Paperbacks from Hell [N.F. - Literature, Art]

Real-world Vatican infighting always makes for a good plot. Whitley Streiber’s The Night Church depicts a Catholic Church split between a secret cult of Cathars, who are breeding the anti-man to wipe Homo sapiens off the map, and the last surviving vestiges of the Inquisition, who use gruesome blowtorch torture to snuff out the Cathars before their mind-controlled subjects can hump mankind into extinction.

Horror stalwart James Herbert took the Roman Catholic Church to task in Shrine: a mute child performs miracles and, before you know it, the holy fathers are ignoring scary nuns, ghosts, and animated statues of the Virgin Mary and instead falling all over themselves to capture the media spotlight. Here the Church is less concerned with helping the poor than with recruiting new congregants to fill its empty pews. Which means the clergy are caught completely off guard when the little girl turns out to be possessed not by the Holy Spirit but by yet another ghost of yet another murdered English witch. It’s a theological failure that can only be resolved when an army of zombies claw their way out of the grave during a televised healing session and murder pretty much everyone on live TV.

In 1978, after the thirty-three-day reign of Pope John Paul I, the Catholic Church elected its first non-Italian pope in four hundred years. Pope John Paul II became an instant international celebrity, drawing crowds wherever he went. The fascination with priest sex met the adoration of JP2 in Dark Angel, 1982’s overheated hothouse of a novel that tells the story of how the Pope was stalked by a flesh-hungry succubus and how one lone wolf Irish American priest risked everything to slake the she-demon’s insatiable thirst for man flesh and save John Paul’s celibacy.

Joe O’Meara, a tough Irish kid born to Pennsylvania steelworkers, became a college football star known as “the Wolf” before attending seminary in Boston. Now he functions as valet and bodyguard to Cardinal Ricci, the Pope’s right-hand man, who gets humped to death by a succubus in Vatican City. Whoops.

Full of thick-blooming flowers and ripe nightmares wherein hugely pregnant nuns give birth to clawed monsters with the face of Cardinal Ricci, Dark Angel exists in a state of maximum hysteria. As for the succubus, Angela Tansa, she drives Porsches and must have sex every seven days in order to stay alive. Her latest Romeo is a Eurotrash aristocrat who says things like, “I want to fuck that fatness out of you!” as Angela gorges on artichokes and Mexican food…because she’s carrying Cardinal Ricci’s baby!

This is the kind of book in which a priest resists fleshy temptation by jamming a nail through his hand, people vomit their souls into toilets, and succubuses ooze black breast milk. And when Joe discovers that the succubus can be destroyed only if she’s decapitated at the moment of orgasm, you know this book is about to go so far over the top it achieves orbit.

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Catholic priests looked so good on covers, it didn’t matter what was inside. William Peter Blatty’s Exorcist sequels, The Ninth Configuration and Legion, were Catholic enough, and Unholy Communion was about a priest who becomes a horny werewolf. But Dagon was a Southern Gothic by way of H. P. Lovecraft. Credit 23

JIM THIESEN

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Jim Thiesen is famous for his fully painted, beautifully textured book covers for such authors as Brian Lumley and Chelsea Quinn Yarbro. He’s also known for his work on Doubleday’s reprints of Stephen King’s first four novels and his iconic H. R. Giger–inspired cover for Richard Matheson’s I Am Legend (which Tor cropped, digitally blurred, and altered, much to Thiesen’s dismay). But nothing can alter the power of his cover for The Gilgul, which is based on a monstrous head he sculpted, lit, and photographed himself. There’s nothing else like it in horror paperbacks, and it is truly a staggering work of heart-breaking horror genius.

One from Golem A, One from Golem B

Catholics weren’t hogging all the horrific fun. Jewish horror is a small but strong subset of the paperback horror boom. In fact, this tiny ethnic enclave punches above its weight and includes one of the best covers of the decade, as well as one of the best books in the whole boom. Even F. Paul Wilson’s The Keep got the big-budget Michael Mann Hollywood movie treatment. But it was Henry Hocherman’s The Gilgul that ruled bookstore shelves, thanks to its amazing cover.