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

by Grady Hendrix

The Shinglo (1989),

Robert McCammon’s The Wolf’s Hour (1989)

Blood on the Ice,

Berserker

Obelisk,

In 1975 a Scotsman named Graham Masterton published his first novel, a short book called The Manitou,

Crooked Tree (1980)

Totem (1989),

Shadoweyes (1984).

The Devil’s Breath (1982),

Skeleton Dancer (1989)

Rachel Carson’s 1962 best seller Silent Spring

1970’s best seller The Late Great Planet Earth.

(C.A.D.S., 1985),

(Phoenix, 1987),

Ashes series, starting...

Chumash,

Master of Lies in 1992,

Feast (1988),

Sandman!).

Male Nymphomaniac and The Man from O.R.G.Y.),

The Shrieking Shadows of Penporth Island and The Wailing Winds of Juneau Abbey),

William W. Johnstone, whose preacher-driven novel The Devil’s Kiss

(Rick Hautala’s Night Stone) in 1986.

Schow lived out both his splatterpunk and rock fantasies in The Kill Riff (1987),

Stage Fright’s

The Scream’s “postmetal cyber-thrash band” that worships Satan (both books 1988),

Graham Masterton dominated the first cover of Frighteners with his outrageous cannibal-kid story “Eric the Pie,”

Joe R. Lansdale’s first serial killer novel, Act of Love, slithered out of Zebra Books in 1981. He followed with a few limited-edition books before publishing The Drive-In and its sequel, The Drive-In 2.

The Nightrunners

Straw Dogs

(Below the Line, 1987).

Judi Miller, the Aaron Spelling of horror novels. Both of her show-business slasher novels—Save the Last Dance for Me (1981) and Phantom of the Soap Opera (1988)—

1970, Lawrance Holmes’s novel A Very Short Walk

Judith Rossner’s 1975 novel Looking for Mr. Goodbar,

Peregrine (1981)

Horror Story (1979),

Tessier’s Shockwaves (1982),

Rapture (1987)

Eric C. Higgs’s The Happy Man

Flora Rheta Schreiber, author of the best-selling 1973 multiple personality best seller Sybil, delivered a true-crime account of the murders committed by Joseph Kallinger in a book called The Shoemaker—

Paul Dale Anderson’s Instruments of Death series ignored its human characters in favor of their titular methods of mutilation: Claw Hammer, Pickaxe, Icepick, and Meat Cleaver. Redheads were popular, or at least scalping them on the book’s first page was, as in Razor’s Edge. But nothing tracked the rise and decline of horror better than Rex Miller’s Chaingang novels. Hailed as a bold new chapter in the gospel of splatterpunk, Miller’s Slob appeared in 1987 to much sweaty-palmed page-turning.

Miller was nothing if not flexible, and over the course of Chaingang (1992), Savant (1994), and Butcher (1994)

Joan Aiken’s ersatz gothics like The Wolves of Willoughby Chase (1962,

Duncan, the queen of young-adult suspense, had started turning out teen thrillers in 1966, including I Know What You Did Last Summer (1973), Stranger with My Face (1981), and the cult classic Daughters of Eve (1979).

Black Christmas (1983)

Slay Bells (1994)

Slumber Party.

Christmas Babies (1991),

February 1991 the first Abyss book, The Cipher by Kathe Koja,