Highlighting cover artists as well as authors, Hendrix walks us through a number of sub-genres - 'Real Estate Nightmares', 'Weird Science', and yes, 'Creepy Kids' are a few of the chapter titles - and the story of each chapter is often the same: someone writes a book that becomes a bestseller (and often a movie, natch), and its sucess inspires untold numbers of ripoffs, each more insane than the last. But over the past couple months, that section of my bookshelf has expanded and is now overflowing thanks to Grady Hendrix's Paperbacks From Hell, which shined a long overdue spotlight on the horror fiction craze that lasted through the '70s and '80s. If they weren't turned into movies I probably wouldn't have the Hannibal Lecter books or The Exorcist on my shelf, as those literary sub-genres (serial killer/demonic possession, respectively) aren't exactly my cup of tea just as with movies, things about evil children and killer animals are more my speed, so it's very possible I WOULD own Peter Benchley's Jaws even if it wasn't turned into one of the greatest movies of all time.īy nature these books don't take up too much space on their own - King is the only who never got the memo that it was OK to keep your horror novels to a couple hundred pages or so. The rest is primarily horror novels Stephen King of course takes up a big part of that section (in fact, King gets his own separate bookcase), but there are a number of horror novels I amassed over the years from the likes of Clive Barker and Brian Keene, including a number of titles that - bringing things together - were the basis for a number of major horror films. I estimate that at least 75% of my collection consists of novelizations, screenplays, non-fiction accounts of this or that movie, horror movie guides (including - plug alert - my own!), etc. If you look at my book collection, you're likely to come away thinking of one word: movies.

Joyride by Stephen Crye