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

Toy Cemetery (1987) achieves maximum Johnstone. Vietnam vet Jay Clute returns to Victory, Missouri, where he grew up, with nine-year-old daughter Kelly in tow. Within hours of his arrival, Jay discovers that the two major local landmarks are (1) an enormous doll factory in the center of town run by an obese pedophile named Bruno Dixon, who films satanic kiddie porn in it, and (2) a high-security hospital/mental institution/underground research facility that houses the “products of incest,” enormous man-monsters with apple-sized heads and superhuman strength. Tiny toys run amok, as does incest. Jay and his daughter almost hook up their first night, only to snap out of it when the crosses they’re wearing clink together.

Reading this book is like driving through a dust storm while in a post-concussion haze: the harder you try to focus, the more everything slips away into an insanity vortex. A supermarket check-out girl’s head explodes, but no one seems to mind. Possessed teenage boys follow Kelly through town, waggling their inappropriate boners until she fights them with karate and kills one with an ax. Everyone has a secret doll collection. A tiny French general leads a toy army.

Johnstone piles incident on incident, trope on trope, and if something isn’t working he keeps on piling. When time itself needs to be brought to a screeching halt, Jay Clute just pulls out his gun and shoots a clock. Because clocks make time, right? In William W. Johnstone’s world, why not?

Location, Location, Location

In 1964 the police shooting of a young black man kicked off the Harlem riots in New York City. In 1965 a dispute between a police officer and a young black man pulled over for drunk driving kicked off the Watts riots in Los Angeles. Those two incidents in turn kicked off white flight: middle- and upper-class white families fleeing the cities for the countryside, embracing a back-to-the-land lifestyle, buying farmhouses, and turning homey hamlets into planned communities.

Between 1970 and 1980, one million white people left New York City, and in the first four years of the ’70s, six million Americans ditched the cities for the country. It was the first decade in 150 years that the rural population grew faster than the urban population. The horror novels from this time reveal that what was waiting for these homeowners was far worse than what they had fled. In a stroke of poor planning, apparently the majority of America’s rural communities had been built on cursed land. Whether it’s the site of an ancient murder (The Owlsfane Horror, 1981), a witch hanging (Maynard’s House, 1980), or a Native American massacre (The Curse, 1989), America feels like a massive graveyard stretching from sea to shining sea.

Add in parts of the country rendered unfit for human habitation by invisible aliens who return every few hundred years to kill people with spontaneous orgasms that melt their brains (The Searing, 1980), sinister cults occupying abandoned mental hospitals (The Turning, 1978), or isolated beachheads where Satan is growing killer humanoids in church basements (Effigies, 1980), and you might as well stay in the city and get murdered by the sewer alligators. (Keep reading.)

In a country dotted with mass-killing sites and derelict insane asylums, the sorts of small-town traumas one could encounter are limitless. In The Stepford Wives (1972), Ira Levin mocks the petrified patriarchy who fled the civil rights movement and feminism by retreating to elite Connecticut enclaves where they murder their unhappy wives and replace them with compliant fembots.

Depending on whom you asked, The Stepford Wives by Ira Levin (Rosemary’s Baby) satirized either feminism or its backlash. Credit 89

Not content to rest on the laurels of The Other, Thomas Tryon wrote another classic, Harvest Home (1973), all about the dangers of romanticizing small-town life. Tryon had watched his colleagues abandon the city for the country, lecturing those they left behind about the clean air and good values of their new neighbors. The ex-urbanites buy failing farms at rock-bottom prices and then fetishize what they’ve destroyed, scooping up farm tools at bankruptcy sales and nailing them to the walls of their brand-new kitchens. Tryon wondered if their new neighbors might not share the same values as these newcomers, if perhaps they were aligned with stronger, older, bloodier forces that the city folk had forgotten. So when his urban refugees land in the quaint village of Cornwall Coombe, they’re totally unprepared for the bloody fertility rites the tiny town requires to ensure a good harvest.

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Wherever you go, there Satan is, be it Missouri (The Curse), upstate New York (Effigies, The Turning), or the D.C. suburbs (The Searing). Credit 90