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

by Grady Hendrix

Rice’s vampire trilogy is transparently autobiographical, allowing her to work through death, guilt, fear, and insecurity, emerging at the end as a fabulous superstar. Similarly, her vampires didn’t bring stench and disease like their literary predecessors; they brought beauty and culture. They were romantic gods, and nothing as tacky as a cross or a stake through the heart could kill them. Only sunlight and fire were dramatic enough to take them down.

Vampires in modern horror fiction became a powerful metaphor for our attitudes toward outsiders and the AIDS epidemic

The Thor Power Tool Co. case of 1979 radically changed how books were sold. This U.S. Supreme Court decision upheld the Internal Revenue Service’s rule that companies could no longer “write down,” or lower the value of, unsold inventory. Previously, publishers pulped about 45 percent of their annual inventory, but that still left them with warehouses full of midlist novels that had steady but unspectacular sales. The pressure to sell quickly was off because publishers could list the value of the unsold inventory far below the books’ cover price. After the Thor decision, these books were valued at full cover price, eliminating the tax write-off. Suddenly, the day of the midlist novel was over. Paperbacks were given six weeks on the racks to find an audience, then it was off to the shredder.

Unlike the power wielded by art directors in the ’70s and ’80s publishing world, the cover artist’s lot was not a happy one. Not only were their signatures cropped off covers, but they were rarely credited inside the book; their art was flipped, reused, and rephotographed. Publishers resisted crediting cover artists to avoid creating stars who could demand better terms. Cover artists were destined for obscurity.

It’s easy to put together a profile of the average horror protagonist. Because in every book, at some point, a character will gaze into a mirror and assess his or her looks for the reader.

First, the horror man. He is big but not muscular and usually comes with a deep tan, although he is in fact Anglo-Saxon. He might be Irish or Italian, and in a few weird cases even Greek, but his skin is dark because he works outside doing hard, honest labor, not because of his ethnic heritage. The horror man is made of chisels. His profile is chiseled, his nose is chiseled, his forehead is chiseled. Sometimes even his powerful shoulders are chiseled. The only things that are not chiseled are his eyes. Those are piercing, but also surprisingly soft, and they light up when he smiles. In fact, as serious as the horror man appears, the best way for him to show his feelings is through soul-deep, passionate lovemaking, which he uses to reaffirm his commitment to marriage, or to show that he is the kind of man a woman can feel safe with.

The horror woman has a willowy, athletic figure with dynamite legs. Contrary to expectations, she is often flat-chested (with notable exceptions). She comes in two flavors: either dreamy and artistic, in which case she is given to precognitive dreams, shivers, and a sense that this place is pervaded by an indefinable evil; or practical and hardheaded, ready to sacrifice herself by performing an ancient ritual to save the world or racing into danger to save either her beloved man or child. The most expressive parts of her body are her nipples. They noticeably harden, when she is aroused, surprised, confused, or meeting new people. They are practically prehensile tentacles, capable of lengthening, thickening, unfurling, budding, flaring, and swelling. If she’s nice, she’s blonde, or maybe brunette. If she likes sex too much, her hair is red. Her eyes are almost always green, occasionally gray. Horror fiction protagonists often pause to stare into a mirror; they don’t always like what they see. Credit 126 Surprisingly, the horror woman is usually employed. If she is married, she owns a fashionable boutique. If she is single, she is a gifted artist or ambitious reporter looking for ...

The story captures midcentury small-town living as few books do. Everyone in Pine Cone lives a life bounded by trivial jealousies, petty rivalries, unwritten rules, and microscopic grudges they nurse all their lives. Everyone knows how to behave (this is the black part of town, this is the white; this is the kind of thing we say in church, this is the kind of thing we keep to ourselves). But the titular amulet weakens those barriers and coaxes feelings to the surface like pus. Pine Cone is poisoned before the amulet arrives, not because it’s built on an Indian burial mound, but because it’s another dying American town.

There are two kinds of creature in this world: Americans and inhumanoids. Whether it’s alien super-predators possessing little girls, hyperaccelerating them through puberty, and sending them out to kill with sex (Soulmate, 1974), or Yetis riding icebergs to California so they can decapitate our Miss Snow Queen 1977 (Snowman, 1978), it’s simply a fact: foreign monsters want to get into our country and mess up our stuff. And they all have three things in common: they smell bad (“fetid” is the name of their cologne), they’re dirty (ruining carpets everywhere with dripping pus, goo, slime, and ectoplasm), and they have terrible manners.

The real problem isn’t keeping inhumanoids out of America, it’s keeping Americans out of other countries. Because every time an American goes abroad, a monster hitches a ride on the return trip. “It had been impossible to foresee that Bradford’s search for the Snowman would terminate in this devastating spectacle,” writes Norman Bogner in his book’s prologue, obviously from the point of view of someone who does not understand that traveling to Tibet pretty much guarantees death for nine out of ten Americans.

Misquamacus is the most evil and powerful medicine man in pretty much forever. He’s such a pain in the neck (sorry) that he returns in a sequel with a whole convention of medicine men to inaugurate a new holiday, which guarantees “24 hours of chaos and butchery and torture, the day when the Indian people have their revenge for hundreds of years of treachery and slaughter and rape, all in one huge massacre.” Maybe we could call it Reverse Columbus Day? The massive success of The Manitou (more on its author here) alerted horror writers to the threat posed by not just inhumanoids overseas, but those under our very feet. We had wiped out the Native Americans, but maybe we didn’t get them all, especially the super-angry ones?

Because the mass murder of indigenous Americans is this country’s original sin, these stories are marinated in extra-strength cynicism, complete with conspiracies cooked up by mayors, newspaper reporters, law enforcement officers, and land developers who want to keep stealing artifacts, building condos on hallowed land, and generally being culturally insensitive, all with total impunity. It’s tempting to see hidden depths in these books; however, no one in these stories does much self-analysis and the authors rarely, if ever, engage with the dubious morality of, after wiping out the original Native Americans, now wiping out the few traces of their ghosts, however bloodthirsty, that remain. Skeleton Dancer (1989) is one of the few to engage with bigger issues, such as, “Why would skeletons want to take our son?”

The ’70s and ’80s were a time of growing unease about apocalyptic global destruction, and no one spoke the language of annihilation better than H. P. Lovecraft. He was the first horror writer to discuss the end of the world in a nonreligious context, spawning a brand of horror that posited the extermination of the human race in purely secular terms.

Grossman was twenty-nine, then the youngest president of a publishing house, and she and Zacharius had no pretensions. Without deep pockets, they had to be smarter and faster. When other publishers went high, Zebra went low. They paid lower royalties (sometimes a mere 2 percent) and smaller advances (as little as $500), and they paid late. They kept a small staff (twenty-two people), but hired smart. Zebra’s door was open to talent from other publishers who’d been passed over for promotions or forced to retire. Lacking deep ties to the literary community, Grossman and Zacharius plunged into the slush pile and emerged with titles they thought no one would touch: historical romances. By the early ’80s they had built Zebra, and Kensington, into a powerhouse with $10 million in sales annually.

Grant was a purveyor of what he first called “dark fantasy”—what was later called “quiet horror.”

A truism is that horror functions best in short stories. Horror is about character and mood. Some of its most effective concepts felt a little threadbare stretched to a few hundred pages, and many of horror’s best writers (Dennis Etchison, Robert Aickman, Ramsey Campbell) did their finest work in the short form. More than any other genre, horror kept short stories alive.

by the mid-’80s the Satanic Panic was in full swing, possibly because the threat of secret satanists was a welcome distraction from the real dangers threatening to kill us all, like a foreign policy based on mutual assured destruction.

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.

Almost exclusively a boys’ club (the most prominent female purveyor of splatterpunk, Poppy Z. Brite, is a trans man),

I had no idea Brite was trans

But this thin layer of macho attitude—bristling with Uzis, crossbows, leather pants, and cocaine—conceals a surprisingly conservative core. Whether it’s Stage Fright’s dark god of metal who plays the Dreamatron, a piece of tech that lets him beam his vividly imagined dreams into the audience’s minds, or The Scream’s “postmetal cyber-thrash band” that worships Satan (both books 1988), rock was portrayed exactly as it was shown in Christian scare pamphlets. Lead singers were spoiled brats and junkies, hooked on bondage, torture, or drugs made from the blood of schizophrenics. Hell looked exactly like an Iron Maiden album cover. And women were the devil.

The FBI had been using the term serial killer since 1961, and books about psychotic killers have a long history, dating back at least to Robert Bloch’s Psycho in 1959. In 1970, Lawrance Holmes’s novel A Very Short Walk introduced us to a killer narrating the story of his own murderous alienation, starting as an angry fetus stewing in amniotic rage juice. Judith Rossner’s 1975 novel Looking for Mr. Goodbar, about a woman who picks up a stranger in a bar and gets murdered for her trouble, was a cultural touchstone that inspired a million magazine think pieces. But 1981 was the dawn of something new. That was the year the term serial killer entered the mainstream.

According to the FBI, there were only 19 serial murders in the ’60s, while the ’70s saw a flood of 119, and the ’80s yielded 200. The country watched in stunned fascination as one unshaven white man with a supervillain name after another was arrested for inhuman crimes: the Hillside Strangler, Son of Sam, the Freeway Killer, the Vampire of Sacramento, the Green River Killer, the Sunset Strip Killer, the Midtown Slasher.

As the ’80s progressed, supernatural horror felt exhausted, with the same old writers dishing out the same old books. Horror movies were all campy slaughter, aimed at teens in on the joke. But the serial-killer book walked the line between crime fiction and horror novel, bringing in new—and in some cases, better—writers, or at least writers whose tricks weren’t familiar to exhausted audiences. Informed by the splatterpunk movement, these writers felt like they had permission to upset readers. A lot. Thomas Tessier’s placid prose lured readers out on the ice, which then cracked, plunging them into a nightmare abyss where alcoholic plastic surgeons babbled about the Marquis de Sade to living human torsos shorn of limbs and locked in cages.

As the ’90s approached, the seemingly insatiable kid’s market emerged as horror’s last hope. R. L. Stine launched his teen horror series Fear Street in 1989, which included seasonal offerings like Silent Night. Around the same time Christopher Pike began turning out Lois Duncan–esque teen thrillers, proving to publishers that kids had a ravenous hunger for horror. Adult readers were left in the dust, while Stine and Pike went on to found the best-selling series Goosebumps in 1992 and Spooksville in 1995, respectively.

I read Pike growing up! Spooksville was one of my favorite series.

mostly, holiday paperback horror turned out to be that terrible boyfriend who wraps an Applebee’s coupon in a Tiffany’s box or slides a subscription to Ladies’ Home Journal into an iPhone case. Its savagely seasonal covers concealed a distinct lack of Christmas carnage inside. No enraged, fire-shrouded snowmen appear in Slumber Party. And not only are no evil elf-babies born in Christmas Babies (1991), but the novel takes place in February. In Florida.

That'd be very disappointing.

Christmas is the most wonderful time of the year for WASPs, and WASP horror novels (you remember them from chapter 2) include plenty of Christmas carnage for every boy and girl. Weirdly enough, it was by way of Christmas that the Satanic Panic spread its infection from heavy metal and role-playing games to horror movies. In 1984 TriStar Pictures released Silent Night, Deadly Night, and television ads for this touching tale—about a tiny orphan who dons a Santa suit and murders everyone in sight—featured a bloody St. Nick waving an ax. That image earned so many protests, and resulted in so many tots picketing movie theaters with WE LOVE SANTA signs, that the distributor pulled the film from theaters after barely a week. It was a lesson that horror writers learned well: mess with Santa and risk getting axed.

An editorial assistant took over and Dell lost confidence in the line, refusing to publish the third title on Brite’s contract, Exquisite Corpse, due to its “extreme” content.

It's been at least a decade since I read that, but I do remember it being really disturbing.

The lesson horror teaches us is that everything dies.

We can’t be certain that anyone is reading these books anymore. But we can hope. Because after all the monsters have flown away, hope is what’s left at the bottom of the box.