Hendrix Grady - Paperbacks From Hell: The Twisted History of 70s and 80s Horror Fiction

The books original hardback cover by Paul Bacon featured merely a tiny foot.

Sadly, the Gestapochauns are completely absent from the last thirty pages of the book. The author devoted the remaining pages to a discrete psychic battle that takes place in the dreams of the non-psychic, non-Nazi, non-leprechaun members of the cast. In other words, the Boring People. Yet Christopher and his Gestapochauns fly so high and so far in those middle passages that they practically touch the sun.

No matter what book I read next, the Gestaopchauns clung to my gray folds, whispering to me in my sleep: What else has been forgotten? After some late-night googling brought me to Will Erricksons Too Much Horror Fiction blog, I blacked out. One year later, I woke up squatting in the middle of an aisle at Sullivans Trade-a-Book in the heart of South Carolina, surrounded by piles of musty horror paperbacks. Apparently I was buying them. Apparently I was reading them. Apparently I was addicted.

The books I love were published during the horror paperback boom that started in the late 60s, after Rosemarys Baby hit the big time. Their reign of terror ended in the early 90s, after the success of Silence of the Lambs convinced marketing departments to scrape the word horror off spines and glue on the word thriller instead. Like The Little People, these books had their flaws, but they offered such wonders. Whens the last time you read about Jewish monster brides, sex witches from the fourth dimension, flesh-eating moths, homicidal mimes, or golems stalking Long Island? Divorced from current trends in publishing, these out-of-print paperbacks feel like a breath of fresh air. Get ready to meet some of my new favorite writers: 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. Youll 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.

The book youre holding is a road map to the horror Narnia I found hidden in the darkest recesses of remote bookstoresa weird, wild, wonderful world that feels totally alien today, and not just because of the trainloads of killer clowns. In these books from the 70s and 80s, doctors swap smokes with patients while going over their ultrasounds, housewives are diagnosed as having too much imagination, African Americans are sometimes called negroes, and parents swoon in terror at the suggestion that they have a test tube baby.

These books, written to be sold in drugstores and supermarkets, werent worried about causing offense and possess a jocular, straightforward, lets get it on attitude toward sex. Many were published before the AIDS epidemic, at the height of the Swinging 70s, and theyre unapologetic about the idea that adults dont need much of an excuse to take off their clothes and hop into bed.

Though they may be consigned to dusty dollar boxes, these stories are timeless in the way that truly matters: they will not bore you. Thrown into the rough-and-tumble marketplace, the writers learned they had to earn every readers attention. And so they delivered books that move, hit hard, take risks, go for broke. Its not just the covers that hook your eyeballs. Its the writing, which respects no rules except one: always be interesting.