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August 6 - August 7, 2022
When Jill Bauman painted the cover for Alan Ryan’s The Kill she took a doll into the woods, shooting it in as many different poses as possible before draping it over a wooden fence like a corpse. Refusing to depict dead bodies in her paintings, she’s since painted dozens, if not hundreds, of dolls on book covers ranging from Elizabeth Engstrom’s When Darkness Loves Us to Edmund Plante’s Garden of Evil.
Hating clowns is a waste of time because you’ll never loathe a clown as much as he loathes himself. But a magician? Magicians think they’re wise and witty, full of patter and panache, walking around like they don’t deserve to be shot in the back of the head and dumped in a lake.
For all the grandeur of its self-regard, magic consists of nothing more than making a total stranger feel stupid. Worse, the magician usually dresses like a jackass.
Juice dances around like a beam of sunshine, dusting her sentences with adorable phrases like “Gosh o’Friday” and “Crime-a-nitly.” By the time her alcoholic mom calls her “little bitch mouth,” you’re kind of on Mom’s side.
Juice attends the meetings, showing the men her own pathetic, half-baked tricks, which they indulge because they’re too frail to hold a pillow over her face until she stops struggling.
The fact that the Sleights’ master plan to dispose of their dangerous enemy was to lock him in an unguarded trunk and shove it in the basement of the local college drama department gives you an indication of the masterminds we’re dealing with. Then again, LeFey can’t even lift Pa-Nah’s magical skeleton key off a simple-minded girl whose biggest dream is to wear fishnet stockings and wash dove shit out of top hats.
Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to 1984, the year Jack Chick published his infamous anti-RPG (role-playing game) tract Dark Dungeons, claiming that these dice-and-paper games were a gateway to satanism and suicide.
His parents hired private investigator and tireless self-promoter William Dear
Dear knew absolutely zilch about D&D, so he told a reporter that the game might have had something to do with the disappearance. That was all the press needed to declare Egbert a victim of a D&D game “gone wrong,” igniting a media maelstrom.
by then Dear’s colorful version of events had taken hold and two relevant books were already on their way to market. The first was from Rona Jaffe, the extremely famous author who, back in 1958, had published the proto–Sex and the City best seller The Best of Everything. Her subsequent Mazes and Monsters (1981), released in the wake of the Egbert scandal, was a book about RPGs written by an author who knew nothing about them—and cared even less.
Jaffe did mint two conventions that became staples of RPG panic books. The first was that each player turns to RPGs because something is broken inside them (usually, divorced parents are to blame). The other is that the games are deeply silly.
It’s an unwritten rule that if you’re going to make a quick buck off a young person’s alleged suicide attempt, you should at least be entertaining. Jaffe broke that rule, but John Coyne would not repeat her mistake with his Hobgoblin (1981).
After ambling along like a slow-moving character study for eighteen chapters, the book delivers a gibbering, blood-drenched climax at the school’s Halloween dance as almost every secondary character is gruesomely slaughtered. In a brief epilogue, Scott decides that murdering a man makes him a grown-up and he no longer needs to play Hobgoblin.
H. G. Wells had written about vast armies of ants eating Brazilians in 1905, and Daphne du Maurier and Alfred Hitchcock had introduced audiences to death from the skies in The Birds (1963), but 1974 was pop culture’s Year of the Animal.
Watership Down was already a hit in England, but in April 1974 it debuted in the United States, where Richard Adams’s saga of brave bunnies outsold Peter Benchley’s angry shark, remaining on the New York Times Best Seller List until January 1975.
And over in a grungy part of London, a 28-year-old advertising copywriter named James Herbert was writing his first novel, all about his deepest childhood fear. It was called The Rats.
By the time Herbert died in 2013, he was the United Kingdom’s most successful horror novelist, with 54 million books sold worldwide. He wrote ghost stories, alternate histories, and thrillers, but his first two books—The Rats and The Fog (1975)—are proto-punk ragers: nasty, mean, anti-establishment sleaze ripped straight from Herbert’s id and redeemed by his complete and utter conviction to go there.
Martin Amis, reviewing for the Observer, wrote that the novel was “enough to make a rodent retch, undeniably, and enough to make any human pitch the book aside.” But even back then no one cared what Martin Amis had to say,
Only Harris proves inedible, saving his school by punching the rodents to death. Next up: ultrasonics. Harris thinks gas is for girls and ultrasonics are stupid. Instead he grabs an ax, drives over a living carpet of rats, and finds the gigantic two-headed rat boss.
It forms a cloud and drifts across England like a deadly fart, turning cows psychotic, making schoolboys castrate their gym teachers (Herbert hates gym teachers), causing pigeons to peck people to death, and making a pilot fly a loaded plane into the GPO Tower. In one of the book’s most famous scenes, 148,820 people commit suicide by walking into the sea.
No its the perspective that makes that scene
It was The Rats (and to some extent The Fog) that set the template for everything that came after, for Herbert had revealed a great truth to aspiring horror novelists that would guide British horror books for the next twenty years: human beings are delicious, and England is full of them.
Cujo (1981) is the book most associated with killer canines, but the subgenre was going strong by the time Stephen King published his ambitious novel about a good dog gone mad due to a bad bat with rabies.
The problem with killer-dog books is that most people like dogs, so as soon as a canine eats a kid, we find ourselves wondering what the kid did to provoke it. As a result, these novels are often real bummers.
All brown corduroy and tweed, the story’s told in the deadpan tones of a BBC informational film, even as infected corgis turn on their owners and Jack Russell terriers rampage through the countryside, leaving half-eaten tramps in their wake.
For three years he woke up every morning, checked the papers, and saw that no one had done it yet. He didn’t want to do it. He kept waiting for someone else to do it, because it was so damn obvious. Then one morning, three years after James Herbert had unleashed his Rats, Sharman picked up his pen and unleashed…The Cats.
When a radio announcer is buried alive in an avalanche of mewling kittens, the immediate reaction is not one of horror but a soul-deep “awwwww…”
When Alan Ryan took his novel Panther! to Signet, he also brought a cover by his friend, artist Jill Bauman. The publishers didn’t like being told what to do, so they rejected the cover and commissioned new art by Tom Hallman. Published here for the first time is Bauman’s unused cover (above), along with the image that was used in its place (right).
In the four years after James Herbert’s The Rats, every critter got a turn at the all-you-can-eat human-meat buffet. Authors reveled in an escalating arms race to find new creatures—bees, alligators, fire ants!—that could tear us apart like chicken wings. A mere year after his public-health-scare screed Rabid, David Anne thought he had a winner in The Folly (1978). What man could contain his screams when confronted with killer rabbits?
Those bunnies have nothing on Academy Award–winning screenwriter George Wells’s sole novel, the scrotum-ripping Taurus (1982), about Mexican bulls retired from the bullfighting circuit who get stoned on agave roots and go on a crime spree across Mexico, murdering women with their enormous penises, killing men by goring them in the crotch, and generally demonstrating that bulls are “the most virile animal the world has ever known.”
Animal-amok literature reached peak lunacy with Mark Washburn and Robert Webb’s The Predators, in which a Kodiak bear and a great white shark battle each other on pay-per-view cable.
Peter Tonkin builds a better Jaws with Killer, dropping the awkward Mafia and infidelity subplots from Peter Benchley’s best seller and cutting right to the good stuff: five characters, stranded on an ice floe, at the mercy of a pod of killer whales, led by a crazed super-whale escaped from a military laboratory. It’s a nonstop symphony of chaos as these angry pandas of the sea bite off blue whale tongues while botanists toss dynamite at herds of stampeding walruses.
Davenport is not only Britain’s top marine biologist, he’s also its loneliest. Only constant work can fill his long, solitary nights, and now he commits his stiff upper lip and his sad coping skills to avenge his nephew. Davenport meets Pat, a young woman as lonely as he is, who brings his dusty old penis back to life after years in storage.
Davenport remembers paraquat, the common weed killer found in every British garden shed that’s so toxic it can cause Parkinson’s disease. Davenport dives over King Crab’s army in his helicopter, drenching them in this toxic soup, killing them where they scuttle. The few survivors retreat on a shame march back into the sea.
Hence Michael Crichton’s The Andromeda Strain, about a killer microbe, sold millions of copies, whereas no one has ever written a book called Stomp, about killer elephants. Insects nestle into that sweet spot: small enough to be disgusting, yet big enough to be dangerous.
Starting with the inevitable prologue and always ending with the survival of a few hardy specimens (just in case sales justify a sequel), these books have much in common. They take place almost exclusively during the hottest day/week/month of the year after radiation/evolution/untested insecticide causes fauna to mutate. Insect-attack books are basically morality tales in which unscrupulous developers, ethics-free businessmen, and ineffectual local leaders find their scale-balancing comeuppances between chitinous mandibles.
The exception is Pierce Nace’s wildly amoral Eat Them Alive (1977), in which Dyke Mellis tries to double-cross his criminal associates after a robbery. They foil his plan, castrate him, and leave him to die in the desert. Dyke recovers and is hiding in South America almost a decade later when an earthquake raises an island full of ten-foot-tall praying mantises off the coast. Immediately turning giant praying mantises into giant praying-mantis lemonade, Dyke trains them to kill at his command.
Horror’s biggest mystery: Who is Pierce Nace? The best guess is that she’s Evelyn Pierce Nace, a 69-year-old Texan credited with authoring 40 paperbacks.
But insects don’t just want to teach us how to be good by chewing off our faces—they also want to gobble our junk. Michael R. Linaker’s scorpions (technically arachnids, but still likely to invade England, so basically insects) focus their attacks on women’s breasts when they aren’t spreading mayhem at the nearby circus. John Halkin’s caterpillars in Squelch (1985) home in on a police constable’s groin. And the seemingly benign moths of Mark Sonders’s Blight (1981) are full of surprises, as one young mother discovers when she is swarmed to death: “They could hurt her no more. They had done
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“Moths attack sweaters and fly around light bulbs. They don’t devour humans.” And yet they do, flying into ears and noses, down throats, and, unfortunately, up butts.
It’s also no surprise that in their inebriated state, humans often make terrible decisions—going outside in the dark to investigate why the dog suddenly stopped barking, or battling the caterpillar invasion by releasing thousands of five-foot-long lizards that eat the caterpillars and then quickly overrun the country themselves.
When John Wyndham’s subjects turn their stinging vines on humanity in his 1951 novel Day of the Triffids, their betrayal was understandable. After all, they were Soviet plants, born with hatred in their sappy green hearts. But when plants mind-control us so that they can feed on our blood, it’s hard not to be offended.
Diving into the literature, one quickly realizes that plants and humans have been enemies forever, or at least since Arthur Conan Doyle’s 1880 short story “The American’s Tale,” about a killer Venus flytrap in Montana.
Even worse, human sexuality causes them to recoil in disgust, and one plant was traumatized when it telepathically witnessed sexual intercourse. No wonder they want us dead.
In The Sentinel (1974), a model moves into a brownstone…from hell. In The Shining (1977), an economically strapped family takes a last-chance job in a hotel…from hell. In The House Next Door (1978), nouveau-riche suburbanites build the contemporary home…from hell. But it all started with Robert Marasco’s Burnt Offerings (1973), a chilling tale about a family who escapes the city to move into a summer rental…from hell.
Marasco was a high school English teacher, so his illusions about human nature had long ago been stomped to death. He originally wrote Burnt Offerings as a screenplay, and first intended it to be a black comedy, but as Marasco said in an interview: “It just came out black.”
If social and political anxiety spawns zombies, then economic anxiety births haunted houses. Marasco created the now-common real estate nightmare scenario: a cash-strapped family (or individual) gets a deal on a place above their socioeconomic station.
Once they move into the old Allardyce place, the house reshapes the couple into their own worst nightmares. Marian cleans obsessively, hypnotized by the expensive uncared-for antiques. Dear, aging Aunt Elizabeth is sharing their vacation, and although she’s a real live wire at first, she becomes frailer as the story progresses. Ben transforms into the kind of father he never wanted to be, practically raping his wife and nearly drowning his son while bullying him into “being a man.” Their behavior gets worse, but every day the house looks better and better.
Marasco was the first American writer to bring anxieties about class, mortgages, and equity to the forefront of the haunted-house novel. Both Jay Anson’s The Amityville Horror (1979) and Stephen King’s The Shining (1977) follow his formula: cash-strapped family gets deal on new place and comes to regret it.
Americans have always been aware that their homes can be menaced by unseen forces. Perhaps those forces are the ghosts of people murdered there a hundred years before, or maybe it’s toxic waste from a leaky landfill. Maybe demons are stealing your life force, or maybe it’s radiation. Your kids might be sick because your house is built over a cemetery, or the radon in the basement.
Despite Jackson’s iconic The Haunting of Hill House, Matheson’s go-for-broke Hell House, Anne Rivers Siddons’s beautifully disturbing The House Next Door, and even Marasco’s pioneering Burnt Offerings, the unfortunate fact remains that America’s most iconic haunted house is the title property from The Amityville Horror. Crass, commercial minded, grandiose, ridiculous, this carnival barker’s idea of a haunted house is a shame-train of stupid.
