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

AFTERWORD Recommended Reading By Will Errickson

While reading Paperbacks from Hell, you may have compiled a lengthy to-read list. Or you may feel like I did, decades ago, on the first day at my job at a dusty used bookstore with the entire horror section to myself: Where do I start?

Ease your way into horror fiction the way I did, by rereading novels in the genre that you’ve read before, and then turning to the ones you remember from when they were first released but never read. When I did this, I found that Stephen King’s ’Salem’s Lot and Pet Sematary, John Farris’s All Heads Turn When the Hunt Goes By, and Peter Straub’s Ghost Story still hold up (no surprise). Ray Garton’s Live Girls, a sleazy ’80s NYC vampire tale, is lots of fun today. The rollicking splatterpunky tales collected by David J. Schow in Silver Scream are a terrific blast from the past; Thomas F. Monteleone’s series of 1990s anthologies, Borderlands, blend real-life horror with the surreal and the absurd in a way that continues to be effective.

Writers I dug in their ’80s heyday—Clive Barker, Dennis Etchison, T.E.D. Klein, Karl Edward Wagner—are even more enjoyable to me as an older, more experienced reader. Michael Blumlein’s icy short works, collected in 1990’s The Brains of Rats, reveal a talent unfettered by horror conventions but still within the parameters.

Thomas Tessier is a mature, intelligent writer who threads together sex and horror like nobody’s business. Finishing Touches and Rapture are near-masterpieces of the era, and his werewolf novel The Nightwalker is a penetrating psycho-thriller set in punk-era London. His short stories, scattered in various anthologies, are well worth searching out as well.

As you explore further, you’ll discover overlooked writers like Michael McDowell, Alan Ryan, and Graham Masterton. Two of my favorite novels from the pre–Stephen King ’70s are William H. Hallahan’s The Search for Joseph Tully and Joan Samson’s The Auctioneer. Fantastic stuff! Hallahan’s novel is a chilling work of fate and vengeance across the ages that remains enigmatic and melancholy; Samson’s story of quiet, polite small-town life slowly upended by the mysterious appearance of the titular character is compulsively readable and psychologically adept.

You may be tempted to dismiss some subgenres depicted in this book…don’t! I looked down on “animal attacks” books (see chapter 3) until I found The Cormorant, British author Stephen Gregory’s 1986 debut novel. Critically lauded upon release, it’s a doom-laden journey as the protagonist inherits the titular avian. Obsession and tragedy follow. Feral is a light-footed affair about marauding felines; author Berton Roueche’s understated prose subtly evokes humanity’s complicit guilt in the matter. At the opposite pole is Gregory A. Douglas’s nasty The Nest, which gleefully runs roughshod over taste and decorum, as though the author had dared himself to make his writing grosser and grosser. He was a pulp writer getting paid a penny a word, and he worked for it. This hopeless, despairing book featuring mutant cockroaches, but with the courage of its trashy convictions, may make one wish that more Zebra titles had been so committed.

If you hunger for vampire thrills, try Fevre Dream, George R. R. Martin’s bloodthirsty nineteenth-century tale of night creatures on a Mississippi River steamboat, with lively characterizations and historical detail. The late Michael Talbot’s cult novel A Delicate Dependency contains almost no bloodshed but is rife with opulent dressing and intellectual debate; collectors pay ridiculous prices for it (and yet I found a copy at a library sale for a single dollar). For tawdrier, cheaper vampire fun, try Lee Duigon’s Lifeblood, Marc Eliot’s How Dear the Dawn, and Leslie Whitten’s crime procedural mystery/horror Progeny of the Adder. Whitten’s title comes from a Baudelaire poem, but the story isn’t so high-minded; its grim matter-of-factness prefigures both Stephen King’s ’Salem’s Lot and television’s The Night Stalker.

Love stories can offer much to horror: Lovers Living, Lovers Dead is a loopy Freudian mystery in which a middle-aged professor tries to plumb the depths of his young wife’s mental state; author Richard Lortz’s arty pretensions and casual ’70s sexism elicits some groans, but the bizarre basis for the woman’s instability is a stunner. Joan Chambers, a lesbian playwright, produced The Burning, which links two present-day women to the tragic fate of lovers condemned as witches in the past. Sensitively wrought and suffused with a kind of free-floating heartache, the paperback novel was adorned with a lurid Rowena Morrill cover that may have turned off non-genre readers who otherwise might have been drawn to the tragic story.

Domestic horrors come full flower in A Nest of Nightmares, a paperback collection of short stories by American Lisa Tuttle, published only in Great Britain in 1986. Her work showcases women’s lives and heightens their anxieties to deadly degrees. Melanie Tem’s The Prodigal has a child protagonist trying to make sense of an adult world in which two of her siblings go missing. The very nature of friendship is rent asunder in the creepily excellent Spectre, from Stephen Laws, in which a group of British college mates confront their long-ago secrets and memories.

Some of the best horror titles cannot be classified. The Happy Man, by Eric C. Higgs, introduces Marquis de Sade–style pleasures into a precisely-wrought suburban background. French surrealist Roland Topor’s The Tenant from 1964 oozes paranoia and humiliation, its moody euro-intellectualism a refresher compared to the less subtle horror offerings. Another title that’s hard to classify but not to be missed is Gwen, in Green; the book features one of my favorite covers, by George Ziel. As an eco-horror novel with tendrils of then-current pseudoscience and female sexual liberation, Hugh Zachary’s utterly ’70s novel charms with its datedness and its explicitness.

I hope you find some of the books and authors mentioned here to your liking. Before long, you may find that your horror paperback collection, like mine, keeps growing, almost of its own volition. Personally, I wouldn’t have it any other way.

Will Errickson collects and reviews vintage horror literature and celebrates its resplendent paperback cover art at TooMuchHorrorFiction.blogspot.com. He provided many of the cover images for this book from his own collection.