6.3 KiB
Title: Paperbacks from Hell: The Twisted History of '70s and '80s Horror Fiction
Author: Grady Hendrix
Started Reading: 2020-09-04
Finished Reading: 2020-10-05
Highlights (Libby)
| Date | Chapter | Percent | Color | Quote |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| October 03, 2020 18:38 | Chapter 4: Real Estate Nightmares | 30.6% | #FFB | Robert Marasco’s Burnt Offerings (1973), a chilling tale about a family who escapes the city to move into a summer rental…from hell. |
| September 18, 2020 18:47 | Chapter 3: When Animals Attack | 24.8% | #FFB | 1974. It was also the year James Herbert published The Rats, |
| September 18, 2020 18:39 | Chapter 2: Creepy Kids | 32.2% | #FFB | Mazes and Monsters is best remembered today for its TV movie adaptation, which aired in 1982 and featured Tom Hanks in his first leading role, as Pardieu the Holy Man, freaking out on the streets of New York before trying to jump off the World Trade Center. |
| September 18, 2020 18:38 | Chapter 2: Creepy Kids | 31.5% | #FFB | Dungeons |
| September 18, 2020 18:38 | Chapter 2: Creepy Kids | 31.2% | #FFB | Jack Chick published his infamous anti-RPG (role-playing game) tract Dark |
| September 18, 2020 18:19 | Chapter 2: Creepy Kids | 29.0% | #FFB | Edgar Allan Poe’s Hop-Frog (1849) |
Highlights (ReadEra)
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Introduction "The Gestapochauns live in the dark, battling their ancient rat enemies with teeny bullwhips. Shortly after we meet them, the author lets us know that these are not just any Nazi leprechauns. These are psychic Nazi leprechauns who enjoy S&M, are covered with scars from pleasure/pain sessions with their creator, were trained as sex slaves for full-sized human men, and are actually stunted fetuses taken from Jewish concentration camp victims. And one of them is named Adolph." - The Little People (John Christopher)
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Chapter 2: Creepy Kids "McGill, who returned in 1982 to write an Omen novel not based on a film, Omen IV: Armageddon 2000, which opens with a scene of rectal childbirth"
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Chapter 2: Creepy Kids "1974’s Reading List - Let's Go Play at the Adams' still elicits passionate loathing. Search online and you’ll find readers who describe destroying the book after finishing it, who write about being left ill, about how sick the author must have been."
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Chapter 2: Creepy Kids "Fictional clowns come with a body count. Edgar Allan Poe’s Hop-Frog (1849) was a dwarf forced to be a jester who burned eight courtiers to death."
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Chapter 2: Creepy Kids "The Voice of the Clown (1982) would be the snarling six-year-old standing slightly to the side, staring into the camera, clutching a clown doll. Her name is Laura, and she sees right through you. Whatever tricks you try to make her like you, she and her clown are ready." - The Voice of the Clown (Brenda Brown Canary) Note: Nocturnal Revelries Link
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Chapter 2: Creepy Kids "Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to 1984, the year Jack Chick published his infamous anti-RPG (role-playing game) tract Dark Dungeons, claiming that these dice-and-paper games were a gateway to satanism and suicide."
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Chapter 2: Creepy Kids "Reading List - Mazes and Monsters is best remembered today for its TV movie adaptation, which aired in 1982 and featured Tom Hanks in his first leading role, as Pardieu the Holy Man, freaking out on the streets of New York before trying to jump off the World Trade Center." Note The book and the movie are both good late-night, b-rated fun
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Chapter 2: Creepy Kids "Hobgoblin (1981). Protagonist Scott Gardiner is exactly the kind of kid Jaffe warned us was vulnerable to RPGs’ lurid lure: brilliant, creative, socially awkward, and with a dead dad. He’s also into a truly terrible RPG called Hobgoblin" Note Hey! I like this book!
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Chapter 3: When Animals Attack "It was the year punk rock broke: 1974. It was also the year James Herbert published The Rats, which is pretty much the same thing."
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Chapter 4: Real Estate Nightmares "But it all started with Robert Marasco’s Burnt Offerings (1973), a chilling tale about a family who escapes the city to move into a summer rental... from hell."
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Chapter 5: Weird Science "In Little Brother (1983), aliens land on Earth in 1908 and take over the Soviet Union. By 1983 they've infiltrated the American market with an iPad-esque toy called the Possum, which beams addictive subliminal messages into the brains of good American kids."
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Chapter 6: Gothic and Romantic "The story of the Dollanganger children, locked away by their mother, poisoned by their grandmother, and falling in love with each other, became Flowers in the Attic."
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Chapter 8: Splatterpunks, Serial Killers, and Super Creeps "the PMRC publicly demanded that record labels reassess the contracts of musicians who performed violent or sexualized stage shows. They managed to hold Senate hearings on explicit lyrics and “porn rock,” which accomplished little except to show Americans that Twisted Sister’s Dee Snider was more levelheaded and informed than Tipper Gore."
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Chapter 8: Splatterpunks, Serial Killers, and Super Creeps "The first female character in The Scream is introduced to readers as we’re invited to look up her skirt. The second is “all tits and tan and perfect even teeth.” Then she’s murdered."
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Chapter 8: Splatterpunks, Serial Killers, and Super Creeps "Graham Masterton dominated the first cover of Frighteners with his outrageous cannibal-kid story “Eric the Pie,” which evoked instant outrage. The publisher pulled the magazine from newsstands, and it limped through two more issues before shutting down."
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Chapter 8: Splatterpunks, Serial Killers, and Super Creeps "In February 1991 the first Abyss book, The Cipher by Kathe Koja, hit the racks. A sharply observed slice of early-’90s bohemia, it was about a couple of starving artists in a dying Rust Belt city who find a hole in their storage space. Dubbing it the Funhole (the original title of the book), they discover that anything organic fed into the Funhole comes out disturbingly mutated"
Tags: booknotes