The Cipher was anything but typical horror. The main action was psychological, and the Funhole is never explained, but readers were ready for something new. The book shared that year’s Stoker Award for best first novel with another Abyss title, Melanie Tem’s Prodigal, about dead children, social workers, and psychic vampires.
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Abyss published Koja’s next novel, Bad Brains, about an artist whose sustains a minor head injury at a party that unleashes apocalyptic hallucinations, seizures, and extradimensional silver snot dripping over everything he sees. Then his paintings start coming to life. Relentlessly interior, unfolding in dreams, visions, and nightmares, reading the book is like being trapped inside William Blake’s worst headache. Abyss’s brand of psychological horror avoided creepy kids, real estate nightmares, and Satanic cults, and their books gave off a whiff of opium and absinthe. Nancy Holder’s Dead in the Water is her riff on William Hope Hodgson’s early-twentieth-century Sargasso Sea stories, only in her version a clutch of shipwreck survivors is picked up by a hellish cruise ship helmed by an undead buccaneer and his phantasmal pirate crew.
Die-cut covers that teased gruesome art was nothing new for horror paperbacks, but these strikingly creative Abyss covers look like nothing that had come before. Credit 177
Not every Abyss book was a heavy, hallucinatory, psychological drama. Coming right on the heels of The Cipher was Abyss’s second novel, Nightlife by Brian Hodge, which was basically a cross between Crocodile Dundee and Miami Vice. A Yanomamö warrior tracks the newest drug, Skullflush, from his home in Venezuela to Tampa, where it’s getting sold in nightclubs as a bright-green cocaine alternative. A flashy horror thriller for the MTV generation, it’s all were-piranha gangbangers, drug dealers nailed to yachts with arrows, and an AK-47-powered climactic car chase across Tampa’s three-mile-long Howard Frankland Bridge.
Abyss proved that horror fiction still had room for original voices telling new stories about everything from psychoactive plants (Nightlife) to gender identity (X, Y) to Poppy Z. Brite’s re-re-reinvention of vampires (Lost Souls), and Nancy Holder’s hallucinatory sea story (Dead in the Water). Credit 178
Written in chilly, precise, clinical prose, Michael Blumlein’s X, Y feels like the fruit of a collaboration between J. G. Ballard and David Cronenberg. The only thing tying it to the old-school horror market is the fact that its main character is a stripper. After she passes out onstage and wakes up convinced that she’s a man, Blumlein dives into the complicated swamp of gender difference, territory that no other horror novel had broached. Rather than worrying about identity politics or liberation narratives, he boils everything down to biology. And then he keeps on boiling. By the time he’s finished, Blumlein has made a case that our assumptions about our identities aren’t built on bedrock but on ever-shifting sand. It’s probably the only book to cite the Journal of Neuro-Medical Mechanics in its endnotes, and it’s also more dark science fiction than flat-out horror, much like Lisa Tuttle’s quantum narrative Lost Futures, about a woman who begins to simultaneously experience all the lives she could have led.
Abyss’s breakout star was Poppy Z. Brite, whose Lost Souls was the line’s first hardcover book; it earned Brite a six-figure, three-book deal with Dell. His books revolve around the fictional town of Missing Mile, North Carolina, which is populated by sensitive psychic musicians, bisexual vampires, runaway waifs, serial killers, and cannibals. Dripping with graphic sex and violence, refusing to pay lip service to conventional tsk-tsking over runaway kids, Brite’s books are the R-rated, younger, sexier, more rebellious version of Anne Rice’s gothic vampire epics. His characters ditch the lives and families they’d been assigned at birth to build their own stronger, braver, more inclusive families on the margins. Brite had been associated with the splatterpunk movement, but he had something that eluded most of that gang, and he used it wisely: restraint.
For the next three years, Abyss published one new horror title every month. Financially, the line was moderately successful, but its books won awards and were unlike anything on the market. Dennis Etchison published with the line, as did Lisa Tuttle, Kristine Kathryn Rusch, and even Michael McDowell. Their books didn’t set the world on fire, but they did set individual readers’ minds ablaze.
In July 1994, Jeanne Cavelos left Abyss to focus on her own writing and teaching. She was supposed to be replaced by a new editor, but never was. An editorial assistant took over and Dell lost confidence in the line, refusing to publish the third title on Brite’s contract, Exquisite Corpse, due to its “extreme” content. Abyss, with around forty-five titles on its list, withered and died shortly thereafter. And with it went the last echo of the horror boom.
EPILOGUE
The lesson horror teaches us is that everything dies. The horror fiction boom of the 1970s and ’80s became roadkill on the superhighway of the ’90s. Authors disappeared, cover artists found new outlets, and this publishing Titanic hit an iceberg, split apart, and released its cargo into the cold, dark waters to wash up on the shores of thrift stores and used paperback emporiums for years to come.
Things change, flesh rots, houses decay and fall into disrepair—there’s no point complaining. But the lost creativity makes you want to scream and pound on the inside of your coffin lid as it’s being nailed into place. If we forget about these books, where else will we find a town invaded by killer clowns (Dead White), Prometheus chained to a rock in an abandoned New York City subway station (Night Train), an army of killer jellyfish (Slime), a Satan who is obsessed with anal sex (The Nursery), an Alabama family welcoming a river monster into its ranks (The Blackwater series), an army of six-inch-tall Nazi leprechauns (our beloved classic The Little People)?
Darkness may have fallen over the hellscape these books once illuminated, but there are still some candles burning out there in the night, a handful of lonely bonfires kindled on windswept beaches along the coastline of the Internet. There aren’t many, but they’re enough to steer by if you care to explore this dark and fascinating world further. Reach out and you’ll find websites, some books, a few nerds and freaks like me and Will, some professors and academics, each one a lone lighthouse keeper for the legacy of these paperbacks.
We know we can’t make these authors famous again. We know we can’t give their titles another chance at the best-seller list. But for those who love these impossible, unpredictable books, it’s enough for us to imagine that somewhere out there, underneath the vast dome of the night, a few people are curled up on their couches, nestled in their beds, riding the bus or the train, holding a copy of When Darkness Loves Us. Or maybe The Voice of the Clown. Or Elizabeth. Or The Auctioneer. Or Feast. Or The Happy Man.