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

If there’s one thing horror novels from the ’70s and ’80s can teach us, it’s that doctors in hospitals are mostly interested in impregnating patients with Swedish clones (Embryo), decapitating patients and using their heads to form a living computer (Heads, 1985), or harvesting putrid snot from the multiple anuses of alien worms with an insatiable appetite for human flesh (Fatal Beauty, 1990).

It all started with Robin Cook and his novels: Fever, Outbreak, Mutation, Shock, Seizure…terse nouns splashed across paperback racks. And just when you thought you had Cook pegged, he adds an adjective: Fatal Cure, Acceptable Risk, Mortal Fear, Harmful Intent. An ophthalmologist as well as an author, Cook has checked eyes and written best sellers with equal frequency. He’s best known for Coma (1977), the source of the medical-thriller Nile. Written in 1977, the book spent thirteen weeks on the New York Times Best-Seller List and spawned a hit movie directed by Michael Crichton.

Its heroine, Susan Wheeler, is one of those beautiful, brilliant medical students who’s constantly earning double takes from male colleagues or looking in the mirror and wondering if she’s a doctor or a woman—and why can’t she be both, dammit? On her first day as a trainee at Boston Memorial, she settles on “woman” and allows herself to flirt with an attractive patient on his way into a routine surgery. They make a date for coffee, but something goes wrong on the table and he goes into…a COMA!

Determined not to be stood up, Susan researches what happened to her date and discovers the hospital’s dirty secret: they’re selling internal organs to rich foreigners. There’s a chase, a narrow escape, a betrayal by a trusted authority figure, a conspiracy revealed, and a final scene featuring a striking image of comatose chumps dangling from wires. There are also a lot of lectures on medicine and ethics delivered with the plodding rhythms of a man unaccustomed to interruption, a failing Cook shares with Crichton, that other M.D.-turned-author.

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Coma’s success opened the floodgates for books like The Minotaur Factor, The Theta Syndrome, The Orpheus Process, and The Compton Effect. Suddenly, science was exciting—because scientists wanted you dead.

Indeed, science was no longer the domain of nerds wearing safety goggles; it was now the domain of action! Take, for example, the toxic effects of polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs): boring when you read about them in academic studies on drinking water, but exciting when they achieve sentience, dissolve the skin off a trucker, and make him smash his hurtling rig into a speeding train (Slime).

Similarly, there’s no time for dull academic debates about testing pharmaceuticals on animals when a lab monkey sheds its skin and becomes a tiny hell-skeleton wielding a hatchet and an erection, furiously trying to suck the blood from a housewife’s leg. When that happens you don’t need to consult a peer-reviewed journal—you just need to grab an electric knife and carve that sucker up. That’s from Daniel Gower’s The Orpheus Process (1992), a book whose totally metal chapter titles (“Breakfast of Crucifixions,” “Deathwomb”) and studly hero, Dr. Orville Leonard Helmond (who had “managed to love and lay quite a number of pretty women”), can’t hide the fact that the good doc is a terrible scientist. He shoots monkeys with a .22, brings them back to life in his lab, and then either stabs them to death or takes them home to play with his kids. Depends on his mood.

One wonders if even stringent testing protocols could have prevented the tragedy in Fatal Beauty. The cosmetic Beautifique, whose ingredients mostly consist of telepathic worm snot harvested from alien slugs, is rushed to market without FDA approval. When placed on the flesh of nymphomaniacs, S&M freaks, or general weirdos, the compound either transforms them into giant castrating crabs, causes their breast implants to squeeze off the heads of police officers, or makes their skin melt. Results may vary.

Pursuing a degree in forbidden and dangerous science? There are plenty of specialties to consider, including parapsychology (The Tulpa), nuclear fusion (Light Source), surgery (Heads), computers (Next!), chemistry (Slime), and pharmaceutical sales (Fatal Beauty). Credit 101

Starry Starry Nightmare

Most of the science that appeared in these books was pseudoscience, to put it charitably. After all, the ’70s was the decade when finding a cure for cancer was abandoned in favor of finding the Loch Ness monster, searching for UFOs, researching ESP, and trying to establish a scientific basis for astrology. As we all know, the first three are valid areas of scientific inquiry; astrology is a bunch of bunk.

That didn’t stop everyone from asking, “Hey baby, what’s your sign?” In Linda Goodman’s case, the answer was a dollar sign. The radio broadcaster and astrologer’s 1968 book Linda Goodman’s Sun Signs sold three million copies and became the first astrology book to hit the New York Times Best-Seller List. By 1978 astrology columns ran in 1,250 newspapers and 500 astrology books were in print.

Cashing in on this trend was Lyle Kenyon Engle’s book mill, Book Creations. Based in Canaan, New York, Engel and his staff of twenty came up with a book concept, sold it to a publisher, and then hired a writer to churn out copy. If the series did well, they’d milk it dry (John Jakes’s Kent Family Chronicles sold 35 million books). If not, they took it out behind the barn and shot it. Which is exactly what happened to Robert Lory’s Horrorscope series, whose fifth volume, Claws of the Crab, was never published in America.

Launched in 1975, the Zodiac Gothic series (top) and the Birthstone Gothic books (bottom) barely lasted a year each, representing a final attempt by Ballantine to squeeze more cash out of the dying gothic-romance cow. Credit 102

According to most astrology books, a Taurus is supposed to be stubborn. But according to Horrorscope, a Taurus is more likely to be abducted to a Greek island by a demented movie producer, locked in a labyrinth full of acid baths, and dismembered by a robot Minotaur. Aries, you’re trapped inside a hollow volcano full of missing luxury yachts, where fiddling with strange piles of gold gets you burned to death by unquenchable green fire. Leo? You’re a were-lion.

At least Ballantine made it through all twelve signs with their Zodiac Gothic series. Each installment began with popular newspaper astrologer Sydney Omarr doing the chart for the book’s heroine. At the same time, Ballantine was publishing twelve Birthstone Gothics, under their Beagle imprint, in what was probably an attempt to prop up the flagging sales of gothic romances. As always, the fault lies not in our stars, but in our sales.

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