More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
Read between
July 11 - July 14, 2021
From their earliest appearances in literature, vampires have been jerks. Dracula was rude and smelly Eurotrash. Sheridan LeFanu’s Carmilla was a terrible houseguest. And the less said about Varney the Vampire, the better.
Rice gave vampires a voice. And then they wouldn’t shut up.
Rice was writing her way out of a depression after her five-year-old daughter’s death from leukemia, and she unconsciously put all her feelings of helplessness, regret, and guilt into the book. Louis was a passive victim because that’s how Rice felt when she told his story.
As the series progressed and Rice’s fortunes changed, so did her vampire’s voice. Lestat wasn’t a whiner. He was a rock star.
Anne Rice’s vampires marked a significant transition for horror heroes. Before, the protagonists of horror fiction were blue-collar guys: Vietnam vets and salt of the earth types who staked first and asked questions later (if at all). Rice’s vampires were cultured and elegant, powerful and refined, slim hipped and long haired and given to velvet cloaks.
These vampires cannot be monstrous or “other” because we hear their voices, and nothing that speaks to us about heartbreak, or pretty clothes, can truly be alien.
Rarely has a disease engendered such fear and loathing as HIV. The term AIDS was first used in 1982, and by 1985 hundreds of parents would pull their children out of school based on rumors that an infected student might attend. Politicians proclaimed that children could “catch” the infection from a sneeze or a water fountain. Families abandoned the corpses of their dead sons in hospitals. The illness posited a future where human contact would be rare, bodily fluids poisonous.
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.
There was nothing the ’80s respected more than blockbuster success, and only brand names—V.C. Andrews, Anne Rice, Stephen King—would survive the decade. Blockbuster books permanently changed the publishing landscape, and it was all thanks to power tools.
Until recently, one of the most obscure was Jerzy Zielezinski, aka George Ziel. With more than three hundred covers to his name, Ziel was a machine, capable of turning out three paintings a month for romances, crime stories, and celebrity biographies.
Horror would eventually turn into thrillers, and gothics would become romances, but another offshoot of the gothic revival remained stubbornly itself: the Southern gothic.
more than anything, these six books are about women and the power they wield behind the scenes.
Elizabeth Engstrom feels like an Anne Rice who cares about normal people.
Instead, she captures the voices of women on the margins, pushed aside, hungry for the lives they’ve been denied, beating on the glass to get in. It’s their voices that linger.
There are two kinds of creature in this world: Americans and inhumanoids.
In Frank Spiering’s Berserker (1981), no one in New York City even notices a 12-foot-tall Nordic giant in a horned helmet wielding a battle-ax as long as he confines himself to decapitating homeless people. But then he tears off a ballerina’s leg and eats two precious children, and, well, that’s just rude.
Turns out it isn’t just a swelling: Karen’s neck is pregnant! With Misquamacus, a 300-year-old Native American medicine man who’s out for revenge against the Dutch who wiped out his tribe.
The massive success of The Manitou (more on its author here) alerted horror writers to the threat posed by not just inhumanoids overseas, but those under our very feet. We had wiped out the Native Americans, but maybe we didn’t get them all, especially the super-angry ones?
If Zebra Books had a mascot, it would be a slipper-clad skeleton sitting atop a crescent moon against the infinite void of space (hello, Sandman!).
Zebra’s publishers knew their authors weren’t famous enough to sell books on name alone, so they focused instead on covers.
For every dancing skeleton who writes a horror novel, there must be a skeleton wrangler, a person who takes that skeleton to NECON (Northeastern Writers’ Conference), introduces it to the right editors, publishes its first story.
Launched in 1978, Shadows was an anthology in which Grant tolerated no traditional monsters and no gore. Instead he published work by Alan Ryan, Chelsea Quinn Yarbro, Al Sarrantonio, and a couple of Stephen King’s quieter stories. As contributor Thomas Monteleone said, “If your stories weren’t appearing in Shadows, then you just weren’t cutting it.”
A truism is that horror functions best in short stories.
More than any other genre, horror kept short stories alive. In the early ’90s, as publishing collapsed, anthologies still sold well.
In 1986, war was declared. War on metal! “The cassette or CD player in too many teens’ rooms is an altar to evil, dispensing the devil’s devices to the accompaniment of a catchy beat,” warned televangelist Bob Larson.
In the 1983 book Backward Masking Unmasked, author Jacob Aranza warned that Queen’s song “We Are the Champions” was “the unofficial national anthem for gays in America.” Larson listed all the satanic bands out to seduce our children, balancing the usual suspects—Led Zeppelin, AC/DC, Black Sabbath—with Electric Light Orchestra, the Beatles, and the Eagles, as well as the Beach Boys (transcendental meditators), Bee Gees (believers in reincarnation), and John Denver (once tried aikido).
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.
In 1985, the Parents Music Resource Center (PMRC) issued their “Filthy 15” blacklist of objectionable bands, whose only real effect was to guide curious kids to the smuttiest music on the market.
They managed to hold Senate hearings on explicit lyrics and “porn rock,” which accomplished little except to show Americans that Twisted Sister’s Dee Snider was more levelheaded and informed than Tipper Gore.
The group’s only lasting impact was the explicit lyrics sticker on CDs and cassettes, immediately making those recordings one hundred times more desirable to kids.
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.
David Schow coined the term splatterpunk, named for a new school of fiction oozing out of the crypt. At the vanguard was Clive Barker, whose debut six-volume short story collection The Books of Blood, published in the U.K. in 1984, was released in the U.S in 1986 in the form of six terrible-looking paperbacks.
The next crucial element in rock ’n’ roll–splatterpunk books is the obligatory authorial revelation of his own impeccable musical tastes through his characters, who congratulate one another for liking the right bands. This is often paired with denunciations of greedy labels, concert promoters, MTV, and sellout bands.
Genre historian Douglas E. Winter wrote that, although many established novelists may have written the second-best book of the year, there was no doubt that “the best horror novel of the early eighties” was from a relatively obscure thriller writer named Thomas Harris. The book was Red Dragon.
As the ’80s progressed, supernatural horror felt exhausted, with the same old writers dishing out the same old books. Horror movies were all campy slaughter, aimed at teens in on the joke. But the serial-killer book walked the line between crime fiction and horror novel, bringing in new—and in some cases, better—writers, or at least writers whose tricks weren’t familiar to exhausted audiences. Informed by the splatterpunk movement, these writers felt like they had permission to upset readers. A lot.
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.
Horror was out. Serial killers were in. The horror-fiction market of the late ’80s was glutted, and the inevitable crash was happening fast.
Hannibal Lecter hadn’t made serial killers a supertrend yet, but writers already knew they had to offer different flavors of sociopath to hook their readers.
Miller had already elevated Bunkowski above the typical unskilled, blue-collar serial killer by making him the product of a secret government research program to produce super-killers for the Vietnam War. But in the wake of Dr. Lecter’s success, serial killers needed to be collectors of fine art, avengers of the weak, men of taste and refinement. Miller was happy to oblige.
He was “an autodidact, a self-taught killer whose alarming proclivity for violence was surpassed only by what appeared to be a genius intellect.”
Miller transformed Bunkowski from a psychopath who killed at random into a good guy who killed people who deserved it:
The serial killer was no longer a menace. He wasn’t even a cartoon. He had become a hero.
But as the ’80s rolled into the ’90s, even a hero couldn’t save horror publishing.
As horror for adults gasped its last breaths, the genre found new life in a younger generation.
Horror hit its stride with a hungry teenage audience in the ’80s, first with slasher films and then with books.
As the ’90s approached, the seemingly insatiable kid’s market emerged as horror’s last hope. R. L. Stine launched his teen horror series Fear Street in 1989,
At long last, Whitney Houston’s words rang true: the children were the future.
Even more so than Halloween, Christmas is horror’s favorite holiday, full of psycho Santas leaving red-and-green-wrapped heads under each and every Christmas tree.
Weirdly enough, it was by way of Christmas that the Satanic Panic spread its infection from heavy metal and role-playing games to horror movies.
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.
