Paperbacks From Hell

Horror author Grady Hendrix chronicles the rise and fall of the paperback horror boom that began in the late 1960s and ended in the early 1990s. The book traces how horror fiction evolved from a disreputable genre trapped in the pulps of the 1930s into a mass-market juggernaut that filled drugstore racks with tales of demonic possession, killer animals, haunted houses, and homicidal children before collapsing under its own weight.

Hendrix opens with the story of his own obsession. At a science-fiction convention, he discovered a 1966 novel called The Little People by John Christopher, featuring psychic Nazi leprechauns who enjoy sadomasochism. The book's wild inventiveness sent him down a rabbit hole of forgotten horror paperbacks, eventually leading him to Will Errickson's blog Too Much Horror Fiction and years of compulsive collecting. The book that follows serves as a road map to this lost world of fiction.

To explain how the horror boom started, Hendrix surveys the genre's bleak state in the 1960s. While American society convulsed with the Vietnam War, assassinations, riots, and the sexual revolution, horror movies offered dusty vampires and dime-store gimmicks, and horror publishing took its cues from decades-old pulps. The genre avoided even calling itself horror, using labels like "eerie adventure" instead. The unlikely bridge to the boom came through gothic romances, a genre launched in 1960 when Ace editor Jerry Gross noticed his mother reading Daphne du Maurier's Rebecca and realized no gothic romances existed in paperback. For the next 14 years, novels about governesses at brooding estates sold millions of copies, seeding readers' imaginations for darker fare.

The boom itself began with three landmark novels. Ira Levin's Rosemary's Baby (1967), a minimalist thriller about a woman impregnated by the devil, became a massive bestseller and spawned Roman Polanski's Oscar-winning film adaptation. Thomas Tryon's The Other and William Peter Blatty's The Exorcist, both published in 1971, simultaneously hit the New York Times bestseller list. The Exorcist held on for 55 weeks and sold 4 million copies before its 1973 film became a cultural landmark. Together, these three novels made horror respectable for adult readers and triggered an avalanche of Satan-themed fiction. Marketing departments slapped demonic imagery on everything from murder mysteries to literary novels, and every new book claimed to rival its predecessors in terror.

Hendrix traces how satanic horror evolved through the 1970s. The Manson murders and the bestselling true-crime book Helter Skelter (1974) gave novelists a new villain: the satanic cult. Literary writers like William Hjortsberg made single forays into the genre, while Holloway House, a publisher targeting African American readers, produced The Black Exorcist (1974), a blaxploitation reworking of Blatty's premise. Catholic-themed horror proliferated, with priests battling demons, guarding the gates of hell, and fending off succubi, or female demons. Jewish horror emerged as a notable subset, with Bari Wood's The Tribe standing out for its exploration of Holocaust trauma, race, and tribal loyalty. Brian McNaughton wrote cosmic horror novels for a porn publisher, while Michelle Smith's blockbuster memoir Michelle Remembers (1980) helped ignite the Satanic Panic, a widespread moral panic over alleged satanic ritual abuse.

The book's second chapter surveys evil children in horror, from Henry James through the blockbuster Omen franchise, which spawned four sequel novelizations of escalating absurdity. Hendrix catalogs the era's anxieties about reproduction and homicidal offspring, highlighting quieter achievements like Ken Greenhall's Elizabeth (1976), narrated by a calm 14-year-old witch, and Brenda Brown Canary's The Voice of the Clown (1982), about a six-year-old and her murderous clown doll. He also covers Mendal W. Johnson's Let's Go Play at the Adams' (1974), a nihilistic novel about children torturing their babysitter that still provokes visceral reactions decades later.

Environmental disasters of the early 1970s fueled a wave of animal-attack fiction. Peter Benchley's Jaws (1974) spent 45 weeks on the bestseller list, and James Herbert's The Rats (1974) launched the career of Britain's most successful horror novelist, whose proto-punk debut sold out its 100,000-copy print run in weeks. Herbert's great insight, Hendrix argues, was that human beings are delicious and England is full of them. The formula spread to dogs, cats, killer whales, crabs, insects, and even plants, with authors competing to find ever more unlikely predators.

Haunted-house fiction reached critical mass amid the economic anxieties of the 1970s. Robert Marasco's Burnt Offerings (1973) pioneered the "real estate nightmare," in which a cash-strapped family gets a deal on a place above their station and pays a terrible price. Hendrix identifies Marasco's novel as the template for Jay Anson's The Amityville Horror (1977) and Stephen King's The Shining (1977). The chapter also covers small-town horror, including William W. Johnstone's cartoony Devil series, and urban horror, with Fritz Leiber's theory of "Megapolisomancy," the idea that cities generate dark magic through their infrastructure, and Ramsey Campbell's disorienting depictions of urban decay.

Science and pseudoscience provided another rich vein. Robin Cook's Coma (1977) launched the medical thriller, while the era's fascination with astrology, extrasensory perception (ESP), and UFOs generated books ranging from Robert Lory's Horrorscope series to J.N. Williamson's Brotherkind (1987), in which gray-skinned extraterrestrials known as Greys team up with Bigfoot and the Men in Black. Early computer fiction anticipated modern anxieties about screen addiction, as in Little Brother (1983), which features an addictive mind-control device that foreshadows the age of ubiquitous screens.

Hendrix devotes a chapter to gothic and romantic horror, centering on two women who dominated the genre. V.C. Andrews, who used a wheelchair after a fall at age 15, broke through with Flowers in the Attic (1979), about children locked away, poisoned, and falling in love with each other. Andrews died of breast cancer in 1986 with 24 million copies in print; ghostwriter Andrew Neiderman has since written over 68 books under her name. Anne Rice overhauled the vampire's image with Interview with the Vampire (1976), written while processing her daughter's death from leukemia. Rice's sequels coincided with the AIDS crisis, and her cultured, eloquent vampires humanized the "other" at a moment when blood equaled death. The chapter also profiles Michael McDowell, whose six-book Blackwater series (1983) blends magical realism with horror across four decades of an Alabama family's history, and Elizabeth Engstrom, whose When Darkness Loves Us (1985) features Sally Ann Hixson trapped underground for what she believes is eight years but is actually 20.

The book's survey of "inhumanoids," or nonhuman monsters, covers foreign threats like Vikings and yetis alongside homegrown horrors rooted in Native American mythology. Graham Masterton's The Manitou (1975) triggered a gold rush of indigenous spirit fiction, but Hendrix notes that authors rarely grappled with the ethics of exploiting the cultures they depicted. He argues that Native American curses functioned as stand-ins for nuclear weapons: capable of massive destruction, dormant underground, and sealed away but never destroyed.

The final chapter charts horror's demise. The mid-1980s Satanic Panic targeted heavy metal and horror fiction, and writers responded by doubling down. Clive Barker's Books of Blood (1984) launched the splatterpunk movement, a largely male cohort of young writers delivering graphic gore in stripped-down prose. Simultaneously, serial-killer fiction overtook supernatural horror. Thomas Harris's Red Dragon (1981) introduced Hannibal Lecter, and when The Silence of the Lambs (1988) won both the World Fantasy Award and Bram Stoker Award, publishers began rebranding horror as "thriller." The Thor Power Tool Co. case, a 1979 Supreme Court decision that ended tax write-offs for unsold inventory, had already gutted the midlist. Now imprints collapsed, magazines folded, and returns flooded warehouses. Horror for children, including R.L. Stine's Goosebumps (1992) and Christopher Pike's teen thrillers, became the genre's last commercial lifeline.

The genre's final stand came through Dell's Abyss line, launched in 1991 by editor Jeanne Cavelos. Its first book, Kathe Koja's The Cipher, about starving artists who find a hole that mutates anything organic, shared the Bram Stoker Award for best first novel. The line published around 45 psychologically complex titles before Cavelos left in 1994 and was never replaced. Abyss died, and with it went the last echo of the horror paperback boom.

Hendrix closes by lamenting the lost creativity, noting that a few websites and enthusiasts still keep the flame alive. He expresses hope that somewhere, someone is still reading these forgotten books, because "after all the monsters have flown away, hope is what's left at the bottom of the box."