A bunch of great-bad '70s and '80s horror paperbacks are lurching back into print
Background Image: Jill Bauman. Graphic: Emi Tolibas
Grady Hendrix’s Paperbacks From Hell was one of the non-fiction treats of 2017, a smart, funny look back at the horror paperback boom of the 1970s and ’80s, when all you needed was some gorgeous cover art and a blockbuster to rip off and you, too, could be a gory publishing mastermind. We noted in our review of Hendrix’s book that its biggest sin wasn’t giving its readers nightmares, necessarily, but the likelihood that it’d set off an unquenchable wave of low-brow curiosity in its readers, sending them off on a wild goose chase in search of books about killer dolls and aliens with an allergy to KISS, many of which had long since gone out of print.