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

by Grady Hendrix

Horror responded in the most metal way possible. When televangelists denounced horror movies, books, and games as causing cannibalism, murder, suicide, depression, and domestic violence, horror writers and metal bands doubled down, firehosing ever-more-offensive content into the faces of conservatives. In Providence, Rhode Island, at the 12th World Fantasy Convention in 1986, this weaponized brattitude took horror fiction one step closer to extinction when Fangoria columnist David Schow coined the term splatterpunk, named for a new school of fiction oozing out of the crypt. At the vanguard was Clive Barker, whose debut six-volume short story collection The Books of Blood, published in the U.K. in 1984, was released in the U.S in 1986 in the form of six terrible-looking paperbacks. There had always been American writers, like Jack Ketchum, who refused to blink when describing gore, but the complete conviction, serious craft, and forensic eye for grotesque detail that Barker brought to his stories, about zombie actresses giving blowjobs and an army of disembodied hands declaring war on the human race, unleashed the beast.