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

If you can get past the surface silliness—like people meeting at 666 Fifth Avenue and Satan stand-ins with names like Louis Cyphre—the result is a doom-choked detective story that’s one part Philip Marlowe, one part Oedipus Rex, and one part Satanic Bible. The horror isn’t that Harry Angel might be Johnny Favorite, or that Johnny Favorite might have sold his soul, but that Harry Angel might not be who he thinks he is. He may not be a brave World War II veteran. He might in fact be a murderer. Everyone in this book has a double identity, leading to the chilling matter at the heart of all satanic possession fiction: if Satan can get inside us, then maybe we aren’t who we thought we were. Maybe we’re much, much worse.

As ’70s Satan bought and sold souls on the open market, some trends emerged. The bad guys were cultured and elegant. They had violet eyes, black dogs, and vast libraries of antique tomes, and when they died their souls slipped into good guys’ bodies. Struggling reporters got a chance to become famous concert pianists, flailing movie distributors got their dream apartment, traumatized car crash survivors got freedom from their guilt and a new lover, all in exchange for giving away their identities, their selves, their souls.

Every book was “better than Rosemary’s Baby,” “more terrifying than The Exorcist,” and “in the tradition of The Other!” Read in the right order, the titles painted a grim portrait of Satan marching from free-spirited young demon to middle-aged ennui: Satan’s Holiday, Satan’s Gal, Satan’s Seed, Satan’s Child, Satan’s Bride, Satan Sublets, The Sorrows of Satan, Satan’s Mistress, Satan: His Psychotherapy and His Cure.

Publishers deployed desperate gimmicks in order to stand out. Fred Mustard Stewart’s Mephisto Waltz came with a 45 rpm recording of the titular “Mephisto Waltz” by Franz Liszt. TV ads ran for Joan Samson’s The Auctioneer and John Saul’s Suffer the Children. Cover art got bigger, gaudier, and racier, expanding into die-cut covers with stepback art. Inside those covers, authors competed to see who could be a more turned-on, now-era, groove daddy. Exorcism featured possession by LSD, The Inner Circle was all about Beverly Hills and movie stars, and The Stigma saw a witch choked to death on a three-foot-long demon dick.

The history of sixteenth-century Scotland, where witches were hung every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, was the basis for this last as well as early folk-horror novel Satan’s Child and Jane Parkhurst’s Isobel, which was based on the life of Isobel Gowdie, the only witch ever to freely confess to her crimes.

Demonic incubuses and succubuses slithered out of Italian discotheques to send entire apartment buildings into sexual frenzies and to impregnate women with their demon seed. And the most turned-on, now-era, groove daddy of them all was a forgotten hero known as the Satan Sleuth.

ROWENA MORRILL

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Isobel’s electrifying cover painting is the first horror art sold by Rowena Morrill, one of the all-time greats. Better known for her work in science fiction and fantasy, Morrill also painted covers for a freaky series of Lovecraft reprints from Jove. And she remains the only artist in the field whose work has graced not only the cover of Metallica’s greatest bootleg album (No Life ’til Power) but also the walls of one of Saddam Hussein’s love nests.

The Greatest Man in the Whole Entire World

Call him Troy Conway. Call him Vance Stanton. Call him Edwina Noone, or Dorothea Nile, or Jean-Anne de Pre, or any of the seventeen pseudonyms he used to write his more than two hundred novels. He was Michael Avallone, and by his own estimation he was the “King of the Paperback” and the “Fastest Typewriter in the East.” Avallone wrote detective fiction, and gothics, and Partridge Family tie-ins, and the novelization of Friday the 13th Part III in 3-D. And when Satan got hot, he wrote all three slim volumes of The Satan Sleuth series for Warner Books, published between November 1974 and January 1975.

Avallone’s protagonist Philip St. George III “makes even Robert Redford look vapid.” He is “one hundred and eighty-five pounds of whipcord muscles” with “a mind bordering on Einstein IQ.” St. George has “scaled Everest, mastered the Matterhorn, [and] located a lost tribe of headhunters in the Amazon,” but now he receives a phone call that his fiancée Dorothea Daley has been murdered. The killers? Three devil worshippers who are “really sick, demented, half-mad creatures from another universe. Some other planet. They were not human.”