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

The horror woman has a willowy, athletic figure with dynamite legs. Contrary to expectations, she is often flat-chested (with notable exceptions). She comes in two flavors: either dreamy and artistic, in which case she is given to precognitive dreams, shivers, and a sense that this place is pervaded by an indefinable evil; or practical and hardheaded, ready to sacrifice herself by performing an ancient ritual to save the world or racing into danger to save either her beloved man or child. The most expressive parts of her body are her nipples. They noticeably harden, when she is aroused, surprised, confused, or meeting new people. They are practically prehensile tentacles, capable of lengthening, thickening, unfurling, budding, flaring, and swelling. If she’s nice, she’s blonde, or maybe brunette. If she likes sex too much, her hair is red. Her eyes are almost always green, occasionally gray.

Horror fiction protagonists often pause to stare into a mirror; they don’t always like what they see. Credit 126

Surprisingly, the horror woman is usually employed. If she is married, she owns a fashionable boutique. If she is single, she is a gifted artist or ambitious reporter looking for her big break. (It is worth noting that if the horror man is a reporter, he is always a washed-up alcoholic looking for a second chance.) No matter what the job, she is obsessed with proving herself to her male colleagues, which often leads to throwing herself into dangerous situations from which she can only be rescued by the horror man.

Southern Deluge

Horror would eventually turn into thrillers, and gothics would become romances, but another offshoot of the gothic revival remained stubbornly itself: the Southern gothic. Michael McDowell was an Alabama native whom Stephen King once called “the finest writer of paperback originals in America,” and his Blackwater series is the One Hundred Years of Solitude of the genre. He’d be considered one of the great lights of Southern literature if his books dealt with things other than woman-eating hogs, men marrying amphibians, and vengeance-seeking lesbian wrestlers wearing opium-laced golden fingernails.

McDowell started his career with The Amulet (1979), his own 100-page screenplay that he adapted into a 200-page novel after no one would buy it. Avon eventually acquired the book and encouraged McDowell to make it longer. In this story of a disfigured soldier recuperating under the baleful gaze of his malignant mother in the tiny town of Pine Cone, Alabama, we follow a cursed necklace as it sows destruction. It’s not the carnage, rendered in apocalyptic understatement, that is so engaging but the language and social mores of the inhabitants. The story captures midcentury small-town living as few books do. Everyone in Pine Cone lives a life bounded by trivial jealousies, petty rivalries, unwritten rules, and microscopic grudges they nurse all their lives. Everyone knows how to behave (this is the black part of town, this is the white; this is the kind of thing we say in church, this is the kind of thing we keep to ourselves). But the titular amulet weakens those barriers and coaxes feelings to the surface like pus. Pine Cone is poisoned before the amulet arrives, not because it’s built on an Indian burial mound, but because it’s another dying American town.

McDowell’s six-book Blackwater series was published one title per month between January and June 1983, and it was his farewell to the horror genre. Beginning with the flooding of Perdido, Alabama, it follows the fortunes of the Caskey clan beginning with Oscar Caskey’s marriage to Elinor, a mysterious redheaded woman he rescues from the flood, who turns out to be a finned and gilled river monster assuming human form.

McDowell’s first novel started as a screenplay; later he’d write the Beetlejuice script for Tim Burton. Credit 127

The series follows their marriage, and their family, from 1919 to 1960, as new generations are born and older generations pass away. The horror feels more like magical realism, and McDowell balances scenes of genuine human kindness and grace against scenes of a rapist having his arms chewed off by a mutant teenager. McDowell is as enthusiastic about his horror as he is about delicately depicting social hierarchies. He knows that two rival bridge clubs can war with each other for decades. He knows what it feels like to get old. But more than anything, these six books are about women and the power they wield behind the scenes.