Paperbacks From Hell
(2017 - Quirk Books)

(by Grady Hendrix) O.K., while there are a handful of original paintings on display, almost all the art here is the paperback book covers culled from the 'horror' boom of the 1970s & '80s and its death throes of the early '90s (indeed, it is subtitled "The Twisted History Of '70s And '80s Horror Fiction"). Human or supernatural killers abound. And not the front-runners of the genre either, but rather those lower echelons, perhaps approaching or achieving 'shlock'. The author breaks up his many, many, examples into chapters called Hail-Satan, Creepy Kids, When Animals Attack, Real Estate Nightmares, Weird Science, Gothic And Romantic, Inhumanoids, and Splatterpunks-Serial Killers-And-Super Creeps. He canvases what he's gathered, describing those grouped together, finding a lot of similarities, but at the same time pointing up where many individualistically went waaaaay out on their own. The 95 text pages also include a healthy index and capsule-biographies of certain authors, illustrators & publishing companies, as well as caption-credits for all the art exhibited, with a book's title, author, publisher, publication year and the work's painter, if known (which is nowhere near as often as you would hope). So artwise, this 256-page book has 45 of them that each features a large reproduction and another 95 that are dominated by multiple images (note that most of the exhibits are framed in attractive saturated non-white colors). The 'well-presented' artists are: Paul Bacon (3), Jill Bauman (2), John Berkey, Peter Caras, Ruben DeAnda, Lynn Duncombe, Les Edwards (2), Lisa Falkenstein (3), Hector Garrido, Tom Hallman (3), Tom H. Hill, Steve Huston, Roger Kastel, Richard Newton, Terry Oakes, Bob Pepper, Don Ivan Punchatz, Hiram Richardson, Ron Sauber, Greg Winters, and UNKNOWN (15).