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

Horror Goes Native

Despite the drippy, be-tentacled, foul-smelling foreign monsters that slimed into America from overseas, riding over in the museum shipments, rucksacks, cocaine deliveries, and wombs of its citizens, the worst monsters came from our own shores. Let’s face it, the Amityville Horror house wasn’t built on an old Korean deli. It was built on an Indian burial mound.

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In 1975 a Scotsman named Graham Masterton published his first novel, a short book called The Manitou, about a young lady suffering from a slight swelling on the back of her neck. Turns out it isn’t just a swelling: Karen’s neck is pregnant! With Misquamacus, a 300-year-old Native American medicine man who’s out for revenge against the Dutch who wiped out his tribe. Misquamacus is the most evil and powerful medicine man in pretty much forever. He’s such a pain in the neck (sorry) that he returns in a sequel with a whole convention of medicine men to inaugurate a new holiday, which guarantees “24 hours of chaos and butchery and torture, the day when the Indian people have their revenge for hundreds of years of treachery and slaughter and rape, all in one huge massacre.” Maybe we could call it Reverse Columbus Day?

The massive success of The Manitou (more on its author here) alerted horror writers to the threat posed by not just inhumanoids overseas, but those under our very feet. We had wiped out the Native Americans, but maybe we didn’t get them all, especially the super-angry ones? Besides, American Indian–sourced inhumanoids were our very own homegrown monsters ripe for exploitation. It was a horror gold rush, unleashing a diversity seminar’s worth of tribal monsters and spirits to deliver mass mayhem in mass-market paperbacks.

The best-selling Crooked Tree (1980) features a blurb from the New York Times claiming that it’s “an intense, meticulously researched thriller that handles Native American beliefs with both suspense and dignity.” That may be stretching the definition of dignity, although, like many of these books, author Robert C. Wilson takes great pains to point out that the spirit of his evil medicine man—who possesses a woman and turns her into a were-bear that eats campers and stores their tongues in an attractive leather pouch—is not from any tribe we know but from a far older tribe, far more ancient than any that exists today. The same origin story appears in Totem (1989), with its evil spirit-walker who causes contractors violating its ancient burial grounds to impale themselves on surveyors’ stakes. Likewise for the tiny monsters of Shadoweyes (1984). Most of these books begin when ancient native tombs are disrupted, burial baskets are punted off cliffs, or mummified corpses are decapitated. Soon after, white people are having bad dreams and feel compelled to seek out someone who knows “the old ways.”

As if indigenous cultures weren’t stereotyped enough in mainstream fiction, they became fertile ground for inhumanoidism. Credit 140

Native American monsters are portrayed as fetid as overseas inhumanoids, but more often than not they use possessed everyday animals to do their dirty work: insane chipmunks, coyotes with “dead eyes” walking on hind legs, grizzly bears with castration on their minds, killer elk, hordes of rattlesnakes, or even, as in The Devil’s Breath (1982), a flock of birds that tries to drown white people in their droppings. Because the mass murder of indigenous Americans is this country’s original sin, these stories are marinated in extra-strength cynicism, complete with conspiracies cooked up by mayors, newspaper reporters, law enforcement officers, and land developers who want to keep stealing artifacts, building condos on hallowed land, and generally being culturally insensitive, all with total impunity.

It’s tempting to see hidden depths in these books; however, no one in these stories does much self-analysis and the authors rarely, if ever, engage with the dubious morality of, after wiping out the original Native Americans, now wiping out the few traces of their ghosts, however bloodthirsty, that remain. Skeleton Dancer (1989) is one of the few to engage with bigger issues, such as, “Why would skeletons want to take our son?” Good question.

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The aforementioned skeletons are naked, gay, and undead; as usual, they’re also unaffiliated with any known tribe, instead calling themselves the Brave Men-Boys. Acquiring eternal life by sucking the blood (or sperm—the author is hazy on this point) out of their male sacrifices, they come back to life when their leader, cleverly called the Leader, is awakened by twin brothers with ESP, just like he and his twin used to have. In fact, the Leader is a nice skeleton Indian—he wants to bring the twins into his immortal tribe so they can live forever and never be separated, unlike he and his brother. He also plans to resurrect the rest of his Brave Men-Boy tribe to murder all the white people, so you can see he exists in a sort of gray area. In this book, however, the white men do not acknowledge gray areas, and they murder all the skeleton Indians with a SWAT team. The last paragraph reveals that not all the Brave Men-Boys are dead; some are sleeping in an underground cavern, waiting for more psychic twins to reawaken them. It’s an apocalypse paused, which was a hallmark of the subgenre.

The ’70s and ’80s were a time of growing unease about apocalyptic global destruction, and no one spoke the language of annihilation better than H. P. Lovecraft. He was the first horror writer to discuss the end of the world in a nonreligious context, spawning a brand of horror that posited the extermination of the human race in purely secular terms. It’s no mistake that The Manitou’s Misquamacus is not trying to kill humanity on his own, but instead plans to summon Lovecraft’s Great Old Ones to do the job for him.

For decades, readers had been weaned on a steady diet of Armageddon, whether it was the environmental collapse predicted in Rachel Carson’s 1962 best seller Silent Spring or the end times in 1970’s best seller The Late Great Planet Earth. The greatest threat to humanity in the ’80s was nuclear war, of course, which hung over the planet like the sword of Damocles. Men’s adventure paperbacks of the era were full of tough warriors striding through postnuclear wastelands, leading a resistance against the invading Soviet army (C.A.D.S., 1985), fighting horrible mutants (Phoenix, 1987), or battling an oppressive American government (the thirty-four-volume Ashes series, starting in 1983). But, oddly, the closest thing we get to nuclear apocalypse in horror paperbacks are Native American curses.

Capable of massive destruction, dreaming peacefully beneath the earth’s surface until they’re disturbed, these curses are depicted as forces that modern man cannot control and that he unleashes at his peril. At the end of Chumash, when the Malibu coastline is destroyed by an Indian curse, 30,000 people wind up dead and a massive “blast zone,” unsafe for human occupation, is established. It resembles nothing so much as the irradiated wasteland left in the wake of a dirty bomb.

The endings of these books often occur in some kind of underground tomb or chamber where the forces of aboriginal destruction are contained, but never destroyed, usually at great sacrifice on the part of the Anglo heroes. And so, like underground silos containing weapons of mass destruction, Native American curses are sealed away to lie dormant for now, resting uneasily in the darkness, capable of awakening at any moment and destroying us all.

What do vengeful native spirits want? Maybe some company (Skeleton Dancers), maybe an apocalypse (Chumash). Credit 142

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