Paperbacks from Hell The twisted history of '70s and '80s horror fiction

Review by Booklist Review

For anyone who grew up ogling the skull-festooned paperbacks of local dime-store racks, or daring oneself to flip over one of those ghoulish V. C. Andrews die-cut covers, get ready to have a traumatic flashback. Hendrix (My Best Friend's Exorcism, 2016) grave-digs through two decades of pulpy, sordid, gory, incest-filled, and often totally wackadoodle horror novels, sorting them by theme (Creepy Kids, Real Estate Nightmares, Weird Science) and bowing at the genesis texts (Rosemary's Baby, Burnt Offerings, Coma) before providing the author backstories and plot synopses of the resulting legions of quickie shockers. Hendrix efficiently provides cultural context, noting, for instance, how late-1960s environmental disasters set the table for a slew of killer rats, crabs, scorpions, frogs, moths, slugs, maggots, ants, and even plants (see the side section entitled, Salads of the Damned). Half the page space is deservedly given to the demented cover art and accompanying breathless taglines (The shuddering touch of skin-crawling terror!). Your library probably doesn't have most of these obscurities, but your patrons probably include plenty of delightful weirdos who will remember them.--Kraus, Daniel Copyright 2017 Booklist

From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.

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Review by Publisher's Weekly Review

Hendrix, whose novel Horrorstör brought the macabre to big-box Scandinavian furniture stores, returns with this playful history of what he calls the golden era in horror fiction. The book covers the period roughly between the publication of Rosemary's Baby in 1967 and the release of the film version of The Silence of the Lambs in 1991, the success of which Hendrix says convinced publishers to abandon the label "horror" in favor of "thriller." With an authoritative but jocular tone, Hendrix examines notable authors, cover artists, and themes. The fun of the book comes from the ample, and invariably lurid, cover-art reproductions included, and the truly ridiculous variety of story lines discussed (in addition to vampires and werewolves, killer rabbits, moths, and embryos make cameo appearances.) Hendrix tracks shifting trends in subject matter, from the Satanic and occult fiction of the late 1960s and early '70s to the haunted houses of the mid-'70s to the serial slashers of the '80s. A solid portion of the text is devoted to plot synopses, but these-beginning with one featuring "Nazi leprechauns who enjoy S&M"-are never boring. Like some malevolent force in one of his beloved novels, Hendrix's geeky enthusiasm is infectious. Unwary readers might find themselves drawn to musty stacks of old paperbacks. Beware. (Sept.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

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Review by Library Journal Review

This hilarious history from Hendrix (Horrorstör; My Best Friend's Exorcism) is a comprehensive survey of the dime-store horror paperbacks from the 1970s and 1980s-an often overlooked but integral piece of horror literature as a whole. After a brief prolog outlining the genre's history-starting with gothic romances and the influence of Fifties and Sixties pulp fiction-Hendrix delves into different subgenres of horror and the (often chuckle-worthy) jacket covers that came along with them. He devotes chapters to possession novels (influenced and seemingly borderline plagiarized from William Peter Blatty's The Exorcist), books about the spawn of Satan, monsters, and creepy children-all staples of modern-day horror. While his prose is often tongue-in-cheek, Hendrix provides readers with the building blocks of what we have come to expect from horror literature. Also of note are the brief histories of the cover illustrators of these pulpy paperbacks, shedding light on the creators of the art that initially attracted most readers to these books. VERDICT Fans of horror fiction will love this funny and insightful history. Not only is the text informative, but readers will find themselves building booklists from it, too.-Tyler Hixson, Brooklyn P.L. © Copyright 2017. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

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Introduction Years ago at a science-fiction convention, I was flipping through the dollar boxes at a dealer's table when this Hector Garrido cover for The Little People brought my eyeballs to a screeching halt. I wasn't a book collector-- I didn't even know who Hector Garrido was--but I knew what this was: the Mona Lisa of paperback covers. I bought it so fast my fingers blistered. I never expected to actually read the book . . . but three months later, I fished it out of my "To Be Read" pile and cracked it open.      I knew John Christopher's name from his Tripods science-fiction series, which had been serialized as a comic strip in the back of Boys' Life magazine. But this 1966 Avon novel was stronger stuff. In it, a gorgeous secretary inherits an Irish castle from a distant relative and converts it into a B&B to show her patronizing lawyer/fianc. that she can stand on her own. On opening weekend, the house is full of guests: an Irish dreamboat alcoholic, two bickering Americans with a hot-to-trot teenage daughter, and a married couple who met in a concentration camp, where he was a guard and she was a prisoner.      But some uninvited guests are lurking in the basement: the Gestapochauns.      The Gestapochauns live in the dark, battling their ancient rat enemies with teeny bullwhips. Shortly after we meet them, the author lets us know that these are not just any Nazi leprechauns. These are psychic Nazi leprechauns who enjoy S&M, are covered with scars from pleasure/pain sessions with their creator, were trained as sex slaves for full-sized human men, and are actually stunted fetuses taken from Jewish concentration camp victims. And one of them is named Adolph.      While all this information is being hosed into the reader's eyes like a geyser of crazy, this book rockets from 0 to 60 on the loony meter and overdelivers on practically every level. From the moment the Gestapochauns play a mean practical joke on the old Irish washerwoman who works in the kitchen to the moment that the lawyer/fianc. realizes exactly what the Nazi leprechaun named Greta is up to in his pants, it's one fifty-page freakout that's firing on every cylinder.      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 latenight googling brought me to Will Errickson's Too Much Horror Fiction blog, I blacked out. One year later, I woke up squatting in the middle of an aisle at Sullivan's 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 Rosemary's 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. When's 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. You'll 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 you're holding is a road map to the horror Narnia I found hidden in the darkest recesses of remote bookstores--a 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, weren't worried about causing offense and possess a jocular, straightforward, "let's get it on" attitude toward sex. Many were published before the AIDS epidemic, at the height of the Swinging '70s, and they're unapologetic about the idea that adults don't 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-andtumble marketplace, the writers learned they had to earn every reader's attention. And so they delivered books that move, hit hard, take risks, go for broke. It's not just the covers that hook your eyeballs. It's the writing, which respects no rules except one: always be interesting.      So grab a flashlight and come wander down these dark aisles. The shelves are dusty, the lighting is dim, and there's no guarantee you'll come back unchanged or come back at all. All you need is a map and you're ready to take a tour of the paperbacks from hell. Excerpted from Paperbacks from Hell: The Twisted History of '70s and '80s Horror Fiction by Grady Hendrix All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.

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