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

Unable to afford big names, with even B-listers off-limits because at that time they rarely earned out their advances, Cavelos had the idea of making the line the star. Abyss would be a home for genuinely new voices in horror, punk rock writers with something to say beyond “Serial killers are scary.” She didn’t want the same old books with thirtysomething male protagonists wading through piles of naked and mutilated female corpses. She hunted down artists to paint covers that looked like nothing on the market.

In February 1991 the first Abyss book, The Cipher by Kathe Koja, hit the racks. A sharply observed slice of early-’90s bohemia, it was about a couple of starving artists in a dying Rust Belt city who find a hole in their storage space. Dubbing it the Funhole (the original title of the book), they discover that anything organic fed into the Funhole comes out disturbingly mutated. So these art scene bottom-feeders use the Funhole to get themselves a gallery show.

The Cipher was anything but typical horror. The main action was psychological, and the Funhole is never explained, but readers were ready for something new. The book shared that year’s Stoker Award for best first novel with another Abyss title, Melanie Tem’s Prodigal, about dead children, social workers, and psychic vampires.

Credit 176

Abyss published Koja’s next novel, Bad Brains, about an artist whose sustains a minor head injury at a party that unleashes apocalyptic hallucinations, seizures, and extradimensional silver snot dripping over everything he sees. Then his paintings start coming to life. Relentlessly interior, unfolding in dreams, visions, and nightmares, reading the book is like being trapped inside William Blake’s worst headache. Abyss’s brand of psychological horror avoided creepy kids, real estate nightmares, and Satanic cults, and their books gave off a whiff of opium and absinthe. Nancy Holder’s Dead in the Water is her riff on William Hope Hodgson’s early-twentieth-century Sargasso Sea stories, only in her version a clutch of shipwreck survivors is picked up by a hellish cruise ship helmed by an undead buccaneer and his phantasmal pirate crew.

Die-cut covers that teased gruesome art was nothing new for horror paperbacks, but these strikingly creative Abyss covers look like nothing that had come before. Credit 177

Not every Abyss book was a heavy, hallucinatory, psychological drama. Coming right on the heels of The Cipher was Abyss’s second novel, Nightlife by Brian Hodge, which was basically a cross between Crocodile Dundee and Miami Vice. A Yanomamö warrior tracks the newest drug, Skullflush, from his home in Venezuela to Tampa, where it’s getting sold in nightclubs as a bright-green cocaine alternative. A flashy horror thriller for the MTV generation, it’s all were-piranha gangbangers, drug dealers nailed to yachts with arrows, and an AK-47-powered climactic car chase across Tampa’s three-mile-long Howard Frankland Bridge.

Abyss proved that horror fiction still had room for original voices telling new stories about everything from psychoactive plants (Nightlife) to gender identity (X, Y) to Poppy Z. Brite’s re-re-reinvention of vampires (Lost Souls), and Nancy Holder’s hallucinatory sea story (Dead in the Water). Credit 178

Written in chilly, precise, clinical prose, Michael Blumlein’s X, Y feels like the fruit of a collaboration between J. G. Ballard and David Cronenberg. The only thing tying it to the old-school horror market is the fact that its main character is a stripper. After she passes out onstage and wakes up convinced that she’s a man, Blumlein dives into the complicated swamp of gender difference, territory that no other horror novel had broached. Rather than worrying about identity politics or liberation narratives, he boils everything down to biology. And then he keeps on boiling. By the time he’s finished, Blumlein has made a case that our assumptions about our identities aren’t built on bedrock but on ever-shifting sand. It’s probably the only book to cite the Journal of Neuro-Medical Mechanics in its endnotes, and it’s also more dark science fiction than flat-out horror, much like Lisa Tuttle’s quantum narrative Lost Futures, about a woman who begins to simultaneously experience all the lives she could have led.