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

There had always been American writers, like Jack Ketchum, who refused to blink when describing gore, but the complete conviction, serious craft, and forensic eye for grotesque detail that Barker brought to his stories, about zombie actresses giving blowjobs and an army of disembodied hands declaring war on the human race, unleashed the beast. All at once, a pack of young dudes— Ray Garton, Joe R. Lansdale, Richard Christian Matheson, John Skipp, Craig Spector, and Schow—were delivering bloody books featuring all the ways a human body could be folded, spindled, curb stomped, flayed, eaten alive, castrated, blow torched, pierced, meat hooked, and mutilated. Powered by a rejection of literary style and an embrace of short, sharp, stripped-down sentences, these edgelords rejected God, America, Reagan, romance, and even the splatterpunk label, which they took great pains to denounce at every opportunity (even within the pages of anthologies with the word splatterpunk on the cover). Almost exclusively a boys’ club (the most prominent female purveyor of splatterpunk, Poppy Z. Brite, is a trans man), and deeply white-bread (the PMRC targeted gangsta rap as hard as heavy metal, but no writers took up that torch), splatterpunk started as a trickle of short stories before erupting into a mudslide of novels, zines, and anthologies.

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The only thing as stupid and outrageous as splatterpunk was rock. Heavy metal was being hit with hard cultural radiation in the ’80s, and although hair metal and arena rock dominated, in underground chambers, music was mutating into death metal, thrash, and grindcore as bands like Cannibal Corpse, Rigor Mortis, and Megadeth clawed their way toward daylight. Splatterpunk and metal were a match made in hell, both genres delivering attention-seeking spurts of juvenile nihilism alongside gleeful gushers of gore.

Much like the multiplying subgenres of metal, splatterpunk was not just a marketing label but a movement. Its advocates felt they were the future of horror, a resistance pushing back against the Moral Majority, confronting humankind with our bleakest impulses and offering a community for the freaks and geeks left behind by Reagan’s America. But more than a movement, they wanted to be a band. The splatterpunk authors could picture nothing cooler than being in a punk band (and a few of them were, notably John Shirley, as well as John Skipp and Craig Spector). They made sure they were photographed together as often as possible, worked together on anthologies, and cited one another’s work in articles.

Horror fiction and heavy metal were a match made in hell, thanks to books like Stage Fright and The Scream (notable for the Stan Watts mini pull-out poster concealed behind the paperback’s cover). Credit 158

Schow lived out both his splatterpunk and rock fantasies in The Kill Riff (1987), whose narrative did not star the novelty shotgun guitar depicted on the cover but did feature an unfortunately named metal band, Whip Hand, who disbanded after thirteen kids were killed in a riot at one of their concerts. Among the dead was angelic Kristen, whose dad, Lucas Ellington, was (regressively enough) a Vietnam War veteran. After he spends a year in an asylum “resting,” his therapist Sara pronounces him cured, although she worries about his occasional nightmares. No biggie. Once Lucas is out in the world, murdering the members of Whip Hand (who have splintered into solo acts), his bad dreams clear right up.

The most important element in rock ’n’ roll–splatterpunk books is mega-gore. The band’s former rhythm guitarist Jackson Knox gets shredded by a claymore mine planted in his monitor speaker (“It looked as though someone had pushed the guitarist through a tree shredder.”). Ex-keyboardist Brion Hardin is stabbed to death (“Hardin’s tongue bulged out, rimmed with saliva bubbles.”), and the rhythm section is picked off from Lucas’s sniper perch (“It would be fast and easy to plant a slug right into his mouth, which was now hanging open in a black oval…”). Don’t worry about anyone running out of weapons. The former lead singer, Gabriel Stannard, lives in what a thirteen-year-old boy imagines to be decadent luxury, complete with a collection of katanas and an archery range in the basement sporting cop-shaped targets.

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Splatterpunk books had no good guys and no bad guys, only a swarm of indistinguishable jerks dressed in black leather and camo. The Kill Riff’s revelation that Lucas was engaged in an incestuous affair with his daughter proves that the world is all just shades of gray, man. The book makes much of Lucas mourning his wife’s suicide and then gleefully springs the news that in fact he murdered his wife after she discovered the incest. Later, Lucas rescues a young woman from her abusive boyfriend, only to beat her to death with a log. Life is darkness.