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

by Grady Hendrix

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.

Yet for all that activity, horror appeared nowhere on best-seller lists. Horror was for children. It was pulp. If it was any good, it couldn’t possibly be horror and so was rebranded as a “thrilling tale.”

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.

Gothic romances were adult fairy tales. Young governesses appeared at glowering ancestral piles and fell in love with the dark, brooding masters of the house. There was murder, confinement, and ancient curses. Dark secrets piled up at an alarming rate.

In the end, the young governess fell into the arms of the dark lord, realizing that her confused feelings of attraction and revulsion could only be love.

he drafted a memo to his art director about the covers. “I want a category format that my mother and aunts would be proud to be seen reading,” he wrote. “Make the heroine look like a very refined upper-class blond young woman with good cheekbones….She’s running towards you…behind her is a dark castle with one light in the window, usually in the tower. Make the tower tall and thick. Believe me, they’ll get the phallic imagery.”

The blood of the resilient gothic heroine would flow in the veins of ’70s and ’80s heroines fighting to save their souls from Satan, or were-sharks.

pulp fiction was getting interested in the occult.

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.

the books read like Hammer horror films gone mod.

alluring miniskirted psychic Anne Ashby, whose silver wrist cuffs gave her heightened psychic perceptions.

In The Vampires of Finistere, their best adventure, a young bride-to-be is abducted from under her boyfriend’s nose during a mysterious pagan fertility festival in Brittany. Underwater vampires are to blame, and Steven Kane has to battle wolves and were-sharks and even lead an army of dolphins against the Drowned City of Ker-Ys before the climactic storming of an ancient castle.

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.

All three spawned movies and, most important, set the tone for the next two decades of horror publishing.

Rosemary’s Baby became a massive best seller. The film rights were sold before the book was even published.

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.

Four million copies of The Exorcist were sold before William Friedkin’s motion picture adaptation debuted in December 1973

In contrast to Rosemary’s Baby, both The Other and The Exorcist are overwritten.

Satan was the secret ingredient that made sales surge.

Classy Southern novelist Anne Rivers Siddons wrote The House Next Door, which remains one of the best haunted house novels in the genre.

Maynard’s House, about a Vietnam vet taking on a witch in rural Maine. And William Hjortsberg stayed with literary fiction throughout his career…except for one influential sidestep: Falling Angel.

As ’70s Satan bought and sold souls on the open market, some trends emerged. The bad guys were cultured and elegant. They had violet eyes, black dogs, and vast libraries of antique tomes, and when they died their souls slipped into good guys’ bodies.

Every book was “better than Rosemary’s Baby,” “more terrifying than The Exorcist,” and “in the tradition of The Other!”

St. George knows who the culprits are: “Hippies, drop outs, draft dodgers, left-wing radicals, right-wing militants, Jesus Freaks, Devil worshippers, generation gappers, motorcycle weirdos—the whole shebang.”

They marched around in circles, hailing Satan the way New Yorkers hail a cab, muttering curses and spells in barely remembered high school Latin.

thanks to Helter Skelter, ritual murder became the highlight of the satanic social season.

He encourages his glamorous disciples to break into homes and poop on the carpets.

One thing all these books had in common, besides a fanatical devotion to the forces of darkness and a phobic fear of private clubs, was that their characters were as white as the driven snow. Why was Satan only bothering white people? Turns out he wasn’t.

Holloway House was run with all the ethics of Blackbeard the Pirate, and its iconic authors like Iceberg Slim and Donald Goines earned pennies while the publishers made millions.

“What the hell has that jive white God and jive honkie religion done for them?”

feel for L.A. street life. And any book that gives us a climax where the protagonist is stabbed to death in the face as his cult chants “White is the color of death! Black is life and power!” knows how to deliver the goods to its small sector of the literary marketplace.

For unto us, in 1974, three horror novels were born: The Black Exorcist, The Search for Joseph Tully, and The Sentinel

The Sentinel tells the story of Alison Parker, a top model in New York City who, like all beautiful women in 1970s paperbacks, is troubled by a dark past.

he’s the anti-pope, whose liberal Marxist theology will destroy the Church and bring about the apocalypse.

This is a book about tribes—found families who put their backs together and face outward, defending themselves against invaders—and how toxic they can become.

But in 1977 the publishers saw horror novels all over drugstore racks and asked one of its authors, Brian McNaughton, to rip off the recent hit The Omen.

See, these hippies aren’t trying to summon Satan. They worship witches trapped in the fourth dimension. Described as the “Older Gods,” they’re cousins of H. P. Lovecraft’s Elder Gods, and the plot twists and turns like a snake as they force their way into our earthly plane.

Satan’s Mistress features another hippie housewife, another lousy husband, a “conspiracy of scholars, literary men, and theoretical physicists” hiding the truth about the fourth-dimensional witches, and mass murder.

Michelle Remembers, a blockbuster memoir that helped spark America’s Satanic Panic in the 1980s.

Between 1978 and 1984, Russ Martin wrote seven books about the Satanic Organization, a global conspiracy dedicated to the Devil and run by the elite 0.01 percent who rule society and use mind control and body swapping to destroy their enemies.

This was Satanic Panic fan fiction, updating the Michelle Remembers fever dream of a global satanic conspiracy to the yuppie-infested ’80s and giving it a kinky twist.

Underneath all the pseudosexual silliness was the message that a decadent elite controlled everything.

The horror of these books is that Satan always wins. Just look at the world. The evidence is everywhere.

Omen IV: Armageddon 2000, which opens with a scene of rectal childbirth.

it’s important to determine what kind of homicidal child you have: a) adopted (The Godsend, 1976) b) chemically altered (Childmare, 1980) c) possessed (The Moonchild, 1978) d) reincarnated (The Children, 1982) e) poorly parented (Mama’s Little Girl, 1983) f) inappropriately violent for no good reason (Prissy, 1978) g) in possession of psychic powers (The Savior, 1978) h) Satan spawn (Seed of Evil, 1988)

As the famous French writer Alain Robbe-Grillet said, “What do little girls dream about? Knives and blood.”

in Piper (1987), hundreds of children under the age of thirteen, dressed as adorable witches, pirates, and cowboys, murder three thousand adults one All Hallow’s Eve.

These families are all so committed to everything being perfect that they look the other way while their sons murder neighborhood pets, develop Nazi fetishes, and curb-stomp weaker kids. By the time they can no longer ignore the monster in the house, it’s too late.

If the house you just moved into has a basement stuffed with old mannequins, run. If it has a “toy room” filled with clown puppets, run faster. Because the only things scarier than children are their toys.