Credit 164

The language of horror novels even infected true crime books. Flora Rheta Schreiber, author of the best-selling 1973 multiple personality best seller Sybil, delivered a true-crime account of the murders committed by Joseph Kallinger in a book called The Shoemaker—which sports a die-cut cover like a V. C. Andrews novel, lurid marketing copy, and breathless prose about how this sad killer was “pursued by Demons” possessed by “Satanic evil” and haunted by the “ghosts of his past.”

All the strands were converging: serial killers, true crime, splatterpunk, sympathy for the monster. The hangman’s noose was knotted in 1988 when Thomas Harris’s second novel, The Silence of the Lambs, debuted and won the genre’s two biggest honors: the World Fantasy Award and the Bram Stoker Award. A few years later, in 1991, the movie adaptation won five Academy Awards. Suddenly, Hannibal Lecter was a household name. This was the moment horror editors and agents had been eagerly awaiting for more than twenty years. This was the next Exorcist. This was Rosemary’s second baby. And the first thing it did was strangle its older sibling.

Straight razors, butcher knives, steak knives, and leatherworking knives all conveyed the same message: this book is dangerous. Credit 165

Credit 166

Загрузка...