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April 2, 2024 - February 6, 2025
The Gestapochauns live in the dark, battling their ancient rat enemies with teeny bullwhips. Shortly after we meet them, the author lets us know that these are not just any Nazi leprechauns. These are psychic Nazi leprechauns who enjoy S&M, are covered with scars from pleasure/pain sessions with their creator, were trained as sex slaves for full-sized human men, and are actually stunted fetuses taken from Jewish concentration camp victims. And one of them is named Adolph. While all this information is being hosed into the reader’s eyes like a geyser of crazy, this book rockets from 0 to 60 on
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No matter what book I read next, the Gestaopchauns clung to my gray folds, whispering to me in my sleep: What else has been forgotten? After some late-night googling brought me to Will Errickson’s Too Much Horror Fiction blog, I blacked out. One year later, I woke up squatting in the middle of an aisle at Sullivan’s Trade-a-Book in the heart of South Carolina, surrounded by piles of musty horror paperbacks. Apparently I was buying them. Apparently I was reading them. Apparently I was addicted.
The books I love were published during the horror paperback boom that started in the late ’60s, after Rosemary’s Baby hit the big time. Their reign of terror ended in the early ’90s, after the success of Silence of the Lambs convinced marketing departments to scrape the word horror off spines and glue on the word thriller instead. Like The Little People, these books had their flaws, but they offered such wonders. When’s the last time you read about Jewish monster brides, sex witches from the fourth dimension, flesh-eating moths, homicidal mimes, or golems stalking Long Island? Divorced from
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The book you’re holding is a road map to the horror Narnia I found hidden in the darkest recesses of remote bookstores—a weird, wild, wonderful world that feels totally alien today, and not just because of the trainloads of killer clowns.
Thrown into the rough-and-tumble marketplace, the writers learned they had to earn every reader’s attention. And so they delivered books that move, hit hard, take risks, go for broke. It’s not just the covers that hook your eyeballs. It’s the writing, which respects no rules except one: always be interesting.
These books rarely even used the word horror on covers, instead offering “eerie adventure,” “chilling adventure,” “tales of the unexpected,” and “stories of the weird.” Even the work of Shirley Jackson, the empress of American horror fiction, was sold with covers that made her books look like gothic romances.
A terrified woman flees a dark house. One window glows against stormy midnight skies. Somewhere, someone is brooding. Between 1960 and 1974, thousands of these covers appeared on paperback racks as gothic romances became the missing link between the gothic literature of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and the paperback horror of the ’70s and ’80s.
It all started in 1959 when Ace editor Jerry Gross went to his parents’ house for Sunday dinner and noticed that his mom was reading Daphne du Maurier’s novel Rebecca. He asked why she was reading a book from 1938. “Honey,” she said, “They don’t write like that anymore.”
Peak gothic was 1960 to 1974, and authors like Barbara Michaels, Victoria Holt, and Mary Stewart sold in the millions. But the tide began to turn in 1972 when Avon editor Nancy Coffey grabbed a manuscript out of the slush pile and discovered she couldn’t put it down. It was Kathleen Woodiwiss’s The Flame and the Flower, and it became the first bodice ripper, a variety of historical romance featuring more explicit passion. It sold 2.6 million copies. By 1978 the gothic romance had been chained in the attic and starved to death by its younger, sexier competition.
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.
Fueled by amphetamines and written during a feverish ten-month spree, Blatty’s book was dead on arrival in bookstores until a last-minute guest cancellation earned him a sudden appearance on The Dick Cavett Show. A blockbuster was born. For eleven weeks, The Exorcist and The Other held the #1 and #3 marks on the New York Times Best-Seller List. The Other slipped off after twenty-four weeks; The Exorcist would hold on for a whopping fifty-five.
soon every paperback needed Satan on the cover and a blurb comparing it to The Exorcist or Rosemary’s Baby or The Other. It didn’t matter if it was a murder mystery, an alternate-history sci-fi novel, or even an old pulp reprint—Satan was the secret ingredient that made sales surge.
The Satan Sleuth used karate to take on werewolves and dynamite to take out chic but satanic fashion designers obsessed with short women.
Horror stalwart James Herbert took the Roman Catholic Church to task in Shrine: a mute child performs miracles and, before you know it, the holy fathers are ignoring scary nuns, ghosts, and animated statues of the Virgin Mary and instead falling all over themselves to capture the media spotlight. Here the Church is less concerned with helping the poor than with recruiting new congregants to fill its empty pews. Which means the clergy are caught completely off guard when the little girl turns out to be possessed not by the Holy Spirit but by yet another ghost of yet another murdered English
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This is the kind of book in which a priest resists fleshy temptation by jamming a nail through his hand, people vomit their souls into toilets, and succubuses ooze black breast milk. And when Joe discovers that the succubus can be destroyed only if she’s decapitated at the moment of orgasm, you know this book is about to go so far over the top it achieves orbit.
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
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To warn the world, she and Pazder wrote Michelle Remembers, a blockbuster memoir that helped spark America’s Satanic Panic in the 1980s.
Omen IV: Armageddon 2000, which opens with a scene of rectal childbirth. The Barbara Walters of the BBC ushers Damien’s son, Damien Jr., into the world via her anus before dying (probably of shame).
A lot of fear emerged surrounding pregnancy and childbirth, but fortunately horror paperbacks were there to address every new parent’s fears with a resounding “Yes!” Yes, having sex will cause your baby to die, especially if that sex involved female orgasm (Crib, 1982). Yes, having a baby will cause a woman’s breasts to look “as though a vandal had defaced a great work of art” (also Crib). Yes, you will be confined to a locked mental ward after giving birth (too many books to list). Yes, if you have an abortion the remains will be buried in a shallow grave behind the hospital, where they will
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Adopted or chemically altered children should be destroyed immediately because they cannot be reformed. No matter how hard you try, they probably will, at some point, go on a rampage and murder all your other children. Possessed children are usually pawns of a revenge-seeking spirit and, helpfully, often come with instructions for how best to lay the spirit to rest and return your child to normalcy, albeit with a few murders on the little angel’s rap sheet. Reincarnated children are tricky. Seek professional help.
The most important thing to remember is that it is not your fault. 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).
Clown marionettes are bad, but real clowns are worse. Since time immemorial, humankind’s greatest natural predator has been the clown.
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.
Stephen Gresham’s Abracadabra (1988) manages to be about something even worse than the unholy child/clown alliance: the child/magician union. Meet eleven-year old Olivia Jayne Smith, known as Juice, who loves magic. 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.
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.
Let’s face it, humans are delicious. In the eyes of animals, we are walking pizzas, and the best thing is that we deliver ourselves. 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.
In Blood Worm (1987), the main character’s wife sleeps with an enormous number of men during the worm-and beetle apocalypse and then leaves a note for her husband saying she’s a slut and, by the way, their daughter is missing. She immediately becomes an alcoholic hobo and is last seen stumbling around the ruins of London, which has been abandoned to the inevitable postapocalyptic motorcycle gangs.
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.
But 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. Large-scale environmental disasters like Love Canal, the near-meltdown at Three Mile Island, and a series of high-profile asbestos lawsuits made clear that invisible evil was hiding in your home. In fact, if the
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While George and Kathy went on their year-long, round-the-world publicity tour for the movie, Daniel was ditched at a Catholic boarding school, where he claims the priests beat him and tried to exorcize his demons. He was eleven. By his account, those 28 days at 112 Ocean Avenue left him with physical and mental damage from which it took years to recover. Maybe George, Kathy, and their lawyer concocted the haunting story over a bottle of wine, as the lawyer later claimed, but their children didn’t. If every haunted house is built on the site of a terrible crime, the crime that The Amityville
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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.
Its heroine, Susan Wheeler, is one of those beautiful, brilliant medical students who’s constantly earning double takes from male colleagues or looking in the mirror and wondering if she’s a doctor or a woman—and why can’t she be both, dammit?
Most of the science that appeared in these books was pseudoscience, to put it charitably. After all, the ’70s was the decade when finding a cure for cancer was abandoned in favor of finding the Loch Ness monster, searching for UFOs, researching ESP, and trying to establish a scientific basis for astrology. As we all know, the first three are valid areas of scientific inquiry; astrology is a bunch of bunk.
Back in the ’80s we didn’t know that one day all computers would be linked and turned into a giant delivery system for pornography and cat pictures, so networking seemed exciting.
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.
Agent Anita Diamant represented the paperback original and her assistant sold it for $7,500 to editor Ann Patty at Pocket Books. Patty’s assessment of the writing was “it may be awful, but it is a style”—she was smart enough to see that it elicited a rabid reaction among female readers.
From their earliest appearances in literature, vampires have been jerks.
Rice gave vampires a voice. And then they wouldn’t shut up.
Vampires in modern horror fiction became a powerful metaphor for our attitudes toward outsiders and the AIDS epidemic—except for Nightblood (1990), which was for people who thought ’Salem’s Lot needed more machine guns.
He’d be considered one of the great lights of Southern literature if his books dealt with things other than woman-eating hogs, men marrying amphibians, and vengeance-seeking lesbian wrestlers wearing opium-laced golden fingernails.
And though we all feel sympathy for the yeti who hates snow in Snowman, how many ski instructors will we to allow him to decapitate before we hire a bunch of hunters and Vietnam vets to go after him with crossbows armed with tiny nuclear arrowheads? Answer: Three.
Steve vomits blood on a British Airways flight to London and then heads to New York City, where he meets up with his long-suffering girlfriend, Sara Fenster. Instantly she knows something’s wrong because Steve goes nuts over the Egyptian obelisk in Central Park and starts decorating it with severed penises and hobo guts, like a tourist.
Steve tries to tell Sara his problems, but she doesn’t want to hear how he murdered two people and ate a dog.
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.
More than any other genre, horror kept short stories alive. In the early ’90s, as publishing collapsed, anthologies still sold well. So every few years someone decided to produce an anthology proving that horror could be literature, too.
Fueled by Michelle Remembers, James Egbert III’s disappearance (see here), and other sinister claims, by the mid-’80s the Satanic Panic was in full swing, possibly because the threat of secret satanists was a welcome distraction from the real dangers threatening to kill us all, like a foreign policy based on mutual assured destruction.
Horror responded in the most metal way possible. When televangelists denounced horror movies, books, and games as causing cannibalism, murder, suicide, depression, and domestic violence, horror writers and metal bands doubled down, firehosing ever-more-offensive content into the faces of conservatives.
The authors might have been inadvertently revealing too much about their personal hang-ups when they named the evil group out to emasculate rock ’n’ roll M.O.M. (Morality over Music). But just in case you had doubts, they dub the ultimate evil demon out to destroy the world Momma. She’s a 30-foot-tall, rotting, pregnant, hermaphroditic corpse that eats people with her vagina and has a touching vulnerability to rocket launchers.
