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

by Grady Hendrix

And when Joe discovers that the succubus can be destroyed only if she’s decapitated at the moment of orgasm, you know this book is about to go so far over the top it achieves orbit.

(Don’t judge. It was the ’80s.)

terror toddles on two chubby legs.

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.

Reincarnated children are tricky. Seek professional help.

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 hell?” you might wail (Mama’s Little Girl). Fortunately there are some practical, commonsense steps you can take to lower the body count. Most important, try not to have sex with Satan. Fornicating with the incarnation of all evil usually produces children who are genetically predisposed to use their supernatural powers to cram their grandmothers into television sets, headfirst. “But how do I know if the man I’m dating is the devil?” I hear you ask. Here are some warning signs learned from Seed of Evil: Does he refuse to use contractions when he speaks? Does he deliver pickup lines like, “You live on the edge of darkness”? When nude, is his body the most beautiful male form you have ever seen, but possessed of a penis that’s either monstrously enormous, double-headed, has glowing yellow eyes, or all three? After intercourse, does he laugh malevolently, urinate on your mattress, and then disappear? If you spot any of these behaviors, chances are you went on a date with Satan. Or an alien.

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.

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.

Juice attends the meetings, showing the men her own pathetic, half-baked tricks, which they indulge because they’re too frail to hold a pillow over her face until she stops struggling.

Then again, LeFey can’t even lift Pa-Nah’s magical skeleton key off a simple-minded girl whose biggest dream is to wear fishnet stockings and wash dove shit out of top hats. This is hardly a battle of titanic intellects.

First came Jaws by Peter Benchley, a novel about a stressed-out great white shark suffering from portion control issues.

It’s a nonstop symphony of chaos as these angry pandas of the sea bite off blue whale tongues while botanists toss dynamite at herds of stampeding walruses.

As the crabs topple our bridges, it seems that humanity has no choice—mankind is on the menu. Yet King Crab has made one fatal miscalculation. He has eaten Professor Cliff Davenport’s favorite nephew. Now it’s personal.

But insects don’t just want to teach us how to be good by chewing off our faces—they also want to gobble our junk.

Marasco was a high school English teacher, so his illusions about human nature had long ago been stomped to death.

In fact, if the cause was Satan, you were lucky. At least the Lord of Darkness wasn’t a carcinogen.

Crass, commercial minded, grandiose, ridiculous, this carnival barker’s idea of a haunted house is a shame-train of stupid.

but in the third installment the story went from a simple meal of possessed homes to an all-you-can-eat buffet of occult bullshit.

It’s an inspirational story. “One day,” author Ken Eulo said in an interview, “I read The Amityville Horror and I thought to myself, oh Christ, I could do this in my sleep.”

Sometimes a firm spanking is enough to drive the Devil out of a teenager, but usually they have to be shot in the face.

As always, the fault lies not in our stars, but in our sales.

and every respected scientist came down on one of two sides: either aliens were coming to help us attain enlightenment or they wanted to eat us. Or kill us. Or kill us first and then eat us. There were conflicting theories.

Back in the ’80s we didn’t know that one day all computers would be linked and turned into a giant delivery system for pornography and cat pictures, so networking seemed exciting.

Rice gave vampires a voice. And then they wouldn’t shut up. Narrated by an especially whiny Louis, Interview with the Vampire (1976) was greeted with critical disdain (“suckling eroticism” crowed the New Republic, “static…pompous…superficial” proclaimed the New York Times), which hit the author hard. Rice was writing her way out of a depression after her five-year-old daughter’s death from leukemia, and she unconsciously put all her feelings of helplessness, regret, and guilt into the book. Louis was a passive victim because that’s how Rice felt when she told his story.

“The cassette or CD player in too many teens’ rooms is an altar to evil, dispensing the devil’s devices to the accompaniment of a catchy beat,” warned televangelist Bob Larson. In the 1983 book Backward Masking Unmasked, author Jacob Aranza warned that Queen’s song “We Are the Champions” was “the unofficial national anthem for gays in America.” Larson listed all the satanic bands out to seduce our children, balancing the usual suspects—Led Zeppelin, AC/DC, Black Sabbath—with Electric Light Orchestra, the Beatles, and the Eagles, as well as the Beach Boys (transcendental meditators), Bee Gees (believers in reincarnation), and John Denver (once tried aikido).