Mulliga's Tribute to '80s Horror Paperbacks (Part 1) - Paperbacks from Hell

Halloween is coming, and this year Shangrila Towers is paying tribute to the gory, grotesque, and sometimes goofy world of 1980s horror fiction. Let's start with the book that inspired this series of blog posts - Paperbacks from Hell by Grady Hendrix with Will Errickson:

When I read horror novels growing up, they were usually in paperback form (picture a heavily creased, dog-eared, phonebook-thick copy of The Stand in my middle school backpack). Paperbacks from Hell is a love letter to that bygone era, a nonfiction history of the rise and fall of the mass market horror section.  This was a freewheeling time, when books featured everything from Nazi leprechauns to giant mutant cockroaches, with lurid covers designed to pull in curious kids like me. 

Written by author Grady Hendrix (with Will Errickson of "Too Much Horror Fiction"), the book does a good job of summarizing trends in the horror genre and highlighting the authors and publishers who made it happen.  Paperbacks from Hell is about as comprehensive as a book like this can be; for example, I grabbed a couple of random '80s horror paperbacks from my local used bookstore (which shall be revealed later this month...), and it turned out both were mentioned in the book, albeit briefly.

Tastes would change as the '90s came along, and so ended the heyday of trashy horror fiction. But if you want to re-live those days, Paperbacks from Hell is a fun way to do it.