Paperbacks from Hell: The Twisted History of '70s and '80s Horror Fiction

by Grady Hendrix

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 ...

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 i...

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.

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.

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 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.

As discussed, The Black Exorcist is its own wild West Coast jam, while Joseph Tully and The Sentinel are set in isolated apartment houses in desolate New York neighborhoods.

The Sentinel was a bona fide money train thanks to a moderately successful movie version that featured an all-star cast (John Carradine is Father Halloran! Burgess Meredith is Charles Chazen! Christopher Walken is Detective Rizzo! Jeff Goldblum is Jack! And Ava Gardner is “the Lesbian”!)

a famous climax in which the gates of hell spring open and vomit forth a legion of demons played by sideshow freaks, actors with disabilities, and amputees.

After being shocked by her lesbian neighbors (“Masturbation and lesbianism. Right in front of me!”) Alison takes to fainting randomly.

when Alison was a kid, she walked in on her father having sex…with two women at the same time!!! Young Alison ran away but her father chased her down and tried to strangle her with a crucifix necklace, sending her into a fainting, barfing frenzy that ended only when she kicked him in the nards and renounced the church.

What happens next is that Alison is attacked by the naked ghost of her father, her mind shatters, and her lover confines her to the loony bin like some eighteenth-century country squire chaining up his wife in the attic.

Alison never stood a chance, thanks to a Catholic conspiracy to groom her as Father Halloran’s replacement. The poor guy is ready to retire from guarding the gates of hell, which happen to be conveniently located in this delightful brownstone with period details.

The book ends with Alison taking the job and the brownstone being torn down and turned into luxury condos. Which sounds like a cheap punchline until a couple years after the movie, when Konvitz wrote a sequel, The Guardian (1979), set in the same high rise.

Miraculously able to find water in drought-stricken countries, Father Stamp advocates tirelessly for the liberation of oppressed peoples. But wise readers will instantly see through his lies. Turns out, all Stamp’s talk about liberating Central America and the Middle East masks his true agenda: he’s the anti-pope, whose liberal Marxist theology will destroy the Church and bring about the apocalypse.

Whitley Streiber’s The Night Church depicts a Catholic Church split between a secret cult of Cathars, who are breeding the anti-man to wipe Homo sapiens off the map, and the last surviving vestiges of the Inquisition, who use gruesome blowtorch torture to snuff out the Cathars before their mind-controlled subjects can hump mankind into extinction.

Here the Church is less concerned with helping the poor than with recruiting new congregants to fill its empty pews. Which means the clergy are caught completely off guard when the little girl turns out to be possessed not by the Holy Spirit but by yet another ghost of yet another murdered English witch. It’s a theological failure that can only be resolved when an army of zombies claw their way out of the grave during a televised healing session and murder pretty much everyone on live TV.

In 1978, after the thirty-three-day reign of Pope John Paul I, the Catholic Church elected its first non-Italian pope in four hundred years. Pope John Paul II became an instant international celebrity, drawing crowds wherever he went.

Dark Angel, 1982’s overheated hothouse of a novel that tells the story of how the Pope was stalked by a flesh-hungry succubus and how one lone wolf Irish American priest risked everything to slake the she-demon’s insatiable thirst for man flesh and save John Paul’s celibacy.

Now he functions as valet and bodyguard to Cardinal Ricci, the Pope’s right-hand man, who gets humped to death by a succubus in Vatican City. Whoops.

Full of thick-blooming flowers and ripe nightmares wherein hugely pregnant nuns give birth to clawed monsters with the face of Cardinal Ricci, Dark Angel exists in a state of maximum hysteria.

As for the succubus, Angela Tansa, she drives Porsches and must have sex every seven days in order to stay alive. Her latest Romeo is a Eurotrash aristocrat who says things like, “I want to fuck that fatness out of you!” as Angela gorges on articho...

This is the kind of book in which a priest resists fleshy temptation by jamming a nail through his hand, people vomit their souls into toilets...

when Joe discovers that the succubus can be destroyed only if she’s decapitated at the moment of orgasm, you know this book is about to go...

Unholy Communion was about a priest who becomes a horny werewolf.

Jim Thiesen is famous for his fully painted, beautifully textured book covers for such authors as Brian Lumley and Chelsea Quinn Yarbro. He’s also known for his work on Doubleday’s reprints of Stephen King’s first four novels and his iconic H. R. Giger–inspired cover for Richard Matheson’s I Am Legend (which Tor cropped, digitally blurred, and altered, much to Thiesen’s dismay).

Jewish horror is a small but strong subset of the paperback horror boom. In fact, this tiny ethnic enclave punches above its weight and includes one of the best covers of the decade, as well as one of the best books in the whole boom.

F. Paul Wilson’s The Keep got the big-budget Michael Mann Hollywood movie treatment. But it was Henry Hocherman’s The Gilgul that ruled bookstore shelves, thanks to its amazing cover.

The Gilgul doesn’t quite live up to the promise of its cover, however. It honors the beautiful traditions of the Jewish people with the story of a young posses...

When her future groom witnesses her finger-banging a nurse in the local nuthouse, he flees for Miami to swill Jack Daniels and pick up every hooker he can find. The memory of the Holocaust is evoked by a touching scene in which an army of Jewish concentration camp victims comes back from th...

And an American psychiatrist is tied up and injected with HIV-infected blood by two of his patients, a bisexual Puerto Rican and a black pimp, after they sneak a peek at his notes stating that people who get AIDS do...

Coming the same year that the Berlin Wall fell and the Soviet Union started to disintegrate, David Saperstein’s Cold War thriller Red Devi...

Satan (actually Shaitan, the Arabic jinn who refused to kneel before Adam), ditched the Nazis when they lost World War II and assumed the identity of a dead Soviet intelligence officer. Now a higher-up in Soviet military intelligence, Shaitan has recruited a cadre of loyal Satan worshippers and is planning a coup. It’s up to a band of loyal KGB agents, allied with Israeli intell...

Bari Wood’s deeply felt immigrant love song The Tribe.

The Tribe’s opening sequence is guaranteed to make readers’ hearts sink: a prologue set during World War II. In Nuremberg. If you’ve read five horror novels from the ’80s, then you’ve read four prologues set during WWII.

this one asks a question whose answer is intriguing: how did the Jews in Barracks 554 of the Belzec concentration camp survive the war while the SS officers guarding them were starving to death?

Roger and Adam are practically brothers, and their surrogate father is Jacob Levy, Adam’s father, who survived Belzec and now functions as the revered elder of a tight-knit group of Holocaust survivors who, unfortunately, hate Roger because he’s black.

Years later, the Levys have ditched Brooklyn for Long Island, raising Adam’s son in the safe suburbs. But when a black family moves into the neighborhood, the Jewish homeowners panic over potentially plunging property values. Then another murder is committed by an enormous stranger who leaves his African American victims torn to shreds.

This is a book about tribes—found families who put their backs together and face outward, defending themselves against invaders—and how toxic they can become. It’s also a book of grace notes and details.

These three novels were published by Carlyle, the slightly more respectable imprint of Beeline Books, which published straight-up, no-holds-barred dirty books like Paris Sex Circus, The Wife Who Liked to Watch, and High School Orgy Society. But in 1977 the publishers saw horror novels all over drugstore racks and asked one of its authors, Brian McNaughton, to rip off the recent hit The Omen.

The explicit sex scenes are so cut and pasted they barely obscure McNaughton’s cracked cosmic vision. See, these hippies aren’t trying to summon Satan. They worship witches trapped in the fourth dimension.

Satan’s Love Child was one of Carlyle’s biggest sellers, and the publisher rapidly greenlit two more, this time giving McNaughton a free hand. Satan’s Mistress and Satan’s Seductress are practically sex-free, twisted up in each other’s chronologies, with echoes of Mistress reverberating through Seductress in a way that’s downright masterful.

McNaughton’s essential subject is failed families led by crummy parents who’ve given up trying to raise their kids; sort of like Rick Moody’s The Ice Storm with more shoggoths.

a survivor of Mistress’s climactic massacre moves back home and cautiously tries to pick up the pieces of her shattered life. Then time loops, undying witches, and books inside books stomp the protagonist’s delicate recovery into shards, reminding us that McNaughton is writing about a Lovecraftian universe that shows no mercy for fragile humans and their petty emotions.

In 1977, real-life Canadian housewife Michelle Smith suffered a miscarriage and sank into depression. She began therapy with Dr. Lawrence Pazder, who revealed that her problems stemmed from repressed childhood memories. Together, they recovered these traumatic memories—which revealed that in 1955, when Michelle was five years old, her mother turned her over to a Satanic cult that used her as the centerpiece in an 81-day ritual known as the Feast of the Beast. During this marathon orgy, Michelle was raped by snakes, defecated on a Bible, watched her playmates being murdered, saw kittens crucified, had a devil tail and horns surgically grafted to her skeleton, got her teeth knocked out, and ate human flesh while being rubbed all over with dead babies.

It sounds like a Brian McNaughton novel, but Smith claimed it was all true. To warn the world, she and Pazder wrote Michelle Remembers, a blockbuster memoir that helped spark America’s Satanic Panic in the 1980s.

Smith and Pazder left their respective spouses and married each other; they appeared on Oprah, went on a national book tour, popped up in People magazine, and shopped around a movie adaptation of their book, which was kept out of theaters thanks only to threats of a lawsuit from both the Church of Satan’s Anton LaVey and Smith’s father.

Michelle Remembers was a foundational text that brought recovered-memory syndrome and Satanic Ritual Abuse into the mainstream, updating for the ’80s lurid, turn-of-the-century conspiracy theories about white slavers running an international network of sin.