Paperbacks from Hell: The Twisted History of '70s and '80s Horror Fiction

Last week: a scholar's loving appreciation of the glories of medieval book-making. This week: an equally loving tribute to the heyday of the pulpy horror paperback, from Rosemary's Baby to Silence of the Lambs. In my mind they are perfect bibliophilic companions. Hendrix is the author of the horror/humor pastiches Horrorstör and My Best Friend's Exorcism, and his tongue is always somewhere in the vicinity of his cheek, but his affection for the sheer human invention that spawned these books (and their lurid covers) overwhelms his mockery, and by the end of his catalogue—as gloriously illustrated, in its way, as Meetings with Remarkable Manuscripts—you might be convinced that these ephemera are as worth saving as their more illustrious illuminated brethren. As V.C. Andrews's editor described Flowers in the Attic, "It may be awful, but it is a style."