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

Born to British immigrants in Detroit in 1928, Greenhall graduated from high school at age 15. After serving in the army he moved to New York City, where he lived for the rest of his life, editing encyclopedias. He wrote Elizabeth out of the blue, just to see if he could (he also taught himself to play the piano and harpsichord), using his mother’s maiden name as a pseudonym. Elizabeth landed him an agent but he never felt like part of the New York publishing scene. He was appalled by the cover Zebra Books gave Hell Hound (1977), but he was desperate—no other publisher would touch the book. He wrote Childgrave (1982) next, trying to deliver a novel that contained slightly more human sympathy, but it still came out dark. Its secrets are best kept safe, for it revolves around the idea that, as one character notes, “Maybe God is not civilized.”

Greenhall’s next book, The Companion (1988), was told from the point of view of an angel of death working for, and occasionally murdering, the elderly. Then came Death Chain (1991), about a cognac salesman surrounded by murder. At some point, Greenhall’s agent vanished, but when the author went looking for new representation, everyone told him he was too old. Undefeated, he went home, sat down, and wrote Lenoir (1998), an elegant historical novel about the black man who posed for Rubens’s Four Studies of the Head of a Negro. The book was Greenhall’s favorite, and his ability to flawlessly evoke the voice of an abducted African slave stranded in seventeenth-century Amsterdam is nothing short of astonishing. But a patronizing review in the New York Times broke his heart and he never wrote again. He passed away in 2014.

Greenhall is gone, but his characters—Elizabeth, Baxter, Lenoir—go on talking. They sit across from us, chatting calmly, explaining the madness that infects their lives, and eventually it begins to infect our lives, too. We only have to listen.

Toys ’R’ Death

If the house you just moved into has a basement stuffed with old mannequins, run. If it has a “toy room” filled with clown puppets, run faster. Because the only things scarier than children are their toys. In Keeper of the Children (1978), a stuffed Smokey the Bear lays waste to an entire house with its ax, a witch marionette uses part of a bannister as a club, a department store mannequin shows up at the front door holding a golf club, and a superstrong scarecrow comes to kill, leaving “little broomstick footprints” in its wake. Eventually the family dog hurls himself out the second-story window, preferring the sweet release of death to this toybox of terror.

Automatonophobia is the name smug people who’ve never been chased by witch marionettes give to the irrational fear of inanimate objects that resemble human beings: puppets, robots, mannequins, dolls. But can it be called an irrational fear if dolls can actually kill you? And are in fact eager to do so? From Ghost Child (1982) by Duffy Stein:

Marionettes surged forward from their pegs along the wall, as if a spring released them, alive, demonic, an army at war, their faces screaming masks. Their cloth bodies swarmed against the girls, covered their noses, their mouths. Their manipulating wires wrapped snake-like around the girls’ necks, pulled taut, tore tender skin, severed arteries, closed off windpipes, and strangled and mutilated their defenseless victims.

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Dead White’s experimental cover caused a stir—and cleverly concealed its cackling horde of killer clowns. Credit 51

Clown marionettes are bad, but real clowns are worse. Since time immemorial, humankind’s greatest natural predator has been the clown. Stephen King terrified readers with Pennywise in It (1986), but that was centuries after most mammals had learned to flee in terror at the sound of floppy shoes.

Our murderous mountebanks arrive courtesy of the anarchic Harlequin in sixteenth-century commedia dell’arte, followed by the seventeenth-century’s insanely violent Punch and Judy puppet shows. The first white-faced, full-makeup-wearing clowns appeared in the nineteenth century. In England it was Joseph Grimaldi, a horribly abused child who became a clown, then retired at age 45 when his tortured joints crumbled to dust. His son, also a clown, drank himself to death at age 30. France’s first clown, Jean-Gaspard Deburau, once beat a child to death in the street (he was acquitted).