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

That didn’t stop everyone from asking, “Hey baby, what’s your sign?” In Linda Goodman’s case, the answer was a dollar sign. The radio broadcaster and astrologer’s 1968 book Linda Goodman’s Sun Signs sold three million copies and became the first astrology book to hit the New York Times Best-Seller List. By 1978 astrology columns ran in 1,250 newspapers and 500 astrology books were in print.

Cashing in on this trend was Lyle Kenyon Engle’s book mill, Book Creations. Based in Canaan, New York, Engel and his staff of twenty came up with a book concept, sold it to a publisher, and then hired a writer to churn out copy. If the series did well, they’d milk it dry (John Jakes’s Kent Family Chronicles sold 35 million books). If not, they took it out behind the barn and shot it. Which is exactly what happened to Robert Lory’s Horrorscope series, whose fifth volume, Claws of the Crab, was never published in America.

Launched in 1975, the Zodiac Gothic series (top) and the Birthstone Gothic books (bottom) barely lasted a year each, representing a final attempt by Ballantine to squeeze more cash out of the dying gothic-romance cow. Credit 102

According to most astrology books, a Taurus is supposed to be stubborn. But according to Horrorscope, a Taurus is more likely to be abducted to a Greek island by a demented movie producer, locked in a labyrinth full of acid baths, and dismembered by a robot Minotaur. Aries, you’re trapped inside a hollow volcano full of missing luxury yachts, where fiddling with strange piles of gold gets you burned to death by unquenchable green fire. Leo? You’re a were-lion.

At least Ballantine made it through all twelve signs with their Zodiac Gothic series. Each installment began with popular newspaper astrologer Sydney Omarr doing the chart for the book’s heroine. At the same time, Ballantine was publishing twelve Birthstone Gothics, under their Beagle imprint, in what was probably an attempt to prop up the flagging sales of gothic romances. As always, the fault lies not in our stars, but in our sales.

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The eyes have it: ESP is usually invisible, so a piercing stare implies psychic talents for gifted (and not actually conjoined) kids (The Fury), a precognitive photographer (The Nightmare Candidate), a 19th-century hypnotist (The Mesmerist), and Nazi-bred psychic teens (Psychic Spawn). Credit 104

It’s All in the Mind

Astrology may be junk science, but horror readers know that hypnosis is A-1, grade-A science. Whether you wanted to know if your mother was raped by Dracula, whether you were raped by Satan, what sins you committed in your past life, what fantasies compel you to kill in your present one, whether you were possessed by a Vietnamese death demon or abducted by UFOs, in book after book, hypnosis was the answer.

It’s one simple step from hypnosis (totally legit science everyone should use daily) to ESP (slightly iffier). That’s not to say no legitimate ESP research was happening in the 1970s. In fact, both the Princeton Engineering Anomalies Research program and the U.S. government’s Stargate Project logged intriguing but inconclusive results for years. But horror authors of the ’70s weren’t interested in “intriguing but inconclusive.” They were interested in “totally horrifying.”

The Scourge (1980) made the leap via a pharmaceutical company manufacturing a mind-control drug that “makes hypnosis look like a cheap conjuring trick.” (As if it wasn’t one already.) The results were impressive. At the story’s climax, the CEO turns braindead intensive-care-unit patients into his own tiny zombie army.

In Brain Watch (1985), superpsychic powers are the result of splitting a doctor’s noggin into a quadruple brain, unlocking his ability to project illusions, become superstrong, and control the pigment in his skin to ensure a really great tan. This sounds incredible, but apparently natural processes lie untapped inside our brains. As a doctor explains in Psychic Spawn (1987): “It’s very simple, Mr. Stern. What’s happened to you is that you have become psychic.”

Unfortunately, as shown in Mind War (1980), these abilities can be perverted for evil, as the U.S.S.R. recruits a psychic strike team to telekinetically destroy the Golden Gate Bridge, then the Hoover Dam. Fortunately another holdover from ’70s science comes to the rescue: the Prophecies of Nostradamus.

So now that we’ve covered astrology and ESP, what about UFOs? Fake science, or the best science?

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