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

The torture gets worse, and it ends exactly where you’re dreading it will, but the sleaziness one would expect isn’t there. Instead, the conclusion is suffused with an existential grief. Why the kids do this, no one knows. The closest we come to an answer is when Dianne screams at Barbara, “Somebody has to win, and somebody has to lose.” Barbara demands to know what game they’re playing. “The one everyone plays…The game of who wins the game,” Diane answers.

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A completely nihilistic vision of the world, Let’s Go Play at the Adams’ doesn’t deny the possibility of goodness, or beauty, or grace. It merely points out that those are the things we kill first. As Johnson writes in his final, lyrical chapter: “Goodness, go out of the world.”

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Attack of the Killer WASPs

In horror fiction, every culture has its own supernatural menace. African Americans get voodoo. The Chinese get fox spirits. And WASPs (white Anglo-Saxon Protestants) get the all-American boy sporting a varsity letter jacket and blinding-white smile that mask the howling maniac on the inside.

Living in exclusive Connecticut neighborhoods or affluent New Orleans suburbs, these families have names like Stuyvesant and Scarborough. The fathers are successful doctors, lawyers, and insurance brokers; the mothers run fashionable boutiques or, preferably, don’t work at all. The children attend only the best schools. They love to ski, and their problems are handled by therapists with German accents and names like Dr. Reisenkönig.

Like a Shane Black movie, it’s always Christmas in these books. Even Halo, which climaxes at graduation, saves its most sadistic set piece for Christmas vacation. Credit 47

Everything is perfect, everyone is privileged, and every single son is hopelessly insane. Such Nice People (1981) and The Sibling (1979) unfold over that holiest of WASP holidays, Christmas, its silly seasonal anxieties contrasted with sheer horror. In Such Nice People, one son sobs helplessly in the toolshed as his imaginary God, SOLA, screams that he must steal a gun and shoot his family. In The Sibling, another son disappears into a fantasy world where he must steal pieces of cadavers from a morgue and leave them as love offerings for his little sister.

Halo (1987) takes us into a Reagan-era nightmare set in New Orleans, as quarterback, senior, and class valedictorian Billy Halo writes a motivational to-do list that morphs from “Study hard, get a Porsche, go to Stanford” to “Kill my English teacher, kill my ex-girlfriend, go to Stanford,” his charming grin hardening into a death’s-head rictus.

What happened? Such Nice People blames mental illness. The Sibling blames sibling rivalry. Halo blames Billy’s parents for being oblivious and withholding. These families are all so committed to everything being perfect that they look the other way while their sons murder neighborhood pets, develop Nazi fetishes, and curb-stomp weaker kids. By the time they can no longer ignore the monster in the house, it’s too late.

The Whisperer in the Darkness

Subtlety and understatement are not words normally associated with a genre whose covers feature skeleton cheerleaders and hog-tied babysitters, but those qualities are the hallmarks of the six books written by Ken Greenhall (including two under the pseudonym Jessica Hamilton). His characters sit down across from you and tell their stories in measured, reasonable tones. Greenhall writes about animal attacks, witchcraft, serial killers, human sacrifice—and of course, homicidal children—without ever raising his voice.

“When I was younger I saw James, my father’s brother, look from our dog to me without changing his expression. I soon taught him to look at me in a way he looked at nothing else.” So begins Elizabeth (1976). Elizabeth’s voice is calm and sophisticated, winding its way around the events of the book as sinuously as a snake. The fourteen-year-old explains how she murdered her parents with witchcraft and started an affair with her uncle, thanks to the assistance of Frances, a long-dead relative and witch executed in the sixteenth century who appears to Elizabeth through mirrors. Or maybe she doesn’t. Maybe Elizabeth’s parents drowned in a storm. Maybe Elizabeth is insane.

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Ken Greenhall’s books were quieter than his covers…and more disturbing. Credit 49