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

by Grady Hendrix

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.