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

In horror fiction, the conveniences of city life come with significant drawbacks. The city might merge into other dimensions (Night Train), house an underground monster cult (Cellars), or attract dark magic (Our Lady of Darkness). You might run into those weird plant-children from Chapter 2 (Children of the Island), get on a train that channels demonic energy (Ghost Train), fall in with a bunch of physical fitness nuts (The Glow), or run afoul of the reprinted creeps in the Urban Horrors anthology. Credit 95

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But if the supernatural was bad, real-world horrors were worse. Children were scared to go to bed because the landlord might torch the building. Again. A depopulated Brooklyn, slated for demolition, was a ghost town. College professors were mugged and murdered by thirteen-year-olds for subway tokens. There had to be a reason for the madness. In Our Lady of Darkness (1977), Fritz Leiber offers his theory of Megapolisomancy, a “new science of cities” formulated by his fictitious magician Thibaut de Castries. The streets and subway tunnels, water mains and gas pipes, steam tunnels and power cables formed lines of power that imbued cities with dark magic. Or, as a character in Thomas Monteleone’s Night Train (1984) says, “In effect, the city may be coming to life, and if so, it’s proving to be something quite malign.”

In Night Train, other dimensions are melting into ours, the main incursion point lying beneath the Lower East Side (also home to Cellars’ Head Underneath). Albino dwarves, flesh-eating jellyfish, and a subterranean pterodactyl make appearances before the NYPD blasts them to hell with shotguns and concussion grenades. The monsters are defeated, but the city sleeps uneasily. As the book ends, one of the officers keeps an eye on crime stats. As long as they keep going down, people are safe. But if they start going up again, it means the city is stirring back to life. Only gentrification can keep the forces of darkness at bay.

The Crazy-Maker

Ramsey Campbell will show you terror in a plastic bag. Or a pedestrian underpass. Or a deserted council estate. Since the late ’70s, he has written dozens of novels and hundreds of short stories, from erotic horror to the traditional ghost story. But in the ’80s, he was the chief practitioner of Fritz Leiber’s style of urban horror, luring readers into empty city streets and squalid basements and confronting them with the monsters that were born there.

Campbell’s stories feel like week-old newspapers, swollen with water, black with mold, forgotten on the steps of the abandoned tenement. His titles scream like headlines: The Face That Must Die! The Doll Who Ate His Mother! The Parasite! His Liverpool and London are necropolises of marginal people, hateful shut-ins, catatonic homeless, gutter-crawling journalists, their loneliness and isolation amplified by the urban hellscapes in which they’re entombed.

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Ramsey Campbell’s short stories cut deepest, but in the ’80s he turned out his share of big, fat, Stephen King–sized novels that lurch between the supernatural (The Influence) and the psychological (The Face That Must Die). Credit 98

Campbell writes the way schizophrenics think (he’s said that for most of his life, his mother showed signs of schizophrenia). He doesn’t want to describe actions; he wants to alter perceptions. His descriptions are full of visual miscues and the confusion of organic verbs with inorganic nouns. Living creatures behave like automatons, inanimate objects sprout and grow as if alive, personalities are overridden and replaced, the familiar is described in ways that make it seem alien and threatening.

Giving oneself over to Campbell’s writing feels a bit like losing one’s mind. Sounds are heightened, perceptions warped, and squalor becomes synonymous with horror. Reading his books, you begin to feel that your room needs to be scrubbed clean, that bugs are crawling over your skin, and that the city is driving you mad.

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If there’s one thing horror novels from the ’70s and ’80s can teach us, it’s that doctors in hospitals are mostly interested in impregnating patients with Swedish clones (Embryo), decapitating patients and using their heads to form a living computer (Heads, 1985), or harvesting putrid snot from the multiple anuses of alien worms with an insatiable appetite for human flesh (Fatal Beauty, 1990).