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

Gerald “Jerry” Neal Williamson was a prolific writer who never saw a trend he couldn’t imitate. He wrote forty novels, mostly for cellar-dwellers like Leisure and Zebra. His work included haunted house books (Ghost Mansion, 1981), creepy kid books (Playmates, 1982), and UFO books (Brotherkind, 1982), most of which were overwritten and underdeveloped pastiches of other novels. Occasionally one achieved a kind of lunatic grandiosity, mostly by accident (The Premonition, 1981; Brotherkind).

Wright, T. M. (1947–2015)

Terrance “Terry” Michael Wright started his career with the novel Strange Seed (published in hardcover in 1978 and as a paperback in 1980), which earned an enthusiastic blurb from Stephen King. Wright developed a midlist cult following over the course of twenty-four novels. His Manhattan Ghost Story (1984) and five Strange Seed books weave a quiet, off-kilter spell that may not appeal to all readers but is certainly disquieting

Yarbro, Chelsea Quinn (born 1942)

Named a Grand Master at the World Horror Convention in 2003, Yarbro is best known for her Saint-Germain vampire novels. Her Count Saint-Germain is a 4,000-year-old bloodsucker who is romantic and sexy, a gothic pinup boy whose convoluted chronology is tracked from ancient Egypt to postwar Paris over the course of approximately twenty-five novels, starting with Hotel Transylvania in 1978.

AFTERWORDRecommended Reading By Will Errickson

While reading Paperbacks from Hell, you may have compiled a lengthy to-read list. Or you may feel like I did, decades ago, on the first day at my job at a dusty used bookstore with the entire horror section to myself: Where do I start?

Ease your way into horror fiction the way I did, by rereading novels in the genre that you’ve read before, and then turning to the ones you remember from when they were first released but never read. When I did this, I found that Stephen King’s ’Salem’s Lot and Pet Sematary, John Farris’s All Heads Turn When the Hunt Goes By, and Peter Straub’s Ghost Story still hold up (no surprise). Ray Garton’s Live Girls, a sleazy ’80s NYC vampire tale, is lots of fun today. The rollicking splatterpunky tales collected by David J. Schow in Silver Scream are a terrific blast from the past; Thomas F. Monteleone’s series of 1990s anthologies, Borderlands, blend real-life horror with the surreal and the absurd in a way that continues to be effective.

Writers I dug in their ’80s heyday—Clive Barker, Dennis Etchison, T.E.D. Klein, Karl Edward Wagner—are even more enjoyable to me as an older, more experienced reader. Michael Blumlein’s icy short works, collected in 1990’s The Brains of Rats, reveal a talent unfettered by horror conventions but still within the parameters.

Thomas Tessier is a mature, intelligent writer who threads together sex and horror like nobody’s business. Finishing Touches and Rapture are near-masterpieces of the era, and his werewolf novel The Nightwalker is a penetrating psycho-thriller set in punk-era London. His short stories, scattered in various anthologies, are well worth searching out as well.

As you explore further, you’ll discover overlooked writers like Michael McDowell, Alan Ryan, and Graham Masterton. Two of my favorite novels from the pre–Stephen King ’70s are William H. Hallahan’s The Search for Joseph Tully and Joan Samson’s The Auctioneer. Fantastic stuff! Hallahan’s novel is a chilling work of fate and vengeance across the ages that remains enigmatic and melancholy; Samson’s story of quiet, polite small-town life slowly upended by the mysterious appearance of the titular character is compulsively readable and psychologically adept.

You may be tempted to dismiss some subgenres depicted in this book…don’t! I looked down on “animal attacks” books (see chapter 3) until I found The Cormorant, British author Stephen Gregory’s 1986 debut novel. Critically lauded upon release, it’s a doom-laden journey as the protagonist inherits the titular avian. Obsession and tragedy follow. Feral is a light-footed affair about marauding felines; author Berton Roueche’s understated prose subtly evokes humanity’s complicit guilt in the matter. At the opposite pole is Gregory A. Douglas’s nasty The Nest, which gleefully runs roughshod over taste and decorum, as though the author had dared himself to make his writing grosser and grosser. He was a pulp writer getting paid a penny a word, and he worked for it. This hopeless, despairing book featuring mutant cockroaches, but with the courage of its trashy convictions, may make one wish that more Zebra titles had been so committed.