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Serial killers can be anybody, but likely suspects include cemetery caretakers (Joyride), punk rock bands (Ghoul), and anyone swathed in black (Headhunter). They could also be everybody, as in The Strangers, in which secret sociopaths stage a revolution and take over the world. Credit 171
Won’t Somebody Think of the Children?
As horror for adults gasped its last breaths, the genre found new life in a younger generation. Horror fiction for kids had been around for decades, whether it was Joan Aiken’s ersatz gothics like The Wolves of Willoughby Chase (1962, a forerunner of Lemony Snicket’s Series of Unfortunate Events) or thrillers like Lois Duncan’s Killing Mr. Griffin. Duncan, the queen of young-adult suspense, had started turning out teen thrillers in 1966, including I Know What You Did Last Summer (1973), Stranger with My Face (1981), and the cult classic Daughters of Eve (1979). But after the murder of her daughter in 1989, she seemed to lose her taste for fictional horror and devoted the rest of her life to chronicling the search for the girl’s killer.
Horror hit its stride with a hungry teenage audience in the ’80s, first with slasher films and then with books. Dell launched its teen occult horror series, Twilight, in 1982, complete with gruesome corpse exhumations and relatively graphic and goopy gore. Bantam countered with its less gory but more timely Dark Forces series in 1983, which was like the Satanic Panic for teens; its books were full of video games that unleashed Satan as an end-level boss, unholy heavy metal bands, and role-playing games that summoned the Prince of Darkness.
The late ’80s were a growing nightmare for adult horror writers. Author after author failed to earn out advances, and agents unleashed tornadoes of bad advice that ripped through the trailer park of publishing, leaving destruction in its wake: “Write big fat novels because that’s what sold last week.” “Write like Michael Crichton.” “Write like Stephen King.” But the market was glutted and returns were often at 60 percent. The industry was trying everything to stop the bleeding, but the patient wouldn’t leave the table alive.
As the ’90s approached, the seemingly insatiable kid’s market emerged as horror’s last hope. R. L. Stine launched his teen horror series Fear Street in 1989, which included seasonal offerings like Silent Night. Around the same time Christopher Pike began turning out Lois Duncan–esque teen thrillers, proving to publishers that kids had a ravenous hunger for horror. Adult readers were left in the dust, while Stine and Pike went on to found the best-selling series Goosebumps in 1992 and Spooksville in 1995, respectively. At long last, Whitney Houston’s words rang true: the children were the future.
Horror titles aimed at kids tended to feature young people’s interests on the covers: hangin’ at the beach, rock and roll, computer games, peering into creepy mirrors, and gazing over the edge of a cliff. Credit 172
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Hang Your Stockings and Say Your Prayers
It’s the night before Christmas and all through the town, someone is chopping up pregnant coeds, stabbing babysitters in the brain, and decapitating divorced ladies. Even more so than Halloween, Christmas is horror’s favorite holiday, full of psycho Santas leaving red-and-green-wrapped heads under each and every Christmas tree.
Black Christmas (1983) is an Italian giallo-style thriller, with a faceless black-gloved killer terrorizing a tiny snowbound town. Its stalk ’n’ slash set pieces can be stopped only by inexperienced Sheriff Bud Dunsmore, who is not only overwhelmed by the murders, he hasn’t even bought his daughter a Christmas present yet. Slay Bells (1994) ups the yuletide ante with a deranged lunatic dressed like Santa stalking a snowed-in shopping mall, where he murders teens to avenge his grandfather’s defeat in a long-ago fly-fishing tournament.
But, mostly, holiday paperback horror turned out to be that terrible boyfriend who wraps an Applebee’s coupon in a Tiffany’s box or slides a subscription to Ladies’ Home Journal into an iPhone case. Its savagely seasonal covers concealed a distinct lack of Christmas carnage inside. No enraged, fire-shrouded snowmen appear in Slumber Party. And not only are no evil elf-babies born in Christmas Babies (1991), but the novel takes place in February. In Florida.
Books that delivered true seasonal slaughter typically didn’t advertise that fact on their covers. Christmas is the most wonderful time of the year for WASPs, and WASP horror novels (you remember them from chapter 2) include plenty of Christmas carnage for every boy and girl.
Weirdly enough, it was by way of Christmas that the Satanic Panic spread its infection from heavy metal and role-playing games to horror movies. In 1984 TriStar Pictures released Silent Night, Deadly Night, and television ads for this touching tale—about a tiny orphan who dons a Santa suit and murders everyone in sight—featured a bloody St. Nick waving an ax. That image earned so many protests, and resulted in so many tots picketing movie theaters with WE LOVE SANTA signs, that the distributor pulled the film from theaters after barely a week. It was a lesson that horror writers learned welclass="underline" mess with Santa and risk getting axed.
While Black Christmas and Slay Bells are indeed set during the holidays, there’s no yuletide terror to be found in Christmas Babies or Slumber Party. Credit 175
Death Rattle
By the early ’90s, the coroner had called it and the medical examiner was zipping up horror’s body bag. But one last twitch was left in the corpse.
In 1990, a sales rep at Dell claimed there was room for more paperback horror because everyone was getting out of the market. This would be like someone in Jaws noting there’s plenty of space on the beach. Barely thirty years old, editor Jeanne Cavelos was bored of cursed Indian burial mounds and imitation Stephen King, so when her boss asked her to pitch a horror line, she was ready.
Unable to afford big names, with even B-listers off-limits because at that time they rarely earned out their advances, Cavelos had the idea of making the line the star. Abyss would be a home for genuinely new voices in horror, punk rock writers with something to say beyond “Serial killers are scary.” She didn’t want the same old books with thirtysomething male protagonists wading through piles of naked and mutilated female corpses. She hunted down artists to paint covers that looked like nothing on the market.
In February 1991 the first Abyss book, The Cipher by Kathe Koja, hit the racks. A sharply observed slice of early-’90s bohemia, it was about a couple of starving artists in a dying Rust Belt city who find a hole in their storage space. Dubbing it the Funhole (the original title of the book), they discover that anything organic fed into the Funhole comes out disturbingly mutated. So these art scene bottom-feeders use the Funhole to get themselves a gallery show.