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

Attack of the Killer WASPs

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 the howling maniac on the inside.

Living in exclusive Connecticut neighborhoods or affluent New Orleans suburbs, these families have names like Stuyvesant and Scarborough. The fathers are successful doctors, lawyers, and insurance brokers; the mothers run fashionable boutiques or, preferably, don’t work at all. The children attend only the best schools. They love to ski, and their problems are handled by therapists with German accents and names like Dr. Reisenkönig.

Like a Shane Black movie, it’s always Christmas in these books. Even Halo, which climaxes at graduation, saves its most sadistic set piece for Christmas vacation. Credit 47

Everything is perfect, everyone is privileged, and every single son is hopelessly insane. Such Nice People (1981) and The Sibling (1979) unfold over that holiest of WASP holidays, Christmas, its silly seasonal anxieties contrasted with sheer horror. In Such Nice People, one son sobs helplessly in the toolshed as his imaginary God, SOLA, screams that he must steal a gun and shoot his family. In The Sibling, another son disappears into a fantasy world where he must steal pieces of cadavers from a morgue and leave them as love offerings for his little sister.

Halo (1987) takes us into a Reagan-era nightmare set in New Orleans, as quarterback, senior, and class valedictorian Billy Halo writes a motivational to-do list that morphs from “Study hard, get a Porsche, go to Stanford” to “Kill my English teacher, kill my ex-girlfriend, go to Stanford,” his charming grin hardening into a death’s-head rictus.

What happened? Such Nice People blames mental illness. The Sibling blames sibling rivalry. Halo blames Billy’s parents for being oblivious and withholding. These families are all so committed to everything being perfect that they look the other way while their sons murder neighborhood pets, develop Nazi fetishes, and curb-stomp weaker kids. By the time they can no longer ignore the monster in the house, it’s too late.

The Whisperer in the Darkness

Subtlety and understatement are not words normally associated with a genre whose covers feature skeleton cheerleaders and hog-tied babysitters, but those qualities are the hallmarks of the six books written by Ken Greenhall (including two under the pseudonym Jessica Hamilton). His characters sit down across from you and tell their stories in measured, reasonable tones. Greenhall writes about animal attacks, witchcraft, serial killers, human sacrifice—and of course, homicidal children—without ever raising his voice.

“When I was younger I saw James, my father’s brother, look from our dog to me without changing his expression. I soon taught him to look at me in a way he looked at nothing else.” So begins Elizabeth (1976). Elizabeth’s voice is calm and sophisticated, winding its way around the events of the book as sinuously as a snake. The fourteen-year-old explains how she murdered her parents with witchcraft and started an affair with her uncle, thanks to the assistance of Frances, a long-dead relative and witch executed in the sixteenth century who appears to Elizabeth through mirrors. Or maybe she doesn’t. Maybe Elizabeth’s parents drowned in a storm. Maybe Elizabeth is insane.

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Ken Greenhall’s books were quieter than his covers…and more disturbing. Credit 49

Born to British immigrants in Detroit in 1928, Greenhall graduated from high school at age 15. After serving in the army he moved to New York City, where he lived for the rest of his life, editing encyclopedias. He wrote Elizabeth out of the blue, just to see if he could (he also taught himself to play the piano and harpsichord), using his mother’s maiden name as a pseudonym. Elizabeth landed him an agent but he never felt like part of the New York publishing scene. He was appalled by the cover Zebra Books gave Hell Hound (1977), but he was desperate—no other publisher would touch the book. He wrote Childgrave (1982) next, trying to deliver a novel that contained slightly more human sympathy, but it still came out dark. Its secrets are best kept safe, for it revolves around the idea that, as one character notes, “Maybe God is not civilized.”

Greenhall’s next book, The Companion (1988), was told from the point of view of an angel of death working for, and occasionally murdering, the elderly. Then came Death Chain (1991), about a cognac salesman surrounded by murder. At some point, Greenhall’s agent vanished, but when the author went looking for new representation, everyone told him he was too old. Undefeated, he went home, sat down, and wrote Lenoir (1998), an elegant historical novel about the black man who posed for Rubens’s Four Studies of the Head of a Negro. The book was Greenhall’s favorite, and his ability to flawlessly evoke the voice of an abducted African slave stranded in seventeenth-century Amsterdam is nothing short of astonishing. But a patronizing review in the New York Times broke his heart and he never wrote again. He passed away in 2014.

Greenhall is gone, but his characters—Elizabeth, Baxter, Lenoir—go on talking. They sit across from us, chatting calmly, explaining the madness that infects their lives, and eventually it begins to infect our lives, too. We only have to listen.

Toys ’R’ Death

If the house you just moved into has a basement stuffed with old mannequins, run. If it has a “toy room” filled with clown puppets, run faster. Because the only things scarier than children are their toys. In Keeper of the Children (1978), a stuffed Smokey the Bear lays waste to an entire house with its ax, a witch marionette uses part of a bannister as a club, a department store mannequin shows up at the front door holding a golf club, and a superstrong scarecrow comes to kill, leaving “little broomstick footprints” in its wake. Eventually the family dog hurls himself out the second-story window, preferring the sweet release of death to this toybox of terror.

Automatonophobia is the name smug people who’ve never been chased by witch marionettes give to the irrational fear of inanimate objects that resemble human beings: puppets, robots, mannequins, dolls. But can it be called an irrational fear if dolls can actually kill you? And are in fact eager to do so? From Ghost Child (1982) by Duffy Stein:

Marionettes surged forward from their pegs along the wall, as if a spring released them, alive, demonic, an army at war, their faces screaming masks. Their cloth bodies swarmed against the girls, covered their noses, their mouths. Their manipulating wires wrapped snake-like around the girls’ necks, pulled taut, tore tender skin, severed arteries, closed off windpipes, and strangled and mutilated their defenseless victims.

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Dead White’s experimental cover caused a stir—and cleverly concealed its cackling horde of killer clowns. Credit 51

Clown marionettes are bad, but real clowns are worse. Since time immemorial, humankind’s greatest natural predator has been the clown. Stephen King terrified readers with Pennywise in It (1986), but that was centuries after most mammals had learned to flee in terror at the sound of floppy shoes.

Our murderous mountebanks arrive courtesy of the anarchic Harlequin in sixteenth-century commedia dell’arte, followed by the seventeenth-century’s insanely violent Punch and Judy puppet shows. The first white-faced, full-makeup-wearing clowns appeared in the nineteenth century. In England it was Joseph Grimaldi, a horribly abused child who became a clown, then retired at age 45 when his tortured joints crumbled to dust. His son, also a clown, drank himself to death at age 30. France’s first clown, Jean-Gaspard Deburau, once beat a child to death in the street (he was acquitted).

Fictional clowns come with a body count. Edgar Allan Poe’s Hop-Frog (1849) was a dwarf forced to be a jester who burned eight courtiers to death. Pagliacci features opera’s most famous clown, a sad sack who stabs his cheating wife to death onstage. In the early 1980s, clown panics erupted in Boston, Omaha, and Pittsburgh when rumors circulated that clowns were luring children into white vans.

Clowns are part of the holy trinity of horror paperback iconography, along with skeletons and dolls, yet few books deliver death jesters. Some of horror fiction’s only blood-smeared Bozos appear in Alan Ryan’s Dead White (1983), the charming Christmas tale of killer clowns riding a circus train of death to a snowbound Catskills community. Obscured by veils of billowing snow, they stay offstage for the most part, appearing only a few times—but that’s enough. “The last things Evan Highland saw were the grinning, wide-eyed, red-lipped face of a clown and gigantic white hands that were reaching for his head.” And “The clown’s grin broadened at once into a merry smile. It tightened its grip on Sally’s neck, and then it began to twist her head to the side.” Too many more killer clowns than that and the book cover would need a warning label.