Grady Hendrix, who brought readers My Best Friend's Exorcism and Horrorstör, is back with a new book about the pulp horror boom of the 1970s and '80s with Paperbacks from Hell. He's been reviewing the novels he read for research on his Goodreads page—currently 170 strong and counting. Here he takes us on a tour of the bloodiest, strangest, and downright bizarre paperback horror novels.
Killer crabs invade Britain's beaches. A trainload of killer clowns invades upstate New York. Evil joggers invade Central Park. Just another day at the bookstore from the '70s until the early '90s.
During those 24 years, an avalanche of paperback horror novels with lurid covers buried drugstore and bookstore shelves. Publishers were locked in an arms race to go further over the top than their competitors, so when they weren't dishing up resort spas run by evil Nazis, pterodactyls riding the New York City subways, or Hollywood death cults run by a barely disguised version of Paul Newman, they were startling unwary readers with covers featuring skeletons playing the banjo, teddy bears wielding axes, and evil babies torturing tiny humans trapped in test tubes.
Horror wasn't much of a genre before 1967, when Rosemary's Baby hit the bestseller lists and became a hit movie. A few years later The Exorcist and The Other accomplished the same feat, and a boom was born.
At first, publishers fell all over themselves to deliver more books about Satan (Satan's Pets, Satan's Seductress, Satan's Lovechild), but soon they branched out into killer kids, killer animals, then killer houses, and finally killer everything, from soap opera stars (Phantom of the Soap Opera) to 16th-century Viennese dance crazes (Waltz with Evil).
I read over 400 of these paperbacks to write Paperbacks from Hell and have barely tasted the fruits of this boom. Sure, I talk a lot about John Christopher's The Little People featuring Nazi leprechauns, but how did I miss J.N. Williamson's killer leprechaun novel, Playmates?
There's always one more lunatic corner to explore in the world of horror paperbacks, and while some of these books are so bad, they're good (Toy Cemetery, I'm looking at you), there are plenty that are so good, I can't understand how they were forgotten in the first place.
Ken Greenhall's Elizabeth and Hell Hound are written in Shirley Jackson's precise, chilly diction. Bari Wood's The Tribe and Tom Lewis' Rooftops are two of the best books I've read about New York City as it transitioned from the savage '70s to the go-go '80s. The fact that they're about a killer golem on the loose in Long Island and a serial killer who castrates little boys is beside the point. Throw in 1982's John Shirley classic, Cellars, and you've got a trio of books about a simmering pressure cooker of a city that simmers with so much corruption, sleaze, racial tension, and economic anxiety that it erupts into full-blown supernatural seizures.
These horror writers worked fast and cheap, so they couldn't get too self-conscious about their output: If they didn't get another book on the shelves soon, their family wasn't going to eat. Sometimes this meant they discovered marginal trends years before they surfaced in the mainstream. Nice, privileged kids from good families who are hopelessly, homicidally insane formed the basis of several books (The Sibling, Such Nice People, Halo) years before we learned to fear these kids in the wake of the Columbine shootings and the Menendez brothers murders.
It all came to a screeching halt in the late '80s and early '90s with the publication of The Silence of the Lambs and its hit movie adaptation, which swept the Oscars in 1991. After that, serial killers were the order of the day, and horror novels were rebranded as thrillers. The tide receded, but it left such amazing relics behind in the sand, from Guy N. Smith's killer crabs to John Halkin's killer jellyfish.
See the complete coverage of Horror Week including:
Top 50 Favorite Horror Novels on Goodreads
Stories That Delve into the Darkness
Supernatural Tales and Spooky Folklore
posted by Cybil on October, 13
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