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

Don’t sign the lease! Witch House was a 1945 occult detective novel spruced up for a seller’s market with a new cover by fantasy illustrator Michael Herring. T. M. Wright’s The Woman Next Door was an early standalone novel for the author that deliberately mixed hauntings, ghosts, and child abuse. Walls of Fear was a 1990 haunted house anthology, with a nightmarish cover by rock ’n’ roll artist Jim Warren, edited by Kathryn Cramer, who also edited the 1987 haunted house anthology The Architecture of Fear. Credit 85

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Throughout the books, George and Kathy Lutz claim that the Entity changed their personalities and made them violently aggressive toward their children. But Daniel says that happened plenty of times before they moved in and plenty of times after they moved out. In fact, what happened after they fled was worse. While George and Kathy went on their year-long, round-the-world publicity tour for the movie, Daniel was ditched at a Catholic boarding school, where he claims the priests beat him and tried to exorcize his demons. He was eleven. By his account, those 28 days at 112 Ocean Avenue left him with physical and mental damage from which it took years to recover.

Maybe George, Kathy, and their lawyer concocted the haunting story over a bottle of wine, as the lawyer later claimed, but their children didn’t. If every haunted house is built on the site of a terrible crime, the crime that The Amityville Horror rests on may be child abuse.

Small Town Trauma

You are a Vietnam veteran. You are 6 foot 4, 230 pounds of solid muscle. You can kill a man with your bare hands; you prefer not to. You are driving back to the small town where you grew up, somewhere in the South. Once there, you notice something strange: everyone in town is a sex pervert and a satanist. You reunite with your high school sweetheart. She is a zombie; it takes you a while to figure that out. You are attacked by a dark force. You sing hymns to keep it at bay. You kill a lot of satanists. You kill monsters. You kill some teenagers.

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You are in a William W. Johnstone novel.

Johnstone wrote two hundred books, most of them Westerns and men’s adventure stories. But with his five-part Devil series (1980–92) written for Zebra Books (The Devil’s Kiss, The Devil’s Heart, The Devil’s Touch, The Devil’s Cat, The Devil’s Laughter), Johnstone became a horror novelist. And every one of his horror novels is insane. Characters act in ways that barely resemble human behavior. The carnage flies thick and cartoony, with popped-out eyeballs flying across a room, people’s heads flattening when hit, cats gamboling in loops of human intestines. Johnstone loads his shotgun with tropes—incest monsters, zombie girlfriends, ghost werewolves, killer dolls—and blasts them at the reader again and again until nothing makes sense anymore.

If you’re in a William W. Johnstone book, don’t pet the kitties and don’t play with the toys. Credit 88

In The Nursery (1985), a small town in Louisiana has been taken over by the “Prince of Foulness, Lord of Darkness,” and his friend “the Master on Earth of All Things Dark and Ugly and Evil and Profane.” The cops have been bought off by Satan and are given to ending conversations with statements like, “I’d lick her ass just to see the little puckered hole. Bye, now.” Satanic covens spread their message via heavy-metal music that teaches “self-mutilation, assault, suicide, drugs, murder, sex; anti-establishment and anti-social rebellion against parents, society, education, and law and order.” Sometimes a firm spanking is enough to drive the Devil out of a teenager, but usually they have to be shot in the face. Dogs are good and often form armies to assist humans fighting Satan, whereas cats can go either way.

Toy Cemetery (1987) achieves maximum Johnstone. Vietnam vet Jay Clute returns to Victory, Missouri, where he grew up, with nine-year-old daughter Kelly in tow. Within hours of his arrival, Jay discovers that the two major local landmarks are (1) an enormous doll factory in the center of town run by an obese pedophile named Bruno Dixon, who films satanic kiddie porn in it, and (2) a high-security hospital/mental institution/underground research facility that houses the “products of incest,” enormous man-monsters with apple-sized heads and superhuman strength. Tiny toys run amok, as does incest. Jay and his daughter almost hook up their first night, only to snap out of it when the crosses they’re wearing clink together.

Reading this book is like driving through a dust storm while in a post-concussion haze: the harder you try to focus, the more everything slips away into an insanity vortex. A supermarket check-out girl’s head explodes, but no one seems to mind. Possessed teenage boys follow Kelly through town, waggling their inappropriate boners until she fights them with karate and kills one with an ax. Everyone has a secret doll collection. A tiny French general leads a toy army.

Johnstone piles incident on incident, trope on trope, and if something isn’t working he keeps on piling. When time itself needs to be brought to a screeching halt, Jay Clute just pulls out his gun and shoots a clock. Because clocks make time, right? In William W. Johnstone’s world, why not?

Location, Location, Location

In 1964 the police shooting of a young black man kicked off the Harlem riots in New York City. In 1965 a dispute between a police officer and a young black man pulled over for drunk driving kicked off the Watts riots in Los Angeles. Those two incidents in turn kicked off white flight: middle- and upper-class white families fleeing the cities for the countryside, embracing a back-to-the-land lifestyle, buying farmhouses, and turning homey hamlets into planned communities.

Between 1970 and 1980, one million white people left New York City, and in the first four years of the ’70s, six million Americans ditched the cities for the country. It was the first decade in 150 years that the rural population grew faster than the urban population. The horror novels from this time reveal that what was waiting for these homeowners was far worse than what they had fled. In a stroke of poor planning, apparently the majority of America’s rural communities had been built on cursed land. Whether it’s the site of an ancient murder (The Owlsfane Horror, 1981), a witch hanging (Maynard’s House, 1980), or a Native American massacre (The Curse, 1989), America feels like a massive graveyard stretching from sea to shining sea.

Add in parts of the country rendered unfit for human habitation by invisible aliens who return every few hundred years to kill people with spontaneous orgasms that melt their brains (The Searing, 1980), sinister cults occupying abandoned mental hospitals (The Turning, 1978), or isolated beachheads where Satan is growing killer humanoids in church basements (Effigies, 1980), and you might as well stay in the city and get murdered by the sewer alligators. (Keep reading.)

In a country dotted with mass-killing sites and derelict insane asylums, the sorts of small-town traumas one could encounter are limitless. In The Stepford Wives (1972), Ira Levin mocks the petrified patriarchy who fled the civil rights movement and feminism by retreating to elite Connecticut enclaves where they murder their unhappy wives and replace them with compliant fembots.

Depending on whom you asked, The Stepford Wives by Ira Levin (Rosemary’s Baby) satirized either feminism or its backlash. Credit 89

Not content to rest on the laurels of The Other, Thomas Tryon wrote another classic, Harvest Home (1973), all about the dangers of romanticizing small-town life. Tryon had watched his colleagues abandon the city for the country, lecturing those they left behind about the clean air and good values of their new neighbors. The ex-urbanites buy failing farms at rock-bottom prices and then fetishize what they’ve destroyed, scooping up farm tools at bankruptcy sales and nailing them to the walls of their brand-new kitchens. Tryon wondered if their new neighbors might not share the same values as these newcomers, if perhaps they were aligned with stronger, older, bloodier forces that the city folk had forgotten. So when his urban refugees land in the quaint village of Cornwall Coombe, they’re totally unprepared for the bloody fertility rites the tiny town requires to ensure a good harvest.

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