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

LISA FALKENSTERN

Credit 125

Lisa Falkenstern has more covers in this book than any other artist. A student of Milton Charles, and, later, his wife, she relied on a creative process used by many cover illustrators of the time. After reading a manuscript, she’d submit three sketches for her painting to the publisher. When one was approved, she would rent a studio for a photo shoot, find props, book models, and take reference photos. For Crib she used her infant niece. For the cover of Thomas Monteleone’s Night Train she shot photos on New York City’s 7 train. For PIN, she worried about reproducing the human circulatory system on a man with no skin, so she studied anatomy books to get it right. The resulting painting was so complex, the art director took one look and said, “Make it simpler.”

As the ’80s progressed, Falkenstern lost interest in horror. “Everything was getting more and more gross and disturbing instead of funny and interesting,” she said. Eventually, she started doing romance covers, which were still selling strong, even as horror sales tanked.

Cover sketch for The Nestling by Milton Charles.

Pause and Reflect

Be they demons from hell or crabs from the sea, skeleton doctors or sensitive vampires, we’ve seen who and what bring the horror to these paperbacks. But what about the hapless man or woman who must suddenly cope with a telepathic baby or a haunted bungalow? We always learn about them in the old reliable mirror scene, a horror novel staple that’s as inevitable as death and prologues. It’s easy to put together a profile of the average horror protagonist. Because in every book, at some point, a character will gaze into a mirror and assess his or her looks for the reader.

First, the horror man. He is big but not muscular and usually comes with a deep tan, although he is in fact Anglo-Saxon. He might be Irish or Italian, and in a few weird cases even Greek, but his skin is dark because he works outside doing hard, honest labor, not because of his ethnic heritage.

The horror man is made of chisels. His profile is chiseled, his nose is chiseled, his forehead is chiseled. Sometimes even his powerful shoulders are chiseled. The only things that are not chiseled are his eyes. Those are piercing, but also surprisingly soft, and they light up when he smiles. In fact, as serious as the horror man appears, the best way for him to show his feelings is through soul-deep, passionate lovemaking, which he uses to reaffirm his commitment to marriage, or to show that he is the kind of man a woman can feel safe with.

The horror woman has a willowy, athletic figure with dynamite legs. Contrary to expectations, she is often flat-chested (with notable exceptions). She comes in two flavors: either dreamy and artistic, in which case she is given to precognitive dreams, shivers, and a sense that this place is pervaded by an indefinable evil; or practical and hardheaded, ready to sacrifice herself by performing an ancient ritual to save the world or racing into danger to save either her beloved man or child. The most expressive parts of her body are her nipples. They noticeably harden, when she is aroused, surprised, confused, or meeting new people. They are practically prehensile tentacles, capable of lengthening, thickening, unfurling, budding, flaring, and swelling. If she’s nice, she’s blonde, or maybe brunette. If she likes sex too much, her hair is red. Her eyes are almost always green, occasionally gray.

Horror fiction protagonists often pause to stare into a mirror; they don’t always like what they see. Credit 126

Surprisingly, the horror woman is usually employed. If she is married, she owns a fashionable boutique. If she is single, she is a gifted artist or ambitious reporter looking for her big break. (It is worth noting that if the horror man is a reporter, he is always a washed-up alcoholic looking for a second chance.) No matter what the job, she is obsessed with proving herself to her male colleagues, which often leads to throwing herself into dangerous situations from which she can only be rescued by the horror man.

Southern Deluge

Horror would eventually turn into thrillers, and gothics would become romances, but another offshoot of the gothic revival remained stubbornly itself: the Southern gothic. Michael McDowell was an Alabama native whom Stephen King once called “the finest writer of paperback originals in America,” and his Blackwater series is the One Hundred Years of Solitude of the genre. He’d be considered one of the great lights of Southern literature if his books dealt with things other than woman-eating hogs, men marrying amphibians, and vengeance-seeking lesbian wrestlers wearing opium-laced golden fingernails.

McDowell started his career with The Amulet (1979), his own 100-page screenplay that he adapted into a 200-page novel after no one would buy it. Avon eventually acquired the book and encouraged McDowell to make it longer. In this story of a disfigured soldier recuperating under the baleful gaze of his malignant mother in the tiny town of Pine Cone, Alabama, we follow a cursed necklace as it sows destruction. It’s not the carnage, rendered in apocalyptic understatement, that is so engaging but the language and social mores of the inhabitants. The story captures midcentury small-town living as few books do. Everyone in Pine Cone lives a life bounded by trivial jealousies, petty rivalries, unwritten rules, and microscopic grudges they nurse all their lives. Everyone knows how to behave (this is the black part of town, this is the white; this is the kind of thing we say in church, this is the kind of thing we keep to ourselves). But the titular amulet weakens those barriers and coaxes feelings to the surface like pus. Pine Cone is poisoned before the amulet arrives, not because it’s built on an Indian burial mound, but because it’s another dying American town.

McDowell’s six-book Blackwater series was published one title per month between January and June 1983, and it was his farewell to the horror genre. Beginning with the flooding of Perdido, Alabama, it follows the fortunes of the Caskey clan beginning with Oscar Caskey’s marriage to Elinor, a mysterious redheaded woman he rescues from the flood, who turns out to be a finned and gilled river monster assuming human form.

McDowell’s first novel started as a screenplay; later he’d write the Beetlejuice script for Tim Burton. Credit 127

The series follows their marriage, and their family, from 1919 to 1960, as new generations are born and older generations pass away. The horror feels more like magical realism, and McDowell balances scenes of genuine human kindness and grace against scenes of a rapist having his arms chewed off by a mutant teenager. McDowell is as enthusiastic about his horror as he is about delicately depicting social hierarchies. He knows that two rival bridge clubs can war with each other for decades. He knows what it feels like to get old. But more than anything, these six books are about women and the power they wield behind the scenes.

McDowell’s equally accomplished The Elementals (1981) is about another Southern family, this one haunted by ghosts that dwell in the sand around the family’s Victorian beach house. But it’s the Blackwater series that feels like a major accomplishment. Beginning with two people—one white and one black, one rich and one poor—paddling slowly through a flooded town, and ending the same way almost fifty years later, the series is a heartbreaker. As is the fact that today it’s completely forgotten. Then again, McDowell might have wanted it that way. He once said it was a mistake to try to write for the ages. And yet somehow he did, even when writing disposable paperback originals.

The Elementals is shorter than the Blackwater series, but both explore the horror that lurks behind all those Southern manners. Credit 128