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

The books I love were published during the horror paperback boom that started in the late ’60s, after Rosemary’s Baby hit the big time. Their reign of terror ended in the early ’90s, after the success of Silence of the Lambs convinced marketing departments to scrape the word horror off spines and glue on the word thriller instead. Like The Little People, these books had their flaws, but they offered such wonders. When’s the last time you read about Jewish monster brides, sex witches from the fourth dimension, flesh-eating moths, homicidal mimes, or golems stalking Long Island? Divorced from current trends in publishing, these out-of-print paperbacks feel like a breath of fresh air. Get ready to meet some of my new favorite writers: Elizabeth Engstrom. Joan Samson. Bari Wood. The Lovecraftian apocalypse of Brian McNaughton. The deeply strange alternate universe of William W. Johnstone. Brenda Brown Canary, whose The Voice of the Clown is one of the few books to actually make my jaw drop. You’ll hear the dark whisperings of Ken Greenhall, the gothic Southern twang of Michael McDowell, the clipped British accent of James Herbert, the visionary chants of Kathe Koja, and the clinical drone of Michael Blumlein.

The book you’re holding is a road map to the horror Narnia I found hidden in the darkest recesses of remote bookstores—a weird, wild, wonderful world that feels totally alien today, and not just because of the trainloads of killer clowns. In these books from the ’70s and ’80s, doctors swap smokes with patients while going over their ultrasounds, housewives are diagnosed as having “too much imagination,” African Americans are sometimes called “negroes,” and parents swoon in terror at the suggestion that they have a “test tube baby.”

These books, written to be sold in drugstores and supermarkets, weren’t worried about causing offense and possess a jocular, straightforward, “let’s get it on” attitude toward sex. Many were published before the AIDS epidemic, at the height of the Swinging ’70s, and they’re unapologetic about the idea that adults don’t need much of an excuse to take off their clothes and hop into bed.

Though they may be consigned to dusty dollar boxes, these stories are timeless in the way that truly matters: they will not bore you. Thrown into the rough-and-tumble marketplace, the writers learned they had to earn every reader’s attention. And so they delivered books that move, hit hard, take risks, go for broke. It’s not just the covers that hook your eyeballs. It’s the writing, which respects no rules except one: always be interesting.

So grab a flashlight and come wander down these dark aisles. The shelves are dusty, the lighting is dim, and there’s no guarantee you’ll come back unchanged or come back at all. All you need is a map and you’re ready to take a tour of the paperbacks from hell.

PROLOGUE

To appreciate the transformation that overtook horror fiction in the 1970s and ’80s, let’s consider the state of the genre a decade earlier.

More than any other genre, horror fiction is a product of its time, and the ’60s were a runaway train, smashing through every social value, cultural construct, and national myth at 500 m.p.h., leaving smoking rubble in its wake. The United States officially entered the Vietnam War. A wave of assassinations killed President John F. Kennedy, Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X, and Robert F. Kennedy. Riots sparked by police brutality broke out in Detroit, Harlem, Rochester, and Philadelphia. More riots shook D.C., Chicago, Omaha, Minneapolis, and Baltimore. Buddhist monks set themselves on fire to protest the war; civil rights activists were dragged off buses and beaten; police dogs, tear gas, and fire hoses were turned on peaceful protestors; bombs killed children in churches while the corpses of civil rights workers were hauled out of the Mississippi mud. Birth control pills hit the market, the Vatican liberalized the Catholic Church, the New Pentecostal movement sparked outbreaks of glossolalia (speaking in tongues) in Ivy League colleges all over the Northeast. And a belief that we were living in the End Times spread across America almost as fast as Hugh Hefner was opening Playboy Clubs.

Horror movies responded with polite vampires in velvet capes. Mainstream movies were being mutated by the French New Wave and Akira Kurosawa’s samurai spirit, while biker flicks flipped the bird at square society. Horror movies continued their zomboid shuffle, unaffected by the culture around them. Hammer Films offered dusty vampires shrouded in murky mist, and William Castle’s hokey dime-store gimmicks were aimed squarely at kids. On TV, The Munsters and The Addams Family plodded through their paces to a mechanized laugh track, while the middle-aged vampires of Dark Shadows stalked cardboard sets.