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

George was Kathy Connors’s second husband, and he made it clear he would not invest his time and money in children who didn’t belong to him. George demanded that Kathy’s first husband surrender all parental rights; from then on, he insisted that Daniel and his two siblings call him either “sir” or “Mr. Lutz.” As Daniel said in the documentary, “He’s the biggest asshole you ever could meet.”

Don’t sign the lease! Witch House was a 1945 occult detective novel spruced up for a seller’s market with a new cover by fantasy illustrator Michael Herring. T. M. Wright’s The Woman Next Door was an early standalone novel for the author that deliberately mixed hauntings, ghosts, and child abuse. Walls of Fear was a 1990 haunted house anthology, with a nightmarish cover by rock ’n’ roll artist Jim Warren, edited by Kathryn Cramer, who also edited the 1987 haunted house anthology The Architecture of Fear. Credit 85

Credit 86

Throughout the books, George and Kathy Lutz claim that the Entity changed their personalities and made them violently aggressive toward their children. But Daniel says that happened plenty of times before they moved in and plenty of times after they moved out. In fact, what happened after they fled was worse. While George and Kathy went on their year-long, round-the-world publicity tour for the movie, Daniel was ditched at a Catholic boarding school, where he claims the priests beat him and tried to exorcize his demons. He was eleven. By his account, those 28 days at 112 Ocean Avenue left him with physical and mental damage from which it took years to recover.

Maybe George, Kathy, and their lawyer concocted the haunting story over a bottle of wine, as the lawyer later claimed, but their children didn’t. If every haunted house is built on the site of a terrible crime, the crime that The Amityville Horror rests on may be child abuse.

Small Town Trauma

You are a Vietnam veteran. You are 6 foot 4, 230 pounds of solid muscle. You can kill a man with your bare hands; you prefer not to. You are driving back to the small town where you grew up, somewhere in the South. Once there, you notice something strange: everyone in town is a sex pervert and a satanist. You reunite with your high school sweetheart. She is a zombie; it takes you a while to figure that out. You are attacked by a dark force. You sing hymns to keep it at bay. You kill a lot of satanists. You kill monsters. You kill some teenagers.

Credit 87

You are in a William W. Johnstone novel.

Johnstone wrote two hundred books, most of them Westerns and men’s adventure stories. But with his five-part Devil series (1980–92) written for Zebra Books (The Devil’s Kiss, The Devil’s Heart, The Devil’s Touch, The Devil’s Cat, The Devil’s Laughter), Johnstone became a horror novelist. And every one of his horror novels is insane. Characters act in ways that barely resemble human behavior. The carnage flies thick and cartoony, with popped-out eyeballs flying across a room, people’s heads flattening when hit, cats gamboling in loops of human intestines. Johnstone loads his shotgun with tropes—incest monsters, zombie girlfriends, ghost werewolves, killer dolls—and blasts them at the reader again and again until nothing makes sense anymore.

If you’re in a William W. Johnstone book, don’t pet the kitties and don’t play with the toys. Credit 88

In The Nursery (1985), a small town in Louisiana has been taken over by the “Prince of Foulness, Lord of Darkness,” and his friend “the Master on Earth of All Things Dark and Ugly and Evil and Profane.” The cops have been bought off by Satan and are given to ending conversations with statements like, “I’d lick her ass just to see the little puckered hole. Bye, now.” Satanic covens spread their message via heavy-metal music that teaches “self-mutilation, assault, suicide, drugs, murder, sex; anti-establishment and anti-social rebellion against parents, society, education, and law and order.” Sometimes a firm spanking is enough to drive the Devil out of a teenager, but usually they have to be shot in the face. Dogs are good and often form armies to assist humans fighting Satan, whereas cats can go either way.