‘Paperbacks From Hell’ finds the fun in horror
Satanic possessions, bleeding banisters, monster sharks, children in the attic — all as familiar to readers as their morning coffee, but where did these horrors come from and how did they make themselves at home?
Grady Hendrix tells us all about it in his lavishly illustrated “Paperbacks From Hell: The Twisted History of ’70s and ’80s Horror Fiction,” resurrecting an era when Gothic tales in windswept castles mutated into a new genre called horror. “Written to be sold in drugstores and supermarkets,” these books “offered uncut entertainment,” Hendrix writes, and their writers “weren’t worried about causing offense.”
Hendrix takes us from the quiet ghost stories of the 1960s — which seemed “trapped in the past” — through the aptly named Splatterpunk craze in the late ’80s, with Clive Barker’s “Books of Blood.” From the beaches of Peter Benchley’s fictional Amity to the haunting in Amityville, horror was in the air, and it meant big business.
How did it begin? Everything changed with the publication of two bestsellers, both made into blockbuster movies: Ira Levin’s “Rosemary’s Baby” in 1967 and William Peter Blatty’s “The Exorcist” in 1971. They were the first of their kind to hit the lists since Daphne du Maurier’s “Rebecca” in 1938.
Astonishingly, “The Exorcist” was nearly dead on arrival until a last-minute slot opened up on “The Dick Cavett Show,” allowing Blatty to describe his chronicle of child possession on prime time. Middle America rushed to read it. Hendrix goes so far as to say “Satan was the secret ingredient that made sales surge,” spawning the likes of “To the Devil a Daughter,” “Satan’s Holiday” and “Satan Sublets.” The horror boom had begun, and before long these paperbacks sold millions of copies.
As the ’70s progressed, building on fears first conjured by Shirley Jackson’s “The Haunting of Hill House,” authors set about making their own nightmare houses, most memorably in Robert Marasco’s “Burnt Offerings,” Stephen King’s “The Shining” and Richard Matheson’s frenzied “Hell House.” These scary dwellings were perfectly suited to a decade plagued by lead paint, radon and asbestos scares, not to mention news of Love Canal and Three Mile Island. Hendrix comforts us by pointing out that “if the cause was Satan, you were lucky. At least the Lord of Darkness isn’t carcinogenic.”
By the early ’80s, this brand of domestic horror hit its nadir with a “nonfiction” work by Jay Anson called “The Amityville Horror,” which Hendrix finds “commercial minded, grandiose, ridiculous,” a “carnival barker’s idea of a haunted house.”
Hendrix takes care to highlight rare classics of the genre, such as Mendal W. Johnson’s “novel of lingering horror” “Let’s Go Play at the Adams’,” in which suburban children abduct and torture a baby sitter, offering what Hendrix calls “a completely nihilistic vision of the world,” one that “doesn’t deny the possibility of goodness, or beauty, or grace. It merely points out that those are the things we kill first.”
As the plots became more shocking, cover artists rushed to catch up, going “bigger, gaudier, and racier.” Greeting-card technology was hurried into service to provide “foil, raised monsters, and die-cut windows showing swank stepback art.” These vibrant covers are an art form all their own, luring unsuspecting readers into dark places.
Other monsters crept onto the shelves. Benchley’s 1974 smash “Jaws” pulled in its wake swarms of other creatures, including mad cows, killer crabs and sinister slugs, followed by maniacal physicians and deadly computers. They would all be vanquished in the end by Thomas Harris’ groundbreaking “Silence of the Lambs” (1988) and the brand of techno-thriller it ushered in. The serial killer and “supercreep” soon eclipsed nightmare rabbits and satanic cults.
“Paperbacks From Hell” is as funny as it is engaging, assuring us that whatever else may be said of these paperbacks, “they will not bore you.”
Ernest Hilbert is a freelance writer.