Fifty million American Catholics provided a ready audience for two-fisted tales of priests taking on Satan (In the Name of the Father), heretical cults (The Night Church), and possessed kids (Shrine). Credit 21
Real-world Vatican infighting always makes for a good plot. Whitley Streiber’s The Night Church depicts a Catholic Church split between a secret cult of Cathars, who are breeding the anti-man to wipe Homo sapiens off the map, and the last surviving vestiges of the Inquisition, who use gruesome blowtorch torture to snuff out the Cathars before their mind-controlled subjects can hump mankind into extinction.
Horror stalwart James Herbert took the Roman Catholic Church to task in Shrine: a mute child performs miracles and, before you know it, the holy fathers are ignoring scary nuns, ghosts, and animated statues of the Virgin Mary and instead falling all over themselves to capture the media spotlight. Here the Church is less concerned with helping the poor than with recruiting new congregants to fill its empty pews. Which means the clergy are caught completely off guard when the little girl turns out to be possessed not by the Holy Spirit but by yet another ghost of yet another murdered English witch. It’s a theological failure that can only be resolved when an army of zombies claw their way out of the grave during a televised healing session and murder pretty much everyone on live TV.
In 1978, after the thirty-three-day reign of Pope John Paul I, the Catholic Church elected its first non-Italian pope in four hundred years. Pope John Paul II became an instant international celebrity, drawing crowds wherever he went. The fascination with priest sex met the adoration of JP2 in Dark Angel, 1982’s overheated hothouse of a novel that tells the story of how the Pope was stalked by a flesh-hungry succubus and how one lone wolf Irish American priest risked everything to slake the she-demon’s insatiable thirst for man flesh and save John Paul’s celibacy.
Joe O’Meara, a tough Irish kid born to Pennsylvania steelworkers, became a college football star known as “the Wolf” before attending seminary in Boston. Now he functions as valet and bodyguard to Cardinal Ricci, the Pope’s right-hand man, who gets humped to death by a succubus in Vatican City. Whoops.
Full of thick-blooming flowers and ripe nightmares wherein hugely pregnant nuns give birth to clawed monsters with the face of Cardinal Ricci, Dark Angel exists in a state of maximum hysteria. As for the succubus, Angela Tansa, she drives Porsches and must have sex every seven days in order to stay alive. Her latest Romeo is a Eurotrash aristocrat who says things like, “I want to fuck that fatness out of you!” as Angela gorges on artichokes and Mexican food…because she’s carrying Cardinal Ricci’s baby!
This is the kind of book in which a priest resists fleshy temptation by jamming a nail through his hand, people vomit their souls into toilets, and succubuses ooze black breast milk. And when Joe discovers that the succubus can be destroyed only if she’s decapitated at the moment of orgasm, you know this book is about to go so far over the top it achieves orbit.
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Catholic priests looked so good on covers, it didn’t matter what was inside. William Peter Blatty’s Exorcist sequels, The Ninth Configuration and Legion, were Catholic enough, and Unholy Communion was about a priest who becomes a horny werewolf. But Dagon was a Southern Gothic by way of H. P. Lovecraft. Credit 23
JIM THIESEN
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Jim Thiesen is famous for his fully painted, beautifully textured book covers for such authors as Brian Lumley and Chelsea Quinn Yarbro. He’s also known for his work on Doubleday’s reprints of Stephen King’s first four novels and his iconic H. R. Giger–inspired cover for Richard Matheson’s I Am Legend (which Tor cropped, digitally blurred, and altered, much to Thiesen’s dismay). But nothing can alter the power of his cover for The Gilgul, which is based on a monstrous head he sculpted, lit, and photographed himself. There’s nothing else like it in horror paperbacks, and it is truly a staggering work of heart-breaking horror genius.
One from Golem A, One from Golem B
Catholics weren’t hogging all the horrific fun. Jewish horror is a small but strong subset of the paperback horror boom. In fact, this tiny ethnic enclave punches above its weight and includes one of the best covers of the decade, as well as one of the best books in the whole boom. Even F. Paul Wilson’s The Keep got the big-budget Michael Mann Hollywood movie treatment. But it was Henry Hocherman’s The Gilgul that ruled bookstore shelves, thanks to its amazing cover.
The Gilgul doesn’t quite live up to the promise of its cover, however. It honors the beautiful traditions of the Jewish people with the story of a young possessed bride who sprays blood from her nipples. When her future groom witnesses her finger-banging a nurse in the local nuthouse, he flees for Miami to swill Jack Daniels and pick up every hooker he can find. The memory of the Holocaust is evoked by a touching scene in which an army of Jewish concentration camp victims comes back from the dead in a Bay Shore living room and ascends into the heavens while singing. And an American psychiatrist is tied up and injected with HIV-infected blood by two of his patients, a bisexual Puerto Rican and a black pimp, after they sneak a peek at his notes stating that people who get AIDS do so because they lack the self-control to put on a condom. (Don’t judge. It was the ’80s.)
Coming the same year that the Berlin Wall fell and the Soviet Union started to disintegrate, David Saperstein’s Cold War thriller Red Devil is a book no one was in the mood for. The premise: Satan (actually Shaitan, the Arabic jinn who refused to kneel before Adam), ditched the Nazis when they lost World War II and assumed the identity of a dead Soviet intelligence officer. Now a higher-up in Soviet military intelligence, Shaitan has recruited a cadre of loyal Satan worshippers and is planning a coup. It’s up to a band of loyal KGB agents, allied with Israeli intelligence, to arm themselves with super-shofars that can blast demonic spies and prevent World War III.
Red Devil is Yiddish Cold War camp of the highest order, but it feels like yesterday’s cold kugel next to Bari Wood’s deeply felt immigrant love song The Tribe. Wood started her career as an editor for the medical journal CA: A Cancer Journal for Clinicians, which sounds like the most depressing job ever. Later she had hits with Twins (1977), which was adapted into David Cronenberg’s film Dead Ringers (1988), and Doll’s Eyes (1993), adapted into the Neil Jordan film In Dreams (1999).