Paperbacks From Hell

Page Burners

Paperbacks From Hell
by Grady Hendrix
Quirk Books
ISBN: 978-1-59474-981-0

I was lucky enough to receive a copy of Paperbacks From Hell from a very good friend of mine this Christmas. It was a book I’d heard about and wanted to explore because the subject matter, as implied in the subtitle on the front of the book - ‘The twisted history of 70s and 80s Horror Fiction’ - was a phenomenon I well remember here in the UK and it was something which was timed just right for me to actively explore at the time.

To explain... on 7th September 1981, almost two years after it’s original US broadcast, the first installment of a two part US TV miniseries based on a book by horror writer Stephen King and called ‘Salem’s Lot, was broadcast in the UK. Now I would have been 13 years old when I saw this and was traumatised, like many young ‘uns at the time, by the cool ‘vampire kid' floating outside the bedroom window and the scene where the black shadow pops up from the bottom of the screen with an over the top musical stinger. So... yeah... all us kids loved it and it started me off acquiring Stephen King novels from my local W. H. Smith And Son Ltd.

And, of course, naturally, once you start buying this well written horror stuff, other writers in the same shelving sections come to your attention. How do you judge which ones you want to read next? By that very same thing you should never judge a book by, of course... it’s cover.

So it wasn’t long before I was also devouring the slightly less ‘up market’ but still very well written novels by James Herbert, the most popular of the UK horror writers at the time. So... King’s ‘Salem’s Lot... The Shining... The Stand and then sliding into Herbert’s The Rats... The Fog... The Jonah etc. However, at that age, horror isn’t the only thing your hormonally challenged mind is into and... there was a fair amount of sex included in the majority of the Herbert books. Those well read passages which soon became the first thing you kept an open eye and open fly out for when the latest purchase was brought home.

And then, of course, it’s a slippery slope and you find yourself reading the full banquet (or whatever you could afford on the small amount of pocket money which was somehow your true birth right) of horror novels which combined out and out gory mayhem coupled with extremely experimental and well thumbed sexploitation. Some of those novelists were still very much masters of the craft of writing... I might mention Dean R. Koontz or John Farris here... and others more than made up for in creative, over the top, gory sexiness what they may (or may not) have lacked in terms of their ability to turn a good sentence and write decent prose... so we had people like the beyond prolific Guy N. Smith with his crab books or John Halkin with his killer jellyfish or Shaun Hutson with his bloodthirsty slugs (see my review of the movie of that one here).

What I didn’t realise when I was given this grand tome, is that this particular love letter to the trashy, horror fiction paperback genre of the 70s and 80s was also written by the very same person who wrote a novel which I really liked when I read it last year... Horrorstör (reviewed here)... by Grady Hendrix. So you have him to blame for bringing to our shelves this extremely nicely designed and enormously entertaining volume.

The book starts off with his introduction where he talks about finding a used copy of a book of that era called The Little People by John Christopher. This is a book which features, amongst its many grotesque elements, a bunch of Nazi leprechauns called Gestapochauns who are heavily into S&M (as it was called before it was sanitised, somewhat, to BDSM) and who are created from the unborn foetuses of Jewish concentration camp victims. After hearing this absolutely bonkers concept, I did try to get hold of a decent copy of this book online at proper old school second hand prices (which seems to have gone up from the 30p standard these things used to be picked up for in musty, old book shops of the 1980s, for some reason) but, alas, the prices for this one on ebay etc are fairly high... presumably as a result of people reading Paperbacks From Hell, no doubt.

After the intro, Mr. Hendrix splits his exploration of this delightfully hellish landscape of well thumbed paperbacks by splitting his tome up into eight chapters. These are Hail Satan, Creepy Kids, When Animals Attack, Real Estate Nightmares, Weird Science, Gothic And Romance, Inhumanoids and a mouthful of a final chapter called Splatter Punks, Serial Killers & Super Creeps. He further explores each of his categories with different sections to highlight different types of sub genre and these mini sections, with titles such as Salad Of The Damned, Starry Starry Nightmare and The Vampire Strikes Back, should probably tell you pretty much the tone of the reading experience here than anything else I might add.

But... if it doesn’t... let me spell it out for you.

Hendrix’s take on the genre is fun and irreverent and reflects perfectly the writing style which made his earlier novel Horrorstör so great. It’s also pretty informative as he takes us from the point, starting with gothic romances, where the popular horror novel of the period was properly born to the point of its regrettable demise a couple of decades later. Now I obviously haven’t kept up with times because I didn’t realise the horror novel wasn’t nearly as prevalent as it was during this time. I honestly thought you could still buy really trashy literature like this from the shelves of your local book store but... I guess not so much.

I did, though, learn a fair amount from this book... such as where some of the trends which the author has chosen to bundle up into specific categories first started or were influenced by. The popularity of such things as the demonic possession horror tales or the blaxploitation terrors obviously coining it in after their cinematic counterparts found an audience for them. Various influences and trends are lovingly explored and it’s illustrated throughout with full colour reproductions of various covers.

There are also randomly placed sections for the works and mini biography of various specific cover artists. Usually it's only a page long but it’s a nice thing to add and it even, on occasions, includes unused versions of the cover in question or an original, pre-painting preparatory sketch for these.

Another nice thing was the inclusion of some books (sometimes by name drop only) which I didn’t think anyone else had even heard of or, indeed, had read these days... such as Satan - His Psychotherapy And Cure by the Unfortunate Dr. Kassler, J.S.P.S. (by Jeremy Leven), which was one of the best books I remember reading from that era... or Rona Jaffe’s book Mazes And Monsters which, to be fair, Hendrix seems to hold in far less regard than I.

Above all, though, the writing style is extraordinarily entertaining throughout and I loved little gems of passages about, for instance, how to best raise your possessed, homicidal or downright stabby evil kids. Or the warning about the dangers of keeping demonically possessed toys up in your attic. And a brilliant bit about the typical ‘horror man’ (who is immensely ‘chiselled’) and the typical ‘horror woman’. I especially loved this little bit about the ‘horror woman’...

“The most expressive parts of her body are her nipples. They noticeably harden when she is aroused, surprised, confused or meeting new people. They are practically prehensile tentacles, capable of lengthening, thickening, unfurling, budding, flaring and swelling.”

Yeah... I have to say, I’ve read a few books like that but it’s kinda funny, to be sure.

If I had one caveat with the book... and this is in no way a criticism... it’s that the writer is pretty much coming at this stuff from a mostly American angle when it comes to the cover art. Now a lot of the British cover art was often more sexually exploitative or photographic...or often a thrilling combination of the two... with the UK covers of books like John Halkin’s Slime and Dean R. Koontz Whispers and Night Chills, with their naked ladies in peril or at sleep, something which was often more memorable than the printed words between said covers. It might well be in the interests of Mr. Hendrix to maybe look at doing a sequel to his current tome where he can explore the UK landscape of the time... a Paperbacks From Hell In The UK, if you will.

Like I said, though... not a criticism, more an observation and I have to say I thoroughly enjoyed this writer's journey into a time I had almost forgotten. Much recommended to both the oldies like myself who will find themselves on a trip down memory lane and also to the younger audience who were maybe never exposed to this stuff before. The book is beautifully designed, well researched/written and is an absolute treasure trove of trash for anyone’s book shelf. Check it out when you can.

Slugs

From Mollusc To Dawn

Slugs
Spain/USA 1988
Directed by Juan Piquer Simón
Arrow Films Blu Ray Zone B
Ha! This movie, I’ll warn you up front, is quite delightfully terrible... in all the right places.

I’ve wanted this one since hearing of its existence a few months ago when Arrow Films said they were putting a super duper restored print onto Blu Ray. Now, to be fair, it wouldn’t really take much more incentive than the title and the promise of a movie about killer slugs to ensure I watched this anyway but... as soon as I'd heard the title I did a little quick research and realised that this is kind of like watching an old friend, in some ways...

Back in the early 1980s I, like many other kids the same age as me in their early teens, started reading horror novels. There were plenty of them about and the first author I tried was Stephen King, who I liked a great deal (although his first novel, Carrie, never did anything for me for some reason... I much preferred the movie version of that one). Of course, after you’ve tried King, things get to be a slippery slope and you go onto James Herbert where you suddenly find, if you’re at that age of around 12-14 years when this kind of thing starts to be appealing, that the mixture of full-on graphic sex and bloody carnage is a heady cocktail too powerful to resist. Soon you start trying all the trashiest horror novels you can find that have that lethal combination of flesh sliding against flesh followed by flesh mutilated by some unspeakable horror and, like I said, the bookshops of Great Britain were full of this kind of stuff and all the kids at school would be reading things by these kinds of authors.

I got through a load of books by these kinds of trashy (and often fun) horror writers... I might mention authors like John Halkin or Guy N. Smith and the kinds of books they were churning out about killer jellyfish or giant crabs etc. One such author, producing some of the more well written pulps of the late 1970s/early 1980s horror boom, was Shaun Hutson. I remember reading one of his I liked at the time called Erebus and he was also the writer of a novel called Slugs (which later spawned a sequel, Breeding Ground). I hadn’t realised, until Arrow made their announcement about releasing this title, that there had been a movie adaptation of the first novel as a co-production between Spain and the US... which updated the action from the very ‘English England’ of the novel to America.

My first reaction was... why? My second reaction was... wow, I’ve got to see this one.

And so here I am with a first watch of Slugs and, as I said before... it’s really terrible.

Now, had I seen this movie back at the time of its release (and I suspect that over here it would have been a straight to video, pan and scan job), I would have condemned it for being utter trash and would have consigned it to video hell. However, looking back at it now with the benefit of a slightly rose tinted nostalgia for the kind of movies being made and released by companies like, in this case, New World pictures, it becomes a charming, hilarious and somewhat affectionate viewing experience, for the most part.

The acting is awful and, it has to be said, the screenplay isn’t doing the performers any favours either. Neither is the score in some sequences, credited to someone called Tim Souster but credited only as Music Department for this particular film in his IMDB listing. Maybe that’s because, although there is some nicely put together, Herrmannesque scoring for the majority of the scenes, there are some ‘heroic themes’ which are completely inappropriate to the on screen action and they just popped me out of the film in some truly ‘WTF?’ moments. Which, once you have got over the shock, also contributes to the maniacal enjoyment to a certain extent, it has to be said.

However, there are some quite good practical special effects in this one, to be sure. I thought the infamous ‘slugs bursting out from a guy’s eye sockets’ effect was looking pretty good and a scene where a slug takes a small bite out of the main male protagonist’s finger looked pretty amazing. I don’t know if this was done with stop motion effects or what. I don’t think CGI would have been a viable option back then.

So what did I learn from this movie?

Well, for one thing I learned that if you eat some bits of a slug that’s accidentally gotten into your lettuce leaves, they are going to come to life inside you and eventually burst our of your head in a fairly ostentatious fashion.

Another thing I learned was something which I remember being bizarrely pushed a lot in pulpy novels and horror movies of the 1980s... if you are going to have sex with someone and it’s your wife or long term partner then that’s okay. If, however, you are either having an affair or, in the case of this movie, are a teenage couple seeing each other illicitly behind your parents backs and then having sex... you’d better watch out. In this kind of movie, nature will always find some way to punish you by having some kind of monster or mutation dispose of you in some kind of gory but completely ludicrous manner, once you have your clothes off. And, seriously, this movie is about a bunch of slow moving slugs, after all. If you fall down amongst them... don’t stay down while they eat your eyeballs out and crawl over your bosom or unleashed genitalia like they do here, surely? How is this even possible to be a credible kind of death? It’s like these people just want to be slug fodder. Can someone go and get the condiments already?

And, of course, another valuable lesson which is a familiar one with movies of this ilk also crops up again in this story. That being... if you still have three heroes left at the end trying to kill the menacing molluscs of the title then, no matter how much of a nice guy or a family man any of them are, one of them is still going to get gorily eaten by the title creatures... who in the case of this film also turn out to be strong swimmers, somehow.

And there you have it. Slugs sounds like a terrible movie and it is. The performances are varied, ranging from just this side of acceptable to truly terrible and the pacing in some scenes is... well I’d have to say it’s quite sluggish in some places. :-) However, despite all this, I was grinning from ear to ear as I watched this shockingly stupid and therefore immensely entertaining movie and it’s definitely one I’ll be recommending to my friends. Potentially a star attraction for an ‘alcohol and a few movies’ night with your friends, as far as I’m concerned. As usual, Arrow do an absolutely brilliant job with the crisp, flawless transfer and it comes with the usual spate of cool extras which sets them apart from quite a few of the other boutique home video labels based in the UK at the moment. If you’re not looking for high art then... check out this movie and see how long it takes you to groan or laugh. Definitely worth a watch.