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October 14 - October 27, 2023
Years ago at a science-fiction convention, I was flipping through the dollar boxes at a dealer’s table when this Hector Garrido cover for The Little People brought my eyeballs to a screeching halt.
While all this information is being hosed into the reader’s eyes like a geyser of crazy, this book rockets from 0 to 60 on the loony meter and overdelivers on practically every level.
Elizabeth Engstrom. Joan Samson. Bari Wood. The Lovecraftian apocalypse of Brian McNaughton. The deeply strange alternate universe of William W. Johnstone. Brenda Brown Canary, whose The Voice of the Clown is one of the few books to actually make my jaw drop. You’ll hear the dark whisperings of Ken Greenhall, the gothic Southern twang of Michael McDowell, the clipped British accent of James Herbert, the visionary chants of Kathe Koja, and the clinical drone of Michael Blumlein.
Between 1960 and 1974, thousands of these covers appeared on paperback racks as gothic romances became the missing link between the gothic literature of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and the paperback horror of the ’70s and ’80s.
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
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In The Vampires of Finistere, their best adventure, a young bride-to-be is abducted from under her boyfriend’s nose during a mysterious pagan fertility festival in Brittany. Underwater vampires are to blame, and Steven Kane has to battle wolves and were-sharks and even lead an army of dolphins against the Drowned City of Ker-Ys before the climactic storming of an ancient castle.
Thomas Tryon’s The Other
Tryon delivers an afternoon “spread lavishly, like a picnic on a cloth of light and shade,” and Blatty begins his book, “Like the brief doomed flare of exploding suns that registers dimly on blind men’s eyes, the beginning of the horror passed almost unnoticed.”
The third novel from literary celebrity Beryl Bainbridge featured two creepy kids lurking beneath an enthusiastic comparison to The Exorcist, while avant-garde writer Hubert Selby Jr.’s book about a serial adulterer, The Demon,
Classy Southern novelist Anne Rivers Siddons wrote The House Next Door, which remains one of the best haunted house novels in the genre. Joan Samson’s sole book before her early death from cancer was The Auctioneer, another genre classic, and Mendal W. Johnson managed to write only Let’s Go Play at the Adams’ before he passed away. Herman Raucher wrote the landmark coming-of-age novel Summer of ’42 before he delivered his only horror novel, the creepy Maynard’s House, about a Vietnam vet taking on a witch in rural Maine. And William Hjortsberg stayed with literary fiction throughout his
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Michael Avellone’s Satan Sleuth
Jonathan Fast in his shaggy dog novel The Inner Circle to Joseph Hansen and his gay detective Dave Brandstetter.
Fred Mustard Stewart’s Mephisto Waltz came with a 45 rpm recording of the titular “Mephisto Waltz” by Franz Liszt. TV ads ran for Joan Samson’s The Auctioneer and John Saul’s Suffer the Children.
Exorcism featured possession by LSD, The Inner Circle was all about Beverly Hills and movie stars, and The Stigma saw a witch choked to death on a three-foot-long demon dick. The history of sixteenth-century Scotland, where witches were hung every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, was the basis for this last as well as early folk-horror novel Satan’s Child and Jane Parkhurst’s Isobel, which was based on the life of Isobel Gowdie, the only witch ever to freely confess to her crimes.
Call him Troy Conway. Call him Vance Stanton. Call him Edwina Noone, or Dorothea Nile, or Jean-Anne de Pre, or any of the seventeen pseudonyms he used to write his more than two hundred novels. He was Michael Avallone, and by his own estimation he was the “King of the Paperback” and the “Fastest Typewriter in the East.” Avallone wrote detective fiction, and gothics, and Partridge Family tie-ins, and the novelization of Friday the 13th Part III in 3-D. And when Satan got hot, he wrote all three slim volumes of The Satan Sleuth series for Warner Books, published between November 1974 and January
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Hip chicks with LSD are gateways to Hell in Exorcism, while demons with deadly wieners feature in The Stigma and Incubus. The Succubus is based on the Manacled Mormon, a kidnapping case that rocked London in 1977. Son of Endless Night is a satanic legal thriller and, despite the cover, Dark Advent is a postapocalyptic novel with no Satan at all.
Joy Fielding’s The Transformation (which she has since disowned),
Barney Parrish’s The Closed Circle
And they would have gotten away with it, too, if not for a darn psychic pursuing a “university-level” course in weaving who can tune into their telepathic wavelength.
The Sharing, and in The Sacrifice,
Iceberg Slim and Donald Goines
Joseph Nazel was an author, activist, and journalist who edited Players for a year and hated every minute of it. Slugging down Jack Daniels, a pistol in his desk drawer, he jammed out a tornado of pulp fiction in a blaze of fury, all of it published by Holloway House. Capable of producing a book in six weeks, Nazel wrote novelizations of blaxploitation flicks like Black Gestapo and hardboiled pulp like Black Fury. And he never, as far as anyone knew, sent a single submission to another publishing house, remaining weirdly loyal to the people who least valued his talents. In his blaze of pulp
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For unto us, in 1974, three horror novels were born: The Black Exorcist, The Search for Joseph Tully, and The Sentinel.
Konvitz wrote a sequel, The Guardian (1979),
In the Name of the Father, by John Zodrow,
Fifty million American Catholics provided a ready audience for two-fisted tales of priests taking on Satan (In the Name of the Father), heretical cults (The Night Church), and possessed kids (Shrine).
Dark Angel, 1982’
Catholic priests looked so good on covers, it didn’t matter what was inside. William Peter Blatty’s Exorcist sequels, The Ninth Configuration and Legion, were Catholic enough, and Unholy Communion was about a priest who becomes a horny werewolf. But Dagon was a Southern Gothic by way of H. P. Lovecraft.
F. Paul Wilson’s The Keep
Henry Hocherman’s The Gilgul
David Saperstein’s Cold War thriller Red Devil
Bari Wood’s deeply felt immigrant love song The Tribe. Wood started her career as an editor for the medical journal CA: A Cancer Journal for Clinicians, which sounds like the most depressing job ever. Later she had hits with Twins (1977), which was adapted into David Cronenberg’s film Dead Ringers (1988), and Doll’s Eyes (1993), adapted into the Neil Jordan film In Dreams (1999).
This is a book about tribes—found families who put their backs together and face outward, defending themselves against invaders—and how toxic they can become. It’s also a book of grace notes and details. A broken bottle of perfume whose scent still haunts a garage thirty-five years later. An incongruous flowered curtain that acquires menace as the reader slowly realizes what it conceals. And a murdered man whose last thoughts, as he’s stabbed to death on Nostrand Avenue, are not of fighting back but of a trip he once took with his wife. The way she looked, paddling clumsily at the bow. Of her
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These three novels were published by Carlyle, the slightly more respectable imprint of Beeline Books, which published straight-up, no-holds-barred dirty books like Paris Sex Circus, The Wife Who Liked to Watch, and High School Orgy Society.
Brian McNaughton, to rip off the recent hit The Omen. When he turned in his sex-free manuscript, the head of the company ordered him to put in more “quivering breasts” and “stirring pricks.” In Satan’s Love Child,
McNaughton a free hand. Satan’s Mistress and Satan’s Seductress
fourth book in the series, Satan’s Surrogate, took McNaughton’s literary experimentation to its hallucinatory limits.
Rick Moody’s The Ice Storm
Michelle Remembers, a blockbuster memoir that helped spark America’s Satanic Panic in the 1980s.
Russ Martin
Rhea
The Desecration of Susan Browning.
The Devil and Lisa Black. In The Possession of Jessica Young
Henry James’s Turn of the Screw, with its little creeps Flora and Miles, kids in fiction have been trouble. In the ’40s, Agatha Christie’s Crooked House featured a twelve-year-old psychopath named Josephine, and Ray Bradbury’s 1946 short story “The Small Assassin”
Richard Matheson’s short story about a spider baby, “Born of Man and Woman.”
1953 came Jerome Bixby’s classic “It’s a Good Life,”
William March’s The Bad Seed.
John Wyndham rounded things out with The Midwich Cuckoos in 1957, which was adapted for film as Village of the Damned in 1960.
Joseph Howard isn’t even credited on the cover of the 1978 novelization Damien: Omen II.
Omen III: The Final Conflict (1980), was written by Gordon McGill,
