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

by Grady Hendrix

I knew John Christopher’s name from his Tripods science-fiction series, which had been serialized as a comic strip in the back of Boys’ Life magazine. But this 1966 Avon novel was stronger stuff. In it, a gorgeous secretary inherits an Irish castle from a distant relative and converts it into a B&B to show her patronizing lawyer/fiancé that she can stand on her own. On opening weekend, the house is full of guests: an Irish dreamboat alcoholic, two bickering Americans with a hot-to-trot teenage daughter, and a married couple who met in a concentration camp, where he was a guard and she was a prisoner. But some uninvited guests are lurking in the basement: the Gestapochauns. 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.

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.

In contrast to Rosemary’s Baby, both The Other and The Exorcist are overwritten. Tryon delivers an afternoon “spread lavishly, like a picnic on a cloth of light and shade,” and Blatty begins his book, “Like the brief doomed flare of exploding suns that registers dimly on blind men’s eyes, the beginning of the horror passed almost unnoticed.” But Blatty writes excellent dialogue and he believes deeply in his material. For his part, Tryon underplays the horror so that it sneaks up on the reader, emerging from a thicket of epic-poetic descriptions of nature. By the time you’re ambushed by Tryon’s severed fingers, pitchforks hidden in hay lofts, and dead babies floating in jars, it’s too late. Plus, the end includes a Twilight Zone–worthy twist that kept readers talking and has since influenced a hundred unreliable narrators. These three books—one a precision thriller about the devil impregnating a woman on the Upper West Side, one a blood-and-thunder religious melodrama proclaiming that Satan wanted our children, and one a baroque and lyrical meditation about evil twins and killer kids—shaped everything that came after. Rosemary’s Baby started the pot boiling, but the publication of The Exorcist and The Other threw gasoline all over the stove. Whether it was a reprint from 1949, a reissue of Dennis Wheatley black magic books from 1953, or a brand-new novel, soon every paperback needed Satan on the cover and a blurb comparing it to The Exorcist or Rosemary’s Baby or The Other....

Descended from the pulps, occult horror novels at the dawn of the ’70s still felt like places where The Guardians would feel at home. But after The Exorcist hit movie screens in 1974, horror fiction scraped its pulp influences off its shoe like a piece of old gum. These books still featured cults and black magic, but now Satan wasn’t a threat that you met in remote mansions or on Jamaican plantations. Now the devil was within. Satan was no longer your next-door neighbor—he was you.

Classy Southern novelist Anne Rivers Siddons wrote The House Next Door, which remains one of the best haunted house novels in the genre. Joan Samson’s sole book before her early death from cancer was The Auctioneer, another genre classic, and Mendal W. Johnson managed to write only Let’s Go Play at the Adams’ before he passed away. Herman Raucher wrote the landmark coming-of-age novel Summer of ’42 before he delivered his only horror novel, the creepy 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.

The 1968 Manson murders and the 1970 trial of the Manson family so shocked America that we couldn’t wait to get our hands on Helter Skelter, the 1974 book by prosecutor Vincent Bugliosi. The biggest best-selling true-crime book in history, its tale of life with Charlie was also a gift for horror novelists, providing a new and timely antagonist: the satanic cult. Until then, satanic covens met in basements or wooded glades, slapping at mosquitos who flew up their black robes. They marched around in circles, hailing Satan the way New Yorkers hail a cab, muttering curses and spells in barely remembered high school Latin. But thanks to Helter Skelter, ritual murder became the highlight of the satanic social season. Consider Joy Fielding’s The Transformation (which she has since disowned), published only five years after Charles Manson was sentenced to death. In it, young actresses on the make fall under the influence of their great god Tony, who says things like, “To love your family, you must kill them.”He encourages his glamorous disciples to break into homes and poop on the carpets. At the book’s climax, he sends them to murder every other major character in a genuinely shocking Tate/LaBianca–style home invasion.

In 1977, real-life Canadian housewife Michelle Smith suffered a miscarriage and sank into depression. She began therapy with Dr. Lawrence Pazder, who revealed that her problems stemmed from repressed childhood memories. 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 Michael appeared and healed her, miraculously erasing all physical evidence of these crimes. It sounds like a Brian McNaughton novel, but Smith claimed it was all true. To warn the world, she and Pazder wrote Michelle Remembers, a blockbuster memoir that helped spark America’s Satanic Panic in the 1980s. People who should have known better became convinced that Satan lurked under every heavy-metal album cover and operated day care centers across the country. Smith and Pazder left their respective spouses and married each other; they appeared on Oprah, went on a national book tour, popped up in People magazine, and shopped around a movie adaptation of their book, which was ke...

The 1960s and ’70s spawned a million myths about babies as everyone tried to keep up with the changing rules of reproduction. The Pill hit the market in 1960, IUDs appeared in 1968, abortion was legalized in 1973, and the first successful IVF was carried out in 1978. Massive changes in contraception and fertility technology had phrases like test tube baby and sperm bank on the lips of every American. 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 be struck by lightning and reanimated as brain-eating babies who telekinetically explode your womb (Spawn, 1983). Many women make their way through this minefield of potential hazards with the guidance of their doctor. But the horror novels of this era warn women that their doctors were less likely to write a prescription than to hire a hitman to run them over because they threatened to blow the lid off their baby mill operation. The horror-novel OB/GYN is remote and cold. His name is Dr....

Essentially medical thrillers in the vein of Coma (more about that book in chapter 5), these novels stopped at every station of the genre and genuflected deeply. A doctor always gave a lecture about the virtues of playing God, someone was always sneaking around the hospital’s off-limits area, an insider involved in the experiments was always unable to live with the guilt and volunteered vital information to the main character but was killed before their secrets could be revealed. That death was always made to look like a suicide. And, just as surrogate mothers always turned out to be crazed murderers, there was always a previous victim who seemed insane but who might be telling the truth if everyone would stop dosing her with Thorazine for a second and listen. The message seemed to be that women should have babies by finding them in a cabbage patch or receiving them from a stork, the way nature intended, rather than using their dangerous, weird-looking wombs.

“But how do I know if the man I’m dating is the devil?” I hear you ask. Here are some warning signs learned from Seed of Evil: Does he refuse to use contractions when he speaks? Does he deliver pickup lines like, “You live on the edge of darkness”? When nude, is his body the most beautiful male form you have ever seen, but possessed of a penis that’s either monstrously enormous, double-headed, has glowing yellow eyes, or all three? After intercourse, does he laugh malevolently, urinate on your mattress, and then disappear? If you spot any of these behaviors, chances are you went on a date with Satan. Or an alien.

Elizabeth (1976). Elizabeth’s voice is calm and sophisticated, winding its way around the events of the book as sinuously as a snake. The fourteen-year-old explains how she murdered her parents with witchcraft and started an affair with her uncle, thanks to the assistance of Frances, a long-dead relative and witch executed in the sixteenth century who appears to Elizabeth through mirrors. Or maybe she doesn’t. Maybe Elizabeth’s parents drowned in a storm. Maybe Elizabeth is insane.

Our murderous mountebanks arrive courtesy of the anarchic Harlequin in sixteenth-century commedia dell’arte, followed by the seventeenth-century’s insanely violent Punch and Judy puppet shows. The first white-faced, full-makeup-wearing clowns appeared in the nineteenth century. In England it was Joseph Grimaldi, a horribly abused child who became a clown, then retired at age 45 when his tortured joints crumbled to dust. His son, also a clown, drank himself to death at age 30. France’s first clown, Jean-Gaspard Deburau, once beat a child to death in the street (he was acquitted). Fictional clowns come with a body count. Edgar Allan Poe’s Hop-Frog (1849) was a dwarf forced to be a jester who burned eight courtiers to death. Pagliacci features opera’s most famous clown, a sad sack who stabs his cheating wife to death onstage. In the early 1980s, clown panics erupted in Boston, Omaha, and Pittsburgh when rumors circulated that clowns were luring children into white vans.

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.

In the early ’70s, being killed by Satan or his spawn seemed a lot less likely than being killed by some corner-cutting, penny-pinching, midlevel employee at a giant corporation. In 1967, the captain of the oil tanker Torrey Canyon took a short cut on his way to Wales and hit Pollard’s Rock, 15 miles off the coast of Cornwall, spilling 25 million gallons of crude oil and unleashing a lethal 270-square-mile slick. In 1969, a blowout on Union Oil’s Platform A off the coast of California coated 30 miles of shoreline with black sludge. Ohio’s Cuyahoga River was so polluted with industrial runoff that it burst into flames. The toxic water of Lake Erie was devoid of life. Suddenly, everyone noticed we were destroying the planet, and so in 1970 the Environmental Protection Agency was created, the same year the first Earth Day was held and Greenpeace was founded. The Clean Air Act of 1970 was followed by the Clean Water Act in 1972, and then the Endangered Species Act in 1973. It was clear that nature needed to be protected from us. But who would protect us from nature?

Ah, the 1970s: High inflation! Rising unemployment! Oil crisis! Recession! School desegregation! White flight! High crime! Son of Sam! It was the decade when everything went to hell—and explains why the haunted-house novel reached critical mass. In The Sentinel (1974), a model moves into a brownstone…from hell. In The Shining (1977), an economically strapped family takes a last-chance job in a hotel…from hell. In The House Next Door (1978), nouveau-riche suburbanites build the contemporary home…from hell. But it all started with Robert Marasco’s Burnt Offerings (1973), a chilling tale about a family who escapes the city to move into a summer rental…from hell. 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.

Even though two of the three great novels of the ’70s horror boom featured female main characters (Rosemary’s Baby and The Exorcist), V. C. Andrews was the first female brand-name horror writer, capable of selling millions of books simply because her name was on the cover. It’s no accident that her style of horror was the one originally popularized by women: the gothic. 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. The sexual revolution of the ’60s encouraged a new frankness about sex, and movies like 1972’s Deep Throat made the depiction of raw sex no big deal. When the Playboy Channel debuted on cable in 1982, it was greeted with a shrug. The culture was ready for a romantic backlash. In the ’80s, everyone was either in therapy or on talk shows talking about their terrible childhoods. Horror had returned to the shadowy bedrooms of the family home. It was up to Andrews to show us that families could house, and create, monsters.

The Amulet (1979), his own 100-page screenplay that he adapted into a 200-page novel after no one would buy it. Avon eventually acquired the book and encouraged McDowell to make it longer. In this story of a disfigured soldier recuperating under the baleful gaze of his malignant mother in the tiny town of Pine Cone, Alabama, we follow a cursed necklace as it sows destruction. It’s not the carnage, rendered in apocalyptic understatement, that is so engaging but the language and social mores of the inhabitants. The story captures midcentury small-town living as few books do. Everyone in Pine Cone lives a life bounded by trivial jealousies, petty rivalries, unwritten rules, and microscopic grudges they nurse all their lives. Everyone knows how to behave (this is the black part of town, this is the white; this is the kind of thing we say in church, this is the kind of thing we keep to ourselves). But the titular amulet weakens those barriers and coaxes feelings to the surface like pus. Pine Cone is poisoned before the amulet arrives, not because it’s built on an Indian burial mound, but because it’s another dying American town.

Blackwater series was published one title per month between January and June 1983, and it was his farewell to the horror genre. Beginning with the flooding of Perdido, Alabama, it follows the fortunes of the Caskey clan beginning with Oscar Caskey’s marriage to Elinor, a mysterious redheaded woman he rescues from the flood, who turns out to be a finned and gilled river monster assuming human form.