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

by Grady Hendrix

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.