Цитаты из книги Paperbacks From Hell

Horror responded in the most metal way possible. When televangelists denounced horror movies, books, and games as causing cannibalism, murder, suicide, depression, and domestic violence, horror writers and metal bands doubled down, firehosing ever-more-offensive content into the faces of conservatives.

It was a lesson that horror writers learned well: mess with Santa and risk getting axed.

Sometimes a firm spanking is enough to drive the Devil out of a teenager, but usually they have to be shot in the face.

If social and political anxiety spawns zombies, then economic anxiety births haunted houses.

Will a D&D-type game make a high school student more popular, or more murdery? The answer won’t surprise you.

Skeletons may have their faults, but you have to admire them for working hard enough to earn advance degrees in pediatrics, obstetrics, and nursing.

Whether you wanted to know if your mother was raped by Dracula, whether you were raped by Satan, what sins you committed in your past life, what fantasies compel you to kill in your present one, whether you were possessed by a Vietnamese death demon or abducted by UFOs, in book after book, hypnosis was the answer.

If there’s one thing horror novels from the ’70s and ’80s can teach us, it’s that doctors in hospitals are mostly interested in impregnating patients with Swedish clones (Embryo), decapitating patients and using their heads to form a living computer (Heads, 1985), or harvesting putrid snot from the multiple anuses of alien worms with an insatiable appetite for human flesh (Fatal Beauty, 1990).

These characters’ inclination toward romance could be due to spending much of their time drunk in pubs. Always the first meeting place for farmers alarmed that their prize sheep have been eaten by something they’ve never encountered before, the pubs never seem to close, no matter how many slugs reduce the local citizenry to piles of grisly bones or how many snails drag their prey from bed and into their hell maws.

Moths are the Rocky Balboas of the killer-insect world.

Don’t mind if I do, say the crabs, although in their language it sounds more like clickety-click-click, as they start with the tramp platter.

There is not an animal that walks, crawls, swims, or flies that does not want humankind dead. Bears hate us, bats hate us, dogs and cats clearly hate us. Let’s face it, humans are delicious. In the eyes of animals, we are walking pizzas, and the best thing is that we deliver ourselves.

In fact, it’s the humans who look like the sadistic monsters in Cats Gone Wild books, saying things like, “So, the plan is to wait for the cats to show themselves and then go at them with flame throwers.” When the felines are finally burned alive with napalm and the survivors are machine-gunned, it feels like something of an overreaction, especially when we all know that a helicopter dangling a bit of string could have led them out of town just as efficiently.

Before the internet, cats were sometimes considered less than cute.

It turns out the only monster in this book is ill-informed writing.

Magicians think they’re wise and witty, full of patter and panache, walking around like they don’t deserve to be shot in the back of the head and dumped in a lake. For all the grandeur of its selfregard, magic consists of nothing more than making a total stranger feel stupid. Worse, the magician usually dresses like a jackass.

If the house you just moved into has a basement stuffed with old mannequins, run. If it has a “toy room” filled with clown puppets, run faster. Because the only things scarier than children are their toys.