I promise to discuss certain works in the genre that I like, but for now I will recount a recent finding.
There was a book published in 2017 titled
Paperbacks from Hell: The Twisted History of '70s and '80s Horror Fiction.
The author has a repertoire of pretty deficient looking books, and I don't have enough energy to go through one for the sake of this post.
If there is anything which characterizes the work, it is an interest in the So-Bad-It's-Good aesthetic often seen post-2010s, and a distant reminiscence of a booming paperback industry. The preface of the book details finding a book called
The Little People, a schlock-y paperback about midget Nazi leprechauns, which begins this author's journey into paperbacks; the basic gist is that it's "friggin' crazy" and does not deserve to be forgotten. The result is that, with the aid of the
Too Much Horror Fiction blog, the author reports a fast-and-loose history of horror fiction from around the 70s and 80s, along with some other mention of horror paperbacks in the 60s.
I feel repulsed by this for a few reasons. For one thing, the works that are "forgotten" are almost unanimously considered poor quality: the intention of recovering these books is nearly the same as RedLetterMedia reviving a rare VHS SOV horror film. Rarely, one of these will have some creative spark within its contents, but it is tarnished by the personal license of the creator. It is by indulgence, by lack of means, or by the compulsion to
be a creator that dooms the work. I already referenced Lovecraft's Supernatural Horror in Literature essay above, but a comparison between that and the book discussed here. Lovecraft does not mince words in his estimation of various novels, he has no trouble in detailing the ills and shortcomings of an author, but everything discussed here is in an appreciative retrospective light. It does not really matter if a certain paperback is imitative of a successful box office hit like Jaws, it is detailed in such a way that resembles a glowing advertisement regardless of defects. The title relates to a history of the fiction produced during this time, but it is more a narrative account about the mediocre books being written in response to higher-quality media.
This sort of industry imitation mentioned in the last paragraph is stifling, a total inertia of the creative act, but is prized as a continued innovation in the craft of writing horror. I find it improbable that most authors are supposed to transcend the same writing prompt, especially whenever they are all doing this instantaneously the moment when a film achieves enough financial success. In fact, most of the examples listed within the chapters are all responses to larger movements within film: The Exorcist and The Omen were both novels, but once they're adapted to the film format, it accelerates a list of copycats, repetitions of the same theme. The brusque Epilogue says that the "boom" of the paperback industry ended in the 90s, but nothing described here really evokes the idea of a "boom". It is the lack thereof, a parasitism that feeds off of mass audience whims.
A passage in Ezra Pound's How to Write comes to mind:
Quote:...There was also a crisis in the American book trade. This crisis as I see it was and is at the moment I write this (July 22, 1930) due to a fear that the American public is too stupid to buy books without buying bindings. The continental European buys books in paper covers at 50 or 60 cents per volume in order to see what is in them very much as the American buys magazines. The cry that cheaper books means standardization and "Fordizing" is sheer hypocrisy or incomprehension of what Ford has done with the automobile. The crass American publisher did not try to Fordize...The book trade overproduced books that would not run, i.e. they were inferior junk, they were novels, etc., that were forgotten in five years or less, or the works of "great authors" that lasted ten years and couldn't last longer. There was no attempt to achieve literary efficiency.
There are two problems at hand during Ezra Pound's time, the first is the proper efficiency of the book trade, and the problem of literary quality. Certainly, as the decades passed, the paperback succeeded over the hardcover, and the concern over a right binding is exclusive to those who purchase Library of America editions (which might be true too for other smaller publishing companies; I am not currently in a position to know this, though). The major publishing companies of our time have consolidated repeatedly, and cannot consolidate more because of legal concerns about monopoly. Likewise, there is a remarkable strength of paperback production compared to the hardcover, a comparative luxury. Yet, when one turns their gaze over to the quality of these produced paperbacks, it is clear that it still is
not Fordized. The market has continued and will continue to be populated with the inferior products of cultural moments, works that cannot last in immediate memory. In an restricted focus on horror books, it is clear that what overproduction has occurred is in relation to what can be imitated: does the public currently remember the cult escapades of Manson? Then hundreds of different books can enter production on the subject, all using the infamy for its own ends, then its fate is left up to the audience. This is true for the movie industry too, but for what's been mentioned above, it's doubly so for publications — the horror paperback is an imitation of an imitation.
Branching off from this, another noticeable part is its frequent inclusion of the paperback covers. Not too many are remarkable, only commissions for low-quality horror paperbacks, but the author makes sure to include them often throughout the chapters. Giving credit to the author, it is not an incidental part of horror paperback history, because some companies would narrow their attention to commissioning cover art for lesser-known novelists. It could also help generate an audience that grew up on pulp magazines, or be a short-term ploy to attract customers in the event of an inferior book. I do not think this would have been important to us today had it not been for the reduced attention to cover art. A discussion of this kind goes well beyond the constraints of this post, but the overarching tendencies of the book cover today adopts a minimalist design, but not in the sense of a Gallimard cover (red typeface on a yellowed-white cover). Whatever the intent behind cover art today, Something is missing. I did not set out to use this example, but it was found in the course of two minutes.
Here is an old cover art of Jay Anson's Amityville Horror, published by Bantam Books:
The flies and the devil horn formed by the H makes the cover imperfect, but it is still far superior to the republished cover in 2019, published by Vesper:
It is clear that, in light of recent cover art, the past is superior. This is true for science-fiction paperbacks, and I imagine others that fall under the standards of "genre fiction". Whenever these publishing companies wished to excite the consumer, they had first assumed that creating the best possible art for the text was the most rational course of action. Now, this does not appear to be necessary. Discussion as to why this is might fit into another thread topic.
I think part of the admiration about this art is that they invoke the spirit of some livelier past. This is perhaps what drew the attention of the author in the first place, because the sheer amount of times covers are discussed/shown. It is the essential factor for why someone would hold interest in mediocre horror novels forgotten to time. They remind people, even if only in a hint, of what a regular functioning publishing industry would look like. For this reason, it is more desirable to praise these distant forgotten paperbacks than to do so with anything today.
To end this post, I will share some covers I liked that were included within Paperbacks From Hell: