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

A truism is that horror functions best in short stories. Horror is about character and mood. Some of its most effective concepts felt a little threadbare stretched to a few hundred pages, and many of horror’s best writers (Dennis Etchison, Robert Aickman, Ramsey Campbell) did their finest work in the short form.

More than any other genre, horror kept short stories alive. In the early ’90s, as publishing collapsed, anthologies still sold well. So every few years someone decided to produce an anthology proving that horror could be literature, too. The first, and most important, came from superagent Kirby McCauley, who was inspired by Harlan Ellison’s game-changing Dangerous Visions science-fiction anthology from 1967. McCauley bundled together stories by Stephen King (“The Mist”), Dennis Etchison (then best known as the short-story writer’s short-story writer), Ramsey Campbell, Joyce Carol Oates, and Isaac Bashevis Singer for his landmark 1981 book, Dark Forces.

Etchison edited his own cutting-edge anthology called, natch, Cutting Edge (1986). Critic Douglas E. Winter did it with Prime Evil in 1988, and Monteleone took a stab with Borderlands in 1990. Even as the horror market collapsed in the early ’90s, themed anthologies stayed strong in paperback. But if ever there was a canary in the coal mine for the horror boom, it died in 1989 when Grant announced he was ending Shadows after ten volumes because the quality of the submissions had dropped “drastically.” After that, Grant wrote some media tie-ins for The X-Files, and then silence. As the industry descended into darkness, so, too, did Charles L. Grant.

Anthologies featured some of the best horror fiction of the ’70s and ’80s, from the spooky tales in Charles Grant’s taste-making Shadows to Dennis Etchison’s rule-breaking Cutting Edge. Credit 153

Credit 154

In 1986, war was declared. War on metal!

“The cassette or CD player in too many teens’ rooms is an altar to evil, dispensing the devil’s devices to the accompaniment of a catchy beat,” warned televangelist Bob Larson. In the 1983 book Backward Masking Unmasked, author Jacob Aranza warned that Queen’s song “We Are the Champions” was “the unofficial national anthem for gays in America.” Larson listed all the satanic bands out to seduce our children, balancing the usual suspects—Led Zeppelin, AC/DC, Black Sabbath—with Electric Light Orchestra, the Beatles, and the Eagles, as well as the Beach Boys (transcendental meditators), Bee Gees (believers in reincarnation), and John Denver (once tried aikido). Fueled by Michelle Remembers, James Egbert III’s disappearance (see here), and other sinister claims, by the mid-’80s the Satanic Panic was in full swing, possibly because the threat of secret satanists was a welcome distraction from the real dangers threatening to kill us all, like a foreign policy based on mutual assured destruction.

Credit 155

Pop culture was the battlefield in this new holy war, and heavy metal music was on the front lines. In 1985, the Parents Music Resource Center (PMRC) issued their “Filthy 15” blacklist of objectionable bands, whose only real effect was to guide curious kids to the smuttiest music on the market. Made up of the wives of power brokers and politicians in Washington, D.C., the PMRC publicly demanded that record labels reassess the contracts of musicians who performed violent or sexualized stage shows. They managed to hold Senate hearings on explicit lyrics and “porn rock,” which accomplished little except to show Americans that Twisted Sister’s Dee Snider was more levelheaded and informed than Tipper Gore. The group’s only lasting impact was the explicit lyrics sticker on CDs and cassettes, immediately making those recordings one hundred times more desirable to kids.

Clive Barker (far left) made a name for himself with his debut multivolume short-story collection, inspiring the splatterpunk movement of gory horror fiction. David Schow coined the term, and John Skipp and Craig Spector were among its founding fathers (right). Credit 156

Horror responded in the most metal way possible. When televangelists denounced horror movies, books, and games as causing cannibalism, murder, suicide, depression, and domestic violence, horror writers and metal bands doubled down, firehosing ever-more-offensive content into the faces of conservatives. In Providence, Rhode Island, at the 12th World Fantasy Convention in 1986, this weaponized brattitude took horror fiction one step closer to extinction when Fangoria columnist David Schow coined the term splatterpunk, named for a new school of fiction oozing out of the crypt. At the vanguard was Clive Barker, whose debut six-volume short story collection The Books of Blood, published in the U.K. in 1984, was released in the U.S in 1986 in the form of six terrible-looking paperbacks.