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

by Grady Hendrix

Juice dances around like a beam of sunshine, dusting her sentences with adorable phrases like “Gosh o’Friday” and “Crime-a-nitly.” By the time her alcoholic mom calls her “little bitch mouth,” you’re kind of on Mom’s side.

Write a scene in which an army of cats descends on London, and most people will assume that at any moment they’ll lose interest and start rolling around in a sunbeam or chasing laser pointers. Kitties are just too cute and fluffy to be scary, and scenes of their soft paws poking under doors induce giggles rather than gasps. When a radio announcer is buried alive in an avalanche of mewling kittens, the immediate reaction is not one of horror but a soul-deep “awwwww…”

After all, the ’70s was the decade when finding a cure for cancer was abandoned in favor of finding the Loch Ness monster, searching for UFOs, researching ESP, and trying to establish a scientific basis for astrology. As we all know, the first three are valid areas of scientific inquiry; astrology is a bunch of bunk.

According to most astrology books, a Taurus is supposed to be stubborn. But according to Horrorscope, a Taurus is more likely to be abducted to a Greek island by a demented movie producer, locked in a labyrinth full of acid baths, and dismembered by a robot Minotaur.

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.