Fantasia 2017: Author Grady Hendrix’s Paperbacks from Hell One-Man Show Was a Delight
You may already be familiar with Grady Hendrix if you’ve come across his novel Horrorstör about a haunted superstore that closely resembles an IKEA or his last tale set in the Satanic Panic days of the late Eighties, My Best Friend’s Exorcism. For all the fans of horror movie compilation books like the Psychotronic Encyclopedia of Film by Michael Weldon or Nightmare USA from FAB Press, Hendrix’s latest, Paperbacks from Hell: The Twisted History of ’70s and ’80s Horror Fiction, is essentially a readers’ guide to the weirdest and most bizarre horror paperbacks during the book boom of the Seventies and Eighties.
Although Paperbacks from Hell (only available in paperback, of course) doesn’t hit shelves until September 19th courtesy of Quirk Books (pre-orders are now open), the author performed a rapturous and often hilarious one-man show at the Fantasia International Film Fest this past Monday, July 24th, highlighting some of the craziest examples of horror novel shlock.
The multimedia performance also served as a history lesson on the paperback onslaught that hit bookstores after the holy trinity of horror bestsellers ushered in the craze during the late Sixties. The Exorcist, Rosemary’s Baby, and The Other created a literary hellmouth that unleashed thousands upon thousands of copycat horror novels throughout the Seventies until Stephen King kept the ball rolling during the Eighties.
Hendrix gleefully and feverishly ran down the utterly insane plots of some of these books: Toy Cemetery by William J. Johnstone is about a Vietnam Vet who returns home to discover a pedophile running a suspicious doll factory and the local mental institution overrun with man-monsters; John Christopher’s The Little People features Nazi Leprechauns, born in concentration camps and engineered for sin; and The Shadow Man proves your home computer can help you with your taxes and aid in killing witches. Simultaneously, Hendrix makes you want to track down some of these gems but also marvel at the fact that he actually did, then read ALL of them, and wrote a book about it.
Paperbacks from Hell is also a love letter to some of the forgotten stories that may have unfairly been lumped in with the dumptruck of rubbish that just isn’t worth diving into, no matter how devilishly inviting the front cover is. Novels like The Tribe by Bari Wood and The Auctioneer by Joan Samson were highlighted for their imaginativeness and spoken about with great affection by Hendrix. There are always diamonds in the ruff, but to Hendrix they all shine. Hell, he even literally sang their praises during his show!
If you weren’t lucky enough to be there at Fantasia 2017 to see Grady’s tour de force, be sure to go out and grab a copy of Paperbacks from Hell as soon as it becomes available. For now, we may see each other at the 99-cent bin looking for that elusive copy of Night Shriek.
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