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

First, Miller made sure readers knew that his killer “warped every curve, deviated from every chart…he was that rare human being called the physical precognitive.” He was “an autodidact, a self-taught killer whose alarming proclivity for violence was surpassed only by what appeared to be a genius intellect.” He had a photographic memory, the ability to detect the presence of human life in a house, an understanding of “the role of the mystagogue in televangelistic fund-raising, cellular phenomena, theoretical fluid mechanics” and “noncyclical phylogeny,” whatever that is. He was “a master at camouflaged doublespeak,” much like his author, able to make anyone believe anything with almost no effort. He possessed “the natural skills of a consummate actor: keen powers of observation and mimicry, a predisposition for thorough preparation, the ability to instantly summon up stored emotion, and the feel for a character’s center.” He knew how to make “a smart bomb activated by an ordinary kitchen food timer. A device for starting an undetectable fire.” He was immune to poison ivy. Miller transformed Bunkowski from a psychopath who killed at random into a good guy who killed people who deserved it: drug dealers, evil psychiatrists, cold-blooded psychotic snipers sporting micropenises and armed with futuristic ray guns, who happened to have graduated from the same government black-ops program as Bunkowski did. That happened in Savant, the last of the Chaingang novels, which revealed that Chaingang had to destroy the other assassins in his old super-psychopath program because they killed indiscriminately and had sex with prostitutes. Unlike Chaingang, who, by this point, was only killing the people who abused him as a child or were mean to puppies.

Horror fiction of the late ’80s seemed more interested in the killer’s weapons than in the killer. Credit 169

By the end of Savant, Chaingang—whom we met in the first book raping a woman, ejaculating on her face, then breaking her neck—had developed the ability to turn invisible in darkness by regulating his respiration and heart rate like a ninja. He had mailed a teeny tiny possum heart to the government doctor who created him and had adopted five adorable puppies. The serial killer was no longer a menace. He wasn’t even a cartoon. He had become a hero.

But as the ’80s rolled into the ’90s, even a hero couldn’t save horror publishing. Canada’s mass-market paperback publisher, Paperjacks, stalled drastically in 1989; Tudor Books disappeared that same year. Mass-market paperbacks were replaced by larger and more lucrative trade paperbacks. Magazines died suddenly and without warning; Twilight Zone magazine shuttered in 1989, Fear magazine ceased publication in 1991, and Omni magazine became online-only in 1995. Paper costs were rising, distribution was becoming more difficult, and things were looking grim. In the late ’80s, St. Martin’s cut back its horror line, followed by Tor, then Pinnacle; Avon went on hiatus. Finally, in 1996, Zebra closed its skeleton farm.

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Serial killers can be anybody, but likely suspects include cemetery caretakers (Joyride), punk rock bands (Ghoul), and anyone swathed in black (Headhunter). They could also be everybody, as in The Strangers, in which secret sociopaths stage a revolution and take over the world. Credit 171

Won’t Somebody Think of the Children?

As horror for adults gasped its last breaths, the genre found new life in a younger generation. Horror fiction for kids had been around for decades, whether it was Joan Aiken’s ersatz gothics like The Wolves of Willoughby Chase (1962, a forerunner of Lemony Snicket’s Series of Unfortunate Events) or thrillers like Lois Duncan’s Killing Mr. Griffin. Duncan, the queen of young-adult suspense, had started turning out teen thrillers in 1966, including I Know What You Did Last Summer (1973), Stranger with My Face (1981), and the cult classic Daughters of Eve (1979). But after the murder of her daughter in 1989, she seemed to lose her taste for fictional horror and devoted the rest of her life to chronicling the search for the girl’s killer.

Horror hit its stride with a hungry teenage audience in the ’80s, first with slasher films and then with books. Dell launched its teen occult horror series, Twilight, in 1982, complete with gruesome corpse exhumations and relatively graphic and goopy gore. Bantam countered with its less gory but more timely Dark Forces series in 1983, which was like the Satanic Panic for teens; its books were full of video games that unleashed Satan as an end-level boss, unholy heavy metal bands, and role-playing games that summoned the Prince of Darkness.