Throughout its history, the horror genre has been effective at exploring and subverting cultural anxieties and taboos. Between the late 1960s and early 90s, there was plenty of material to work with. These decades saw one revolution after another, including the upending of social mores around sexuality, rapid developments in science and technology and the apocalyptic fears of the Cold War. It was also a boom time for mass market paperbacks, and horror authors in this period abandoned convention and respectability, running with the most bizarre and indecent plots they could imagine.
“When’s the last time you read about…sex witches from the fourth dimension, flesh-eating moths, homicidal mimes, or golems stalking Long Island?”
Hell-bent on lifting such books out of obscurity, vintage horror fanatics Grady Hendrix and Will Errickson authored “Paperbacks from Hell,” which assembles hundreds of these eccentric novels. Their labor of love, which won a Bram Stoker Award in 2017, features books where “no plot was too ludicrous, no cover art too appalling, no evil too despicable,” novels that go whole hog on camp with inflated taglines like “FILLED WITH CHILLING TERROR THAT SURPASSES ANYTHING YOU’VE EVER EXPERIENCED!” Horror enthusiasts will come away with a frightfully long To-Be-Read list. Here’s a small dose of what’s inside:
- Elizabeth Engstrom’s “When Darkness Loved Us” and “Black Ambrosia”
- John Farris’s “Fury”
- Ken Greenhall’s “Elizabeth”
- Mendal W. Johnson’s “Let’s Go Play at the Adams’”
- Kathe Koja’s “The Cipher” (my favorite so far)
- Michael McDowell’s “Blackwater” series
- Joan Samson’s “The Auctioneer”
- John Shirley’s “Cellars”
- Bernard Taylor’s “The Reaping”
- Lisa Tuttle’s “Familiar Spirit” and short story collection “A Nest of Nightmares”
A Goodreads user was motivated to create a master list of all the titles mentioned by Hendrix and Errickson. While some are out of print, Valancourt Books is now re-releasing select titles under its “Paperbacks from Hell” imprint, complete with the original covers. Several of these releases along with many other titles are available through DBRL. As always, if you’re aching to read something covered that we don’t own, try an Interlibrary Loan request.
