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

by Grady Hendrix

When you can’t take a simple swim in the pond without Venus flytraps turning you into a murderous zombie (Gwen, in Green; 1974), something really must be done. Diving into the literature, one quickly realizes that plants and humans have been enemies forever, or at least since Arthur Conan Doyle’s 1880 short story “The American’s Tale,” about a killer Venus flytrap in Montana.

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.

Why would aliens travel all that way to eat us? Don’t they have food on their home planets? Well, what if they’re not aliens at all? Leave it to J. N. Williamson to reveal the truth. Brotherkind (1987) starts as your typical abduction story, with Sheila gangbanged on a UFO by a bunch of midget aliens who must use the power of their collective semen to overcome her DNA’s natural resistance. Also, Bigfoot joins in because he was hitching a lift. Returning home, she finds hypnosis, and love, in the arms of parapsychologist Martin Ruben, but the two are menaced by Men in Black. Rubin unravels the conspiracy: alien Greys have teamed up with Bigfoot and the Men in Black and Mothman to seed humanity with alien/human babies. P.S., they’re not aliens at all, but part of a hidden race that we used to call fairies. Ever since Eisenhower sold us out to the Greys in 1954, our planet has become a one-stop shopping solution for every jerk with a flying saucer. Credit 106 Fortunately, Martin is able to melt the Men in Black and the Greys with the power of the rock band KISS, specifically their hit “Firehouse,” which he finds on an “acid rock” station. Then he simply refuses to believe in Bigfoot until his aggressive disbelief makes the ten-foot-tall manimal fall apart. Tragically, he cannot reach Sheila in time and her hybrid baby is abducted. The book ends with the author assuring us, as any good scientist would, that although the story we have just read is not true, it’s also not not tr...

Yes, it’s easy to sit here in the safety of the now and mock a bunch of paperback novelists for not accurately foreseeing the future, but they did get one thing right. All these books, no matter how silly, don’t feel like much fun. An underlying pessimism runs through them, mostly because their suspicions about technology turned out to be true.

In Little Brother (1983), aliens land on Earth in 1908 and take over the Soviet Union. By 1983 they’ve infiltrated the American market with an iPad-esque toy called the Possum, which beams addictive subliminal messages into the brains of good American kids. When worried parents try to limit the ever-increasing screen time, the kids either commit suicide or attack Mom and Dad. In the end, the adults figure “What the hell?” and become addicted to Possum, too. Anyone who thinks this is baseless paranoia hasn’t watched a parent texting while rocketing down a highway at 70 m.p.h. in the family van.

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.