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

by Grady Hendrix

More than any other genre, horror fiction is a product of its time,

The totally macho moniker “Peter Saxon” was a group pen name for a bunch of British authors (W. Howard Baker, Rex Dolphin, and Wilfred McNeilly, among others) who churned out ersatz pulp novels with fully painted covers that looked like all the other pulp reprints on the stands. Baker had used the Saxon pen name to write some popular installments of the Sexton Blake detective series, and by many accounts he was the mastermind who ensured that his cabal of Guardian ghost writers hit their quota of nubile flesh, gratuitous violence, and sexy swinging. The six Guardian books were about square-jawed, tweed-and-blackbriar-pipe types investigating haunted houses, underwater vampires, voodoo cults, and Australians. Sort of like Scooby-Doo, only with more orgies.

The horror isn’t that Harry Angel might be Johnny Favorite, or that Johnny Favorite might have sold his soul, but that Harry Angel might not be who he thinks he is. He may not be a brave World War II veteran. He might in fact be a murderer. Everyone in this book has a double identity, leading to the chilling matter at the heart of all satanic possession fiction: if Satan can get inside us, then maybe we aren’t who we thought we were. Maybe we’re much, much worse.

you know this book is about to go so far over the top it achieves orbit.

The icy heart at the center of McNaughton’s trash fiction masterpieces is the new world promised by the Older God Zurvan. He will eliminate all contrasts and contradictions, making Earth a planet with no prisons, no mental hospitals, no darkness, and no war. Sounds good, until you realize that he will also eliminate the difference between good and evil; life and death will blur, and there will be no more freedom, because it will also be slavery. Zurvan is a vampire of life’s essence, the great leveler, the same-maker. He is the ultimate expression of the hippie summer of love: the loss of self, the destroyer of conflict. He embodies the existential fear at the heart of Satanic cult books and possession novels, the fear that we are losing our individual identities to become servants of another’s will. Have a Coke and a smile. Zurvan is here.

Michelle Remembers was a foundational text that brought recovered-memory syndrome and Satanic Ritual Abuse into the mainstream, updating for the ’80s lurid, turn-of-the-century conspiracy theories about white slavers running an international network of sin.

The 1960s and ’70s spawned a million myths about babies as everyone tried to keep up with the changing rules of reproduction. The Pill hit the market in 1960, IUDs appeared in 1968, abortion was legalized in 1973, and the first successful IVF was carried out in 1978. Massive changes in contraception and fertility technology had phrases like test tube baby and sperm bank on the lips of every American. A lot of fear emerged surrounding pregnancy and childbirth, but fortunately horror paperbacks were there to address every new parent’s fears with a resounding “Yes!”

The message seemed to be that women should have babies by finding them in a cabbage patch or receiving them from a stork, the way nature intended, rather than using their dangerous, weird-looking wombs.

The terrifying truth about childbirth is that carrying the fetus to term is merely the first step on the long road to having your house to yourself again. Every fetus eventually turns into a child, and, as so many wise men and women in the horror paperback industry know, terror toddles on two chubby legs.

In the world of horror paperbacks, child-rearing has few rewards. If you manage to avoid the deranged surrogate mothers who orgasm during labor and want to steal back their baby and send it to heaven with its brothers and sisters (Hush Little Baby, 1982), and you can dodge the secret cult stealing Jewish babies and selling them for $50,000 a pop (Crib), you still must care for the infant itself, which comes with its own challenges. Babies can be fussy, and the fussiest babies have a body count. Of course, every mother thinks her baby is perfect, but at some point, as her home fills with dead bodies, she has to face facts and admit that the fruit of her womb is a face-eating beast spawned from the deepest recesses of hell. If Whitney Houston is right, and the children are indeed our future, then we need to approach our future with maximum caution.

As long as they belong to someone else, homicidal children can be a joy. They’re highly accomplished, respectful to those they’re not murdering, and when they’re finally arrested, you’re left feeling that much better about your own little underachievers, whose terrible table manners suddenly seem like a testament to their normalcy rather than your poor parenting. But what to do if the sinister suckling lives under your roof? How does one parent the homicidal child? First, make sure that what you’re dealing with is in fact a child and not just, say, a slow-growing adult who shaves his pubic hair to appear prepubescent (The Next). Second, it’s important to determine what kind of homicidal child you have: a) adopted (The Godsend, 1976) b) chemically altered (Childmare, 1980) c) possessed (The Moonchild, 1978) d) reincarnated (The Children, 1982) e) poorly parented (Mama’s Little Girl, 1983) f) inappropriately violent for no good reason (Prissy, 1978) g) in possession of psychic powers (The Savior, 1978) h) Satan spawn (Seed of Evil, 1988) Adopted or chemically altered children should be destroyed immediately because they cannot be reformed. No matter how hard you try, they probably will, at some point, go on a rampage and murder all your other children. Possessed children are usually pawns of a revenge-seeking spirit and, helpfully, often come with instructions for how best to lay the spirit to rest and return your child to normalcy, albeit with a few murders on the little an...

Some crossover exists between poorly parented children and children who are inappropriately violent for no good reason, but it’s best to stay out of the way of either type. Same for children in possession of psychic powers. The most important thing to remember is that it is not your fault. Many children are born evil and must be taught to be good. As the famous French writer Alain Robbe-Grillet said, “What do little girls dream about? Knives and blood.” Or, as Erma Bombeck said, “A child needs your love most when he deserves it least.” For example, after he has murdered a news anchor by shooting him in the face (The Children) or as he’s lighting your wife’s teenaged lover on fire (Tricycle).

“How can I possibly stop my child from murdering strangers with a hammer because she thinks they are demons from hell?” you might wail (Mama’s Little Girl). Fortunately there are some practical, commonsense steps you can take to lower the body count. Most important, try not to have sex with Satan. Fornicating with the incarnation of all evil usually produces children who are genetically predisposed to use their supernatural powers to cram their grandmothers into television sets, headfirst. “But how do I know if the man I’m dating is the devil?” I hear you ask. Here are some warning signs learned from Seed of Evil: Does he refuse to use contractions when he speaks? Does he deliver pickup lines like, “You live on the edge of darkness”? When nude, is his body the most beautiful male form you have ever seen, but possessed of a penis that’s either monstrously enormous, double-headed, has glowing yellow eyes, or all three? After intercourse, does he laugh malevolently, urinate on your mattress, and then disappear? If you spot any of these behaviors, chances are you went on a date with Satan. Or an alien.

A coat and tie on your wee whippersnapper (Seed of Evil) says either “tiny funeral director” or “psychopath.” A young lady wearing a bow at her neck or wearing a lacy party dress reads as either “I am a living Victorian doll,” or “I will murder you the minute your back is turned.” Some parents try to deal with the difficulties of dressing homicidal children by sending them to a school that requires them to wear a uniform, which is an excellent idea. Nothing looks smarter, or more fashionable, than hordes of schoolchildren dressed in matching navy blazers rampaging across the British countryside, slaughtering everyone in sight (Childmare).

A completely nihilistic vision of the world, Let’s Go Play at the Adams’ doesn’t deny the possibility of goodness, or beauty, or grace. It merely points out that those are the things we kill first.

In horror fiction, every culture has its own supernatural menace. African Americans get voodoo. The Chinese get fox spirits. And WASPs (white Anglo-Saxon Protestants) get the all-American boy sporting a varsity letter jacket and blinding-white smile that mask the howling maniac on the inside.

That's probably a leftover from the victorian era, where society was collectively obsessed with the idea that otherwise respectable facades were hiding dangerous and/sordid behavior. That gets explored in everything from Sherlock Holmes (most prominently in The Man with the Twisted Lip) and The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde to contemporary yellow journalism.

What happened? Such Nice People blames mental illness. The Sibling blames sibling rivalry. Halo blames Billy’s parents for being oblivious and withholding. These families are all so committed to everything being perfect that they look the other way while their sons murder neighborhood pets, develop Nazi fetishes, and curb-stomp weaker kids. By the time they can no longer ignore the monster in the house, it’s too late.

From the perspective of the twenty-first century - and multiple mass shootings committed by teens and men that stakeholders (such as parents) insisted were fine right up until they slaughtered a bunch of people - that's sounds pretty accurate.

Greenhall is gone, but his characters—Elizabeth, Baxter, Lenoir—go on talking.

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.

Since time immemorial, humankind’s greatest natural predator has been the clown.

Clowns are part of the holy trinity of horror paperback iconography, along with skeletons and dolls, yet few books deliver death jesters.

Hating clowns is a waste of time because you’ll never loathe a clown as much as he loathes himself. But a magician? Magicians think they’re wise and witty, full of patter and panache, walking around like they don’t deserve to be shot in the back of the head and dumped in a lake. For all the grandeur of its self-regard, magic consists of nothing more than making a total stranger feel stupid. Worse, the magician usually dresses like a jackass.

The fact that the Sleights’ master plan to dispose of their dangerous enemy was to lock him in an unguarded trunk and shove it in the basement of the local college drama department gives you an indication of the masterminds we’re dealing with. Then again, LeFey can’t even lift Pa-Nah’s magical skeleton key off a simple-minded girl whose biggest dream is to wear fishnet stockings and wash dove shit out of top hats. This is hardly a battle of titanic intellects.

Because, as Abracadabra tells us, “Real magic is people.” And please note, “people” does not include magicians, witches, witch marionettes, clowns, clown dolls, or children. We’d all be a lot safer without any of them.

In 1979, Egbert disappeared from his dorm room at Michigan State University and was traced to the steam tunnels that ran beneath the campus. There the trail went cold. His parents hired private investigator and tireless self-promoter William Dear to look into the case. Dear knew that Egbert played Dungeons and Dragons, and he heard that some of the Michigan State students LARPed in the steam tunnels (LARP stands for live-action role-playing, a type of game in which costumed players interact in character.) Dear knew absolutely zilch about D&D, so he told a reporter that the game might have had something to do with the disappearance. That was all the press needed to declare Egbert a victim of a D&D game “gone wrong,” igniting a media maelstrom. It turns out the only monster in this book is ill-informed writing. Credit 57 Egbert showed up six months later living in Louisiana under an assumed name, but by then Dear’s colorful version of events had taken hold and two relevant books were already on their way to market.

First came Jaws by Peter Benchley, a novel about a stressed-out great white shark suffering from portion control issues. It sank its teeth into the New York Times Best-Seller List and hung on for an astonishing forty-five weeks. In the summer of 1975, Steven Spielberg’s big-screen adaptation became an Exorcist-sized blockbuster, ensuring that a generation of children would be so terrified of sharks, they’d fish them into near extinction over the next three decades.

In fact, it’s the humans who look like the sadistic monsters in Cats Gone Wild books, saying things like, “So, the plan is to wait for the cats to show themselves and then go at them with flame throwers.” When the felines are finally burned alive with napalm and the survivors are machine-gunned, it feels like something of an overreaction, especially when we all know that a helicopter dangling a bit of string could have led them out of town just as efficiently.

There is not an animal that walks, crawls, swims, or flies that does not want humankind dead. Bears hate us, bats hate us, dogs and cats clearly hate us. Let’s face it, humans are delicious. In the eyes of animals, we are walking pizzas, and the best thing is that we deliver ourselves.

Strangely, the insect apocalypse seems to put everyone in the mood for love. In Squelch, after her sister has half her foot gnawed off by a hungry caterpillar, a young television director leaps into bed with her brother-in-law. In Blood Worm (1987), the main character’s wife sleeps with an enormous number of men during the worm-and beetle apocalypse and then leaves a note for her husband saying she’s a slut and, by the way, their daughter is missing. She immediately becomes an alcoholic hobo and is last seen stumbling around the ruins of London, which has been abandoned to the inevitable postapocalyptic motorcycle gangs.

These characters’ inclination toward romance could be due to spending much of their time drunk in pubs. Always the first meeting place for farmers alarmed that their prize sheep have been eaten by something they’ve never encountered before, the pubs never seem to close, no matter how many slugs reduce the local citizenry to piles of grisly bones or how many snails drag their prey from bed and into their hell maws. Gin and whiskey are dispensed liberally all day long, and everyone seems to be playing a drinking game: receive a shock, take a drink. It’s also no surprise that in their inebriated state, humans often make terrible decisions—going outside in the dark to investigate why the dog suddenly stopped barking, or battling the caterpillar invasion by releasing thousands of five-foot-long lizards that eat the caterpillars and then quickly overrun the country themselves.

Here’s more bad news: it’s not just dogs and cats and insects and fish and birds and killer whales who hate humanity. Vegetables hate us, too. In a way, that hurts more. Old ladies putter about in their gardens, farmers lovingly tend their crops, and when we celebrate our most romantic occasions, we want our plant buddies with us, so we rip off their arms and bring them along. How could they not like us? When John Wyndham’s subjects turn their stinging vines on humanity in his 1951 novel Day of the Triffids, their betrayal was understandable. After all, they were Soviet plants, born with hatred in their sappy green hearts. But when plants mind-control us so that they can feed on our blood, it’s hard not to be offended. After all, most of us don’t eat plants if we can help it, and then it’s mostly vegetarians who do the eating. If the plants want to murder them, something could probably be arranged.

Marasco was a high school English teacher, so his illusions about human nature had long ago been stomped to death.

If social and political anxiety spawns zombies, then economic anxiety births haunted houses.

What Marian doesn’t realize is that she’s not the owner of this house—she’s its slave. Summer is spent on her knees, waxing floors, dusting frames, repairing damage, letting her family die without batting an eye. To her, cleaning is an act of ownership, but the cruel truth is that the Allardyces had money and she doesn’t and nothing will change that. She can live in their house, she can wax their floors, but she’ll never belong. Before Marasco, Shirley Jackson and Richard Matheson had written haunted-house books—The Haunting of Hill House (1959) and Hell House (1971) are both genre classics, but neither had a thing to say about money. They were about psychic investigators going to abandoned mansions to figure out how they got so spooky. Marasco and his now-forgotten best seller focused on the real issue for most people with a haunted house: “Can I get my investment back?”

Americans have always been aware that their homes can be menaced by unseen forces. Perhaps those forces are the ghosts of people murdered there a hundred years before, or maybe it’s toxic waste from a leaky landfill. Maybe demons are stealing your life force, or maybe it’s radiation. Your kids might be sick because your house is built over a cemetery, or the radon in the basement. Large-scale environmental disasters like Love Canal, the near-meltdown at Three Mile Island, and a series of high-profile asbestos lawsuits made clear that invisible evil was hiding in your home. In fact, if the cause was Satan, you were lucky. At least the Lord of Darkness wasn’t a carcinogen.

Throughout the books, George and Kathy Lutz claim that the Entity changed their personalities and made them violently aggressive toward their children. But Daniel says that happened plenty of times before they moved in and plenty of times after they moved out. In fact, what happened after they fled was worse. While George and Kathy went on their year-long, round-the-world publicity tour for the movie, Daniel was ditched at a Catholic boarding school, where he claims the priests beat him and tried to exorcize his demons. He was eleven. By his account, those 28 days at 112 Ocean Avenue left him with physical and mental damage from which it took years to recover. Maybe George, Kathy, and their lawyer concocted the haunting story over a bottle of wine, as the lawyer later claimed, but their children didn’t. If every haunted house is built on the site of a terrible crime, the crime that The Amityville Horror rests on may be child abuse.

You are in a William W. Johnstone novel. Johnstone wrote two hundred books, most of them Westerns and men’s adventure stories. But with his five-part Devil series (1980–92) written for Zebra Books (The Devil’s Kiss, The Devil’s Heart, The Devil’s Touch, The Devil’s Cat, The Devil’s Laughter), Johnstone became a horror novelist. And every one of his horror novels is insane. Characters act in ways that barely resemble human behavior. The carnage flies thick and cartoony, with popped-out eyeballs flying across a room, people’s heads flattening when hit, cats gamboling in loops of human intestines. Johnstone loads his shotgun with tropes—incest monsters, zombie girlfriends, ghost werewolves, killer dolls—and blasts them at the reader again and again until nothing makes sense anymore.

I knew this name looked familiar; I recognize the name from the review of Trigger Warning (tagline: POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WON'T SAVE YOU)! It's the penname that got taken over by the relative (she's a niece or something, I think) after the guy died, and now she writes drivel for the far right.

In a stroke of poor planning, apparently the majority of America’s rural communities had been built on cursed land. Whether it’s the site of an ancient murder (The Owlsfane Horror, 1981), a witch hanging (Maynard’s House, 1980), or a Native American massacre (The Curse, 1989), America feels like a massive graveyard stretching from sea to shining sea.

To be fair: that's because it is.

Tryon had watched his colleagues abandon the city for the country, lecturing those they left behind about the clean air and good values of their new neighbors. The ex-urbanites buy failing farms at rock-bottom prices and then fetishize what they’ve destroyed, scooping up farm tools at bankruptcy sales and nailing them to the walls of their brand-new kitchens.

It turns out the shaft was shut down because the miners had accidentally drilled into hell, unleashing forces of darkness that were defeated thanks only to a freak cave-in. The mysterious investors want to drill down again, this time on purpose. Like a Springsteen song mashed up with Dante’s Inferno, the mine reopens and the townsfolk receive a Bible’s worth of plagues: their taps run with hot and cold blood, workers are zombified, and fast-growing thorns crack the foundations of homes. By the time it’s raining hellfire, Cunningham has drilled home the idea that small towns are death traps and we’re lucky to get out while we can. The only way manufacturing will return is through a deal with the devil.

In Our Lady of Darkness (1977), Fritz Leiber offers his theory of Megapolisomancy, a “new science of cities” formulated by his fictitious magician Thibaut de Castries. The streets and subway tunnels, water mains and gas pipes, steam tunnels and power cables formed lines of power that imbued cities with dark magic. Or, as a character in Thomas Monteleone’s Night Train (1984) says, “In effect, the city may be coming to life, and if so, it’s proving to be something quite malign.” In Night Train, other dimensions are melting into ours, the main incursion point lying beneath the Lower East Side (also home to Cellars’ Head Underneath). Albino dwarves, flesh-eating jellyfish, and a subterranean pterodactyl make appearances before the NYPD blasts them to hell with shotguns and concussion grenades. The monsters are defeated, but the city sleeps uneasily. As the book ends, one of the officers keeps an eye on crime stats. As long as they keep going down, people are safe. But if they start going up again, it means the city is stirring back to life. Only gentrification can keep the forces of darkness at bay.

Most of the science that appeared in these books was pseudoscience, to put it charitably. 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 always, the fault lies not in our stars, but in our sales.

P.S., they’re not aliens at all, but part of a hidden race that we used to call fairies.

I like that plot twist, actually.

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 true either. Now that’s science!

Back in the ’80s we didn’t know that one day all computers would be linked and turned into a giant delivery system for pornography and cat pictures, so networking seemed exciting. We learned our lessons only by trial and error. Trial: Why not let a fetus network its brain with the hospital mainframe? Error: Fetus becomes a big-headed psychic baby that wants to murder everyone (The Unborn 1980). Trial: Let’s teach monkeys to control robots with their minds. Error: God intervenes and makes everyone either crazy or dead (The Hacker 1989). 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.

Horror is a woman’s genre, and it has been all the way back to the oldest horror novel still widely read today: Frankenstein by Mary Shelley, daughter of pioneering feminist author Mary Wollstonecraft. Ann Radcliffe’s gothic novels (The Mysteries of Udolpho, The Italian) made her the highest-paid writer of the late eighteenth century. In the nineteenth century, Mary Elizabeth Braddon and Charlotte Riddell were book-writing machines, turning out sensation novels and ghost stories by the pound. Edith Wharton wrote ghost stories before becoming a novelist of manners, and Vernon Lee (real name Violet Paget) wrote elegant tales of the uncanny that rival anything by Henry James. Three of Daphne du Maurier’s stories became Hitchcock films (Jamaica Inn, Rebecca, The Birds), and Shirley Jackson’s singular horror novel The Haunting of Hill House made her one of the highest-regarded American writers of the twentieth century.

V. C. Andrews was the first female brand-name horror writer, capable of selling millions of books simply because her name was on the cover. It’s no accident that her style of horror was the one originally popularized by women: the gothic. 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.

List for fourteen weeks. Diagnosed with breast cancer in 1986, Andrews hid her condition as long as she could; in December of that year, with 24 million copies of her seven novels in print, she passed away. Within days, Simon and Schuster’s staff received a memo informing them that Andrews had left behind unpublished novels, as well as detailed notes and outlines for more, allowing them to publish books under her name for years to come, starting with a Flowers in the Attic prequel. Anita Diamant reached into her stable of writers and produced Andrew Neiderman, whose novel PIN had found an eager reader in Andrews. To date, Neiderman has written over sixty-eight books as V. C. Andrews.

“We all have primal fears of being helpless, trapped in a situation beyond our control,” she said, talking about her disease; her books were about people breaking out of their prisons, finding freedom, becoming empowered. Later in that 1985 interview, Andrews was asked if her stories were autobiographical. “I don’t want to write an autobiography,” she said. “My life isn’t finished yet.” A year later, she was dead. And yet she lived on.