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

Horror fiction and heavy metal were a match made in hell, thanks to books like Stage Fright and The Scream (notable for the Stan Watts mini pull-out poster concealed behind the paperback’s cover). Credit 158

Schow lived out both his splatterpunk and rock fantasies in The Kill Riff (1987), whose narrative did not star the novelty shotgun guitar depicted on the cover but did feature an unfortunately named metal band, Whip Hand, who disbanded after thirteen kids were killed in a riot at one of their concerts. Among the dead was angelic Kristen, whose dad, Lucas Ellington, was (regressively enough) a Vietnam War veteran. After he spends a year in an asylum “resting,” his therapist Sara pronounces him cured, although she worries about his occasional nightmares. No biggie. Once Lucas is out in the world, murdering the members of Whip Hand (who have splintered into solo acts), his bad dreams clear right up.

The most important element in rock ’n’ roll–splatterpunk books is mega-gore. The band’s former rhythm guitarist Jackson Knox gets shredded by a claymore mine planted in his monitor speaker (“It looked as though someone had pushed the guitarist through a tree shredder.”). Ex-keyboardist Brion Hardin is stabbed to death (“Hardin’s tongue bulged out, rimmed with saliva bubbles.”), and the rhythm section is picked off from Lucas’s sniper perch (“It would be fast and easy to plant a slug right into his mouth, which was now hanging open in a black oval…”). Don’t worry about anyone running out of weapons. The former lead singer, Gabriel Stannard, lives in what a thirteen-year-old boy imagines to be decadent luxury, complete with a collection of katanas and an archery range in the basement sporting cop-shaped targets.

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Splatterpunk books had no good guys and no bad guys, only a swarm of indistinguishable jerks dressed in black leather and camo. The Kill Riff’s revelation that Lucas was engaged in an incestuous affair with his daughter proves that the world is all just shades of gray, man. The book makes much of Lucas mourning his wife’s suicide and then gleefully springs the news that in fact he murdered his wife after she discovered the incest. Later, Lucas rescues a young woman from her abusive boyfriend, only to beat her to death with a log. Life is darkness.

The next crucial element in rock ’n’ roll–splatterpunk books is the obligatory authorial revelation of his own impeccable musical tastes through his characters, who congratulate one another for liking the right bands. This is often paired with denunciations of greedy labels, concert promoters, MTV, and sellout bands. Then there’s the mandatory mockery of the Christian right and “Moral Majoritroids.” Some of these denunciations ramble on for entire chapters. In these books, all Bible thumpers are hypocrites who barely have time to attend church between their busy schedules of burning albums, having sex with children, and getting high. But this thin layer of macho attitude—bristling with Uzis, crossbows, leather pants, and cocaine—conceals a surprisingly conservative core. Whether it’s Stage Fright’s dark god of metal who plays the Dreamatron, a piece of tech that lets him beam his vividly imagined dreams into the audience’s minds, or The Scream’s “postmetal cyber-thrash band” that worships Satan (both books 1988), rock was portrayed exactly as it was shown in Christian scare pamphlets. Lead singers were spoiled brats and junkies, hooked on bondage, torture, or drugs made from the blood of schizophrenics. Hell looked exactly like an Iron Maiden album cover. And women were the devil.

Sputtering Out

The first female character in The Scream is introduced to readers as we’re invited to look up her skirt. The second is “all tits and tan and perfect even teeth.” Then she’s murdered. Not even female dogs are safe from being gang raped, and women spend an inordinate amount of time stripping down and hopping in the shower. The authors might have been inadvertently revealing too much about their personal hang-ups when they named the evil group out to emasculate rock ’n’ roll M.O.M. (Morality over Music). But just in case you had doubts, they dub the ultimate evil demon out to destroy the world Momma. She’s a 30-foot-tall, rotting, pregnant, hermaphroditic corpse that eats people with her vagina and has a touching vulnerability to rocket launchers.

Splatterpunk fizzled in the mid-’90s because it delivered too much splatter, not enough punk, but it was shockingly fertile before it folded. The late ’80s and early ’90s spawned an overflowing dump truck’s worth of splatterpunk anthologies and magazines. Fangoria magazine split off the edgier Gorezone, while Fear magazine debuted in the U.K. and soon spun off its own fiction mag, Frighteners.

Graham Masterton dominated the first cover of Frighteners with his outrageous cannibal-kid story “Eric the Pie,” which evoked instant outrage. The publisher pulled the magazine from newsstands, and it limped through two more issues before shutting down. Fear closed shortly thereafter, followed by Gorezone in 1994. Some splatter zines went bust without publishing a second issue.

E. T. Steadman’s cartoony covers didn’t prepare readers for the wild ’n’ wooly weirdness inside. Credit 160

But there were survivors. Joe R. Lansdale’s first serial killer novel, Act of Love, slithered out of Zebra Books in 1981. He followed with a few limited-edition books before publishing The Drive-In and its sequel, The Drive-In 2. Set in a drive-in movie theater that’s suddenly and supernaturally cut off from the rest of the world, these shaggy dog stories owe a big debt to Stephen King’s “The Mist.” But Lansdale is a better writer than a lot of his compatriots, and he wields his down-home folksy drawl like a straight razor. His early novel The Nightrunners wasn’t published until much later because, when he wrote it, most publishers didn’t know what to do with it. A recently raped woman and her husband retreat to the country to heal after the attack, but are tracked down by the reincarnation of her rapist. It’s one part Straw Dogs and one part Texas noir. But the story offers insight into the psychology of trauma that a book like The Kill Riff lacks, offering compassion for its victims, rather than mere high-fives to its cool-dude perpetrators.