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

Fictional clowns come with a body count. Edgar Allan Poe’s Hop-Frog (1849) was a dwarf forced to be a jester who burned eight courtiers to death. Pagliacci features opera’s most famous clown, a sad sack who stabs his cheating wife to death onstage. In the early 1980s, clown panics erupted in Boston, Omaha, and Pittsburgh when rumors circulated that clowns were luring children into white vans.

Clowns are part of the holy trinity of horror paperback iconography, along with skeletons and dolls, yet few books deliver death jesters. Some of horror fiction’s only blood-smeared Bozos appear in Alan Ryan’s Dead White (1983), the charming Christmas tale of killer clowns riding a circus train of death to a snowbound Catskills community. Obscured by veils of billowing snow, they stay offstage for the most part, appearing only a few times—but that’s enough. “The last things Evan Highland saw were the grinning, wide-eyed, red-lipped face of a clown and gigantic white hands that were reaching for his head.” And “The clown’s grin broadened at once into a merry smile. It tightened its grip on Sally’s neck, and then it began to twist her head to the side.” Too many more killer clowns than that and the book cover would need a warning label.

Sometimes a doll on the cover symbolizes possessiveness (Possession) or general creepiness (The Doll Castle, Dark Companions). But in The Surrogate, an actual doll gleefully strangles humans, and the ghost kid of Somebody Come and Play lures children to their doom with a playroom full of gendered toys: dollhouses and play kitchens for girls, action figures and toy cars for boys. And in Keeper of the Children, it’s not just a teddy bear with an axe, but also a witch marionette, a mannequin with a golf club, and a scarecrow that gleefully murder humans. Credit 52

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If all the knife-wielding kindergarten kids, psychic preschoolers, and homicidal high-school students from this chapter were in a school picture, The Voice of the Clown (1982) would be the snarling six-year-old standing slightly to the side, staring into the camera, clutching a clown doll. Her name is Laura, and she sees right through you. Whatever tricks you try to make her like you, she and her clown are ready.

Laura lives in Oklahoma with her daddy and his new family, and she’s had her clown doll ever since she was born. It’s one of those childhood security objects that just appears in the crib one day and sticks around. But there’s one problem: “Her clown hated her mother.”

Well, that isn’t very comforting. Laura’s mother killed herself long ago, and her father’s new wife fits right into the fairy-tale tradition of wicked stepmothers, although she doesn’t seem to have done anything bad enough to earn the ire of a clown. After Stepmom forces Laura to attend first grade (which ends badly), Laura and her clown declare full-scale war. They start with gaslighting, but when Stepmom gets pregnant and gives birth to what Laura describes as “the screaming mud-baby,” things go full psycho. You will have moments when you need to put this book down and walk away.

Later chapters involve some Native American woo-woo, but in the face of the carnage of the final pages, that’s a minor speed bump on the highway to hell. This book teaches us one thing about kids: you can’t live with ’em, you can’t kill ’em. But they sure can kill you.

Clown dolls (The Voice of the Clown) and ordinary dolls (The Kill) are the hardest working cover models in the horror paperback biz, along with skeletons. Credit 54

JILL BAUMAN

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When Jill Bauman painted the cover for Alan Ryan’s The Kill she took a doll into the woods, shooting it in as many different poses as possible before draping it over a wooden fence like a corpse. Refusing to depict dead bodies in her paintings, she’s since painted dozens, if not hundreds, of dolls on book covers ranging from Elizabeth Engstrom’s When Darkness Loves Us to Edmund Plante’s Garden of Evil.

A self-taught painter from Brooklyn, New York, and now living in Queens, Bauman was working as a studio assistant for the painter Walter Velez when he lost his agent. He made her a deal: if she represented his work, he would teach her how to paint. His only condition: she couldn’t show her portfolio to anyone for two years. She agreed and two years later she was ready to rock. One of her first covers was for Charles L. Grant’s A Glow of Candles. “It was my birthday,” she remembers. “I thought everybody forgot it, and I was doing this cover, and no one was calling, so I put the candle on top of [the doll’s] head. That was my birthday present to myself.”