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

It sounds like a Brian McNaughton novel, but Smith claimed it was all true. To warn the world, she and Pazder wrote Michelle Remembers, a blockbuster memoir that helped spark America’s Satanic Panic in the 1980s. People who should have known better became convinced that Satan lurked under every heavy-metal album cover and operated day care centers across the country. Smith and Pazder left their respective spouses and married each other; they appeared on Oprah, went on a national book tour, popped up in People magazine, and shopped around a movie adaptation of their book, which was kept out of theaters thanks only to threats of a lawsuit from both the Church of Satan’s Anton LaVey and Smith’s father.

Michelle Remembers was a foundational text that brought recovered-memory syndrome and Satanic Ritual Abuse into the mainstream, updating for the ’80s lurid, turn-of-the-century conspiracy theories about white slavers running an international network of sin. The Satanic Panic posited a cradle-to-grave satanic network that indoctrinated children into sex and drug rings, using Saturday morning cartoons and He-Man action figures, with New Age occultists wielding crystals behind it all. Eighties America was ready for conspiracy theories, no matter how silly, and we’re about to meet a man named Russ Martin who had a few for sale.

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Could the demonic ordeal described by Michelle Smith possibly be real? (Spoiler alert: No.) Credit 30

Logically, Playboy Press published most of Martin’s kinky, cynical, psychosexual books. Credit 31

Russ Martin’s Conspiracy of Kink

Between 1978 and 1984, Russ Martin wrote seven books about the Satanic Organization, a global conspiracy dedicated to the Devil and run by the elite 0.01 percent who rule society and use mind control and body swapping to destroy their enemies. Rhea is an outlier: nothing more than the straightforward story of a cheating Hollywood executive, the witch who seduces him, and the wife who ends up impaled on Satan’s ice-cold, two-pronged penis.

After that, he stepped firmly into the new decade with The Desecration of Susan Browning. Susan and Marty are young actors in Los Angeles about to make it big when Marty saves a wealthy woman named Wanda Carmichael from being raped. Wanda is intrigued by this young stud, and soon Marty has disappeared, filed for divorce, and is living with Wanda on her fabulous estate. The Satanic Organization has made him Wanda’s love slave using an obsession spell. As he tells Susan, if Wanda asked him to kill his ex-wife, he’d do it in a heartbeat.

This was Satanic Panic fan fiction, updating the Michelle Remembers fever dream of a global satanic conspiracy to the yuppie-infested ’80s and giving it a kinky twist. In the next five books, Martin returns obsessively to certain themes: betrayal by authority, body swapping, mind control, and an ever-shifting power exchange as obsession spells bounced from character to character like pervy pinballs. Lisa Black, a minor character in Susan Browning, takes center stage in The Devil and Lisa Black. In The Possession of Jessica Young we meet Stephen Abbott, head honcho of the Satanic Organization, locked in a psychic war with Jessica Young, whose powerful abilities spell trouble for Satan. Abbot mind-controls Jessica’s sister, Jessica teams up with a cop to stage a rescue, the cop betrays Jessica, and then Jessica’s sister betrays Jessica, too.

And so it goes: betrayal bleeds into betrayal in an endless blur of sexualized dominance and submission. Nine-year-olds are trapped in adult bodies. Powerful women are turned into French maids. Psychic vampires from Hong Kong murder children in Washington, D.C. The final installment takes place at a military academy, which is also a secret base for swapping the minds of older Satanic Organization loyalists into the bodies of teenaged cadets. The only ones who can resist the mind control are virgins. Lest one think this is too kinky for mainstream publishing, know that when Playboy Press shut down in 1982, Tor instantly picked up the rest of Martin’s series.

Underneath all the pseudosexual silliness was the message that a decadent elite controlled everything. In Martin’s world, everyone was either a master or a slave. Satan was the force that made your dreams come true at the price of your soul. Satan was the cause of all corruption. Satan was the reason things never worked out. Resistance was futile. The game was rigged before you were ever born.

The horror of these books is that Satan always wins. Just look at the world. The evidence is everywhere.

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