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

Jeffrey Catherine Jones, the artist behind these decadent covers, got her first gig on an Edgar Rice Burroughs book because she could imitate the dark, doomy dynamism of Frank Frazetta (whose hard-rocking art graced almost every book and album cover of the era). Jones eventually made art for everyone from Screw magazine to DC Comics. She found her own dreamy style, combining Art Nouveau influences with Frazetta’s muscularity to depict liquid human forms in delicate landscapes that kept threatening to dissolve into purely abstract Rorschach blots. From 1975 to 1979, Jones shared studio space with Michael Kaluta, Barry Windsor-Smith, and Bernie Wrightson, and together the four of them helped reinvent American fantasy illustration. Jones was born male, but identified as a woman, and began hormone therapy in 1998. When she passed away in 2011, she had painted at least 150 covers.

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Unholy Trinity: Rosemary’s Baby (1967), The Other (1971), and The Exorcist (1971) spawned a new era in horror fiction. Credit 8

Between April 1967 and December 1973, everything changed.

In a little more than five years, horror fiction became fit for adults, thanks to three books. Ira Levin’s Rosemary’s Baby, Thomas Tryon’s The Other, and William Peter Blatty’s The Exorcist were the first horror novels to grace Publishers Weekly’s annual best-seller list since Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca in 1938. And except for three books by Peter “Jaws” Benchley, they’d be the only horror titles on that list until Stephen King’s The Dead Zone in 1979. All three spawned movies and, most important, set the tone for the next two decades of horror publishing.

Horror was for nobodies when Ira Levin—a scriptwriter with a single book (1953’s A Kiss before Dying) and a failed Broadway musical (Drat! The Cat!) to his name—sat down to write a novel about a woman who gives birth to the devil. A minimalist masterpiece written in deft, surgical sentences, Rosemary’s Baby became a massive best seller. The film rights were sold before the book was even published. Four months after the book hit the stands, Roman Polanski rolled cameras on an adaptation that would earn an Oscar. The film, described as “sick and obscene” by the Los Angeles Times and given a “C for Condemned” rating by the Catholic Church, wound up saving Paramount Studios from bankruptcy.

Rosemary’s Baby was a spark to the heart for horror fiction, but the corpse really began to boogie in June 1971, when Thomas Tryon’s The Other and William Peter Blatty’s The Exorcist simultaneously made the New York Times Best-Seller List. Fueled by amphetamines and written during a feverish ten-month spree, Blatty’s book was dead on arrival in bookstores until a last-minute guest cancellation earned him a sudden appearance on The Dick Cavett Show. A blockbuster was born. For eleven weeks, The Exorcist and The Other held the #1 and #3 marks on the New York Times Best-Seller List. The Other slipped off after twenty-four weeks; The Exorcist would hold on for a whopping fifty-five.

Four million copies of The Exorcist were sold before William Friedkin’s motion picture adaptation debuted in December 1973 and became a cultural landmark. The film was the second-highest-grossing movie of the year and won two Academy Awards.

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Tryon had what People magazine called “a relentlessly mediocre acting career” before he starred in dictatorial director Otto Preminger’s The Cardinal, an experience that drove the future author to a nervous breakdown and made him swear to become a producer so that he could always fire the director. No one cared about his treatment for a movie about evil twins called The Other, however, so he locked himself in a room for eighteen months and emerged having repurposed his screenplay into a novel. Working the promotional circuit like a pro, Tryon turned his book into the ninth best-selling book of 1971.