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

Hang Your Stockings and Say Your Prayers

It’s the night before Christmas and all through the town, someone is chopping up pregnant coeds, stabbing babysitters in the brain, and decapitating divorced ladies. Even more so than Halloween, Christmas is horror’s favorite holiday, full of psycho Santas leaving red-and-green-wrapped heads under each and every Christmas tree.

Black Christmas (1983) is an Italian giallo-style thriller, with a faceless black-gloved killer terrorizing a tiny snowbound town. Its stalk ’n’ slash set pieces can be stopped only by inexperienced Sheriff Bud Dunsmore, who is not only overwhelmed by the murders, he hasn’t even bought his daughter a Christmas present yet. Slay Bells (1994) ups the yuletide ante with a deranged lunatic dressed like Santa stalking a snowed-in shopping mall, where he murders teens to avenge his grandfather’s defeat in a long-ago fly-fishing tournament.

But, mostly, holiday paperback horror turned out to be that terrible boyfriend who wraps an Applebee’s coupon in a Tiffany’s box or slides a subscription to Ladies’ Home Journal into an iPhone case. Its savagely seasonal covers concealed a distinct lack of Christmas carnage inside. No enraged, fire-shrouded snowmen appear in Slumber Party. And not only are no evil elf-babies born in Christmas Babies (1991), but the novel takes place in February. In Florida.

Books that delivered true seasonal slaughter typically didn’t advertise that fact on their covers. Christmas is the most wonderful time of the year for WASPs, and WASP horror novels (you remember them from chapter 2) include plenty of Christmas carnage for every boy and girl.

Weirdly enough, it was by way of Christmas that the Satanic Panic spread its infection from heavy metal and role-playing games to horror movies. In 1984 TriStar Pictures released Silent Night, Deadly Night, and television ads for this touching tale—about a tiny orphan who dons a Santa suit and murders everyone in sight—featured a bloody St. Nick waving an ax. That image earned so many protests, and resulted in so many tots picketing movie theaters with WE LOVE SANTA signs, that the distributor pulled the film from theaters after barely a week. It was a lesson that horror writers learned well: mess with Santa and risk getting axed.

While Black Christmas and Slay Bells are indeed set during the holidays, there’s no yuletide terror to be found in Christmas Babies or Slumber Party. Credit 175

Death Rattle

By the early ’90s, the coroner had called it and the medical examiner was zipping up horror’s body bag. But one last twitch was left in the corpse.

In 1990, a sales rep at Dell claimed there was room for more paperback horror because everyone was getting out of the market. This would be like someone in Jaws noting there’s plenty of space on the beach. Barely thirty years old, editor Jeanne Cavelos was bored of cursed Indian burial mounds and imitation Stephen King, so when her boss asked her to pitch a horror line, she was ready.

Unable to afford big names, with even B-listers off-limits because at that time they rarely earned out their advances, Cavelos had the idea of making the line the star. Abyss would be a home for genuinely new voices in horror, punk rock writers with something to say beyond “Serial killers are scary.” She didn’t want the same old books with thirtysomething male protagonists wading through piles of naked and mutilated female corpses. She hunted down artists to paint covers that looked like nothing on the market.

In February 1991 the first Abyss book, The Cipher by Kathe Koja, hit the racks. A sharply observed slice of early-’90s bohemia, it was about a couple of starving artists in a dying Rust Belt city who find a hole in their storage space. Dubbing it the Funhole (the original title of the book), they discover that anything organic fed into the Funhole comes out disturbingly mutated. So these art scene bottom-feeders use the Funhole to get themselves a gallery show.

The Cipher was anything but typical horror. The main action was psychological, and the Funhole is never explained, but readers were ready for something new. The book shared that year’s Stoker Award for best first novel with another Abyss title, Melanie Tem’s Prodigal, about dead children, social workers, and psychic vampires.

Credit 176

Abyss published Koja’s next novel, Bad Brains, about an artist whose sustains a minor head injury at a party that unleashes apocalyptic hallucinations, seizures, and extradimensional silver snot dripping over everything he sees. Then his paintings start coming to life. Relentlessly interior, unfolding in dreams, visions, and nightmares, reading the book is like being trapped inside William Blake’s worst headache. Abyss’s brand of psychological horror avoided creepy kids, real estate nightmares, and Satanic cults, and their books gave off a whiff of opium and absinthe. Nancy Holder’s Dead in the Water is her riff on William Hope Hodgson’s early-twentieth-century Sargasso Sea stories, only in her version a clutch of shipwreck survivors is picked up by a hellish cruise ship helmed by an undead buccaneer and his phantasmal pirate crew.

Die-cut covers that teased gruesome art was nothing new for horror paperbacks, but these strikingly creative Abyss covers look like nothing that had come before. Credit 177

Not every Abyss book was a heavy, hallucinatory, psychological drama. Coming right on the heels of The Cipher was Abyss’s second novel, Nightlife by Brian Hodge, which was basically a cross between Crocodile Dundee and Miami Vice. A Yanomamö warrior tracks the newest drug, Skullflush, from his home in Venezuela to Tampa, where it’s getting sold in nightclubs as a bright-green cocaine alternative. A flashy horror thriller for the MTV generation, it’s all were-piranha gangbangers, drug dealers nailed to yachts with arrows, and an AK-47-powered climactic car chase across Tampa’s three-mile-long Howard Frankland Bridge.