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

by Grady Hendrix

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.

the only horror titles on that list until Stephen King’s The Dead Zone in 1979.

Horror was for nobodies when Ira Levin—a scriptwriter with a single book (1953’s A Kiss before Dying) and a failed Broadway musical (Drat! The Cat!) to his name—sat down to write a novel about a woman who gives birth to the devil. A minimalist masterpiece written in deft, surgical sentences, Rosemary’s Baby became a massive best seller.

Rosemary’s Baby was a spark to the heart for horror fiction, but the corpse really began to boogie in June 1971, when Thomas Tryon’s The Other and William Peter Blatty’s The Exorcist simultaneously made the New York Times Best-Seller List. Fueled by amphetamines and written during a feverish ten-month spree, 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. A blockbuster was born. For eleven weeks, The Exorcist and The Other held the #1 and #3 marks on the New York Times Best-Seller List. The Other slipped off after twenty-four weeks; The Exorcist would hold on for a whopping fifty-five. Four million copies of The Exorcist were sold before William Friedkin’s motion picture adaptation debuted in December 1973

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.

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.

All the way back to Henry James’s Turn of the Screw, with its little creeps Flora and Miles, kids in fiction have been trouble. In the ’40s, Agatha Christie’s Crooked House featured a twelve-year-old psychopath named Josephine, and Ray Bradbury’s 1946 short story “The Small Assassin” gave us a baby out to murder his parents. But the ’50s were the true decade of the terrible tyke. The decade kicked off with Richard Matheson’s short story about a spider baby, “Born of Man and Woman.” In 1953 came Jerome Bixby’s classic “It’s a Good Life,” with its all-powerful, bratty three-year-old psychic god Anthony. It has been adapted three times for The Twilight Zone (the original series, the reboot, and the feature film) and once for The Simpsons. The next year saw the arrival of the twin masterworks of killer-kid literature: William Golding’s Lord of the Flies and William March’s The Bad Seed.

Turn of the Screw became director and cinematographer Freddie Francis’s dripping, doomed, black-and-white chiller The Innocents (1961). Lord of the Flies hit the silver screen in 1963, and then Jack Hill gave us Ralph, Virginia, and Elizabeth Merrye, three murderous adults with the minds of children in 1964’s Spider Baby, followed by the game-changing satanic fetus of Rosemary’s Baby and in 1970 Freddie Francis did it again with Girly.

Greenhall’s next book, The Companion (1988), was told from the point of view of

angel of death working for, and occasionally murdering, the elderly.

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.

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).

Clowns are part of the holy trinity of horror paperback iconography, along with skeletons and dolls, yet few books deliver death jesters. Some of horror fiction’s only blood-smeared Bozos appear in Alan Ryan’s Dead White (1983), the charming Christmas tale of killer clowns riding a circus train of death to a snowbound Catskills community.