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

JIM THIESEN

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Jim Thiesen is famous for his fully painted, beautifully textured book covers for such authors as Brian Lumley and Chelsea Quinn Yarbro. He’s also known for his work on Doubleday’s reprints of Stephen King’s first four novels and his iconic H. R. Giger–inspired cover for Richard Matheson’s I Am Legend (which Tor cropped, digitally blurred, and altered, much to Thiesen’s dismay). But nothing can alter the power of his cover for The Gilgul, which is based on a monstrous head he sculpted, lit, and photographed himself. There’s nothing else like it in horror paperbacks, and it is truly a staggering work of heart-breaking horror genius.

One from Golem A, One from Golem B

Catholics weren’t hogging all the horrific fun. Jewish horror is a small but strong subset of the paperback horror boom. In fact, this tiny ethnic enclave punches above its weight and includes one of the best covers of the decade, as well as one of the best books in the whole boom. Even F. Paul Wilson’s The Keep got the big-budget Michael Mann Hollywood movie treatment. But it was Henry Hocherman’s The Gilgul that ruled bookstore shelves, thanks to its amazing cover.

The Gilgul doesn’t quite live up to the promise of its cover, however. It honors the beautiful traditions of the Jewish people with the story of a young possessed bride who sprays blood from her nipples. When her future groom witnesses her finger-banging a nurse in the local nuthouse, he flees for Miami to swill Jack Daniels and pick up every hooker he can find. The memory of the Holocaust is evoked by a touching scene in which an army of Jewish concentration camp victims comes back from the dead in a Bay Shore living room and ascends into the heavens while singing. And an American psychiatrist is tied up and injected with HIV-infected blood by two of his patients, a bisexual Puerto Rican and a black pimp, after they sneak a peek at his notes stating that people who get AIDS do so because they lack the self-control to put on a condom. (Don’t judge. It was the ’80s.)

Coming the same year that the Berlin Wall fell and the Soviet Union started to disintegrate, David Saperstein’s Cold War thriller Red Devil is a book no one was in the mood for. The premise: Satan (actually Shaitan, the Arabic jinn who refused to kneel before Adam), ditched the Nazis when they lost World War II and assumed the identity of a dead Soviet intelligence officer. Now a higher-up in Soviet military intelligence, Shaitan has recruited a cadre of loyal Satan worshippers and is planning a coup. It’s up to a band of loyal KGB agents, allied with Israeli intelligence, to arm themselves with super-shofars that can blast demonic spies and prevent World War III.

Red Devil is Yiddish Cold War camp of the highest order, but it feels like yesterday’s cold kugel next to Bari Wood’s deeply felt immigrant love song The Tribe. Wood started her career as an editor for the medical journal CA: A Cancer Journal for Clinicians, which sounds like the most depressing job ever. Later she had hits with Twins (1977), which was adapted into David Cronenberg’s film Dead Ringers (1988), and Doll’s Eyes (1993), adapted into the Neil Jordan film In Dreams (1999).

The Tribe’s opening sequence is guaranteed to make readers’ hearts sink: a prologue set during World War II. In Nuremberg. If you’ve read five horror novels from the ’80s, then you’ve read four prologues set during WWII. But this one asks a question whose answer is intriguing: how did the Jews in Barracks 554 of the Belzec concentration camp survive the war while the SS officers guarding them were starving to death?

Cut to Brooklyn, 1981. On Flatbush Avenue, a Jewish philosophy professor named Adam Levy is stabbed to death by a gang of kids who can barely grow mustaches. His best friend, Roger Hawkins, an African American cop on the rise, gets the grim task of telling the family their son is dead. Roger and Adam are practically brothers, and their surrogate father is Jacob Levy, Adam’s father, who survived Belzec and now functions as the revered elder of a tight-knit group of Holocaust survivors who, unfortunately, hate Roger because he’s black. Before Roger can track down the kids who killed Adam, an enormous stranger tears them to pieces. Roger suspects the survivors have something to do with it, but his suspicions drive away Jacob and Rachel, Adam’s widow.

Years later, the Levys have ditched Brooklyn for Long Island, raising Adam’s son in the safe suburbs. But when a black family moves into the neighborhood, the Jewish homeowners panic over potentially plunging property values. Then another murder is committed by an enormous stranger who leaves his African American victims torn to shreds. Suddenly the past is bubbling up through the floorboards: Adam’s murder, Brooklyn, Belzec, Barracks 554, all the way back to the village in Dabrowa where Jacob Levy was born. The war never ended, and it’s hauled its stinking carcass onto Long Island.

This is a book about tribes—found families who put their backs together and face outward, defending themselves against invaders—and how toxic they can become. It’s also a book of grace notes and details. A broken bottle of perfume whose scent still haunts a garage thirty-five years later. An incongruous flowered curtain that acquires menace as the reader slowly realizes what it conceals. And a murdered man whose last thoughts, as he’s stabbed to death on Nostrand Avenue, are not of fighting back but of a trip he once took with his wife. The way she looked, paddling clumsily at the bow. Of her profile as she turned to smile at him. He’s dying, and all he can think about is that impossibly perfect afternoon a long, long time ago.

A Jewish historian and an ancient evil fought Nazis in The Keep, which spawned five sequels, while the KGB teamed up with Mossad against Satan in Red Devil. Credit 25

A true novel of New York City, The Tribe is about gentrification, urban blight, and super-rabbis. Credit 26

Welcome to Porn Country!

These three novels were published by Carlyle, the slightly more respectable imprint of Beeline Books, which published straight-up, no-holds-barred dirty books like Paris Sex Circus, The Wife Who Liked to Watch, and High School Orgy Society. But in 1977 the publishers saw horror novels all over drugstore racks and asked one of its authors, Brian McNaughton, to rip off the recent hit The Omen. When he turned in his sex-free manuscript, the head of the company ordered him to put in more “quivering breasts” and “stirring pricks.”

In Satan’s Love Child, Marcia Creighton is a reporter for a small-town newspaper in New Jersey, happy to lead a normal life after spending her teenage years in a hippie love cult attending Satanic orgies she’d rather forget. Now she’s a mother of three, and all is well except for her selfish alcoholic husband, their family’s disappearing black dog Lucifer, and a corpse strolling around the local morgue. But hey, that’s not so weird for New Jersey. Then a bunch of hippies moves into the area and, before you know it, Marcia’s oldest daughter is falling into trances and having nightmares. Invisible monsters show up, people get killed, there is a lot of sex and…it’s actually pretty great.

The explicit sex scenes are so cut and pasted they barely obscure McNaughton’s cracked cosmic vision. See, these hippies aren’t trying to summon Satan. They worship witches trapped in the fourth dimension. Described as the “Older Gods,” they’re cousins of H. P. Lovecraft’s Elder Gods, and the plot twists and turns like a snake as they force their way into our earthly plane.

Satan’s Love Child was one of Carlyle’s biggest sellers, and the publisher rapidly greenlit two more, this time giving McNaughton a free hand. Satan’s Mistress and Satan’s Seductress are practically sex-free, twisted up in each other’s chronologies, with echoes of Mistress reverberating through Seductress in a way that’s downright masterful. If you can call a book that features so many transdimensional slime monsters masterful.

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A fourth book in the series, Satan’s Surrogate, took McNaughton’s literary experimentation to its hallucinatory limits. Credit 28

McNaughton’s essential subject is failed families led by crummy parents who’ve given up trying to raise their kids; sort of like Rick Moody’s The Ice Storm with more shoggoths. Satan’s Mistress features another hippie housewife, another lousy husband, a “conspiracy of scholars, literary men, and theoretical physicists” hiding the truth about the fourth-dimensional witches, and mass murder. Satan’s Seductress picks up years later, when a survivor of Mistress’s climactic massacre moves back home and cautiously tries to pick up the pieces of her shattered life. Then time loops, undying witches, and books inside books stomp the protagonist’s delicate recovery into shards, reminding us that McNaughton is writing about a Lovecraftian universe that shows no mercy for fragile humans and their petty emotions.

The icy heart at the center of McNaughton’s trash fiction masterpieces is the new world promised by the Older God Zurvan. He will eliminate all contrasts and contradictions, making Earth a planet with no prisons, no mental hospitals, no darkness, and no war. Sounds good, until you realize that he will also eliminate the difference between good and evil; life and death will blur, and there will be no more freedom, because it will also be slavery.

Zurvan is a vampire of life’s essence, the great leveler, the same-maker. He is the ultimate expression of the hippie summer of love: the loss of self, the destroyer of conflict. He embodies the existential fear at the heart of Satanic cult books and possession novels, the fear that we are losing our individual identities to become servants of another’s will. Have a Coke and a smile. Zurvan is here.

Michelle Misremembered

In 1977, real-life Canadian housewife Michelle Smith suffered a miscarriage and sank into depression. She began therapy with Dr. Lawrence Pazder, who revealed that her problems stemmed from repressed childhood memories. Together, they recovered these traumatic memories—which revealed that in 1955, when Michelle was five years old, her mother turned her over to a Satanic cult that used her as the centerpiece in an 81-day ritual known as the Feast of the Beast. During this marathon orgy, Michelle was raped by snakes, defecated on a Bible, watched her playmates being murdered, saw kittens crucified, had a devil tail and horns surgically grafted to her skeleton, got her teeth knocked out, and ate human flesh while being rubbed all over with dead babies. At the finish line, the Virgin Mary and the Archangel Michael appeared and healed her, miraculously erasing all physical evidence of these crimes.

It sounds like a Brian McNaughton novel, but Smith claimed it was all true. To warn the world, she and Pazder wrote Michelle Remembers, a blockbuster memoir that helped spark America’s Satanic Panic in the 1980s. People who should have known better became convinced that Satan lurked under every heavy-metal album cover and operated day care centers across the country. Smith and Pazder left their respective spouses and married each other; they appeared on Oprah, went on a national book tour, popped up in People magazine, and shopped around a movie adaptation of their book, which was kept out of theaters thanks only to threats of a lawsuit from both the Church of Satan’s Anton LaVey and Smith’s father.

Michelle Remembers was a foundational 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. Eighties America was ready for conspiracy theories, no matter how silly, and we’re about to meet a man named Russ Martin who had a few for sale.

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Could the demonic ordeal described by Michelle Smith possibly be real? (Spoiler alert: No.) Credit 30