The Party Decade
Welcome to the ’80s, where life was a bitchin’ ride in a sweet Porsche! Manufacturing was dead! We were a service and technology economy now! Everyone get rich! America is number one! Let’s kill a commie for mommy and head for the mall!
Science may have been running amok in horror fiction, but in the real world it was making books more eye-catching. Greeting card technology was repurposed for the book business as Kluge embossers and Bobst stampers worked overtime to coat covers in foil, raised monsters, and die-cut windows showing swank stepback art. Coming soon: hologram covers! Strachan Henshaw printing presses ran hot, spitting out 450 new paperback titles each month and 200 new horror titles every year.
Paperbacks of the ’70s had been shaped by grim, sober novels like The Exorcist and Rosemary’s Baby. By contrast, horror fiction of the ’80s was warped by the gaudy delights of Stephen King and V. C. Andrews. The Dead Zone (1979) became King’s first book to debut on the New York Times Best-Seller List; by 1983 an estimated 40 million copies of King’s books were in print. The Exorcist was for squares, and Rosemary’s Baby smelled like grandma. If you wanted to do serious business, you needed an endorsement from King.
Anne Rice’s 1976 Interview with the Vampire birthed a slew of sequels in the ’80s, transforming Rice into a brand name and spawning an arterial gush of vampire novels. Besides King, Rice, and V. C. Andrews (more about Rice and Andrews next chapter), a second tier of writers turned out doorstop-sized books that quickly moved to bookstore racks in malls and airports everywhere. Ramsey Campbell, Peter Straub, John Saul, Dean Koontz, and John Farris bounced up and down the best-seller lists, earning much of their profit from paperback sales. Superagent Kirby McCauley and his Pimlico Agency represented all the big names in horror and sci-fi. McCauley had two pieces of advice for writers: write novels—the fatter the better—and sell paperback originals (hardcovers did a lot for authorial egos but little for sales). As everyone knows, an author is only as good as the last sales report.
Small horror imprints had flourished in the ’70s, but in the ’80s the big publishers gobbled them up. Penguin acquired Grosset & Dunlap and Playboy Press, setting off a trend that snowballed into an extinction-level event by decade’s end. Once they had eaten the little guys, big publishers flooded the market with their own paperback original imprints, like Spectra, Onyx, Pinnacle, and Overlook.
The ’70s saw horror get serious, but the ’80s were party time. And the guest of honor at that party was Time magazine’s 1982 “Man of the Year,” fresh out of the lab and ready to rock and rolclass="underline" the personal computer!
Horror paperback covers reflected their decade, full of big hair (Hot Blood), lurid neon color schemes (Nocturnal), shopping malls (The Mall), and the Cold War (Black Magic). Credit 110
Horror Goes High Tech
The seeds of a computer revolution were planted in the ’70s, when humanity was betrayed by the twin engines of government and commerce. Politicians lied about nuclear war, scientists lied about pollution, NASA lied about aliens. Private companies were poisoning the oceans with toxic waste and acid rain. But a technological counterculture was brewing in garages and spare bedrooms all over the country. Channels like the Whole Earth Catalogue and science-fiction movies seeded receptive minds with the idea that technology could be turned to more human needs.
Some writers overpromised, depicting computers as superheroes. Stephen Gresham, author of The Shadow Man (1986), believed that personal computers could generate hard-light holograms capable of running our errands, but then again Gresham also believed that pro wrestling was real, so he might have been a simpleton. In his book, eight-year-old Joey gets C.A.P. (Computer Assisted Playmate) when his pro-wrestler father, Jeb “The Dixie Strangler” Stuart, decides that his son is lonely after his parents’ divorce. Turns out that Jeb’s ex-wife is a witch, and no matter how open-minded you are, you should never marry a witch.
How will computers change everything? They might defend kids from witches (The Shadow Man), enable super-nerds to stalk and murder strangers (The Hacker), spawn software glitches that become actual insects (Bugs), or become addictions that control our minds (Little Brother). At least two of those predictions have come true! Credit 111
Joey is C.A.P.’s “little friend,” and when Mom summons the digital demon known only as the Shadow Man to kill her son, C.A.P. screams that “A PRELIMINARY SCAN SHOWS A HIGH RANKING DEMON OF SOME TYPE—A SHAPESHIFTER.” Which is way more useful than “404: file not found.” C.A.P. uses his “Timeshifter Beam” to trap Mom in the past, saving the day. But can C.A.P. help Joey win back his father’s love? He wouldn’t be a computer if he couldn’t.
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Back in the ’80s we didn’t know that one day all computers would be linked and turned into a giant delivery system for pornography and cat pictures, so networking seemed exciting. We learned our lessons only by trial and error. Triaclass="underline" Why not let a fetus network its brain with the hospital mainframe? Error: Fetus becomes a big-headed psychic baby that wants to murder everyone (The Unborn 1980). Triaclass="underline" Let’s teach monkeys to control robots with their minds. Error: God intervenes and makes everyone either crazy or dead (The Hacker 1989). Yes, it’s easy to sit here in the safety of the now and mock a bunch of paperback novelists for not accurately foreseeing the future, but they did get one thing right. All these books, no matter how silly, don’t feel like much fun. An underlying pessimism runs through them, mostly because their suspicions about technology turned out to be true.
In Little Brother (1983), aliens land on Earth in 1908 and take over the Soviet Union. By 1983 they’ve infiltrated the American market with an iPad-esque toy called the Possum, which beams addictive subliminal messages into the brains of good American kids. When worried parents try to limit the ever-increasing screen time, the kids either commit suicide or attack Mom and Dad. In the end, the adults figure “What the hell?” and become addicted to Possum, too. Anyone who thinks this is baseless paranoia hasn’t watched a parent texting while rocketing down a highway at 70 m.p.h. in the family van.
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Andrew Neiderman Puts a PIN in It
Your children want to know where babies come from, so you:
a) give them a talk about the birds and the bees
b) buy them a book called Your Changing Body
c) show them a tasteful PBS documentary
d) use ventriloquism to make them think your transparent, life-size anatomical dummy is alive and capable of answering all their questions about human reproduction.
If you picked (D), then the storyline of PIN (1981) won’t seem so strange. Leon and Ursula have lived together ever since their parents died in a car accident. The kids grew up thinking dad’s anatomical model, PIN, was alive, and now Leon throws his voice unconsciously, keeping PIN talking. PIN eats with them, listens to Leon’s weird poetry recitals, and when Leon and Ursula have incest sex, PIN likes to help. If you’re a completely insane lunatic shut-in with ice water in your veins and screaming bats inside your skull, this would be paradise. And for Leon, it is.