Цитаты из книги Paperbacks From Hell

And so it goes: betrayal bleeds into betrayal in an endless blur of sexualized dominance and submission.

Between 1978 and 1984, Russ Martin wrote seven books about the Satanic Organization, a global conspiracy dedicated to the Devil and run by the elite 0.01 percent who rule society and use mind control and body swapping to destroy their enemies.

The Guardian featured big action, psychic warfare, and séances gone wrong, but its tired transsexual-panic plot twist left it feeling as flat as a communion wafer.

Readers couldn’t get enough books about spooky Catholics. In the wake of The Exorcist, a cry went up from paperback publishers: “Send more priests!” And, lo, did the racks fill with demonic men of the cloth and scary nuns.

Demonic incubuses and succubuses slithered out of Italian discotheques to send entire apartment buildings into sexual frenzies and to impregnate women with their demon seed. And the most turned-on, now-era, groove daddy of them all was a forgotten hero known as the Satan Sleuth.

Every book was “better than Rosemary’s Baby,” “more terrifying than The Exorcist,” and “in the tradition of The Other!” Read in the right order, the titles painted a grim portrait of Satan marching from free-spirited young demon to middle-aged ennui: Satan’s Holiday, Satan’s Gal, Satan’s Seed, Satan’s Child, Satan’s Bride, Satan Sublets, The Sorrows of Satan, Satan’s Mistress, Satan: His Psychotherapy and His Cure.

The blood of the resilient gothic heroine would flow in the veins of ’70s and ’80s heroines fighting to save their souls from Satan, or weresharks. And were-sharks were coming. Because over on the other side of the bookrack, pulp fiction was getting interested in the occult.

Gothic romances were adult fairy tales. Young governesses appeared at glowering ancestral piles and fell in love with the dark, brooding masters of the house. There was murder, confinement, and ancient curses. Dark secrets piled up at an alarming rate. In the end, the young governess fell into the arms of the dark lord, realizing that her confused feelings of attraction and revulsion could only be love.

The books I love were published during the horror paperback boom that started in the late ’60s, after Rosemary’s Baby hit the big time. Their reign of terror ended in the early ’90s, after the success of Silence of the Lambs convinced marketing departments to scrape the word horror off spines and glue on the word thriller instead.

Babies can be fussy, and the fussiest babies have a body count.

Mainstream movies were being mutated by the French New Wave and Akira Kurosawa’s samurai spirit, while biker flicks flipped the bird at square society. Horror movies continued their zomboid shuffle, unaffected by the culture around them.

No matter what book I read next, the Gestaopchauns clung to my gray folds, whispering to me in my sleep: What else has been forgotten?

But some uninvited guests are lurking in the basement: the Gestapochauns.