The Forgotten Writers Who Blew Me Away: An Exclusive Guest Post from Grady Hendrix, Author of Paperbacks from Hell

By Grady Hendrix / September 19, 2023 at 1:34 am

Paperback $24.49 ~~$26.99~~

Paperbacks from Hell: The Twisted History of '70s and '80s Horror Fiction

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Paperback $24.49 ~~$26.99~~

If you are ever wondering where your horror obsession comes from, then Grady Hendrix is here to the rescue. Let’s open the cellar door and take a deep dive into the many questions you had about horror novels but were afraid to ask. Discover how Grady decided what books belonged in Paperbacks from Hell and learn more about the history of the horror genre.

Killer crabs invade Britain’s beaches. A berserk auctioneer destroys a quiet New England town. A hyper-intelligent Bull Terrier murders owners who don’t live up to his expectations. Just another day at the bookstore from the Seventies through the early Nineties. Over the course of those 24 years, a mudslide of paperback horror novels with lurid covers buried drugstore and bookstore shelves. Publishers were locked in an arms race to go further over the top than their competitors, so when they weren’t dishing up Irish B&Bs infested by Nazi leprechauns, underground incest monsters menacing the rural heartland or Hollywood death cults run by a barely-disguised version of Paul Newman, they were startling unwary readers with covers featuring skeletons playing piano, teddy bears wielding axes and dead-eyed psychic children.

Horror didn’t exist as a literary genre before 1967 when Rosemary’s Baby hit the bestseller lists and became a hit movie. A few years later William Peter Blatty’s The Exorcist and Thomas Tryon’s The Other accomplished the same feat and the boom was born as publishers realized there was gold in these paperback hills. At first, they delivered more books about Satan (Satan’s Pets, Satan’s Slaves, Satan’s Sublet, Satan’s Lovechild) but soon they branched out into killer kids, killer animals, killer houses, killer soap opera stars (Phantom of the Soap Opera) and killer 16th century Viennese dance crazes (Waltz With Evil).

I read around 300 of these paperbacks to write Paperbacks from Hell and I have the brain damage to prove it. But while plenty of these paperbacks are little more than fun forgettable pulp, I also stumbled across some forgotten writers who blew me away. Ken Greenhall’s books (including Hell Hound) are written in Shirley Jackson’s precise, chilly voice, and yet he had to work a day job as an encyclopedia editor all his life, constantly shunted from one paperback house to another. He was finally fired by his agent for being “too old” to represent any longer.

I stumbled across Elizabeth Engstrom’s When Darkness Loves Us after reading a whole crate of really terrible paperbacks and her writing melted my face. Darkness consists of two novellas. The first is one of the most monstrous stories about motherhood I’ve ever read and It Went There. That left me totally unprepared for the second novella which is a heartbreaking horror riff on Flowers for Algernon. She wrote a few more horror novels before moving on to other genres and her horror work slipped out of print.

Joan Samson and Mendal W. Johnson each wrote only one book before they died, but their two novels stand out as classics of the genre. The Auctioneer is the tale of a small town gripped by auction mania, transforming from a sleepy farming community to a totalitarian township where the police are the enforcers and mob rule is the law. Think of Cormac McCarthy rewriting Stephen King’s Needful Things and you’ve got a good idea of what Samson is doing here. Johnson’s Let’s Go Play at the Adams’ already had a cult reputation as one of the toughest books ever written, but it had fallen out of print. On the surface, it’s about a babysitter trapped and tortured by the kids she babysits for, but it’s also a radical indictment of violence and cruelty written by a man who had seen plenty of it in his lifetime. It’s a book I never want to read again, but one I’m so glad I read once.

And there are many, many more. Bari Wood’s The Tribe is THE great Jewish horror novel of the 20^th century, Thomas Tessier’s Rapture took down toxic tech bros before we even knew they were a thing, and Thomas Page’s The Spirit is the greatest Bigfoot novel ever written. Many of these horror writers worked fast and cheap, so they couldn’t get too self-conscious about their output: if they didn’t get another book on the shelves their family wasn’t going to eat. Sometimes this meant they discovered trends years before they surfaced in the mainstream. Nice, privileged kids from good families who are hopelessly, homicidally insane formed the basis of several books (The Sibling, Such Nice People, Halo) years before we learned to fear these kids in the wake of the Columbine shootings and the Menendez Brothers murders.

But it all came to a screeching halt in the late Eighties and early Nineties with the publication of Silence of the Lambs, and its hit movie adaptation that swept the Oscars in 1991. After that, serial killers were the order of the day and horror novels were rebranded as thrillers. The boom was over, but it left such treasures behind, patiently waiting underground, patiently waiting for readers, patiently waiting for you. These four books we’re republishing with Barnes and Noble are just the door. Behind them lies a haunted library whose shelves go back and back and back, further than the eye can see, and if you listen, you can hear killer crabs scuttling beneath them in the dark.