Fiction for geeks and freaks

Mutant cockroaches. Vampires terrorizing Washington. Bigfoot. Hallucinogenic drugs made from the blood of schizophrenics. A slug-eating inbred family living in underground caves. Killer dogs. Killer cats. A golem stalking New York City. Blood from the taps. Death by sex. A portal to hell opened in a coalmine in Tennessee. A babysitter tortured to death by the kids. A man whose face falls off.

For about twenty years – from the beginning of the 1970s to the early 1990s – the anglophone publishing industry rode the wave of horror. This prolonged moment of popular success for the most disreputable of genres looks, in retrospect, like a case study in how gothic media flourishes during periods of social distress. The explosion in horror titles was driven by publishing’s profit motive, of course, but the appetite it answered was worked up by something else, the anxious fallout of the 1960s – after Vietnam and Watergate and Charles Manson came the crisis-ridden unravelling towards the Reagan-Thatcherite 1980s. Horror for horrific times.

Commercially it started with a trio of writers who forced horror fiction out of the backroom and into the shop window: Ira Levin (Rosemary’s Baby, 1967), William Peter Blatty (The Exorcist, 1971) and Thomas Tryon (The Other, 1971), splashed across bookstands everywhere. Others – Stephen King with Carrie (1974) and Anne Rice with Interview with the Vampire (1976) – followed in their wake. Having tapped the public’s desire for shocks and splatter, horror became big business, spurring dedicated imprints at major publishing houses and keeping dozens of midlist writers (and illustrators) in work. It also developed its own feedback loop with cinema. After William Friedkin adapted The Exorcist in 1973, and Steven Spielberg worked considerable magic with Peter Benchley’s Jaws (1974), you couldn’t move in bookshops for demonic possessions and animals-gone-mad. The occult, the paranormal, the disturbing and the sick: the reading public lapped it up.

It couldn’t last. With the cultural sands shifting and the genre exhausted, sales died off by the early 1990s and publishers reoriented their lists to thrillers and (serial) killers instead. For several generations of readers, though, the heyday of unapologetic horror – fetishized not least in the glorious excesses of the cover art – lingered in the memory, driving an enduring cult status among collectors and true believers. The writer Grady Hendrix and the fan blogger Will Errickson are both, and in 2017 put together an affectionate and heavily illustrated survey of the period. Their book, Paperbacks from Hell, stimulated enough interest to lead the independent, Virginia-based Valancourt Books to revisit selected titles from among those Hendrix and Errickson discussed. Now we have twenty-one reissues, complete with new introductions.

I don’t recommend reading all of them in one go. I’m not sure I can take another deranged pet or bloody scream. No more bad sex, please. They are a mixed bag, these paperbacks; a few might have been left in the crypt. But some are highly entertaining and strangely prescient, and a few stand out as genuinely startling and original. Lisa Tuttle’s short story collection A Nest of Nightmares (1986) is intelligently crafted and full of indelible moments. She is a terrific writer who deserves more recognition. Let’s Go Play at the Adams’ (1974), Mendal Johnson’s only published novel, is an ember spat from the fires of America’s intergenerational rage. It is accomplished writing, but mercilessly misanthropic. Then there is Joan Samson’s The Auctioneer (1975). A mysterious stranger arrives in rural New Hampshire and begins to run auctions to raise money for the town’s police force. Locals donate items and tourists buy it all, but success breeds demand, and as desperate townspeople run out of possessions the tone turns ominous, then malign, and the charismatic auctioneer develops an ever-tighter grip. It’s atmospheric and politically sharp. Had Shirley Jackson written it – and it feels like the sort of thing she would write – the book would be much better known. Then there’s Bari Wood’s The Tribe (1981), which should be more than a footnote in the history of Jewish-American fiction. Relocating the ancient folklore of the golem to postwar New York, it’s a novel haunted as much by the city’s economic and racial strife as it is by the Holocaust.

There is also a notable strain of environmental concern in many of these stories, long before “ecogothic” became an accepted subgenre. Hugh Zachary’s Gwen,In Green (1974) is part softcore romp and part house-developer revenge plot, a sort of Emmanuelle-does-Gaia hypothesis: very 1970s, but its mash-up of genre clichés with moments of confrontational violence is also a forerunner to the climate irreality that pulses through our own culture. Jere Cunningham’s The Abyss (1981) is magnificently over the top and, like The Auctioneer – and like Elizabeth Engstrom’s vampire fantasy Black Ambrosia (1988), another in the series – feels as if it bubbles up from a stream of working-class despair. Set in the coal belt of central Tennessee, the town of Bethel is in hopeless decline until a corporation reopens the long-closed mine. Jobs and prosperity follow. The first half lays this out slowly, a curious mixture of Southern gothic and postindustrial demotic – a touch Harper Lee, a touch Bruce Springsteen. But what you’re really reading for is the second half: drilling into the earth reopens a gateway to hell, spilling forth a torrent of awful suffering and culminating, in the novel’s Boschean final pages, in a surreal apocalypse. “The earth burned; logic ended”, it concludes, which could be a slogan for all these novels. The Abyss is frankly ludicrous, and needs an edit, but it’s also arresting and affecting – an authentic hillbilly elegy, a scream let out from a nightmare that a whole region can’t wake up from. In its own way it should be an Appalachian classic.

Am I missing the point? It has become de rigueur to take genre seriously by “recovering” it: plucking out titles (or writers) from the sea of paperback churn and claiming that they – exceptionally, among their stablemates – meet high culture’s anointing criteria after all. At the same time literary fiction’s own “genre turn” during the past twenty or so years has status-washed popular forms for a rarefied audience, and now august pages such as these can talk seriously about “hardboileds” and westerns and zombies when well-known literary writers decide to play around with them. Alongside both these trends has run an entire genre system, which – as Mark McGurl brilliantly demonstrated in Everything and Less: The novel in the age of Amazon (2021) – has mutated with the advent of the self-published ebook into a vast and accelerating machine of creative output largely governed by one multinational corporation. Approved from above and saturated from below, genre fiction is no longer marginal to the literary field, or to “literature” itself.

All of these Paperbacks from Hell, on the other hand, speak to a nostalgia for a time when genre fiction was still on the margins, and it’s this that makes the whole series such a fascinating fragment of cultural history. In that margin, beyond incorporation, horror fiction thrived unregulated, indifferent to its status as a commodity or its reputation with arbiters of taste. To Valancourt’s credit, it hasn’t tried to sprinkle these reissues with ponderous prestige or swap out the lurid covers for serious black-and-white photography. These twenty-one books come to us already well aware of what they are – schlocky, fantastic, anarchic and dubious, and not really submissible to literary criteria at all. The pulpy plots are not a failing but a refusal to comply, while the pocket-sized format makes their proud disreputability tangible in your hand – it’s outsider art, to be read in bedrooms and on night buses. Just like your teacher warned you, this is fiction for geeks and freaks, for the morbid and the weirdos and the lost. In all these ways the books carry a residue from a time when horror – despite occasional incursions into mainstream culture – was still on the edge of things and could speak to the people that found themselves there too. Now it’s cool, and everywhere. Academics organize symposiums about it. It’s in the TLS. Horror has become acceptable, and what could be more horrifying than that?

Mark Storey is a Reader in American Literature at the University of Warwick. He is the co-editor, with Stephen Shapiro, of The Cambridge Companion to American Horror, 2022

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