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

What makes Engstrom’s stories so memorable is that she speaks from the point of view of her monsters but never becomes their cheerleader, as Rice does. Instead, she captures the voices of women on the margins, pushed aside, hungry for the lives they’ve been denied, beating on the glass to get in. It’s their voices that linger.

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Inhumanoids may look normal at first, but they’re one skin-peel away from giving you nightmares. Credit 134

There are two kinds of creature in this world: Americans and inhumanoids. Whether it’s alien super-predators possessing little girls, hyperaccelerating them through puberty, and sending them out to kill with sex (Soulmate, 1974), or Yetis riding icebergs to California so they can decapitate our Miss Snow Queen 1977 (Snowman, 1978), it’s simply a fact: foreign monsters want to get into our country and mess up our stuff. And they all have three things in common: they smell bad (“fetid” is the name of their cologne), they’re dirty (ruining carpets everywhere with dripping pus, goo, slime, and ectoplasm), and they have terrible manners.

It’s the lack of politeness that really rankles. In Frank Spiering’s Berserker (1981), no one in New York City even notices a 12-foot-tall Nordic giant in a horned helmet wielding a battle-ax as long as he confines himself to decapitating homeless people. But then he tears off a ballerina’s leg and eats two precious children, and, well, that’s just rude. And though we all feel sympathy for the yeti who hates snow in Snowman, how many ski instructors will we to allow him to decapitate before we hire a bunch of hunters and Vietnam vets to go after him with crossbows armed with tiny nuclear arrowheads? Answer: Three.

The real problem isn’t keeping inhumanoids out of America, it’s keeping Americans out of other countries. Because every time an American goes abroad, a monster hitches a ride on the return trip. “It had been impossible to foresee that Bradford’s search for the Snowman would terminate in this devastating spectacle,” writes Norman Bogner in his book’s prologue, obviously from the point of view of someone who does not understand that traveling to Tibet pretty much guarantees death for nine out of ten Americans. “Ten sherpa porters and nine men in his party were already dead,” reads the next paragraph, “hacked to death, their dismembered bodies consumed by a beast with an insatiable hunger for human flesh,” a turn of events that anyone who’s traveled abroad could easily predict.

In The Shinglo (1989), Scott Pillar fights in the Vietnam War and brings home a head full of trauma that doesn’t just ruin his life, it also shatters his family and destroys large swaths of Cleveland. As he says under hypnosis when asked what he does for a living, “I tear things apart…bit by bit I’m going to tear this whole fucking country right down to the ground.” Not to get too symbolic, but Oliver Stone won an Oscar for making a movie with that exact premise.

Where were the classic monsters—the vampires, the wolfmen, the zombies—while all this was going on? Vampires were getting sexy courtesy of Anne Rice, and, to be honest, no one much cared about werewolves…although Robert McCammon’s The Wolf’s Hour (1989) featured a British secret agent who was also a werewolf going behind enemy lines to kill Nazis. That storyline was echoed in reverse by Blood on the Ice, a take on World War II’s “Weather Wars” during which Nazi and Allied forces conducted military operations over weather-reporting stations in the North Atlantic. This historical event was made almost interesting by the addition of an SS officer who happens to be a vampire. As for zombies, despite their inescapable popularity today, they weren’t doing much in ’70s and ’80s horror novels. Surprising, given that those years were something of a golden age for movie zombies courtesy of George Romero (Dawn of the Dead, Day of the Dead), Dan O’Bannon (Return of the Living Dead), and Lucio Fulci (Zombie, City of the Living Dead). Mummies, however, were another story…

International travel may broaden your horizons, but you’ll wind up bringing home a flesh-eating Viking, a demonically possessed army buddy, or just a really bad infection. Credit 135