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

by Grady Hendrix

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.