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January 10 - February 19, 2025
Most important, try not to have sex with Satan. 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.
The Voice of the Clown (1982)
Watership Down was already a hit in England, but in April 1974 it debuted in the United States, where Richard Adams’s saga
The Rats and The Fog (1975)—
James Herbert’s The Rats,
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:
Pierce Nace’s wildly amoral Eat Them Alive (1977),
Robert Marasco’s Burnt Offerings (1973), a chilling tale about a family who escapes the city to move into a summer rental…from hell.
The Devil’s Kiss, The Devil’s Heart, The Devil’s Touch, The Devil’s Cat, The Devil’s Laughter), Johnstone became a horror novelist. And every one of his horror novels is insane. Characters act in ways that barely resemble human behavior. The carnage flies thick and cartoony, with popped-out eyeballs flying across a room, people’s heads flattening when hit, cats gamboling in loops of human intestines.
In The Stepford Wives (1972), Ira Levin mocks the petrified patriarchy who fled the civil rights movement and feminism by retreating to elite Connecticut enclaves where they murder their unhappy wives and replace them with compliant fembots.
Jere Cunningham sums up small-town trauma in The Abyss (1984), his apocalyptic novel set in Tennessee coal country.
Robin Cook and his novels: Fever, Outbreak, Mutation, Shock, Seizure…terse nouns splashed across paperback racks.
Horror novelist Whitley Streiber (Wolfen, The Hunger, The Night Church)
Ann Radcliffe’s gothic novels (The Mysteries of Udolpho, The Italian) made her the highest-paid writer of the late eighteenth century.
except for Nightblood (1990), which was for people who thought ’Salem’s Lot needed more machine guns. Its protagonist, Chris Stiles, is a Vietnam vet and the ultimate divorced dad, constantly disappearing at crucial moments, leaving his woman and adopted children in peril, then reappearing at the last second with his silenced Uzi to save the day. Nightblood is so hardcore, you grow hair on your palms as you read. And it ends the only way possible: by giving Stiles a leather trench coat and a katana and reassuring us that he will continue to kill vampires forever.
McDowell started his career with The Amulet (1979), his own 100-page screenplay that he adapted into a 200-page novel after no one would buy it. Avon eventually acquired the book and encouraged McDowell to make it longer.
McDowell’s six-book Blackwater series was published one title per month between January and June 1983, and it was his farewell to the horror genre.
McDowell’s equally accomplished The Elementals (1981) is about another Southern family, this one haunted by ghosts that dwell in the sand around the family’s Victorian beach house.
Black Ambrosia (1986) contrasts most obviously with Rice’s work. Here, Engstrom’s vampire, Angelina Watson, is totally traditional—she doesn’t like crucifixes, can turn into fog, controls mens’ minds, sleeps in a coffin, sucks the blood of lovers and is not a metaphor for AIDS.
In 1975 a Scotsman named Graham Masterton published his first novel, a short book called The Manitou, about a young lady suffering from a slight swelling on the back of her neck. Turns out it isn’t just a swelling: Karen’s neck is pregnant!
Feast (1988), about gourmet cannibal cults. The story opens with the immortal line: “‘Well, then,’ said Charlie, his face half hidden in the shadows. ‘How long do you think this baby has been dead?’”
Graham Masterton went where lesser writers feared to tread, chronicling madmen living inside walls (Walkers), an apocalyptic grain blight (Famine), an evil chair (The Heirloom), cannibal cults (Feast), and a mirror that witnessed a child’s murder (Mirror
But what made Grant the ultimate skeleton wrangler was Shadows. Launched in 1978, Shadows was an anthology in which Grant tolerated no traditional monsters and no gore. Instead he published work by Alan Ryan, Chelsea Quinn Yarbro, Al Sarrantonio, and a couple of Stephen King’s quieter stories. As contributor Thomas Monteleone said, “If your stories weren’t appearing in Shadows, then you just weren’t cutting it.”
Clive Barker, whose debut six-volume short story collection The Books of Blood, published in the U.K. in 1984, was released in the U.S in 1986 in the form of six terrible-looking paperbacks.
Joe R. Lansdale’s first serial killer novel, Act of Love, slithered out of Zebra Books in 1981. He followed with a few limited-edition books before publishing The Drive-In and its sequel, The Drive-In 2
Judi Miller, the Aaron Spelling of horror novels. Both of her show-business slasher novels—Save the Last Dance for Me (1981) and Phantom of the Soap Opera (1988)
Red Dragon was a writer’s book that inspired dozens of copycats but never quite broke into the mainstream.
Eric C. Higgs’s The Happy Man was a short, minimalist novel of suburban ennui written in disaffected prose that could pass as a Brett Easton Ellis novella if it contained less cannibalism.
Flora Rheta Schreiber, author of the best-selling 1973 multiple personality best seller Sybil, delivered a true-crime account of the murders committed by Joseph Kallinger in a book called The Shoemaker
But nothing tracked the rise and decline of horror better than Rex Miller’s Chaingang novels.
Magazines died suddenly and without warning; Twilight Zone magazine shuttered in 1989, Fear magazine ceased publication in 1991, and Omni magazine became online-only in 1995.
the first Abyss book, The Cipher by Kathe Koja, hit the racks. A sharply observed slice of early-’90s bohemia, it was about a couple of starving artists in a dying Rust Belt city who find a hole in their storage space.
breakout star was Poppy Z. Brite, whose Lost Souls was the line’s first hardcover book;
Ray Garton’s Live Girls, a sleazy ’80s NYC vampire tale, is lots of fun today.
Two of my favorite novels from the pre–Stephen King ’70s are William H. Hallahan’s The Search for Joseph Tully and Joan Samson’s The Auctioneer
If you hunger for vampire thrills, try Fevre Dream, George R. R. Martin’s bloodthirsty nineteenth-century tale of night creatures on a Mississippi River steamboat, with lively characterizations and historical detail.
For tawdrier, cheaper vampire fun, try Lee Duigon’s Lifeblood, Marc Eliot’s How Dear the Dawn, and Leslie Whitten’s crime procedural mystery/horror Progeny of the Adder
The very nature of friendship is rent asunder in the creepily excellent Spectre, from Stephen Laws, in which a group of British college mates confront their long-ago secrets and memories.
The Happy Man, by Eric C. Higgs, introduces Marquis de Sade–style pleasures into a precisely-wrought suburban background.
Another title that’s hard to classify but not to be missed is Gwen, in Green; the book features one of my favorite covers, by George Ziel. As an eco-horror novel with tendrils of then-current pseudoscience and female sexual liberation, Hugh Zachary’s utterly ’70s novel charms with its datedness and its explicitness.
