Though they may be consigned to dusty dollar boxes, these stories are timeless in the way that truly matters: they will not bore you. Thrown into the rough-and-tumble marketplace, the writers learned they had to earn every reader’s attention. And so they delivered books that move, hit hard, take risks, go for broke. It’s not just the covers that hook your eyeballs. It’s the writing, which respects no rules except one: always be interesting.
So grab a flashlight and come wander down these dark aisles. The shelves are dusty, the lighting is dim, and there’s no guarantee you’ll come back unchanged or come back at all. All you need is a map and you’re ready to take a tour of the paperbacks from hell.
PROLOGUE
To appreciate the transformation that overtook horror fiction in the 1970s and ’80s, let’s consider the state of the genre a decade earlier.
More than any other genre, horror fiction is a product of its time, and the ’60s were a runaway train, smashing through every social value, cultural construct, and national myth at 500 m.p.h., leaving smoking rubble in its wake. The United States officially entered the Vietnam War. A wave of assassinations killed President John F. Kennedy, Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X, and Robert F. Kennedy. Riots sparked by police brutality broke out in Detroit, Harlem, Rochester, and Philadelphia. More riots shook D.C., Chicago, Omaha, Minneapolis, and Baltimore. Buddhist monks set themselves on fire to protest the war; civil rights activists were dragged off buses and beaten; police dogs, tear gas, and fire hoses were turned on peaceful protestors; bombs killed children in churches while the corpses of civil rights workers were hauled out of the Mississippi mud. Birth control pills hit the market, the Vatican liberalized the Catholic Church, the New Pentecostal movement sparked outbreaks of glossolalia (speaking in tongues) in Ivy League colleges all over the Northeast. And a belief that we were living in the End Times spread across America almost as fast as Hugh Hefner was opening Playboy Clubs.
Horror movies responded with polite vampires in velvet capes. Mainstream movies were being mutated by the French New Wave and Akira Kurosawa’s samurai spirit, while biker flicks flipped the bird at square society. Horror movies continued their zomboid shuffle, unaffected by the culture around them. Hammer Films offered dusty vampires shrouded in murky mist, and William Castle’s hokey dime-store gimmicks were aimed squarely at kids. On TV, The Munsters and The Addams Family plodded through their paces to a mechanized laugh track, while the middle-aged vampires of Dark Shadows stalked cardboard sets.
But if horror movies and television shows were stuck in the ’50s, horror publishing was trapped in the ’30s. While mainstream publishers were on fire with books like Truman Capote’s chilling true-crime shocker In Cold Blood, Jacqueline Susann’s titillating Valley of the Dolls, and Joseph Heller’s Catch-22, the horror genre was taking its cues from the pulps of yesteryear. These books rarely even used the word horror on covers, instead offering “eerie adventure,” “chilling adventure,” “tales of the unexpected,” and “stories of the weird.” Even the work of Shirley Jackson, the empress of American horror fiction, was sold with covers that made her books look like gothic romances.
The ’60s were rocking, but horror paperbacks got covers that were fusty, musty, and downright dusty. Credit 3
It’s not that people weren’t buying books. After crashing in the 1950s, the paperback market surged back less than a decade later when college students turned Ballantine’s paperback editions of The Lord of the Rings into a zeitgeist-sized hit. Bantam Books reprinted pulp adventures of Doc Savage from the ’30s and ’40s, adding lush, photorealistic, fully painted covers by James Bama. And there was an early-’60s “Burroughs Boom” when publishers discovered that twenty-eight of Edgar Rice Burroughs’s books had fallen into the public domain. Suddenly, thirty-year-old Tarzan and John Carter of Mars novels were hitting stands, with new covers painted by Frank Frazetta and Richard Powers, alongside Conan reprints.
Yet for all that activity, horror appeared nowhere on best-seller lists. Horror was for children. It was pulp. If it was any good, it couldn’t possibly be horror and so was rebranded as a “thrilling tale.” Horror seemed to have no future because it was trapped in the past. That was all about to change, and already there were signs that something was stirring. They were found in the romance section of the bookstore.
Women Running from Houses
A terrified woman flees a dark house. One window glows against stormy midnight skies. Somewhere, someone is brooding. Between 1960 and 1974, thousands of these covers appeared on paperback racks as gothic romances became the missing link between the gothic literature of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and the paperback horror of the ’70s and ’80s.
It all started in 1959 when Ace editor Jerry Gross went to his parents’ house for Sunday dinner and noticed that his mom was reading Daphne du Maurier’s novel Rebecca. He asked why she was reading a book from 1938. “Honey,” she said, “They don’t write like that anymore.”
Intrigued, Gross holed up in the New York Public Library and combed through Book Review Digest, studying the “gothic romance” category. He noticed that none of the books were currently in print, and none had ever appeared in paperback. He bought their paperback rights in bulk and in 1960 published Thunder Heights by Phyllis Whitney and Mistress of Mellyn by Victoria Holt, whose agent had pushed her to revive the gothic romances of the 19th century.
Gothic romances were adult fairy tales. Young governesses appeared at glowering ancestral piles and fell in love with the dark, brooding masters of the house. There was murder, confinement, and ancient curses. Dark secrets piled up at an alarming rate. In the end, the young governess fell into the arms of the dark lord, realizing that her confused feelings of attraction and revulsion could only be love.
Peak gothic was 1960 to 1974, and authors like Barbara Michaels, Victoria Holt, and Mary Stewart sold in the millions. But the tide began to turn in 1972 when Avon editor Nancy Coffey grabbed a manuscript out of the slush pile and discovered she couldn’t put it down. It was Kathleen Woodiwiss’s The Flame and the Flower, and it became the first bodice ripper, a variety of historical romance featuring more explicit passion. It sold 2.6 million copies. By 1978 the gothic romance had been chained in the attic and starved to death by its younger, sexier competition.
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When Gross came up with his idea to publish a line of gothic romances, he drafted a memo to his art director about the covers. “I want a category format that my mother and aunts would be proud to be seen reading,” he wrote. “Make the heroine look like a very refined upper-class blond young woman with good cheekbones….She’s running towards you…behind her is a dark castle with one light in the window, usually in the tower. Make the tower tall and thick. Believe me, they’ll get the phallic imagery.”
Variations on this formula buried bookshelves for over a decade and had an enormous impact on the first wave of paperback horror covers. Women in diaphanous gowns holding candles, dark houses, stormy skies, and a reliance on the more ominous end of the color spectrum became trademarks. Hair, clouds, gowns, and landscapes dissolved into abstract swirls, light was luminous, darkness was tangible, compositions were dynamic.