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

by Grady Hendrix

McGill, who returned in 1982 to write an Omen novel not based on a film, Omen IV: Armageddon 2000,

Omen V: The Abomination (1985)

fortunately horror paperbacks were there to address every new parent’s fears with a resounding “Yes!” Yes, having sex will cause your baby to die, especially if that sex involved female orgasm (Crib, 1982). Yes, having a baby will cause a woman’s breasts to look “as though a vandal had defaced a great work of art” (also Crib). Yes, you will be confined to a locked mental ward after giving birth (too many books to list). Yes, if you have an abortion the remains will be buried in a shallow grave behind the hospital, where they will be struck by lightning and reanimated as brain-eating babies who telekinetically explode your womb (Spawn, 1983).

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.

Embryo (1980)

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),

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.

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.

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)

Kids can be a handful, especially if they aren’t actually kids (The Next), control reality via a dollhouse (Kate’s House), or catch on to the fact that you’re practicing human slavery (The Sky Children). But as long as you keep them away from leaded gasoline (Childmare), don’t let them grow monster arms (The Moonchild), and don’t kidnap them (Prissy), you should survive.

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.”

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).

Some parents will feel helpless. “How can I possibly stop my child from murdering strangers with a hammer because she thinks they are demons from he...

Seed of Evil:

Piper (1987),

Why do children act out? They might be nature creatures (Nursery Tale, Strange Seed), possessed by a vengeful spirit (Judgment Day), covering up a murder (The Little Girl Who Lives Down the Lane), or plotting a murder (Harriet Said…).Maybe they’re an ape-human hybrid (The Sendai), getting attacked by snakes (The Accursed), a hammer-wielding hellion (Mama’s Little Girl), capable of raising the dead (The Savior), or juggling a second personality that’s probably a demon (Smart as the Devil).

The only book written by Mendal W. Johnson, who died two years after it was published, 1974’s Let’s Go Play at the Adams’

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.

Such Nice People (1981) and The Sibling (1979)

Halo (1987)

Ken Greenhall (including two under the pseudonym Jessica Hamilton). His characters sit down across from you and tell their stories in measured, reasonable tones. Greenhall writes about animal attacks, witchcraft, serial killers, human sacrifice—and of course, homicidal children—without ever raising his voice. “When I was younger I saw James, my father’s brother, look from our dog to me without changing his expression. I soon taught him to look at me in a way he looked at nothing else.” So begins Elizabeth (1976).

Hell Hound (1977), but he was desperate—no other publisher would touch the book. He wrote Childgrave (1982)

Greenhall’s next book, The Companion (1988), was told from the point of view of an angel of death working for, and occasionally murdering, the elderly. Then came Death Chain (1991), about a cognac salesman surrounded by murder. At some point, Greenhall’s agent vanished, but when the author went looking for new representation, everyone told him he was too old. Undefeated, he went home, sat down, and wrote Lenoir (1998), an elegant historical novel about the black man who posed for Rubens’s Four Studies of the Head of a Negro.

Keeper of the Children (1978),

Ghost Child (1982) by Duffy Stein: Marionettes surged forward from their pegs along the wall, as if a spring released them, alive, demonic, an army at war, their faces screaming masks. Their cloth bodies swarmed against the girls, covered their noses, their mouths. Their manipulating wires wrapped snake-like around the girls’ necks, pulled taut, tore tender skin, severed arteries, closed off windpipes, and strangled and mutilated their defenseless victims.

Dead White’s experimental cover caused a stir—and cleverly concealed its cackling horde of killer clowns.

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

Some of horror fiction’s only blood-smeared Bozos appear in Alan Ryan’s Dead White (1983),

Sometimes a doll on the cover symbolizes possessiveness (Possession) or general creepiness (The Doll Castle, Dark Companions). But in The Surrogate, an actual doll gleefully strangles humans, and the ghost kid of Somebody Come and Play lures children to their doom with a playroom full of gendered toys: dollhouses and play kitchens for girls, action figures and toy cars for boys. And in Keeper of the Children, it’s not just a teddy bear with an axe, but also a witch marionette, a mannequin with a golf club, and a scarecrow that gleefully murder humans.

The Voice of the Clown (1982)

This book teaches us one thing about kids: you can’t live with ’em, you can’t kill ’em. But they sure can kill you.

Elizabeth Engstrom’s When Darkness Loves Us to Edmund Plante’s Garden of Evil.

Charles L. Grant’s A Glow of Candles.

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.

Stephen Gresham’s Abracadabra (1988)

1984, the year Jack Chick published his infamous anti-RPG (role-playing game) tract Dark Dungeons,

Rona Jaffe, the extremely famous author who, back in 1958, had published the proto–Sex and the City best seller The Best of Everything. Her subsequent Mazes and Monsters (1981),

John Coyne would not repeat her mistake with his Hobgoblin (1981).

Jaws by Peter Benchley,

Watership Down was already a hit in England, but in April 1974 it debuted in the United States, where Richard Adams’s

a 28-year-old advertising copywriter named James Herbert was writing his first novel, all about his deepest childhood fear. It was called The Rats.

The Fog (1975)—

Herbert turned out two Rats sequels: Lair in 1979 and Domain in 1984,

Robert Calder (a pen name for Jerrold Mundis) can’t make us hate the lab animal on the run in The Dogs (1976), and in The Long Dark Night (1978; adapted for the screen as The Pack), callous summer vacationers pretty much get what’s coming to them at the paws of the dogs they heartlessly abandon each year. Even homicidal Baxter the bull terrier in Hell Hound is the most likable character in Greenhall’s book.

Rabid

Imagine what it was like to be Nick Sharman. For three years he woke up every morning, checked the papers, and saw that no one had done it yet. He didn’t want to do it. He kept waiting for someone else to do it, because it was so damn obvious. Then one morning, three years after James Herbert had unleashed his Rats, Sharman picked up his pen and unleashed…The Cats.

Night-Shriek and Satan’s Pets!

A mere year after his public-health-scare screed Rabid, David Anne thought he had a winner in The Folly (1978).

Taurus (1982),

The Farm (1984). The pigs proved popular and trotted off into the sequel, The City (1986).