Paperbacks from Hell: The Twisted History of 70's and 80's Horror Fiction (2017) by Grady Hendrix: A delightful book about the boom in horror paperbacks that lasted from roughly 1968 to 1993. What a time it was to be alive! I know! I was there!
Copiously illustrated. Maybe obscenely illustrated! Horror writer Grady Hendrix keeps things zipping along, aided by all the crazy covers from those paperbacks (and discussions of some of the more famous cover artists of the period). A chronological discussion of the era shares space with thematic discussions (Insects! Incest!) and pieces on notable writers of the boom.
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| Nazi leprechauns! |
The covers, though. Really, even if this were just a picture book, it would be worth the money, even for a casual horror reader. I'm not casual, so I really loved it.
Hendrix begins the story of his own infatuation with horror paperbacks by discussing his discovery of John Christopher's batshit-crazy novel The Little People, thanks to its batshit-crazy cover art.
Holy moley! I have to buy and read this book!
I noticed a few factual errors (most puzzlingly, the misidentification of the writer of Watership Down). But overall, Grady has an interestingly idiosyncratic take on the Golden Age of Paperback Horror, along with the reasons for its rise and fall. Will Errickson supplies an essay at the back of the book, along with a lot of help Hendrix gleaned from Too Much Horror Fiction. Highly recommended.
House of Bones by Dale Bailey (2003): Tense, sharply written haunted-house story about a Cabrini-Green-type public-housing estate in Chicago and the supernatural thing or things that haunt its abandoned corridors.
Stylistically, Bailey is a much wittier and more poetic prose writer than many of his contemporaries. Also somewhat unusually, House of Bones tackles the issue of race in America, something horror novels aren't traditionally known for. Thematically, the supernatural element has risen organically from the excluded and terrorized population of the housing project over years and decades.
Now, with the housing project closed and all but one of the apartment towers demolished, a billionaire has brought four seemingly unrelated people to Dreamland (the so-nicknamed last tower and center or decades of horror) for a two-week stay to attempt to delve into whether or not Something exists in Dreamland.
The team-investigates-haunted-house sub-genre of horror is a venerable one, with at least two towering (ahem) examples, Shirley Jackson's The Haunting of Hill House and Richard Matheson's Hell House. Bailey's novel doesn't quite reach those heights. It is, nonetheless, a thoughtful and occasionally harrowing read, with more on its mind than simply scaring the reader, and with solidly and believably rendered protagonists. Recommended.
