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

Tryon, and the writers who followed in his footsteps, suggested that urban refugees patronized the flyover states at their peril. Joan Samson’s The Auctioneer is a hard and flinty book about a small farming community decimated by the city dwellers who move in and start buying up all the wagon wheels and handmade quilts, then the town’s small children, and finally its soul. Maynard’s House is a snowy Maine ghost story about a Vietnam vet who moves to the countryside to heal his traumatized soul, only to find that the quiet country nights are more hellish than any tour of ’Nam, thanks to the spirit of a witch hanged there centuries before. Or maybe it’s the PTSD that’s loosening his grip on reality. Or maybe it doesn’t matter because whatever the cause, the effect is the same: moving to the country is the worst decision he ever made.

Digging in Deeper

Jere Cunningham sums up small-town trauma in The Abyss (1984), his apocalyptic novel set in Tennessee coal country. The town of Bethel has shrunk to a dying cluster of cheap bars and trailer parks since all the old mines closed. But now investors are bringing in deep-drilling equipment to reopen an old shaft. Suddenly there are jobs, people are moving back, and the dream of manufacturing’s return is alive again. A few ominous signs appear, but if you’re loyal to Bethel, if you’re the kind of person who belongs there, if you believe in America, then you’re not about to question a good thing.

It turns out the shaft was shut down because the miners had accidentally drilled into hell, unleashing forces of darkness that were defeated thanks only to a freak cave-in. The mysterious investors want to drill down again, this time on purpose. Like a Springsteen song mashed up with Dante’s Inferno, the mine reopens and the townsfolk receive a Bible’s worth of plagues: their taps run with hot and cold blood, workers are zombified, and fast-growing thorns crack the foundations of homes. By the time it’s raining hellfire, Cunningham has drilled home the idea that small towns are death traps and we’re lucky to get out while we can. The only way manufacturing will return is through a deal with the devil.

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Yet even as Satan rises up over the Appalachian Mountains, one character turns to another and shrugs. “Hoss,” he says, “I never claimed to know what was normal in this world.” Then he cracks open a beer and walks away. Small towns may be hell on earth, but they feel uniquely American in a way that big cities never will.

Welcome to Fear City

What were one million white middle-class New Yorkers fleeing in the ’70s and ’80s? Hell, apparently.

A 1968 sanitation strike left 48,000 tons of garbage rotting in the streets. Murder rates skyrocketed (the city’s annual homicides reached an all-time high of 2,245 by 1990; these days they total around 352). Between 1965 and 1975, auto thefts doubled, rapes tripled, robberies increased tenfold. Hell wasn’t the small town. It was the big city.

As the middle class fled, the tax base collapsed; by the mid-’70s, the Big Apple was within days of defaulting on a $150 million debt. So many city employees were laid off that twenty-six fire companies disbanded. Fifty firehouses were shuttered and the city went up in flames: in 1970, over 120,000 fires broke out, and arson investigations hit 13,000 per year.

The South Bronx was a moonscape of abandoned buildings and vacant lots. The East Village was crawling with junkies. The Upper West Side was a mugger’s paradise. It was the perfect place for horror. In A Manhattan Ghost Story (1984), T. M. Wright imagines a city choked with ghosts, some of whom work in bordellos. Kit Reed’s near-future Fort Privilege (1985) sees jaded New Yorkers holed up in a luxury building under siege from the scum outside. A newcomer watches people dragged from their cars during traffic jams and beaten to death for their wallets. “You’re new to the city,” a New Yorker says to the traumatized witness. “You’re just not used to the pace.”

It was hell aboveground and hell underground. A simple-minded mystic bites off young boys’ penises in Spanish Harlem (Rooftops, 1981) while alligators roam the sewers (Death Tour, 1978). The real-life blackout of 1977 provides cover for half-human throwbacks to rampage up from the sewers in T. E. D. Klein’s novella “Children of the Kingdom,” and secret societies worship the subway-tunnel-dwelling Head Underneath in John Shirley’s Cellars (1982).

Giant turtles and 50-pound goldfish flushed down toilets long ago live in harmony with Death Tour’s sewer gators. Credit 93

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