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

Egbert showed up six months later living in Louisiana under an assumed name, but by then Dear’s colorful version of events had taken hold and two relevant books were already on their way to market. The first was from Rona Jaffe, the extremely famous author who, back in 1958, had published the proto–Sex and the City best seller The Best of Everything. Her subsequent Mazes and Monsters (1981), released in the wake of the Egbert scandal, was a book about RPGs written by an author who knew nothing about them—and cared even less.

Jaffe did mint two conventions that became staples of RPG panic books. The first was that each player turns to RPGs because something is broken inside them (usually, divorced parents are to blame). The other is that the games are deeply silly. (“Kate was Glacia, the fighter, Jay Jay was Freelik the Frenetic of Glossamir, a Sprite, and Robbie was Pardieu, a Holy Man.”) Mazes and Monsters is best remembered today for its TV movie adaptation, which aired in 1982 and featured Tom Hanks in his first leading role, as Pardieu the Holy Man, freaking out on the streets of New York before trying to jump off the World Trade Center.

Will a D&D-type game make a high school student more popular, or more murdery? The answer won’t surprise you. Credit 58

It’s an unwritten rule that if you’re going to make a quick buck off a young person’s alleged suicide attempt, you should at least be entertaining. Jaffe broke that rule, but John Coyne would not repeat her mistake with his Hobgoblin (1981).

Protagonist Scott Gardiner is exactly the kind of kid Jaffe warned us was vulnerable to RPGs’ lurid lure: brilliant, creative, socially awkward, and with a dead dad. He’s also into a truly terrible RPG called Hobgoblin that may be only slightly less ridiculous than Mazes and Monsters. In a deeply unrealistic touch, Scott became wildly popular after introducing this RPG to Spencertown, his fancy boarding school. But as the story begins, he’s not popular anymore. After his dad died (while Scott was playing Hobgoblin, of course) he was sent to public school, where his skill as the 25th level paladin, Brian Boru, makes him not an object of admiration, but a creep.

After ambling along like a slow-moving character study for eighteen chapters, the book delivers a gibbering, blood-drenched climax at the school’s Halloween dance as almost every secondary character is gruesomely slaughtered. In a brief epilogue, Scott decides that murdering a man makes him a grown-up and he no longer needs to play Hobgoblin. Ironically, while Jaffe and Coyne posited RPGs as an escape from reality, they’re the ones running from the truth, fabricating a fear of games that hadn’t harmed anybody, based on false information about a missing person case. Who’s the hobgoblin now?

Credit 59

In the early ’70s, being killed by Satan or his spawn seemed a lot less likely than being killed by some corner-cutting, penny-pinching, midlevel employee at a giant corporation. In 1967, the captain of the oil tanker Torrey Canyon took a short cut on his way to Wales and hit Pollard’s Rock, 15 miles off the coast of Cornwall, spilling 25 million gallons of crude oil and unleashing a lethal 270-square-mile slick. In 1969, a blowout on Union Oil’s Platform A off the coast of California coated 30 miles of shoreline with black sludge. Ohio’s Cuyahoga River was so polluted with industrial runoff that it burst into flames. The toxic water of Lake Erie was devoid of life.

Suddenly, everyone noticed we were destroying the planet, and so in 1970 the Environmental Protection Agency was created, the same year the first Earth Day was held and Greenpeace was founded. The Clean Air Act of 1970 was followed by the Clean Water Act in 1972, and then the Endangered Species Act in 1973. It was clear that nature needed to be protected from us. But who would protect us from nature?

H. G. Wells had written about vast armies of ants eating Brazilians in 1905, and Daphne du Maurier and Alfred Hitchcock had introduced audiences to death from the skies in The Birds (1963), but 1974 was pop culture’s Year of the Animal. First came Jaws by Peter Benchley, a novel about a stressed-out great white shark suffering from portion control issues. It sank its teeth into the New York Times Best-Seller List and hung on for an astonishing forty-five weeks. In the summer of 1975, Steven Spielberg’s big-screen adaptation became an Exorcist-sized blockbuster, ensuring that a generation of children would be so terrified of sharks, they’d fish them into near extinction over the next three decades.