December 4, 2023 9:50 pm
Okay, I finally decided that I needed to read Paperbacks from Hell, by Grady Hendrix, which was first published in 2017!
Back in October, I wrote about the 1984 horror novel Carnosaur, and it sent me fondly reminiscing about all the cheap paperback horror novels I read as a kid. I bought books like Crabs on the Rampage, about hordes of giant crabs, impervious to even tank cannons, rampaging across the UK.
I didn’t realize it at the time, but I was living through a special period in the history of horror fiction. Horror was experiencing an unprecedented boom, and the huge demand for horror led to a flood of cheap paperbacks that could be purchased anywhere, even the grocery store. I didn’t realize how special this era was until the crash of horror in the early 90s, when those weird, violent, graphic, often schlocky novels mostly disappeared.
I obviously am not the only person who feels this fondness for the weird paperbacks of that era. Grady Hendrix, a super accomplished horror author in his own right, stumbled across the extremely bizarre and shocking novel The Little People one day, and was immediately captivated by its whip-cracking Nazi leprechauns.
He wondered what other strange novels he had missed from that period, and that led him to write Paperbacks from Hell, which is a fun and colorful look at the history of the 80s paperback boom, but still manages to be thoughtful and rigorous and detailed.
The chapters cover all the subgenres of 80s horror: “Hail, Satan,” “Creepy Kids,” “When Animals Attack,” “Real Estate Nightmares,” and more. The book covers all the made up conspiracies that were in the news when I was a kid: the Satanic Panic, the fear that Dungeons & Dragons/heavy metal music is corrupting our kids, and more. Hendrix has a lot of scorn for all the fake fearmongerers, and manages to eviscerate them, with entertaining wit. For example, discussing the “recovered memory” “true story” Michelle Remembers, he writes
Michelle Remembers was a fouundational text that brought recovered-memory syndrome and Satanic Ritual Abuse into the mainstream, updating for the ’80s lurid, turn-of-the-century conspiracy theories about white slavers running an international network of sin. The Satanic Panic posited a cradle-to-grave satanic network that indoctrinated children into sex and drug rings, using Saturday morning cartoons and He-Man action figures, with New Age occultists wielding crystals behind it all.
Because it is an ode to the lurid paperbacks of the 80s, Paperbacks from Hell is full color and includes images on nearly every page of covers from the genre. This means that the book is a rather quick read, despite being over 200 large pages long. This is not a criticism, though — it is great to have the history encapsulated in a quick and entertaining way that is nevertheless informative.
What killed the horror boom of the 80s? The answer is well-known now, so it isn’t really a spoiler, but it was Silence of the Lambs. The novel and movie turned the public’s eye away from garish (often supernatural) horror and towards serious police procedurals about serial killers. I think about this a lot now, because horror is experiencing another boom. Barnes and Noble has a horror section again, which it didn’t have for years, and I’m seeing books by super-talented authors who have never been best-sellers appearing on the shelves. There is an appetite for horror again: will horror remain a lasting genre this time? Or does it periodically die, only to rise from the grave once again?
Posted by skullsinthestars
Categories: Horror
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