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

If you hunger for vampire thrills, try Fevre Dream, George R. R. Martin’s bloodthirsty nineteenth-century tale of night creatures on a Mississippi River steamboat, with lively characterizations and historical detail. The late Michael Talbot’s cult novel A Delicate Dependency contains almost no bloodshed but is rife with opulent dressing and intellectual debate; collectors pay ridiculous prices for it (and yet I found a copy at a library sale for a single dollar). For tawdrier, cheaper vampire fun, try Lee Duigon’s Lifeblood, Marc Eliot’s How Dear the Dawn, and Leslie Whitten’s crime procedural mystery/horror Progeny of the Adder. Whitten’s title comes from a Baudelaire poem, but the story isn’t so high-minded; its grim matter-of-factness prefigures both Stephen King’s ’Salem’s Lot and television’s The Night Stalker.

Love stories can offer much to horror: Lovers Living, Lovers Dead is a loopy Freudian mystery in which a middle-aged professor tries to plumb the depths of his young wife’s mental state; author Richard Lortz’s arty pretensions and casual ’70s sexism elicits some groans, but the bizarre basis for the woman’s instability is a stunner. Joan Chambers, a lesbian playwright, produced The Burning, which links two present-day women to the tragic fate of lovers condemned as witches in the past. Sensitively wrought and suffused with a kind of free-floating heartache, the paperback novel was adorned with a lurid Rowena Morrill cover that may have turned off non-genre readers who otherwise might have been drawn to the tragic story.

Domestic horrors come full flower in A Nest of Nightmares, a paperback collection of short stories by American Lisa Tuttle, published only in Great Britain in 1986. Her work showcases women’s lives and heightens their anxieties to deadly degrees. Melanie Tem’s The Prodigal has a child protagonist trying to make sense of an adult world in which two of her siblings go missing. The very nature of friendship is rent asunder in the creepily excellent Spectre, from Stephen Laws, in which a group of British college mates confront their long-ago secrets and memories.

Some of the best horror titles cannot be classified. The Happy Man, by Eric C. Higgs, introduces Marquis de Sade–style pleasures into a precisely-wrought suburban background. French surrealist Roland Topor’s The Tenant from 1964 oozes paranoia and humiliation, its moody euro-intellectualism a refresher compared to the less subtle horror offerings. Another title that’s hard to classify but not to be missed is Gwen, in Green; the book features one of my favorite covers, by George Ziel. As an eco-horror novel with tendrils of then-current pseudoscience and female sexual liberation, Hugh Zachary’s utterly ’70s novel charms with its datedness and its explicitness.

I hope you find some of the books and authors mentioned here to your liking. Before long, you may find that your horror paperback collection, like mine, keeps growing, almost of its own volition. Personally, I wouldn’t have it any other way.

Will Errickson collects and reviews vintage horror literature and celebrates its resplendent paperback cover art at TooMuchHorrorFiction.blogspot.com. He provided many of the cover images for this book from his own collection.

CREDITS

Listed below is publisher and cover artist information for each book reproduced in Paperbacks from Hell. We have tried to include complete and accurate names, titles, and dates. Please contact the publisher to correct omissions or errors in attribution. All artwork copyright of the artists.

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Total Recall by Peg Case and John Migliore (Paperjacks, 1987), cover art by Tom Hallman

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Child of Hell by William Dobson (Signet Books, 1982), cover art by Tom Hallman

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The Little People by John Christopher (Avon Books, 1966), cover art by Hector Garrido

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Rod Serling’s Triple W: Witches, Warlocks, and Werewolves edited by Rod Serling (Bantam Books, 1963), cover artist unknown

Unholy Trinity by Ray Russell (Bantam Books, 1967), cover artist unknown

We Have Always Lived in the Castle by Shirley Jackson (Popular Library, 1963), cover art by William Teason

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Something Evil by Arthur Hoffe (Avon Books, 1968), cover art by Bob Foster

The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson (Fawcett Popular Library, 1977), cover artist unknown

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