Horror's Guilty Pleasures
Horror's Guilty Pleasures
Return with me now to the glory days of guts, gore, and flesh-eating nightmares.A time when the paperback cover ruled supreme. I'm talking about the great horror fiction boom of the 1970's and 1980's, of course, when each month dozens upon dozens of cheesy horror novels from major houses flooded the book racks of your local brick-and-mortar store. The cover was the thing: the more gruesome, the more grisly, the more gut-wrenching, the better. And nobody did covers like the UK publishers: NEL, Arrow, Star, Hamyln, Sphere etc.That isn't to say, of course, that England held a patent on good horror artists--they didn't--but for some reason, American publishers were simply too conservative on the whole to produce books with maggoty skulls, impaled women, and cannibals feeding on bloody human hearts. A tradition, unfortunately, that continues to this day in the lackluster, anemic books put out by those American publishers that even bother putting out horror at all. Zebra Books, for example, who had a very active horror line in those days, thought that the pinnacle of horror illustration was the skeleton. And so they pumped out countless horror novels--most of them pretty bad--and the covers were nearly identical: a cheerleading skeleton, a skeleton in a baby carriage, and--ooo, this'll get 'em--two skeleton girls playing jumprope.Not the case in Jolly Old England. Gore and shock was the thing. And love it or hate, it was this kind of visceral imagery that sold millions of books. Back in the 1980's, when you wanted a horror novel and nothing else would do, you wanted it to be easily identifiable. You didn't want to grab some lame cozy mystery or tepid suspense novel and in the UK, there was absolutely no chance of that. Of course, there were always the pretentious bastards who thought such grisly covers were demeaning to the form, that great fictional medium that Poe and Hawthorn, some contend, once labored in. I recall one reviewer calling these covers "the artistic equivalent of two boys poking a dead cat to see if the maggots will come out." In other words, childish. But since horror fiction speaks directly to the frightened child in us all...why not? Let us kick our lofty ideals to the curb where they belong and be done with them. We're talking horror fiction here, people! If good horror is the literary equivalent of anything then it's a scary tale told around the fire or one of those unpleasant stories kids whisper to each in the dark.I'm not ashamed to say that I bought dozens of books just for the grotesque covers. There was thrill to it, I suppose, when someone saw you reading a book with slugs tunneling through a screaming human head on the cover. The same childish joy I got as a kid dragging squeamish girls to look at a decomposing dog in a ditch. When you had one of these books in your hand you were saying, "Yeah, I can take it. I got good nerves and a strong fucking stomach." After all, any fool can read Joyce Carol Oates or John Updike, but it takes a special kind of mind to appreciate Shaun Hutson!Anyway, in the UK these kinds of books were called "nasties" and that was an appropriate tag for what you were to find in their pages. For if you wanted blood, guts, and graphic close-ups of the most sickening atrocities, then you would not be disappointed. If the nasties had a father, then it was probably James Herbert, Britain's best-selling horror writer and the author of such absolute gems as The Fog, The Dark, and The Spear. But it was his first novel, The Rats, that gave birth to the nasties. Plenty of these books had supernatural horrors or serial killers running about hacking people up, but their real mainstay was nature run wild. Herbert had created the template with The Rats and it sold like crazy and soon the bookstores were flooded with novels about spiders and worms, blowflies and jellyfish, mad dogs and flesh-eating cats, killer pike, snakes, even lamprey and man-eating pigs got in on the fun.So let us return to those wonderful days when a lover of horror could simply go to any bookstore, drugstore, or newsstand to get his bloody fix. No muddled covers, no pretentious literary bullshit, no effeminate teenage vampires, no weak-kneed subtlety, and absolutely no delusions of grandeur.The horror is the thing...