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

In 1971 another one-two pop culture punch reshaped the era when a pair of low-budget movies, Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song and Shaft, grossed millions at the box office. Blaxploitation was born! Ready to ride the wave was Holloway House, a cheapjack publisher founded by two white Hollywood publicists in 1959. The company radically changed direction after the Watts riots in 1965, when management saw an underserved audience in the ashes and started cranking out mass-market paperbacks for African American readers.

Holloway House was run with all the ethics of Blackbeard the Pirate, and its iconic authors like Iceberg Slim and Donald Goines earned pennies while the publishers made millions. The company published twelve magazines, including Players, an African American version of Playboy that was a huge financial success and, for a time, functioned as a soapbox for black liberation. Until the bosses actually read an issue and insisted on removing every article about politics and making the models look as white as possible.

Joseph Nazel was an author, activist, and journalist who edited Players for a year and hated every minute of it. Slugging down Jack Daniels, a pistol in his desk drawer, he jammed out a tornado of pulp fiction in a blaze of fury, all of it published by Holloway House. Capable of producing a book in six weeks, Nazel wrote novelizations of blaxploitation flicks like Black Gestapo and hardboiled pulp like Black Fury. And he never, as far as anyone knew, sent a single submission to another publishing house, remaining weirdly loyal to the people who least valued his talents. In his blaze of pulp production, Nazel had a blaxploitation version of The Exorcist ready to smack the racks nine months after the movie premiered in theaters. Meet The Black Exorcist.

Barbados Sam and his woman, Sheila, are high priest and priestess of a satanic voodoo cult on the outskirts of Los Angeles. Their pitch is simple: “What the hell has that jive white God and jive honkie religion done for them?” But in a cynical twist, the cult is in fact a front for the Mafia, with Barbados Sam and Sheila forcing true believers to assassinate mob targets. Every inch of Sam and Sheila’s scam is fake until they murder a cult traitor (and possible police informant). Sheila’s eyes glow green and she becomes possessed by the real Satan. “It was time to move beyond murder for hire. It was time to slaughter at random,” the Dark Lord enthuses, dreaming of a race war.

Opposing them is righteous soul brother Reverend Roger Lee, assistant pastor of Resurrection Church of Christ, who used to be a pimp working the streets until he found God. Sheila sprouts cloven hooves and tries to seduce Lee; when that fails, she squats to urinate on his Holy Bible and he whips her bare butt with his belt, driving her into the streets. Meanwhile, a young cultist trying to kick his satanic habit tosses his grandma out the third-story window of a hospital.

Nazel lifts gags from The Exorcist, giving them a quick coat of gritty ghetto grime, and there’s plenty of padding as mamas spend five pages wailing for their dead babies. But Nazel was an African American man deeply tied to his community, and so The Black Exorcist has a real feel for L.A. street life. And any book that gives us a climax where the protagonist is stabbed to death in the face as his cult chants “White is the color of death! Black is life and power!” knows how to deliver the goods to its small sector of the literary marketplace.

Holloway House published only two other horror novels: Devil Dolls and The Rootworker. Credit 18

Hot under the Collar

Readers couldn’t get enough books about spooky Catholics. In the wake of The Exorcist, a cry went up from paperback publishers: “Send more priests!” And, lo, did the racks fill with demonic men of the cloth and scary nuns.