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

Nails in the Coffin

Horror was out. Serial killers were in. The horror-fiction market of the late ’80s was glutted, and the inevitable crash was happening fast. Imprints collapsed like punctured lungs, publishers shoveled books onto store shelves faster than readers could buy them, and returns flooded into warehouses. Customers stayed away in droves. Writers begged their editors to market their books as thrillers instead of horror.

Gore ruled the market. Splatterpunk still seemed like a badge of authenticity, and readers greedy for guts were rewarded by Fangoria magazine’s Gorezone spinoff in 1988. Paul Dale Anderson’s Instruments of Death series ignored its human characters in favor of their titular methods of mutilation: Claw Hammer, Pickaxe, Icepick, and Meat Cleaver. Redheads were popular, or at least scalping them on the book’s first page was, as in Razor’s Edge. But nothing tracked the rise and decline of horror better than Rex Miller’s Chaingang novels. Hailed as a bold new chapter in the gospel of splatterpunk, Miller’s Slob appeared in 1987 to much sweaty-palmed page-turning.

Hannibal Lecter hadn’t made serial killers a supertrend yet, but writers already knew they had to offer different flavors of sociopath to hook their readers. Miller gave them Daniel “Chaingang” Bunkowski, a 469-pounder who defied all logic as his creator tried to meet market demands. Bunkowski prowled the Midwest, murdering at random, committing sex crimes against women, and pulping the skulls of men who annoyed him. The man determined to bring him down was a tough Chicago cop named Jack Eichord, who happened to be an expert in the new science of profiling serial killers. The first Chaingang book felt almost like an attempt to put the pathetic squalor of the actual serial killer on the page. Bunkowski was a junk-food-addicted monstrosity who put away forty egg rolls at a time and whose breath smelled like “stale burritos, wild onions and garlic, bad tuna, and your basic terminal halitosis.” But then The Silence of the Lambs won all those Academy Awards.

Credit 168

Miller had already elevated Bunkowski above the typical unskilled, blue-collar serial killer by making him the product of a secret government research program to produce super-killers for the Vietnam War. But in the wake of Dr. Lecter’s success, serial killers needed to be collectors of fine art, avengers of the weak, men of taste and refinement. Miller was happy to oblige. Chaingang Bunkowski began as nothing more than a murderous slob, but Miller was nothing if not flexible, and over the course of Chaingang (1992), Savant (1994), and Butcher (1994) he turned Bunkowski into a superhero.

First, Miller made sure readers knew that his killer “warped every curve, deviated from every chart…he was that rare human being called the physical precognitive.” He was “an autodidact, a self-taught killer whose alarming proclivity for violence was surpassed only by what appeared to be a genius intellect.” He had a photographic memory, the ability to detect the presence of human life in a house, an understanding of “the role of the mystagogue in televangelistic fund-raising, cellular phenomena, theoretical fluid mechanics” and “noncyclical phylogeny,” whatever that is. He was “a master at camouflaged doublespeak,” much like his author, able to make anyone believe anything with almost no effort. He possessed “the natural skills of a consummate actor: keen powers of observation and mimicry, a predisposition for thorough preparation, the ability to instantly summon up stored emotion, and the feel for a character’s center.” He knew how to make “a smart bomb activated by an ordinary kitchen food timer. A device for starting an undetectable fire.” He was immune to poison ivy. Miller transformed Bunkowski from a psychopath who killed at random into a good guy who killed people who deserved it: drug dealers, evil psychiatrists, cold-blooded psychotic snipers sporting micropenises and armed with futuristic ray guns, who happened to have graduated from the same government black-ops program as Bunkowski did. That happened in Savant, the last of the Chaingang novels, which revealed that Chaingang had to destroy the other assassins in his old super-psychopath program because they killed indiscriminately and had sex with prostitutes. Unlike Chaingang, who, by this point, was only killing the people who abused him as a child or were mean to puppies.

Horror fiction of the late ’80s seemed more interested in the killer’s weapons than in the killer. Credit 169

By the end of Savant, Chaingang—whom we met in the first book raping a woman, ejaculating on her face, then breaking her neck—had developed the ability to turn invisible in darkness by regulating his respiration and heart rate like a ninja. He had mailed a teeny tiny possum heart to the government doctor who created him and had adopted five adorable puppies. The serial killer was no longer a menace. He wasn’t even a cartoon. He had become a hero.

But as the ’80s rolled into the ’90s, even a hero couldn’t save horror publishing. Canada’s mass-market paperback publisher, Paperjacks, stalled drastically in 1989; Tudor Books disappeared that same year. Mass-market paperbacks were replaced by larger and more lucrative trade paperbacks. Magazines died suddenly and without warning; Twilight Zone magazine shuttered in 1989, Fear magazine ceased publication in 1991, and Omni magazine became online-only in 1995. Paper costs were rising, distribution was becoming more difficult, and things were looking grim. In the late ’80s, St. Martin’s cut back its horror line, followed by Tor, then Pinnacle; Avon went on hiatus. Finally, in 1996, Zebra closed its skeleton farm.

Credit 170