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

All the way back to Henry James’s Turn of the Screw, with its little creeps Flora and Miles, kids in fiction have been trouble. In the ’40s, Agatha Christie’s Crooked House featured a twelve-year-old psychopath named Josephine, and Ray Bradbury’s 1946 short story “The Small Assassin” gave us a baby out to murder his parents. But the ’50s were the true decade of the terrible tyke. The decade kicked off with Richard Matheson’s short story about a spider baby, “Born of Man and Woman.” In 1953 came Jerome Bixby’s classic “It’s a Good Life,” with its all-powerful, bratty three-year-old psychic god Anthony. It has been adapted three times for The Twilight Zone (the original series, the reboot, and the feature film) and once for The Simpsons.

The next year saw the arrival of the twin masterworks of killer-kid literature: William Golding’s Lord of the Flies and William March’s The Bad Seed. John Wyndham rounded things out with The Midwich Cuckoos in 1957, which was adapted for film as Village of the Damned in 1960. For the next ten years, evil kids belonged on film. Turn of the Screw became director and cinematographer Freddie Francis’s dripping, doomed, black-and-white chiller The Innocents (1961). Lord of the Flies hit the silver screen in 1963, and then Jack Hill gave us Ralph, Virginia, and Elizabeth Merrye, three murderous adults with the minds of children in 1964’s Spider Baby, followed by the game-changing satanic fetus of Rosemary’s Baby and in 1970 Freddie Francis did it again with Girly.

As discussed in Chapter 1, Thomas Tryon’s 1971 evil-twin best seller The Other inspired the horror boom of the ’70s, with its underage murderers playing big brother to the most infamous killer child of them all: Damien Thorn. Wanting to cash in on the success of The Exorcist, producer Harvey Bernhard hired screenwriter David Seltzer to write The Omen, a smash that spawned two sequels and numerous remakes (as well as popularizing 666 as the “number of the beast”).

A few weeks before the movie debuted, Seltzer wrote a novelization of his screenplay that ran a slim 202 pages and it became a surprise hit, selling 3.5 million copies. It’s one of the better movie novelizations, with the film’s big scenes all present and accounted for. Seltzer adds even more details, such as gutter journalist Keith Jennings being so lonely that he creates a friend by sticking a cooked chicken on a root beer bottle and making it dance. There’s also a nutty backstory in which one of the priests selected to kill Damien reminisces about doing missionary work in Africa, where he fell in love with a young man and was forced to watch his lover eat his own testicles before being flayed alive.

Unlike David Seltzer, Joseph Howard isn’t even credited on the cover of the 1978 novelization Damien: Omen II. His book isn’t terrible, but it pales compared to the original. Characters communicate mostly by reciting long passages from the Book of Revelation or shouting, “Your child is the Antichrist! He must be destroyed!” Nevertheless, it sold about 1.5 million copies.

The third novelization (and the last to correspond to a motion picture), Omen III: The Final Conflict (1980), was written by Gordon McGill, whose name appears on the cover but who had nothing to do with the screenplay. Damien’s character, now the head of Thorn Corporation, talks as if he was raised in a German military academy (“Pleased to meet you, Miss Reynolds. You are the Barbara Walters of the BBC, perhaps?”), recites death metal lyrics (“Birth is pain. Death is pain. Beauty is pain.”), and waxes rhapsodic over, as he charmingly puts it, “the gaping wound of a woman.” A bunch of priests are on a holy suicide mission to stab the now-adult Damien to death with the Seven Sacred Daggers of Megiddo; after Damien makes love to the Barbara Walters of the BBC, the priests manage to stick one of these magic Ginsu knives in his back. That seems to be curtains for Damien, and it certainly was for the film franchise.

Not so for McGill, who returned in 1982 to write an Omen novel not based on a film, Omen IV: Armageddon 2000, which opens with a scene of rectal childbirth. The Barbara Walters of the BBC ushers Damien’s son, Damien Jr., into the world via her anus before dying (probably of shame). Cut to seventeen years later, in the futuristic year 2000: Thorn Corporation is run by Paul Buher, a relatively minor character from the series who keeps teenage Damien Jr. isolated on the grand old family estate, Pereford, where Dad’s embalmed corpse stands like a mannequin in the black chapel.

The Final Conflict wasn’t so final—Damien Thorn’s progeny kept the family business going for two more installments. Credit 33

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This book revolves around yet another attempt to insert the Seven Sacred Daggers of Megiddo into the spawn of Satan. Chief among those trying to turn the Antichrist into a knife block is Philip Brennan, the American ambassador overseeing Arab-Israeli peace talks, which fall apart when an Israeli politician clocks a Syrian representative with an ashtray. Then Brennan’s devil-worshipping wife stabs her husband before he can stab Damien with his Christian cutlery, and World War III breaks out.

Omen V: The Abomination (1985) picks up a few years after this nuclear exchange. Opening with a list of the thirty-one characters slaughtered in the series so far, it follows Pulitzer Prize–winning writer Paul Mason and his intrepid researcher Anna as they write a book about the Thorn family and how all their friends die a lot. Damien Jr. becomes head of the Thorn Corporation and starts engineering the apocalypse again. Anna is brainwashed into becoming Damien’s slave shortly after she interviews Philip Brennan’s backstabbing wife from the previous book, who has since taken a knife and mutilated her vagina as penance for her betrayal.

Everyone converges on Pereford for a satanic orgy, where Anna betrays Paul, who tries to kill Damien Jr. The series concludes with Damien Jr. crushed by a massive falling crucifix ridden by Philip Brennan’s mad wife, who lands on Damien crotch-first, and we’re informed that the last sight Damien Jr. sees is “the mutilation of Margaret Brennan.” THE END.

Or is it? In the epilogue, Paul Mason sits down to write his book and types…the first lines of the first Omen novelization by David Seltzer.

What to Expect When You’re Expecting (a Hell Baby)

The 1960s and ’70s spawned a million myths about babies as everyone tried to keep up with the changing rules of reproduction. The Pill hit the market in 1960, IUDs appeared in 1968, abortion was legalized in 1973, and the first successful IVF was carried out in 1978. Massive changes in contraception and fertility technology had phrases like test tube baby and sperm bank on the lips of every American. A lot of fear emerged surrounding pregnancy and childbirth, but fortunately horror paperbacks were there to address every new parent’s fears with a resounding “Yes!” Yes, having sex will cause your baby to die, especially if that sex involved female orgasm (Crib, 1982). Yes, having a baby will cause a woman’s breasts to look “as though a vandal had defaced a great work of art” (also Crib). Yes, you will be confined to a locked mental ward after giving birth (too many books to list). Yes, if you have an abortion the remains will be buried in a shallow grave behind the hospital, where they will be struck by lightning and reanimated as brain-eating babies who telekinetically explode your womb (Spawn, 1983).

Many women make their way through this minefield of potential hazards with the guidance of their doctor. But the horror novels of this era warn women that their doctors were less likely to write a prescription than to hire a hitman to run them over because they threatened to blow the lid off their baby mill operation. The horror-novel OB/GYN is remote and cold. His name is Dr. Borg or Dr. Kabel, and he works at the Karyll Clinic, which sounds like a location in a David Cronenberg movie. He spends Christmas Day alone, and he’s probably having an incestuous affair with his sister. If you are visiting a fertility clinic that has a conveyor belt running directly from the delivery room to what everyone refers to as “the Off-Limits Building,” find another doctor.

The floating unborn became a recurring image on horror novel covers, even for books like The Jonah and The Reaping, which didn’t feature a single evil fetus. Credit 35

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As readers soon learn, a woman is never more vulnerable than when she’s pregnant or in labor, especially if the hospital happens to be conducting illegal experiments on living human fetuses. Essentially medical thrillers in the vein of Coma (more about that book in chapter 5), these novels stopped at every station of the genre and genuflected deeply. A doctor always gave a lecture about the virtues of playing God, someone was always sneaking around the hospital’s off-limits area, an insider involved in the experiments was always unable to live with the guilt and volunteered vital information to the main character but was killed before their secrets could be revealed. That death was always made to look like a suicide. And, just as surrogate mothers always turned out to be crazed murderers, there was always a previous victim who seemed insane but who might be telling the truth if everyone would stop dosing her with Thorazine for a second and listen.

The message seemed to be that women should have babies by finding them in a cabbage patch or receiving them from a stork, the way nature intended, rather than using their dangerous, weird-looking wombs. But for those who insisted on doing things the hard way, these novels were full of long descriptions of medical procedures like amniocentesis and culdoscopy. Books like Embryo (1980) served, on the one hand, as thrillers about insane gynecologists trying to produce a master race of identical Swedish babies, and on the other as racy versions of What to Expect When You’re Expecting.

The terrifying truth about childbirth is that carrying the fetus to term is merely the first step on the long road to having your house to yourself again. Every fetus eventually turns into a child, and, as so many wise men and women in the horror paperback industry know, terror toddles on two chubby legs.

In the world of horror paperbacks, child-rearing has few rewards. If you manage to avoid the deranged surrogate mothers who orgasm during labor and want to steal back their baby and send it to heaven with its brothers and sisters (Hush Little Baby, 1982), and you can dodge the secret cult stealing Jewish babies and selling them for $50,000 a pop (Crib), you still must care for the infant itself, which comes with its own challenges. Babies can be fussy, and the fussiest babies have a body count.

Of course, every mother thinks her baby is perfect, but at some point, as her home fills with dead bodies, she has to face facts and admit that the fruit of her womb is a face-eating beast spawned from the deepest recesses of hell. If Whitney Houston is right, and the children are indeed our future, then we need to approach our future with maximum caution.

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