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

by Grady Hendrix

The totally macho moniker “Peter Saxon” was a group pen name for a bunch of British authors (W. Howard Baker, Rex Dolphin, and Wilfred McNeilly, among others) who churned out ersatz pulp novels with fully painted covers that looked like all the other pulp reprints on the stands. Baker had used the Saxon pen name to write some popular installments of the Sexton Blake detective series, and by many accounts he was the mastermind who ensured that his cabal of Guardian ghost writers hit their quota of nubile flesh, gratuitous violence, and sexy swinging. The six Guardian books were about square-jawed, tweed-and-blackbriar-pipe types investigating haunted houses, underwater vampires, voodoo cults, and Australians. Sort of like Scooby-Doo, only with more orgies.

Between April 1967 and December 1973, everything changed. In a little more than five years, horror fiction became fit for adults, thanks to three books. Ira Levin’s Rosemary’s Baby, Thomas Tryon’s The Other, and William Peter Blatty’s The Exorcist were the first horror novels to grace Publishers Weekly’s annual best-seller list since Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca in 1938. And except for three books by Peter “Jaws” Benchley, they’d be the only horror titles on that list until Stephen King’s The Dead Zone in 1979. All three spawned movies and, most important, set the tone for the next two decades of horror publishing.

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. At the finish line, the Virgin Mary and the Archangel Michael appeared and healed her, miraculously erasing all physical evidence of these crimes. 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. People who should have known better became convinced that Satan lurked under every heavy-metal album cover and operated day care centers across the country. 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 ke...

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. In the ’40s, Agatha Christie’s Crooked House featured a twelve-year-old psychopath named Josephine, and Ray Bradbury’s 1946 short story “The Small Assassin” gave us a baby out to murder his parents. But 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.”

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). Some parents will feel helpless. “How can I possibly stop my child from murdering strangers with a hammer because she thinks they are demons from hell?” you might wail (Mama’s Little Girl). Fortunately there are some practical, commonsense steps you can take to lower the body count. 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. “But how do I know if the man I’m dating is the devil?” I hear you ask. Here are some warning signs learned from Seed of Evil: Does he refuse to use contractions when he speaks? Does he deliver pickup lines like, “You live on the edge of darkness”? 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? After intercourse, does he laugh malevolently, urinate on your mattress, and then disappear? If you spot any of these behav...

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). His characters sit down across from you and tell their stories in measured, reasonable tones. Greenhall writes about animal attacks, witchcraft, serial killers, human sacrifice—and of course, homicidal children—without ever raising his voice.

Clown marionettes are bad, but real clowns are worse. 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.

Fictional clowns come with a body count. 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. Clowns are part of the holy trinity of horror paperback iconography, along with skeletons and dolls, yet few books deliver death jesters.

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.

It was the year punk rock broke: 1974. It was also the year James Herbert published The Rats, which is pretty much the same thing. 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. Stephen King has noted that Herbert’s books have a “raw urgency,” and if by “raw” he means “totally flayed of skin” and if by “urgency” he means “gripping you by the collar and screaming in your face,” then we agree. The former is a blockhead of a book. What is it about? Rats. What do they do? Eat everyone. 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, and the initial 100,000-copy print run sold out in a couple of weeks.

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.” Reviewers panned or patronized it, but the book caught on, sparking the wave of haunted-house novels later in the decade. 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. Hoping to start fresh, they go all-in, quickly realizing that their attempt to buy a better life at a discount is the worst decision they ever made. Now all they can do is run, screaming for their lives, abandoning their investment.

house, she can wax their floors, but she’ll never belong. Before Marasco, Shirley Jackson and Richard Matheson had written haunted-house books—The Haunting of Hill House (1959) and Hell House (1971) are both genre classics, but neither had a thing to say about money. They were about psychic investigators going to abandoned mansions to figure out how they got so spooky. Marasco and his now-forgotten best seller focused on the real issue for most people with a haunted house: “Can I get my investment back?” 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. When you’re stuck with a haunted house, it doesn’t matter how much you put into repairing the boiler or fixing the pool. At the end of the day, all you can do is run.

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.

Reading this book is like driving through a dust storm while in a post-concussion haze: the harder you try to focus, the more everything slips away into an insanity vortex.

By the time it’s raining hellfire, Cunningham has drilled home the idea that small towns are death traps and we’re lucky to get out while we can. The only way manufacturing will return is through a deal with the devil. Credit 92 Yet even as Satan rises up over the Appalachian Mountains, one character turns to another and shrugs. “Hoss,” he says, “I never claimed to know what was normal in this world.” Then he cracks open a beer and walks away. Small towns may be hell on earth, but they feel uniquely American in a way that big cities never will.

In Night Train, other dimensions are melting into ours, the main incursion point lying beneath the Lower East Side (also home to Cellars’ Head Underneath). Albino dwarves, flesh-eating jellyfish, and a subterranean pterodactyl make appearances before the NYPD blasts them to hell with shotguns and concussion grenades. The monsters are defeated, but the city sleeps uneasily. As the book ends, one of the officers keeps an eye on crime stats. As long as they keep going down, people are safe. But if they start going up again, it means the city is stirring back to life. Only gentrification can keep the forces of darkness at bay.

Ramsey Campbell will show you terror in a plastic bag. Or a pedestrian underpass. Or a deserted council estate. Since the late ’70s, he has written dozens of novels and hundreds of short stories, from erotic horror to the traditional ghost story. But in the ’80s, he was the chief practitioner of Fritz Leiber’s style of urban horror, luring readers into empty city streets and squalid basements and confronting them with the monsters that were born there. Campbell’s stories feel like week-old newspapers, swollen with water, black with mold, forgotten on the steps of the abandoned tenement. His titles scream like headlines: The Face That Must Die! The Doll Who Ate His Mother! The Parasite! His Liverpool and London are necropolises of marginal people, hateful shut-ins, catatonic homeless, gutter-crawling journalists, their loneliness and isolation amplified by the urban hellscapes in which they’re entombed.

Welcome to the ’80s, where life was a bitchin’ ride in a sweet Porsche! Manufacturing was dead! We were a service and technology economy now! Everyone get rich! America is number one! Let’s kill a commie for mommy and head for the mall!

In Little Brother (1983), aliens land on Earth in 1908 and take over the Soviet Union. By 1983 they’ve infiltrated the American market with an iPad-esque toy called the Possum, which beams addictive subliminal messages into the brains of good American kids. When worried parents try to limit the ever-increasing screen time, the kids either commit suicide or attack Mom and Dad. In the end, the adults figure “What the hell?” and become addicted to Possum, too. Anyone who thinks this is baseless paranoia hasn’t watched a parent texting while rocketing down a highway at 70 m.p.h. in the family van.

Even though two of the three great novels of the ’70s horror boom featured female main characters (Rosemary’s Baby and The Exorcist), V. C. Andrews was the first female brand-name horror writer, capable of selling millions of books simply because her name was on the cover. It’s no accident that her style of horror was the one originally popularized by women: the gothic. Gothic horror was domestic horror in which affairs of the heart were as important as affairs of the flesh. Its subject matter was families, marriage, houses, children, insanity, and secrets.

Seventeen-year-old Graham Masterton started out as a newspaper reporter in his native Scotland. He soon became the editor of Mayfair, a men’s magazine, and then moved over to Penthouse. At the tender age of twenty-five he wrote the sex instruction book Acts of Love; since then he has written close to thirty more lovemaking manuals. In 1975 he took a break from nookie advice to write The Manitou, the novel that launched his fiction career. He has written more than seventy books, including historical sagas, humor collections, and movie novelizations. Critics write reviews of Masterton’s books in a stunned, slack-jawed daze. “Be warned,” a still-reeling reviewer for Kirkus wrote of Master of Lies in 1992, “Masterton’s newest…opens with what may be the single most sadistic scene in horror history….The excruciating detail here seemingly acknowledges no bounds and culminates in a soul-draining depiction of a giant mutilating the penis of a renowned psychic.”

Wherever you think this book won’t go, Masterton not only goes there, he reports back in lunacy-inducing detail. By the last page we’ve seen amputee dwarf assassins, flaming dogs, one of the most harrowing scenes of self-cannibalism ever committed to paper, one death by explosive vomiting, and an appearance by Jesus Christ himself. Throughout, Masterton enjoys himself immensely. He cares about his characters. His dialogue is funnier than it needs to be, his gore is gorier, and his sex is more explicit. His books may not be the most tasteful, or consistent, but you feel that Masterson will gladly hang up his hat the minute they’re not the most original.

Thomas Tessier’s placid prose lured readers out on the ice, which then cracked, plunging them into a nightmare abyss where alcoholic plastic surgeons babbled about the Marquis de Sade to living human torsos shorn of limbs and locked in cages. One of the few horror novelists to spin his fear out of adult sexual relationships, rather than slopping sex on top of his stories like a mountain of Reddi-wip, Tessier’s books feel more mature, and therefore much darker, than a lot of what was on the market.

A kind of Fight Club for the hot tub set, 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.

All the strands were converging: serial killers, true crime, splatterpunk, sympathy for the monster. The hangman’s noose was knotted in 1988 when Thomas Harris’s second novel, The Silence of the Lambs, debuted and won the genre’s two biggest honors: the World Fantasy Award and the Bram Stoker Award. A few years later, in 1991, the movie adaptation won five Academy Awards. Suddenly, Hannibal Lecter was a household name. This was the moment horror editors and agents had been eagerly awaiting for more than twenty years. This was the next Exorcist. This was Rosemary’s second baby. And the first thing it did was strangle its older sibling.

Miller transformed Bunkowski from a psychopath who killed at random into a good guy who killed people who deserved it: drug dealers, evil psychiatrists, cold-blooded psychotic snipers sporting micropenises and armed with futuristic ray guns, who happened to have graduated from the same government black-ops program as Bunkowski did. That happened in Savant, the last of the Chaingang novels, which revealed that Chaingang had to destroy the other assassins in his old super-psychopath program because they killed indiscriminately and had sex with prostitutes. Unlike Chaingang, who, by this point, was only killing the people who abused him as a child or were mean to puppies.

By the end of Savant, Chaingang—whom we met in the first book raping a woman, ejaculating on her face, then breaking her neck—had developed the ability to turn invisible in darkness by regulating his respiration and heart rate like a ninja. He had mailed a teeny tiny possum heart to the government doctor who created him and had adopted five adorable puppies. The serial killer was no longer a menace. He wasn’t even a cartoon. He had become a hero.

In February 1991 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. Dubbing it the Funhole (the original title of the book), they discover that anything organic fed into the Funhole comes out disturbingly mutated. So these art scene bottom-feeders use the Funhole to get themselves a gallery show. The Cipher was anything but typical horror. The main action was psychological, and the Funhole is never explained, but readers were ready for something new. The book shared that year’s Stoker Award for best first novel with another Abyss title, Melanie Tem’s Prodigal, about dead children, social workers, and psychic vampires.

Abyss published Koja’s next novel, Bad Brains, about an artist whose sustains a minor head injury at a party that unleashes apocalyptic hallucinations, seizures, and extradimensional silver snot dripping over everything he sees. Then his paintings start coming to life. Relentlessly interior, unfolding in dreams, visions, and nightmares, reading the book is like being trapped inside William Blake’s worst headache.

Written in chilly, precise, clinical prose, Michael Blumlein’s X, Y feels like the fruit of a collaboration between J. G. Ballard and David Cronenberg. The only thing tying it to the old-school horror market is the fact that its main character is a stripper. After she passes out onstage and wakes up convinced that she’s a man, Blumlein dives into the complicated swamp of gender difference, territory that no other horror novel had broached. Rather than worrying about identity politics or liberation narratives, he boils everything down to biology. And then he keeps on boiling. By the time he’s finished, Blumlein has made a case that our assumptions about our identities aren’t built on bedrock but on ever-shifting sand. It’s probably the only book to cite the Journal of Neuro-Medical Mechanics in its endnotes, and it’s also more dark science fiction than flat-out horror,

Abyss’s breakout star was Poppy Z. Brite, whose Lost Souls was the line’s first hardcover book; it earned Brite a six-figure, three-book deal with Dell. His books revolve around the fictional town of Missing Mile, North Carolina, which is populated by sensitive psychic musicians, bisexual vampires, runaway waifs, serial killers, and cannibals. Dripping with graphic sex and violence, refusing to pay lip service to conventional tsk-tsking over runaway kids, Brite’s books are the R-rated, younger, sexier, more rebellious version of Anne Rice’s gothic vampire epics. His characters ditch the lives and families they’d been assigned at birth to build their own stronger, braver, more inclusive families on the margins. Brite had been associated with the splatterpunk movement, but he had something that eluded most of that gang, and he used it wisely: restraint.

In July 1994, Jeanne Cavelos left Abyss to focus on her own writing and teaching. She was supposed to be replaced by a new editor, but never was. An editorial assistant took over and Dell lost confidence in the line, refusing to publish the third title on Brite’s contract, Exquisite Corpse, due to its “extreme” content. Abyss, with around forty-five titles on its list, withered and died shortly thereafter. And with it went the last echo of the horror boom.

The lesson horror teaches us is that everything dies. The horror fiction boom of the 1970s and ’80s became roadkill on the superhighway of the ’90s. Authors disappeared, cover artists found new outlets, and this publishing Titanic hit an iceberg, split apart, and released its cargo into the cold, dark waters to wash up on the shores of thrift stores and used paperback emporiums for years to come.

We can’t be certain that anyone is reading these books anymore. But we can hope. Because after all the monsters have flown away, hope is what’s left at the bottom of the box.