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

The language of horror novels even infected true crime books. Flora Rheta Schreiber, author of the best-selling 1973 multiple personality best seller Sybil, delivered a true-crime account of the murders committed by Joseph Kallinger in a book called The Shoemaker—which sports a die-cut cover like a V. C. Andrews novel, lurid marketing copy, and breathless prose about how this sad killer was “pursued by Demons” possessed by “Satanic evil” and haunted by the “ghosts of his past.”

All the strands were converging: serial killers, true crime, splatterpunk, sympathy for the monster. The hangman’s noose was knotted in 1988 when Thomas Harris’s second novel, The Silence of the Lambs, debuted and won the genre’s two biggest honors: the World Fantasy Award and the Bram Stoker Award. A few years later, in 1991, the movie adaptation won five Academy Awards. Suddenly, Hannibal Lecter was a household name. This was the moment horror editors and agents had been eagerly awaiting for more than twenty years. This was the next Exorcist. This was Rosemary’s second baby. And the first thing it did was strangle its older sibling.

Straight razors, butcher knives, steak knives, and leatherworking knives all conveyed the same message: this book is dangerous. Credit 165

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In serial-killer horror, fire is a tool of killers, not Satan (Burning Obsession); masks conceal madmen, not mutants (Horror Story, The Hood); breath is stolen by asphyxiation, not aliens (Dying Breath); blood is spilled by knives, not fangs (Razor’s Edge); and office parties are awkward (Office Party, also real life). Credit 167

Nails in the Coffin

Horror was out. Serial killers were in. The horror-fiction market of the late ’80s was glutted, and the inevitable crash was happening fast. Imprints collapsed like punctured lungs, publishers shoveled books onto store shelves faster than readers could buy them, and returns flooded into warehouses. Customers stayed away in droves. Writers begged their editors to market their books as thrillers instead of horror.

Gore ruled the market. Splatterpunk still seemed like a badge of authenticity, and readers greedy for guts were rewarded by Fangoria magazine’s Gorezone spinoff in 1988. Paul Dale Anderson’s Instruments of Death series ignored its human characters in favor of their titular methods of mutilation: Claw Hammer, Pickaxe, Icepick, and Meat Cleaver. Redheads were popular, or at least scalping them on the book’s first page was, as in Razor’s Edge. But nothing tracked the rise and decline of horror better than Rex Miller’s Chaingang novels. Hailed as a bold new chapter in the gospel of splatterpunk, Miller’s Slob appeared in 1987 to much sweaty-palmed page-turning.

Hannibal Lecter hadn’t made serial killers a supertrend yet, but writers already knew they had to offer different flavors of sociopath to hook their readers. Miller gave them Daniel “Chaingang” Bunkowski, a 469-pounder who defied all logic as his creator tried to meet market demands. Bunkowski prowled the Midwest, murdering at random, committing sex crimes against women, and pulping the skulls of men who annoyed him. The man determined to bring him down was a tough Chicago cop named Jack Eichord, who happened to be an expert in the new science of profiling serial killers. The first Chaingang book felt almost like an attempt to put the pathetic squalor of the actual serial killer on the page. Bunkowski was a junk-food-addicted monstrosity who put away forty egg rolls at a time and whose breath smelled like “stale burritos, wild onions and garlic, bad tuna, and your basic terminal halitosis.” But then The Silence of the Lambs won all those Academy Awards.

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Miller had already elevated Bunkowski above the typical unskilled, blue-collar serial killer by making him the product of a secret government research program to produce super-killers for the Vietnam War. But in the wake of Dr. Lecter’s success, serial killers needed to be collectors of fine art, avengers of the weak, men of taste and refinement. Miller was happy to oblige. Chaingang Bunkowski began as nothing more than a murderous slob, but Miller was nothing if not flexible, and over the course of Chaingang (1992), Savant (1994), and Butcher (1994) he turned Bunkowski into a superhero.