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
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