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

by Grady Hendrix

Eighties America was ready for conspiracy theories, no matter how silly, and we’re about to meet a man named Russ Martin who had a few for sale.

Between 1978 and 1984, Russ Martin wrote seven books about the Satanic Organization, a global conspiracy dedicated to the Devil and run by the elite 0.01 percent who rule society and use mind control and body swapping to destroy their enemies.

Rhea is an outlier: nothing more than the straightforward story of a cheating Hollywood executive, the witch who seduces him, and the wife who ends up impaled on Satan’s ice-cold, two-pronged penis.

This was Satanic Panic fan fiction, updating the Michelle Remembers fever dream of a global satanic conspiracy to the yuppie-infested ’80s and giving it a kinky twist. In the next five books, Martin returns obsessively to certain themes: betrayal by authority, body swapping, mind control, and an ever-shifting power exchange as obsession spells bounced from character to character like pervy pinballs.

Lest one think this is too kinky for mainstream publishing, know that when Playboy Press shut down in 1982, Tor instantly picked up the rest of Martin’s series.

All the way back to Henry James’s Turn of the Screw, with its little creeps Flora and Miles, kids in fiction have been trouble.

the ’50s were the true decade of the terrible tyke. The decade kicked off with Richard Matheson’s short story about a spider baby, “Born of Man and Woman.” In 1953 came Jerome Bixby’s classic “It’s a Good Life,” with its all-powerful, bratty three-year-old psychic god Anthony. It has been adapted three times for The Twilight Zone (the original series, the reboot, and the feature film) and once for The Simpsons.

The next year saw the arrival of the twin masterworks of killer-kid literature: William Golding’s Lord of the Flies and William March’s The Bad Seed.

Wanting to cash in on the success of The Exorcist, producer Harvey Bernhard hired screenwriter David Seltzer to write The Omen, a smash that spawned two sequels and numerous remakes (as well as popularizing 666 as the “number of the beast”).

There’s also a nutty backstory in which one of the priests selected to kill Damien reminisces about doing missionary work in Africa, where he fell in love with a young man and was forced to watch his lover eat his own testicles before being flayed alive.

Damien’s character, now the head of Thorn Corporation, talks as if he was raised in a German military academy (“Pleased to meet you, Miss Reynolds. You are the Barbara Walters of the BBC, perhaps?”), recites death metal lyrics (“Birth is pain. Death is pain. Beauty is pain.”), and waxes rhapsodic over, as he charmingly puts it, “the gaping wound of a woman.”

Not so for McGill, who returned in 1982 to write an Omen novel not based on a film, Omen IV: Armageddon 2000, which opens with a scene of rectal childbirth.

This book revolves around yet another attempt to insert the Seven Sacred Daggers of Megiddo into the spawn of Satan. Chief among those trying to turn the Antichrist into a knife block is Philip Brennan, the American ambassador overseeing Arab-Israeli peace talks, which fall apart when an Israeli politician clocks a Syrian representative with an ashtray.

she interviews Philip Brennan’s backstabbing wife from the previous book, who has since taken a knife and mutilated her vagina as penance for her betrayal.

The series concludes with Damien Jr. crushed by a massive falling crucifix ridden by Philip Brennan’s mad wife, who lands on Damien crotch-first, and we’re informed that the last sight Damien Jr. sees is “the mutilation of Margaret Brennan.” THE END.

A lot of fear emerged surrounding pregnancy and childbirth, but fortunately horror paperbacks were there to address every new parent’s fears with a resounding “Yes!”

Yes, having sex will cause your baby to die, especially if that sex involved female orgasm (Crib, 1982). Yes, having a baby will cause a woman’s breasts to look “as though a vandal had defaced a great work of art” (also Crib). Yes, you will be confined to a locked mental ward after giving birth (too many books to list). Yes, if you have an abortion the remains will be buried in a shallow grave behind the hospital, where they will be struck by lightning and reanimated as brain-eating babies who telekinetically explode your womb (Spawn, 1983).

The horror-novel OB/GYN is remote and cold. His name is Dr. Borg or Dr. Kabel, and he works at the Karyll Clinic, which sounds like a location in a David Cronenberg movie.

If you are visiting a fertility clinic that has a conveyor belt running directly from the delivery room to what everyone refers to as “the Off-Limits Building,” find another doctor.

there was always a previous victim who seemed insane but who might be telling the truth if everyone would stop dosing her with Thorazine for a second and listen.

The message seemed to be that women should have babies by finding them in a cabbage patch or receiving them from a stork, the way nature intended, rather than using their dangerous, weird-looking wombs. But for those who insisted on doing things the hard way, these novels were full of long descriptions of medical procedures like amniocentesis and culdoscopy.

In the world of horror paperbacks, child-rearing has few rewards. If you manage to avoid the deranged surrogate mothers who orgasm during labor and want to steal back their baby and send it to heaven with its brothers and sisters (Hush Little Baby, 1982), and you can dodge the secret cult stealing Jewish babies and selling them for $50,000 a pop (Crib), you still must care for the infant itself, which comes with its own challenges. Babies can be fussy, and the fussiest babies have a body count.

As long as they belong to someone else, homicidal children can be a joy. They’re highly accomplished, respectful to those they’re not murdering, and when they’re finally arrested, you’re left feeling that much better about your own little underachievers, whose terrible table manners suddenly seem like a testament to their normalcy rather than your poor parenting.

First, make sure that what you’re dealing with is in fact a child and not just, say, a slow-growing adult who shaves his pubic hair to appear prepubescent (The Next).

it’s important to determine what kind of homicidal child you have: a) adopted (The Godsend, 1976) b) chemically altered (Childmare, 1980) c) possessed (The Moonchild, 1978) d) reincarnated (The Children, 1982) e) poorly parented (Mama’s Little Girl, 1983) f) inappropriately violent for no good reason (Prissy, 1978) g) in possession of psychic powers (The Savior, 1978) h) Satan spawn (Seed of Evil, 1988)

Adopted or chemically altered children should be destroyed immediately because they cannot be reformed. No matter how hard you try, they probably will, at some point, go o...

The most important thing to remember is that it is not your fault. Many children are born evil and must be taught to be good. As the famous French writer Alain Robbe-Grillet said, “What do little girls dream about? Knives and blood.”

Or, as Erma Bombeck said, “A child needs your love most when he deserves it least.” For example, after he has murdered a news anchor by shooting him in the face (The Children) or as he’s lighting your wife’s teenaged lover on fire (Tricycle).

Fornicating with the incarnation of all evil usually produces children who are genetically predisposed to use their supernatural powers to cram their grandmothers into television sets, headfirst.

When nude, is his body the most beautiful male form you have ever seen, but possessed of a penis that’s either monstrously enormous, double-headed, has glowing yellow eyes, or all three?

A young lady wearing a bow at her neck or wearing a lacy party dress reads as either “I am a living Victorian doll,” or “I will murder you the minute your back is turned.” Some parents try to deal with the difficulties of dressing homicidal children by sending them to a school that requires them to wear a uniform, which is an excellent idea.

Disregard these warnings and end up like the town of Elliot, Pennsylvania, where, in Piper (1987), hundreds of children under the age of thirteen, dressed as adorable witches, pirates, and cowboys, murder three thousand adults one All Hallow’s Eve.

On the glass-half-full side, the whole town works together and brings their psychotic progeny under control, with local Vietnam and Korean War vets teaming up to machine-gun the little ankle biters into kibble.

The only book written by Mendal W. Johnson, who died two years after it was published, 1974’s Let’s Go Play at the Adams’ still elicits passionate loathing. Search online and you’ll find readers who describe destroying the book after finishing it, who write about being left ill, about how sick the author must have been. They call it “misogynistic” and “loathsome.” Yet people remember it vividly decades later.

A completely nihilistic vision of the world, Let’s Go Play at the Adams’ doesn’t deny the possibility of goodness, or beauty, or grace. It merely points out that those are the things we kill first.

In horror fiction, every culture has its own supernatural menace. African Americans get voodoo. The Chinese get fox spirits. And WASPs (white Anglo-Saxon Protestants) get the all-American boy sporting a varsity letter jacket and blinding-white smile that mask the howling maniac on the inside.

Everything is perfect, everyone is privileged, and every single son is hopelessly insane. Such Nice People (1981) and The Sibling (1979) unfold over that holiest of WASP holidays, Christmas, its silly seasonal anxieties contrasted with sheer horror.

What happened? Such Nice People blames mental illness. The Sibling blames sibling rivalry. Halo blames Billy’s parents for being oblivious and withholding. These families are all so committed to everything being perfect that they look the other way while their sons murder neighborhood pets, develop Nazi fetishes, and curb-stomp weaker kids.

Subtlety and understatement are not words normally associated with a genre whose covers feature skeleton cheerleaders and hog-tied babysitters, but those qualities are the hallmarks of the six books written by Ken Greenhall (including two under the pseudonym Jessica Hamilton).

“When I was younger I saw James, my father’s brother, look from our dog to me without changing his expression. I soon taught him to look at me in a way he looked at nothing else.” So begins Elizabeth (1976).

Born to British immigrants in Detroit in 1928, Greenhall graduated from high school at age 15. After serving in the army he moved to New York City, where he lived for the rest of his life, editing encyclopedias.

Greenhall’s next book, The Companion (1988), was told from the point of view of an angel of death working for, and occasionally murdering, the elderly. Then came Death Chain (1991), about a cognac salesman surrounded by murder.

Undefeated, he went home, sat down, and wrote Lenoir (1998), an elegant historical novel about the black man who posed for Rubens’s Four Studies of the Head of a Negro. The book was Greenhall’s favorite, and his ability to flawlessly evoke the voice of an abducted African slave stranded in seventeenth-century Amsterdam is nothing short of astonishing. But a patronizing review in the New York Times broke his heart and he never wrote again. He passed away in 2014.

Automatonophobia is the name smug people who’ve never been chased by witch marionettes give to the irrational fear of inanimate objects that resemble human beings: puppets, robots, mannequins, dolls.

Dead White’s experimental cover caused a stir—and cleverly concealed its cackling horde of killer clowns.

Since time immemorial, humankind’s greatest natural predator has been the clown. Stephen King terrified readers with Pennywise in It (1986), but that was centuries after most mammals had learned to flee in terror at the sound of floppy shoes.

The first white-faced, full-makeup-wearing clowns appeared in the nineteenth century. In England it was Joseph Grimaldi, a horribly abused child who became a clown, then retired at age 45 when his tortured joints crumbled to dust. His son, also a clown, drank himself to death at age 30. France’s first clown, Jean-Gaspard Deburau, once beat a child to death in the street (he was acquitted).

Edgar Allan Poe’s Hop-Frog (1849) was a dwarf forced to be a jester who burned eight courtiers to death. Pagliacci features opera’s most famous clown, a sad sack who stabs his cheating wife to death onstage. In the early 1980s, clown panics erupted in Boston, Omaha, and Pittsburgh when rumors circulated that clowns were luring children into white vans.

Some of horror fiction’s only blood-smeared Bozos appear in Alan Ryan’s Dead White (1983), the charming Christmas tale of killer clowns riding a circus train of death to a snowbound Catskills community.

After Stepmom forces Laura to attend first grade (which ends badly), Laura and her clown declare full-scale war. They start with gaslighting, but when Stepmom gets pregnant and gives birth to what Laura describes as “the screaming mud-baby,” things go full psycho. You will have moments when you need to put this book down and walk away.