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

Hello, Clarice

By the late ’80s, horror fiction was walking down an empty street, all alone, late at night, stalked by a maniac that would prove to be its doom: the serial killer. The FBI had been using the term serial killer since 1961, and books about psychotic killers have a long history, dating back at least to Robert Bloch’s Psycho in 1959. In 1970, Lawrance Holmes’s novel A Very Short Walk introduced us to a killer narrating the story of his own murderous alienation, starting as an angry fetus stewing in amniotic rage juice. Judith Rossner’s 1975 novel Looking for Mr. Goodbar, about a woman who picks up a stranger in a bar and gets murdered for her trouble, was a cultural touchstone that inspired a million magazine think pieces.

But 1981 was the dawn of something new. That was the year the term serial killer entered the mainstream. And that was the year that saw the publication of the book Stephen King called “probably the best popular novel to be published since The Godfather.” Genre historian Douglas E. Winter wrote that, although many established novelists may have written the second-best book of the year, there was no doubt that “the best horror novel of the early eighties” was from a relatively obscure thriller writer named Thomas Harris. The book was Red Dragon.

Deeply literary, informed by the latest thinking on forensics and criminal profiling, Red Dragon was a writer’s book that inspired dozens of copycats but never quite broke into the mainstream. Even its ultra-’80s movie adaptation Manhunter (1986) didn’t help sales. However, the book and the film did introduce a minor character named Hannibal Lecter, who was willing to wait for his turn in the spotlight. It wouldn’t be long before the culture caught up to him. According to the FBI, there were only 19 serial murders in the ’60s, while the ’70s saw a flood of 119, and the ’80s yielded 200. The country watched in stunned fascination as one unshaven white man with a supervillain name after another was arrested for inhuman crimes: the Hillside Strangler, Son of Sam, the Freeway Killer, the Vampire of Sacramento, the Green River Killer, the Sunset Strip Killer, the Midtown Slasher.

The seemingly sudden surge of serial killers took everyone by surprise, and in a flash the scariest motive for murder was no motive at all. A deranged falconer terrorizes Manhattan with his killer peregrine falcon in Peregrine (1981) for no other reason than he thinks it’s a challenge. In Horror Story (1979), a disgraced general starts an end-times cult in rural Connecticut, abducts a family of lost tourists, and drops off the husband in Boston with a .357 magnum and instructions to execute a random black family before 11 p.m. or his wife and child die. The general’s motive? Absolutely nothing. Robert Bloch’s agent suggested he write Psycho II (1982), and Bloch complied, submitting a book in which Norman Bates is not so bad. But the therapist who thinks he can rehabilitate him, and the movie producers making a film about his killings, are the ones truly off the deep end.

As the ’80s progressed, supernatural horror felt exhausted, with the same old writers dishing out the same old books. Horror movies were all campy slaughter, aimed at teens in on the joke. But the serial-killer book walked the line between crime fiction and horror novel, bringing in new—and in some cases, better—writers, or at least writers whose tricks weren’t familiar to exhausted audiences. Informed by the splatterpunk movement, these writers felt like they had permission to upset readers. A lot.

Thomas Tessier’s placid prose lured readers out on the ice, which then cracked, plunging them into a nightmare abyss where alcoholic plastic surgeons babbled about the Marquis de Sade to living human torsos shorn of limbs and locked in cages. One of the few horror novelists to spin his fear out of adult sexual relationships, rather than slopping sex on top of his stories like a mountain of Reddi-wip, Tessier’s books feel more mature, and therefore much darker, than a lot of what was on the market. In Tessier’s Shockwaves (1982), a disappointed wife learns that the man she married isn’t just a career-obsessed bore; he is truly dangerous. Rapture (1987) is about a man obsessed with his old high school crush, who’s now married and has a daughter who looks exactly like Mom did in her glory days.

A kind of Fight Club for the hot tub set, Eric C. Higgs’s The Happy Man was a short, minimalist novel of suburban ennui written in disaffected prose that could pass as a Brett Easton Ellis novella if it contained less cannibalism. A bunch of middle-aged yuppies trapped in California cul-de-sacs work identical mindless jobs in the aerospace industry, numbing themselves on weekends with expensive liquor and top-shelf grass. Armored in thick plates of boredom, their shells can be cracked only by a new neighbor who brings violence and illicit humping to their cocktail parties. At first, the newcomer seems to offer entrance into a bold new world of Authentic Experience, but then someone mentions the Marquis de Sade and suddenly machine guns and torture are on the menu. Surprisingly, the book ends on a note of unexpected faith in human decency, albeit one that’s earned by switching this literary assault rifle into full auto mode and squeezing the trigger until the last cartridge hits the ground.