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.
