's biography Nightmare of Ecstasy, Wood's life and work have undergone a public rehabilitation, with new light shed on his evident zeal and honest love of movies and movie production, and Tim Burton's biopic, Ed Wood, earned two Academy Awards.
From the 1950s onward, Wood supplemented his directing and screenwriting income with hastily written pulp fiction, including innumerable pulp crime, horror, and sex novels and occasional non-fiction pieces. As he became increasingly unable to fund film projects, the novels seem to have become Wood's primary source of income.
Wood's novels frequently include transvestite or drag queen characters, or entire plots centering around transvestism (including his angora fetish), and tap into his love of crime fiction and the occult. Wood would often recycle plots of his films for novels, write novelizations of his own screenplays, or reuse elements from his novels in scripts. His first novel, Black Lace Drag was published in 1963 and reissued in 1965 as Killer in Drag. Among his other books are Orgy of The Dead (1965), Devil Girls (1967), Death of a Transvestite (1967), The Sexecutives (1968), and A Study of Fetishes and Fantasies (1973).
Descriptions of Wood's working methods in Nightmare of Ecstasy indicate he would work on a dozen projects at once, simultaneously watching television, eating, drinking, and carrying on conversations while typing. In his quasi-memoir, Hollywood Rat Race, Wood advises new writers to "just keep on writing. Even if your story gets worse, you'll get better."
As Wood's most famous films of the 1950s are not explicitly sexual or violent, the outré content of his novels may shock the unprepared reader. Wood's dark side emerges in such sexual shockers as Raped in the Grass or The Perverts and in short stories such as Toni: Black Tigress, which exploit hot-button topics like violence, rape, racial issues, juvenile delinquency, and drug culture.
Some of Wood's books remained unpublished during his lifetime. Hollywood Rat Race, for example, was written in 1965 and finally released in 1998. The nonfiction book is part primer for young actors and filmmakers, and part memoir. In Rat Race, Wood recounts tales of dubious authenticity, such as how he and Lugosi entered the world of nightclub cabaret.
Wood's popularity waned soon after his biggest "name" star, Béla Lugosi, died. He was able to salvage a saleable feature from Lugosi's last moments on film, but his career declined thereafter. Toward the end of his life, Wood made pornographic movies and wrote pulp crime, horror, and sex novels. His posthumous fame began two years after his death, when he was awarded a Golden Turkey Award as Worst Director of All Time.[1] The lack of conventional filmmaking ability in his work has earned Wood and his films a considerable cult following.
Following the publication of Rudolph Grey's biography Nightmare of Ecstasy, Wood's life and work have undergone a public rehabilitation, with new light shed on his evident zeal and honest love of movies and movie production, and Tim Burton's biopic, Ed Wood, earned two Academy Awards.
From the 1950s onward, Wood supplemented his directing and screenwriting income with hastily written pulp fiction, including innumerable pulp crime, horror, and sex novels and occasional non-fiction pieces. As he became increasingly unable to fund film projects, the novels seem to have become Wood's primary source of income.
Wood's novels frequently include transvestite or drag queen characters, or entire plots centering around transvestism (including his angora fetish), and tap into his love of crime fiction and the occult. Wood would often recycle plots of his films for novels, write novelizations of his own screenplays, or reuse elements from his novels in scripts. His first novel, Black Lace Drag was published in 1963 and reissued in 1965 as Killer in Drag. Among his other books are Orgy of The Dead (1965), Devil Girls (1967), Death of a Transvestite (1967), The Sexecutives (1968), and A Study of Fetishes and Fantasies (1973).
Descriptions of Wood's working methods in Nightmare of Ecstasy indicate he would work on a dozen projects at once, simultaneously watching television, eating, drinking, and carrying on conversations while typing. In his quasi-memoir, Hollywood Rat Race, Wood advises new writers to "just keep on writing. Even if your story gets worse, you'll get better."
As Wood's most famous films of the 1950s are not explicitly sexual or violent, the outré content of his novels may shock the unprepared reader. Wood's dark side emerges in such sexual shockers as Raped in the Grass or The Perverts and in short stories such as Toni: Black Tigress, which exploit hot-button topics like violence, rape, racial issues, juvenile delinquency, and drug culture.
Some of Wood's books remained unpublished during his lifetime. Hollywood Rat Race, for example, was written in 1965 and finally released in 1998. The nonfiction book is part primer for young actors and filmmakers, and part memoir. In Rat Race, Wood recounts tales of dubious authenticity, such as how he and Lugosi entered the world of nightclub cabaret.
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Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews
November 14, 2012
Ed Wood Jr was a film-maker of legendary status, notorious for being often voted (quite unfairly) as the worst film-maker of all time, the man responsible for such schlock classics as Plan 9 from Outer Space. What is less well-known is that he was also a prolific novelist.
His novels were lurid pulpy shockers and were regarded at the time as being pornographic (although such a description seems absurd today).
Devil Girls was published in 1967, and lurid it most certainly is. The front cover assures us that it is a tale of “Hot Rod Harlots on the Highway to Hell” and the description is entirely accurate.
A small town in Texas, on the Gulf of Mexico, has a major problem with juvenile delinquents (always a favourite subject for Wood who wrote the screenplay for the delightfully outrageous juvenile delinquent movie The Violent Years). In particular, the town is menaced by a girl gang known as the Chicks. This gang is involved in an uneasy partnership with an equally unpleasant gang of young males.
A teacher at the local school has been brutally murdered, and these teenage tearaways are the prime suspects. Both the male and female juvenile delinquents are dopers. Not just marijuana, which would be bad enough, but many are also hooked on heroin or on the even more dangerous combination of heroin and cocaine. The Chicks have been recruited by a local drug dealer to act as drug couriers. This dealer, an objectionable individual known as Lark, brings the drugs in by boat but he needs the girls to carry the drugs from the boat to the dockside. His plan is that the girls will conceal the drugs about their persons, mostly in their bras.
And here we find one of the many touches that mark this book as unmistakably the work of Ed Wood - an interest in female undergarments that is both keen and slightly odd. There will be plenty of other such touches.
Battling these youthful miscreants is the overworked but indefatigable Sheriff Buck Rhodes, ably assisted in his crusade against youth crime by the handsome and dedicated young Reverend Steele. The sheriff will have to find a way to stop a major drug shipment from coming ashore and he has few leads to work with.
The leader of the Chicks is Dee, but as her heroin habit grows her control over the gang is starting to slip. She has even bigger problems when the former leader of the Chicks, Lila, breaks out of prison and returns to town, seeking vengeance on those she considers to be responsible for her misfortunes (which means pretty much the whole population of the town but especially her mother). Lila is doing a life sentence for a murder rap. Lila’s kid sister Rhoda is one of the Chicks.
The book is rather like Ed Wood’s movies - it’s both incompetent and entertaining. Although it has to be said that by the standards of pulp fiction it’s by no means as badly written as you might expect. It has a coherent plot and some memorable characters. It builds to a reasonably exciting climax. And it has a deliciously sleazy atmosphere.
Wood’s unconventional sexual tastes are certainly on full display. There is of course a concern for women’s clothing - none of the girls is ever described as simply taking off her sweater. The sweater is lovingly described, especially if it is a pink angora sweater (one of Ed’s favourite garments). There is also a rather disturbing interest in bodily functions.
If you’re a fan of Ed Wood’s movies (and I can’t imagine any right-thinking person not being a fan of his movies) then it’s certainly worth checking out his literary output as well, even if it’s only for their curiosity value and the light they shed on this distinctive icon of American pop culture.
His novels were lurid pulpy shockers and were regarded at the time as being pornographic (although such a description seems absurd today).
Devil Girls was published in 1967, and lurid it most certainly is. The front cover assures us that it is a tale of “Hot Rod Harlots on the Highway to Hell” and the description is entirely accurate.
A small town in Texas, on the Gulf of Mexico, has a major problem with juvenile delinquents (always a favourite subject for Wood who wrote the screenplay for the delightfully outrageous juvenile delinquent movie The Violent Years). In particular, the town is menaced by a girl gang known as the Chicks. This gang is involved in an uneasy partnership with an equally unpleasant gang of young males.
A teacher at the local school has been brutally murdered, and these teenage tearaways are the prime suspects. Both the male and female juvenile delinquents are dopers. Not just marijuana, which would be bad enough, but many are also hooked on heroin or on the even more dangerous combination of heroin and cocaine. The Chicks have been recruited by a local drug dealer to act as drug couriers. This dealer, an objectionable individual known as Lark, brings the drugs in by boat but he needs the girls to carry the drugs from the boat to the dockside. His plan is that the girls will conceal the drugs about their persons, mostly in their bras.
And here we find one of the many touches that mark this book as unmistakably the work of Ed Wood - an interest in female undergarments that is both keen and slightly odd. There will be plenty of other such touches.
Battling these youthful miscreants is the overworked but indefatigable Sheriff Buck Rhodes, ably assisted in his crusade against youth crime by the handsome and dedicated young Reverend Steele. The sheriff will have to find a way to stop a major drug shipment from coming ashore and he has few leads to work with.
The leader of the Chicks is Dee, but as her heroin habit grows her control over the gang is starting to slip. She has even bigger problems when the former leader of the Chicks, Lila, breaks out of prison and returns to town, seeking vengeance on those she considers to be responsible for her misfortunes (which means pretty much the whole population of the town but especially her mother). Lila is doing a life sentence for a murder rap. Lila’s kid sister Rhoda is one of the Chicks.
The book is rather like Ed Wood’s movies - it’s both incompetent and entertaining. Although it has to be said that by the standards of pulp fiction it’s by no means as badly written as you might expect. It has a coherent plot and some memorable characters. It builds to a reasonably exciting climax. And it has a deliciously sleazy atmosphere.
Wood’s unconventional sexual tastes are certainly on full display. There is of course a concern for women’s clothing - none of the girls is ever described as simply taking off her sweater. The sweater is lovingly described, especially if it is a pink angora sweater (one of Ed’s favourite garments). There is also a rather disturbing interest in bodily functions.
If you’re a fan of Ed Wood’s movies (and I can’t imagine any right-thinking person not being a fan of his movies) then it’s certainly worth checking out his literary output as well, even if it’s only for their curiosity value and the light they shed on this distinctive icon of American pop culture.
April 30, 2018
There needs to be a rivial of Ed Wood's pulp novels the way there was for his films because without bad acting and cheap sets he knocks these noir crime tales out of the park! Come on HARD CASE CRIME! Find the missing Ed Wood Jr. pulps!
May 13, 2018
I'm not a Wood fanatic, but I do like certain books and movies that are so bad it's good. Ed Wood is high on that list of contributors. This was a lot more trashy than I would of thought. I couldn't help but laugh out loud. All the slang used here is so archaic, it's almost like it was wrote a hundred years ago.
This revolves around a girl gang called the Chicks. They are in deep with some drug traffickers bringing in "H" and "Mary Jane" from Mexico. Throw in a honest lawman trying to track the ring down. A reverend who wants to clean up his town. A burger joint owner and his giant Indian Chief friend. Don't forget all the juvenile delinquents and if you've seen any of Wood's movies like "The Violent Years" or "Sinister Urge", you know what you'll get.
This revolves around a girl gang called the Chicks. They are in deep with some drug traffickers bringing in "H" and "Mary Jane" from Mexico. Throw in a honest lawman trying to track the ring down. A reverend who wants to clean up his town. A burger joint owner and his giant Indian Chief friend. Don't forget all the juvenile delinquents and if you've seen any of Wood's movies like "The Violent Years" or "Sinister Urge", you know what you'll get.
May 2, 2013
Haven't read anything this indulgently pulpy in years. A quick fun one very firmly rooted in that genre, and unapologetically so.
August 21, 2015
Quite trashy and sleazy. Loved it!
December 4, 2019
Similar to his film The Violent Years, with all the fixation on sweaters, but also dope, grass and crude talk of the shitter.
April 26, 2010
Of the three Wood pulps I've read, this one is probably closest to the experience of watching one of his films. Continuity errors and all! Not quite as sleazy as "Death of a Transvestite" and not as, um, restrained (probably not the best word) as "Killer in Drag."
Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews