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

In contrast to Rosemary’s Baby, both The Other and The Exorcist are overwritten. Tryon delivers an afternoon “spread lavishly, like a picnic on a cloth of light and shade,” and Blatty begins his book, “Like the brief doomed flare of exploding suns that registers dimly on blind men’s eyes, the beginning of the horror passed almost unnoticed.” But Blatty writes excellent dialogue and he believes deeply in his material. For his part, Tryon underplays the horror so that it sneaks up on the reader, emerging from a thicket of epic-poetic descriptions of nature. By the time you’re ambushed by Tryon’s severed fingers, pitchforks hidden in hay lofts, and dead babies floating in jars, it’s too late. Plus, the end includes a Twilight Zone–worthy twist that kept readers talking and has since influenced a hundred unreliable narrators.

These three books—one a precision thriller about the devil impregnating a woman on the Upper West Side, one a blood-and-thunder religious melodrama proclaiming that Satan wanted our children, and one a baroque and lyrical meditation about evil twins and killer kids—shaped everything that came after.

Rosemary’s Baby started the pot boiling, but the publication of The Exorcist and The Other threw gasoline all over the stove. Whether it was a reprint from 1949, a reissue of Dennis Wheatley black magic books from 1953, or a brand-new novel, soon every paperback needed Satan on the cover and a blurb comparing it to The Exorcist or Rosemary’s Baby or The Other. It didn’t matter if it was a murder mystery, an alternate-history sci-fi novel, or even an old pulp reprint—Satan was the secret ingredient that made sales surge.

Satan sold, whether it was new covers slapped on old books (The Dowry, 1949; To the Devil a Daughter, 1953) or an occult cover applied to a mystery about antique collectors (The Devil Finds Work, 1968). Credit 10

Tryon’s influence would take a few years to blossom, but after the one-two punch of Rosemary’s Baby and The Exorcist, suddenly all anyone wanted to talk about was the Devil.

The Devil’s Decade

Descended from the pulps, occult horror novels at the dawn of the ’70s still felt like places where The Guardians would feel at home. But after The Exorcist hit movie screens in 1974, horror fiction scraped its pulp influences off its shoe like a piece of old gum. These books still featured cults and black magic, but now Satan wasn’t a threat that you met in remote mansions or on Jamaican plantations. Now the devil was within. Satan was no longer your next-door neighbor—he was you.

Marketing departments embraced Satan with gusto. The third novel from literary celebrity Beryl Bainbridge featured two creepy kids lurking beneath an enthusiastic comparison to The Exorcist, while avant-garde writer Hubert Selby Jr.’s book about a serial adulterer, The Demon, displayed a blurb comparing it to Rosemary’s Baby. But a whole lot of authors willingly dipped their toes into the horror waters, with surprising success.

Classy Southern novelist Anne Rivers Siddons wrote The House Next Door, which remains one of the best haunted house novels in the genre. Joan Samson’s sole book before her early death from cancer was The Auctioneer, another genre classic, and Mendal W. Johnson managed to write only Let’s Go Play at the Adams’ before he passed away. Herman Raucher wrote the landmark coming-of-age novel Summer of ’42 before he delivered his only horror novel, the creepy Maynard’s House, about a Vietnam vet taking on a witch in rural Maine. And William Hjortsberg stayed with literary fiction throughout his career…except for one influential sidestep: Falling Angel.

Hjortsberg’s book offered hardboiled detective fiction mixed with demonic identity theft. Credit 11

Somewhere between The Guardians and Michael Avellone’s Satan Sleuth in concept, Hjortsberg’s novel depicts a private investigator who falls through the surface of the waking world into a nightmare of satanic sacrifice. The ’70s saw the reinvention of the classic private-eye character by everyone, from Jonathan Fast in his shaggy dog novel The Inner Circle to Joseph Hansen and his gay detective Dave Brandstetter. But Hjortsberg delivered his hardboiled noir straight, tongue nowhere near cheek.

P.I. Harry Angel is hired to find a missing jazz singer, Johnny Favorite, who may be trying to pull an insurance scam. As Harry closes in on his target, everyone he interviews is murdered. It seems that Favorite sold his soul to the devil—and is maybe trying to welch on the deal. And maybe Johnny Favorite is really Harry Angel.