Paperbacks from Hell [N.F. - Literature, Art]

Unholy Trinity: Rosemary’s Baby (1967), The Other (1971), and The Exorcist (1971) spawned a new era in horror fiction. Credit 8

Between April 1967 and December 1973, everything changed.

In a little more than five years, horror fiction became fit for adults, thanks to three books. Ira Levin’s Rosemary’s Baby, Thomas Tryon’s The Other, and William Peter Blatty’s The Exorcist were the first horror novels to grace Publishers Weekly’s annual best-seller list since Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca in 1938. And except for three books by Peter “Jaws” Benchley, they’d be the only horror titles on that list until Stephen King’s The Dead Zone in 1979. All three spawned movies and, most important, set the tone for the next two decades of horror publishing.

Horror was for nobodies when Ira Levin—a scriptwriter with a single book (1953’s A Kiss before Dying) and a failed Broadway musical (Drat! The Cat!) to his name—sat down to write a novel about a woman who gives birth to the devil. A minimalist masterpiece written in deft, surgical sentences, Rosemary’s Baby became a massive best seller. The film rights were sold before the book was even published. Four months after the book hit the stands, Roman Polanski rolled cameras on an adaptation that would earn an Oscar. The film, described as “sick and obscene” by the Los Angeles Times and given a “C for Condemned” rating by the Catholic Church, wound up saving Paramount Studios from bankruptcy.

Rosemary’s Baby was a spark to the heart for horror fiction, but the corpse really began to boogie in June 1971, when Thomas Tryon’s The Other and William Peter Blatty’s The Exorcist simultaneously made the New York Times Best-Seller List. Fueled by amphetamines and written during a feverish ten-month spree, Blatty’s book was dead on arrival in bookstores until a last-minute guest cancellation earned him a sudden appearance on The Dick Cavett Show. A blockbuster was born. For eleven weeks, The Exorcist and The Other held the #1 and #3 marks on the New York Times Best-Seller List. The Other slipped off after twenty-four weeks; The Exorcist would hold on for a whopping fifty-five.

Four million copies of The Exorcist were sold before William Friedkin’s motion picture adaptation debuted in December 1973 and became a cultural landmark. The film was the second-highest-grossing movie of the year and won two Academy Awards.

Credit 9

Tryon had what People magazine called “a relentlessly mediocre acting career” before he starred in dictatorial director Otto Preminger’s The Cardinal, an experience that drove the future author to a nervous breakdown and made him swear to become a producer so that he could always fire the director. No one cared about his treatment for a movie about evil twins called The Other, however, so he locked himself in a room for eighteen months and emerged having repurposed his screenplay into a novel. Working the promotional circuit like a pro, Tryon turned his book into the ninth best-selling book of 1971.

In contrast to Rosemary’s Baby, both The Other and The Exorcist are overwritten. Tryon delivers an afternoon “spread lavishly, like a picnic on a cloth of light and shade,” and Blatty begins his book, “Like the brief doomed flare of exploding suns that registers dimly on blind men’s eyes, the beginning of the horror passed almost unnoticed.” But Blatty writes excellent dialogue and he believes deeply in his material. For his part, Tryon underplays the horror so that it sneaks up on the reader, emerging from a thicket of epic-poetic descriptions of nature. By the time you’re ambushed by Tryon’s severed fingers, pitchforks hidden in hay lofts, and dead babies floating in jars, it’s too late. Plus, the end includes a Twilight Zone–worthy twist that kept readers talking and has since influenced a hundred unreliable narrators.

These three books—one a precision thriller about the devil impregnating a woman on the Upper West Side, one a blood-and-thunder religious melodrama proclaiming that Satan wanted our children, and one a baroque and lyrical meditation about evil twins and killer kids—shaped everything that came after.

Rosemary’s Baby started the pot boiling, but the publication of The Exorcist and The Other threw gasoline all over the stove. Whether it was a reprint from 1949, a reissue of Dennis Wheatley black magic books from 1953, or a brand-new novel, soon every paperback needed Satan on the cover and a blurb comparing it to The Exorcist or Rosemary’s Baby or The Other. It didn’t matter if it was a murder mystery, an alternate-history sci-fi novel, or even an old pulp reprint—Satan was the secret ingredient that made sales surge.

Satan sold, whether it was new covers slapped on old books (The Dowry, 1949; To the Devil a Daughter, 1953) or an occult cover applied to a mystery about antique collectors (The Devil Finds Work, 1968). Credit 10

Tryon’s influence would take a few years to blossom, but after the one-two punch of Rosemary’s Baby and The Exorcist, suddenly all anyone wanted to talk about was the Devil.

The Devil’s Decade

Descended from the pulps, occult horror novels at the dawn of the ’70s still felt like places where The Guardians would feel at home. But after The Exorcist hit movie screens in 1974, horror fiction scraped its pulp influences off its shoe like a piece of old gum. These books still featured cults and black magic, but now Satan wasn’t a threat that you met in remote mansions or on Jamaican plantations. Now the devil was within. Satan was no longer your next-door neighbor—he was you.

Marketing departments embraced Satan with gusto. The third novel from literary celebrity Beryl Bainbridge featured two creepy kids lurking beneath an enthusiastic comparison to The Exorcist, while avant-garde writer Hubert Selby Jr.’s book about a serial adulterer, The Demon, displayed a blurb comparing it to Rosemary’s Baby. But a whole lot of authors willingly dipped their toes into the horror waters, with surprising success.

Classy Southern novelist Anne Rivers Siddons wrote The House Next Door, which remains one of the best haunted house novels in the genre. Joan Samson’s sole book before her early death from cancer was The Auctioneer, another genre classic, and Mendal W. Johnson managed to write only Let’s Go Play at the Adams’ before he passed away. Herman Raucher wrote the landmark coming-of-age novel Summer of ’42 before he delivered his only horror novel, the creepy Maynard’s House, about a Vietnam vet taking on a witch in rural Maine. And William Hjortsberg stayed with literary fiction throughout his career…except for one influential sidestep: Falling Angel.

Hjortsberg’s book offered hardboiled detective fiction mixed with demonic identity theft. Credit 11

Somewhere between The Guardians and Michael Avellone’s Satan Sleuth in concept, Hjortsberg’s novel depicts a private investigator who falls through the surface of the waking world into a nightmare of satanic sacrifice. The ’70s saw the reinvention of the classic private-eye character by everyone, from Jonathan Fast in his shaggy dog novel The Inner Circle to Joseph Hansen and his gay detective Dave Brandstetter. But Hjortsberg delivered his hardboiled noir straight, tongue nowhere near cheek.

P.I. Harry Angel is hired to find a missing jazz singer, Johnny Favorite, who may be trying to pull an insurance scam. As Harry closes in on his target, everyone he interviews is murdered. It seems that Favorite sold his soul to the devil—and is maybe trying to welch on the deal. And maybe Johnny Favorite is really Harry Angel.

If you can get past the surface silliness—like people meeting at 666 Fifth Avenue and Satan stand-ins with names like Louis Cyphre—the result is a doom-choked detective story that’s one part Philip Marlowe, one part Oedipus Rex, and one part Satanic Bible. The horror isn’t that Harry Angel might be Johnny Favorite, or that Johnny Favorite might have sold his soul, but that Harry Angel might not be who he thinks he is. He may not be a brave World War II veteran. He might in fact be a murderer. Everyone in this book has a double identity, leading to the chilling matter at the heart of all satanic possession fiction: if Satan can get inside us, then maybe we aren’t who we thought we were. Maybe we’re much, much worse.

As ’70s Satan bought and sold souls on the open market, some trends emerged. The bad guys were cultured and elegant. They had violet eyes, black dogs, and vast libraries of antique tomes, and when they died their souls slipped into good guys’ bodies. Struggling reporters got a chance to become famous concert pianists, flailing movie distributors got their dream apartment, traumatized car crash survivors got freedom from their guilt and a new lover, all in exchange for giving away their identities, their selves, their souls.

Every book was “better than Rosemary’s Baby,” “more terrifying than The Exorcist,” and “in the tradition of The Other!” Read in the right order, the titles painted a grim portrait of Satan marching from free-spirited young demon to middle-aged ennui: Satan’s Holiday, Satan’s Gal, Satan’s Seed, Satan’s Child, Satan’s Bride, Satan Sublets, The Sorrows of Satan, Satan’s Mistress, Satan: His Psychotherapy and His Cure.

Publishers deployed desperate gimmicks in order to stand out. Fred Mustard Stewart’s Mephisto Waltz came with a 45 rpm recording of the titular “Mephisto Waltz” by Franz Liszt. TV ads ran for Joan Samson’s The Auctioneer and John Saul’s Suffer the Children. Cover art got bigger, gaudier, and racier, expanding into die-cut covers with stepback art. Inside those covers, authors competed to see who could be a more turned-on, now-era, groove daddy. Exorcism featured possession by LSD, The Inner Circle was all about Beverly Hills and movie stars, and The Stigma saw a witch choked to death on a three-foot-long demon dick.

The history of sixteenth-century Scotland, where witches were hung every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, was the basis for this last as well as early folk-horror novel Satan’s Child and Jane Parkhurst’s Isobel, which was based on the life of Isobel Gowdie, the only witch ever to freely confess to her crimes.

Demonic incubuses and succubuses slithered out of Italian discotheques to send entire apartment buildings into sexual frenzies and to impregnate women with their demon seed. And the most turned-on, now-era, groove daddy of them all was a forgotten hero known as the Satan Sleuth.