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

Inhumanoids may look normal at first, but they’re one skin-peel away from giving you nightmares. Credit 134

There are two kinds of creature in this world: Americans and inhumanoids. Whether it’s alien super-predators possessing little girls, hyperaccelerating them through puberty, and sending them out to kill with sex (Soulmate, 1974), or Yetis riding icebergs to California so they can decapitate our Miss Snow Queen 1977 (Snowman, 1978), it’s simply a fact: foreign monsters want to get into our country and mess up our stuff. And they all have three things in common: they smell bad (“fetid” is the name of their cologne), they’re dirty (ruining carpets everywhere with dripping pus, goo, slime, and ectoplasm), and they have terrible manners.

It’s the lack of politeness that really rankles. In Frank Spiering’s Berserker (1981), no one in New York City even notices a 12-foot-tall Nordic giant in a horned helmet wielding a battle-ax as long as he confines himself to decapitating homeless people. But then he tears off a ballerina’s leg and eats two precious children, and, well, that’s just rude. And though we all feel sympathy for the yeti who hates snow in Snowman, how many ski instructors will we to allow him to decapitate before we hire a bunch of hunters and Vietnam vets to go after him with crossbows armed with tiny nuclear arrowheads? Answer: Three.

The real problem isn’t keeping inhumanoids out of America, it’s keeping Americans out of other countries. Because every time an American goes abroad, a monster hitches a ride on the return trip. “It had been impossible to foresee that Bradford’s search for the Snowman would terminate in this devastating spectacle,” writes Norman Bogner in his book’s prologue, obviously from the point of view of someone who does not understand that traveling to Tibet pretty much guarantees death for nine out of ten Americans. “Ten sherpa porters and nine men in his party were already dead,” reads the next paragraph, “hacked to death, their dismembered bodies consumed by a beast with an insatiable hunger for human flesh,” a turn of events that anyone who’s traveled abroad could easily predict.

In The Shinglo (1989), Scott Pillar fights in the Vietnam War and brings home a head full of trauma that doesn’t just ruin his life, it also shatters his family and destroys large swaths of Cleveland. As he says under hypnosis when asked what he does for a living, “I tear things apart…bit by bit I’m going to tear this whole fucking country right down to the ground.” Not to get too symbolic, but Oliver Stone won an Oscar for making a movie with that exact premise.

Where were the classic monsters—the vampires, the wolfmen, the zombies—while all this was going on? Vampires were getting sexy courtesy of Anne Rice, and, to be honest, no one much cared about werewolves…although Robert McCammon’s The Wolf’s Hour (1989) featured a British secret agent who was also a werewolf going behind enemy lines to kill Nazis. That storyline was echoed in reverse by Blood on the Ice, a take on World War II’s “Weather Wars” during which Nazi and Allied forces conducted military operations over weather-reporting stations in the North Atlantic. This historical event was made almost interesting by the addition of an SS officer who happens to be a vampire. As for zombies, despite their inescapable popularity today, they weren’t doing much in ’70s and ’80s horror novels. Surprising, given that those years were something of a golden age for movie zombies courtesy of George Romero (Dawn of the Dead, Day of the Dead), Dan O’Bannon (Return of the Living Dead), and Lucio Fulci (Zombie, City of the Living Dead). Mummies, however, were another story…

International travel may broaden your horizons, but you’ll wind up bringing home a flesh-eating Viking, a demonically possessed army buddy, or just a really bad infection. Credit 135

Berserker gave us the mummified corpse of an ancient Viking on the loose in modern-day Manhattan, but it took Egyptian-born Ehren M. Ehly to bring a mummy to the big city. Born Moreen Le Fleming and named Miss Egypt in 1949, Ehly lived in Cairo and married a U.S. marine guarding the American embassy. She and her mother fled the Black Saturday riots in 1952 and wound up in London, trapped in immigration limbo. Ehly reached the United States courtesy of the game show Truth or Consequences (her husband was asked to judge a beauty contest on the show, and Ehly popped out of an oversized can of condensed milk).

After an injury forced her to retire from her department-store salesperson job, Ehly took writing classes at a community college. Influenced by Dean Koontz and Stephen King, she abandoned plans to write romance novels and sold four horror novels in quick succession to Leisure. Her first was Obelisk, a charming fish-out-of-water scenario featuring an undead cannibalistic Egyptian high priest causing chaos in Manhattan.

Millions of Americans visited the touring Treasures of Tutankhamun museum exhibition at the end of the ’70s, so Egypt was in the air. Ehly capitalized on the trend, starting Obelisk in Cairo, where Steve Harrison and a cultural attaché rob a pharaoh’s tomb. Steve is stabbed with an artifact and becomes a were-Egyptian: by the light of the full moon he turns into the ancient priest Menket. Retracing Ehly’s real-life path to the United States, Steve vomits blood on a British Airways flight to London and then heads to New York City, where he meets up with his long-suffering girlfriend, Sara Fenster. Instantly she knows something’s wrong because Steve goes nuts over the Egyptian obelisk in Central Park and starts decorating it with severed penises and hobo guts, like a tourist.

King Tut’s golden face was a familiar museum exhibit. Credit 136

Steve tries to tell Sara his problems, but she doesn’t want to hear how he murdered two people and ate a dog. All that happened over there, in the Middle East. He’s home now. Unfortunately, Steve’s problems will take more than denial and a prescription to solve. We know, before Sara does, that Steve’s fetid breath means he may as well turn in his U.S. passport. As one guard at the Metropolitan Museum of Art says to another when Steve runs past, “Funny thing about foreigners. They smell different. I mean, this one really stank, you know?” Steve demonstrates his true foreignness when he sets fire to the Met’s Egyptian wing (no respect for our cultural institutions), eats all the orangutans in the Central Park Zoo (no respect for our monkeys), and impregnates Sara with his half-undead Egyptian baby. In the end, he stabs a cop and then slashes his own throat in front of the obelisk as the baby rustles ominously in Sara’s womb.