Literature / Paperbacks from Hell

Paperbacks from Hell: The Twisted History of '70s and '80s Horror Fiction is a 2017 book by Grady Hendrix, tracing the revolution in Horror Literature started in the late 1960s and early 1970s by Ira Levin's Rosemary's Baby and The Stepford Wives, Thomas Tryon's The Other and Harvest Home, and William Peter Blatty's The Exorcist, leading to thousands of novels in a variety of genres and ending in the early 1990s, when the publication of Red Dragon popularized the Psychological Thriller as a more intellectually respectable alternative to horror.

Chapters:

• Introduction
• Prologue
• 1.Hail, Satan
• 2.Creepy Kids
• 3.When Animals Attack
• 4.Real Estate Nightmares
• 5.Weird Science
• 6.Gothic and Romantic
• 7.Inhumanoids
• 8.Splatterpunks, Serial Killers and Super Creeps

"Tropes From Hell"

• Alien Invasion: Quite a few of the books discussed involve alien invasions. Most, but not all, of these turn up in Chapter 5.
• Archive Panic: Invoked in the "Afterword" by Will Errickson.
  "While reading Paperbacks From Hell, you may have compiled a lengthy to-read list. Or you may feel like I did, decades ago, on my first day at my job at a dusty used bookstore with the entire horror section to myself: Where do I start?"
• Arson, Murder, and Jaywalking: From the description of The Guardian series in the prologue:
  "The six Guardian books were about square-jawed, tweed-and-blackbriar-pipe types investigating Haunted Houses, underwater vampires, voodoo cults and Australians".
• Ascended Extra: It's noted in Chapter 8 that Hannibal Lecter was a minor character in Thomas Harris' Red Dragon who became a major character in the sequel The Silence of the Lambs.
• Attack of the Killer Whatever: Chapter 3 is devoted to killer animal fiction, as well as the related Attack of the 50-Foot Whatever and the odd case When Trees Attack.
• Author Appeal: Hendrix is fascinated by the Satanic Panic, which returns in this book having been fictionalized by him in My Best Friend's Exorcism.
• Author Phobia: A minor example, but Hendrix describes Let's Go Play at the Adams' as the only book he's only been able to read once and never wants to go back to.
• Based on a Great Big Lie: Michelle Smith and Lawrence Pazder's Michelle Remembers, which launched the disastrous Satanic Panic during the 1980s. Michelle claimed, among other things, to have watched a Satanic cult murder dozens of kittens and babies during an 81-day ritual to summon Satan while herself being tortured and sexually abused, and then to have been rescued by the Virgin Mary. Recovering memories through hypnosis is pseudoscience, and Michelle's story is demonstrably untrue (school records show no absences during the time this ritual supposedly took place, there is no building matching her description in Victoria, etc).
  • While the Ronald DeFeo Jr. murders did happen, the Amityville series also qualifies for this. In particular, Hendrix is quite scornful of the claim that the haunting "made" the Lutzes abusive to their children.
• Big Creepy-Crawlies: Chapter 3, which focuses on books about things like armies of giant penis-eating praying mantises, swarms of scorpions invading Britain, and so on.
• The Big Rotten Apple: Chapter 4 goes into great detail on the "white flight" trend of the 1970s, and how the fear of cities - as well as the anxieties of moving to smaller towns - impacted the horror genre.
• Bigfoot, Sasquatch, and Yeti: Chapters 5 and 7 both describe books involving these sorts of monsters turning up.
• Blaxploitation: Chapter 1 describes how the Satanic Panic trend in horror literature had a blaxploitation subgenre, often involving generous helpings of Hollywood Voodoo.
• Black-and-Gray Morality: Hendrix describes most of the splatterpunk genre as this, with there being little separation, morally speaking, between heroes and villains (for example, he describes one book, The Kill Riff, in which a man takes revenge on a rock band after his daughter is crushed to death at a concert of theirs that went wrong, but it turns out that he was sleeping with (ie, raping) his daughter, and his tragically dead wife didn't commit suicide, he killed her for finding out about it, making him no better or sympathetic than his victims).

• Cosmic Horror Story: Several references to H. P. Lovecraft and his work, including covers for reprints of The Dunwich Horror and The Colour Out of Space, and works that carried on his influence.
• Covers Always Lie: Chapter 8. Despite the cover and title, Christmas Babies takes place in February, in Florida.
• Creepy Child: Chapter 2, "Creepy Kids", is all about this trope in horror literature.
• Creepy Catholicism: Chapter 1 discusses how a lot of Satanic Panic literature made use of Catholic imagery and often portrayed the Catholic Church as, if not a full-on Religion of Evil, then at least one rife with corruption, often of a specifically satanic nature.

• Cult: Naturally in Chapter 1, with the acknowledgement that writing about "Satanic cults" really took off following the arrest and trial of Charles Manson.

• Deal with the Devil: Jaron Summers' Below the Line in Chapter 8, about a man so desperate to make his movie that he ends up pledging his wife and children as collateral.
• Deliberate Values Dissonance: From the Introduction:
  "In these books from the '70s and '80s, doctors swap smokes with patients, African Americans are sometimes called 'negroes', and parents swoon in terror at the suggestion that they have a 'test tube baby'."
• Dem Bones: MANY covers featured living skeletons. There's even a two-page spread devoted specifically to skeletal doctors, who Grady jokes are the worst kind of doctor.
• Demonic Possession: Prominently featured in Chapter 1, of course (most famously with The Exorcist), but this also turns up elsewhere in the book.

• Everybody Has Lots of Sex: Quite a bit, starting in Chapter 1, where it is often of the Did You Just Romance Cthulhu? variety.
• Follow the Leader: Invoked throughout, since once one novel caught on, others tried to capitalize on its success, to Franchise Killer and even Genre-Killer degrees.
• For the Evulz: Let's Go Play at the Adams', with teens torturing their Bound and Gagged Badly Battered Babysitter.
• Gaia's Vengeance: Type 2 in Chapter 3, which showcases novels about killer animals and the anxieties of the then-new ecological movement.

• Genius Bruiser: Chapter 1. Philip St. George III, the hero of Michael Avallone's The Satan Sleuth trilogy, is described as "one hundred and eighty pounds of whipcord muscles" with "a mind bordering on Einstein IQ."

• Genre-Busting: Chapter 4. Joe Cunningham's The Abyss, about a dying mining town in Tennessee coal country, where it's revealed that the mine was closed because the miners accidentally dug into Hell, Hendrix compares the effects of opening the mine to "a Springsteen song mashed up with Dante's Inferno."
• Giant Enemy Crab: Chapter 3 discusses Guy N. Smith's long-running Killer Crabs series.

• Gothic Horror: Chapter 6 revolves around the revival of gothic and Southern Gothic literature as part of the paperback horror boom.

• Hair-Raising Hare: One of the many varieties of killer animal to turn up in Chapter 3
• Haunted House: A few of them turn up in Chapter 4, which is about the many permutations of the New House, New Problems horror setup.
• Hollywood Exorcism: Exorcisms come up a few times in Chapter 1, since The Exorcist is the Trope Codifier.
• Hollywood Satanism: Chapter 1 in particular is devoted to novels about Satan and Satanists as horror villains. This comes up a little bit in the later chapters as well.
• Horny Vikings:A mummified one on the loose in New York City is the subject of Frank Spiering's Berserker in Chapter 7.
• Horror Doesn't Settle for Simple Tuesday/Twisted Christmas: Chapter 8 has a whole section on holiday-themed horror novels.
• Humans Are Bastards/Humans Are the Real Monsters/Crapsack World/Downer Ending: Lots and lots. As if the title wasn't enough of a tip off, don't look here for Happy Endings.

• Indian Burial Ground: Chapter 7 discussed how this became a common trope in '70s and '80s horror fiction, and notes the moral queasiness some of these books invoke in modern readers about the (almost always white) heroes exterminating remnants of Native civilizations.
• Leg Focus: The horror woman is described as having "a willowy, athletic figure with dynamite legs."

• Mad Scientist: Chapter 5, about Scifi Horror novels, naturally involves a few of these.
• Magical Native American: Very dark examples in Chapter 7, which has a subsection of horror literature with Native American themes, most of which aren't very well researched.
• Mars Needs Women: Chapters 5 and 7, dealing with Scifi Horror and monster fiction, occasionally feature books where aliens or monsters develop a sexual attraction to human women. Inverted in the Blackwater saga (discussed in Chapter 6), where a female river monster who marries a human man.
• Monster Clown: Chapter 2, mostly devoted to Creepy Child novels, also has a section on evil clown themes in horror.
• Moustache de Plume: Inverted in Chapter 2. It's pointed out that Ken Greenhall wrote two novels under the name Jessica Hamilton.
• Mummy: Chapter 7 talks about a few novels that brought back classic monsters like the mummy, though usually in very weird ways. For example, Berserker is about a viking mummy going on a rampage.
• Muscles Are Meaningful: Chapter 6. The horror man is described as being completely chiseled except for his eyes.
• Names to Run Away from Really Fast: As just one example, from Chapter 4: William W. Johnstone's The Nursery includes the "Prince of Foulness, Lord of Darkness" and "the Master on Earth of All Things Dark and Ugly and Evil and Profane."
• New House, New Problems: Chapter 4 is mostly about the rise of this type of horror novel. The 1970s saw a mass exodus of white middle-class city-dwellers for smaller towns, something that is heavily reflected in the horror fiction of the day: stories where such a family moves into a Haunted House or a Town with a Dark Secret, or stories about cities as crime-infested hellholes of squalor and decay (something that was, unfortunately, becoming a bit of a self-fulfilling prophecy as cities started to lose their middle-class taxpayer base).
• Ninja Pirate Robot Zombie: The novel that inspired this whole book, The Little People, is about psychic Nazi bondage leprechauns.

• Nun Too Holy/Naughty Nuns/Nuns Are Spooky: Chapter 1, dealing with Religious Horror, naturally has a few examples of corrupt or outright satanic nuns. See Creepy Catholicism, above.
• The Old Gods: Chapter 1. The "Older Gods" in Brian McNaughton's sex-and-Satan novels Satan's Mistress, Satan's Seductress and Satan's Love Child.
• Old Shame: Invoked. It's noted in Chapter 1 that Joy Fielding later disowned her Charles Manson-inspired novel The Transformation.
• Our Demons Are Different: Chapter 1, naturally, features a wide variety of demonic antagonists.
• Our Vampires Are Different: Anne Rice's The Vampire Chronicles series, among many others. Chapter 6 acknowledges the initial panic over AIDS and how that led to Rice, Fred Saberhagen, John Shirley and others reinventing vampires.
• Our Werewolves Are Different: Chapter 7 is about the classic monsters, and discusses a few werewolf novels, though they turn up elsewhere as well.
• The Power of Rock: KISS's "Firehouse" is used as a weapon against The Men in Black AND The Greys in J.N. Williamson's Brotherkind in Chapter 5.
• Precision F-Strike: Chapter 4. As part of his trashing of the Amityville series, he writes that the third installment (Amityville: The Evil Escapes) expanded from "a simple of meal of possessed homes to an all-you-can-eat buffet of occult bullshit."
• Pulp Magazine: Chapter 1 states that The Exorcist was the point where Horror broke away from its pulp influences.
• Reference Overdosed: What else would you expect from a book chronicling the rise and fall of literary subgenres? There are books and films named constantly.
• Religious Horror: Chapter 1 is all about religiously-themed horror novels, which Grady contends started the entire horror novel boom that the book catalogues.
• Reptiles Are Abhorrent: Chapter 3 has a whole section on monstrous reptiles.
• Revenge of the Sequel: Robert Lory's Horrorscope #2: The Revenge of Taurus is discussed in Chapter 5. Horrorscope was an ambitious, if goofy, attempt to launch a horror franchise with one novel based around each sign of the zodiac, though they never completed the series.
• Satanic Panic: The book talks about the Satanic Panic multiple times, especially in Chapter 1, and covers Michelle Remembers (a notorious book where a woman claimed she had been ritually abused by her mother and given birth multiple times, had a devil's tail sewn onto her, and the Virgin Mary had come down to rescue her).
• Serial Killer: Chapter 8 is mostly about serial killers in horror fiction. In fact, The Silence of the Lambs being designated as a Thriller rather than Horror is considered to be what killed the trend of horror novels.
• Sex, Drugs, and Rock & Roll: Chapter 8 involves a few novels about evil rock bands, most of which go all-in on Evil Is Cool, which Hendrix finds rather annoying, dismissing a lot of the authors as a bunch of "edgelords".
• Shown Their Work: It's pointed out in Chapter 8 that Jaron Summers' Below the Line "spends enough of its time laying out film financing and tax shelters in enough detail for any wannabe Bruckheimer to follow."
• Sinister Minister: A few of them turn up in the Religious Horror novels detailed in Chapter 1.

• Snuff Film: The subject of Below the Line, a horror novel described in Chapter 8.
• Southern Gothic: As a subgenre in Chapter 6.
• Splatter Horror: Chapter 8 is all about this subgenre, with a lot of gross-out Serial Killer novels (like the Chaingang series). A few of the animal attack books in Chapter 3 (like The Rats or Eat Them Alive also have aspects of this.
• Stepford Suburbia: The Trope Namer The Stepford Wives is mentioned in Chapter 4, though this also comes up in Chapter 2, which is partly about the Town with a Dark Secret.
• Subliminal Seduction/Rock Me, Asmodeus!: Discussed a lot. Jacob Aranza's Backwards Masking Unmasked, the rise of the Parents' Music Resource Center, and other Moral Guardians are discussed in Chapter 8.

• Take That!:
  • Hendrix is usually very jovial and tongue-in-cheek about even the most ridiculous horror stories, but becomes very serious about Amityville, mostly because he considers George Lutz, the original owner of the house, to be not only a lying profiteer who invented the whole thing, but an Abusive Parent, according to the man's son.
  • He also clearly has a low opinion of a lot of the splatterpunk writers detailed in Chapter 8, dismissing them as a bunch of "edgelords" who "wanted to be in a band" with a "surprisingly conservative core", and there's a whole subheading devoted to how creepily misogynistic a lot of these books were.
• Threatening Shark: Jaws, the Trope Codifier, is mentioned in Chapter 3.
• Title of the Dead: C.L. Grant's The Hour of the Oxrun Dead, described in in Chapter 7.
• Town with a Dark Secret: Chapter 4 has a lot of novels about moving to such a town.

• The Vietnam Vet: The protagonists of William W. Johnstone's horror novels, in Chapter 4, Chris Stiles of T. Chris Martindale's Nightblood in Chapter 6, along with the villain of Alex Kane's The Shinglo, are all characters who are supposed to have served in 'Nam.
• Villainous Incest: Horribly, this can be found many times throughout the book. The Kill Riff (mentioned above under Black-and-Grey Morality) has an especially gratuitous example, while The Sibling is about an Incest-ant Admirer, and PIN is about an incestuous brother-and-sister pair who are "so hyperintelligent they're basically insane".
• Western Zodiac: Robert Lory's Horrorscope series in Chapter 5, which was supposed to run to 12 books, each thematically tied to a different star sign. Only four books were published - The Green Flames of Aries, The Revenge of Taurus, The Curse of Leo, and Gemini Smile, Gemini Kill. A fifth, The Claws of Cancer, was apparently written but never published.
• White Anglo-Saxon Protestant: Chapter 2 has a whole heading called "Attack of the Killer WASPs", about affluent middle-class Anglo-Saxons as villains.
  In horror fiction, every culture has its own supernatural menace. African Americans get voodoo. The Chinese get fox spirits. And WASPs (white Anglo-Saxon Protestants) get the all-American boy sporting a varsity letter jacket and blinding-white smile that mask teh howling maniac on the inside.

• "X" Makes Anything Cool: The cover of Anne Rivers Siddons' The House Next Door shown in Chapter 4 has the title printed in red except for the x in Next, which is lit up in white.
• Your Head Asplode: Chapter 4. This happens to a supermarket check-out girl in a William W. Johnstone novel, but nobody notices.