80s horror - TL:DR (That's Long, DID Read)

time for a change; the death of a decade

Between the ages of 14 and 16 or thereabouts, the things I probably loved the most – or at least the most consistently – were horror (books and movies) and heavy metal.

These loves changed (and ended, for a long time) at around the same time as each other in a way that I’m sure is typical of adolescence, but which also seemed to reflect bigger changes in the world. Reading this excellent article that references the end of the 80s horror boom made me think; are these apparent beginnings and endings really mainly internal ones that we only perceive as seismic shifts because of how they relate to us? After all, Stephen King, Clive Barker, James Herbert & co continued to have extremely successful careers after I stopped buying their books, and it’s not like horror movies or heavy metal ground to a halt either. But still; looking back, the turn of the 80s to the 90s still feels like a change of era and of culture in a way that not every decade does (unless you’re a teenager when it happens perhaps?) But why should 1989/90 be more different than say, 85/86? Although time is ‘organised’ in what feels like an arbitrary manner (the time it takes the earth to travel around the sun is something which I don’t think many of us experience instinctively or empirically as we do with night and day), decades do seem to develop their own identifiable ‘personalities’ somehow, or perhaps we simply sort/filter our memories of the period until they do so.

“The 80s” is a thing that means many different things to different people; but in the western world its iconography and soundtrack have been agreed on and packaged in a way that, if it doesn’t necessarily reflect your own experience, it at least feels familiar if you were there. What the 2010s will look like to posterity is hard to say; but the 2020s seem to have established themselves as something different almost from the start; whether they will end up as homogeneous to future generations as the 1920s seem to us now is impossible to say at this point; based on 2020 so far, hopefully not.

I sometimes feel like my adolescence began at around the age of 11 and ended some time around 25, but still, my taste in music, books, films etc went through a major change in the second half of my teens which was surely not coincidental. But even trying to look at it objectively, it really does seem like everything else was changing too. From the point of view of a teenager, the 80s came to a close in a way that few decades since have done; in world terms, the cold war – something that had always been in the background for my generation – came to an end. Though that was undoubtedly a euphoric moment, 80s pop culture – which had helped to define what ‘the west’ meant during the latter period of that war – seemed simultaneously to be running out of steam.

“The 80s” (I actually owned this poster as a kid, which seems extremely bizarre now)

My generation grew up with a background of brainless action movies starring people like Arnold Schwarzenegger and Sylvester Stallone, who suddenly seemed to be laughable and obsolete, teen comedies starring ‘teens’ like Andrew McCarthy and Robert Downey, Jr who were now uneasily in their 20s. We had both old fashioned ‘family entertainment’ like Little & Large and Cannon & Ball which was, on TV at least. in its dying throes; but then so was the ‘alternative comedy’ boom initiated by The Young Ones, as its stars became the new mainstream. The era-defining franchises we had grown up with – Star Wars, Indiana Jones, Ghostbusters, Back to the Future, Police Academy – seemed to be either finished or on their last legs. Comics, were (it seemed) suddenly¹ semi-respectable and re-branded as graphic novels, even if many of the comics themselves remained the same old pulpy nonsense in new, often painted covers. The international success of Katsuhiro Otomo’s Akira in 1988 opened the gates for the manga and anime that would become part of international pop culture from the 90s onwards.

the 80s: book covers as faux movie posters – black/red/metallic; extremely non-psychedelic

Those aforementioned things I loved the most in the late 80s, aged 14-15 – horror fiction and heavy metal music – were changing too. The age of the blockbuster horror novel wasn’t quite over, but its key figures; Stephen King, James Herbert, Clive Barker², Shaun Hutson – all seemed to be losing interest in the straightforward horror-as-horror novel³, diversifying into more fantastical or subtle, atmospheric or ironic kinds of stories. In movies too, the classic 80s Nightmare on Elm Street and Friday the 13th franchises – as definitively 80s as anything else the decade produced – began to flag in terms of both creativity and popularity. Somewhere between these two models of evolution and stagnation were the metal bands I liked best. These seemed to either be going through a particularly dull patch, with personnel issues (Iron Maiden, Anthrax) or morphing into something softer (Metallica) or funkier Suicidal Tendencies). As with the influence of Clive Barker in horror, so bands who were only partly connected with metal (Faith No More, Red Hot Chilli Peppers) began to shape the genre. All of which occurred as I began to be obsessed with music that had nothing to do with metal at all, whether contemporary (Pixies, Ride, Lush, the Stone Roses, Happy Mondays, Jesus Jones – jesus, the Shamen etc) or older (The Smiths, Jesus and Mary Chain, The Doors⁴, the Velvet Underground).

Still; not many people are into the same things at 18 as they were at 14; and it’s tempting to think that my feelings about the end of the decade had more to do with my age than the times themselves; but they were indeed a-changing, and a certain aspect of the new decade is reflected in editor Peter K. Hogan’s ‘Outro’ to the debut issue of the somewhat psychedelically-inclined comic Revolver (published July 1990):

Why Revolver?
Because what goes around comes around, and looking out my window it appears to be 1966 again (which means – with any luck – we should be in for a couple of good years ahead of us). Because maybe – just maybe – comics might now occupy the slot that rock music used to. Because everything is cyclical and nothing lasts forever (goodbye, Maggie). Because the 90s are the 60s upside down (and let’s do it right, this time). Because love is all and love is everything and this is not dying. Any more stupid questions?

This euphoric vision of the 90s was understandable (when Margaret Thatcher finally resigned in 1990 there was a generation of by now young adults who couldn’t remember any other Prime Minister) but it aged quickly. The ambiguity of the statement ‘the 90s are the 60s upside down’ is embodied in that disclaimer (and let’s do it right, this time) and turned out to be prophetic; within a month of the publication of Revolver issue1 the Gulf War had begun. Aspects of that lost version of the 90s lived on in rave culture, just as aspects of the summer of love lived on through the 70s in the work of Hawkwind and Gong, but to posterity the 90s definitely did not end up being the 60s vol.2. In the end, like the 80s, the 90s (like every decade?) is defined, depending on your age and point of view, on a series of apparently incompatible things; rave and grunge, Jurassic Park and Trainspotting, Riot Grrrl and the Spice Girls, New Labour and Saddam Hussein.

That tiny oasis of positivity in 1990 – between the Poll Tax Riots on 31st March and the declaration of the first Gulf War on the 2nd August is, looking back, even shorter than I remember, and some of the things I loved in that strange interregnum between adolescence and adulthood (which lasted much longer than those few months) – perhaps because they seemed grown up then – are in some ways more remote now than childhood itself. So… conclusions? I don’t know, the times change as we change and they change us as we change them; a bit too Revolver, a lot too neat. And just as we are something other than the sum of our parents, there’s some part of us too that seems to be independent of the times we happen to exist in. I’ll leave the last words to me, aged 18, not entirely basking in the spirit of peace and love that seemed to be ushered in by the new decade.

¹ in reality this was the result of a decade of quiet progress led by writers like Alan Moore, Neil Gaiman and Frank Miller
² although 100% part of the 80s horror boom, Barker is perhaps more responsible than any other writer for the end of its pure horror phase
³ Stephen King’s Dark Tower series, though dating from earlier in the 80s, appeared in print with much fanfare in the UK in the late 80s and, along with the more sci-fi inflected The Tommyknockers and the somewhat postmodern The Dark Half seemed to signal a move away from the big, cinematic horror novels like Pet Sematary, Christine, Cujo et al. In fact, looking at his bibliography, there really doesn’t appear to be the big shift around the turn of the 90s that I remember, except that a couple of his new books around that time (Dark Tower III, Needful Things, Gerald’s Game for one reason or another didn’t have half the impact that It had on me. That’s probably the age thing). James Herbert, more clearly, abandoned the explicit gore of his earlier work for the more or less traditional ghost story Haunted (1988) and the semi-comic horror/thriller Creed (1990)– a misleadingly portentous title which always makes me think of that Peanuts cartoon where Snoopy types This is a story about Greed. Joe Greed lived in a small town in Colorado… Clive Barker, who had already diverged into dark fantasy with Weaveworld, veered further away from straightforward horror with The Great & Secret Show while reliably fun goremeister Shaun Hutson published the genuinely dark Nemesis, a book with little of the black humour – and only a fraction of the bodycount – of his earlier work. ⁴ the release of Oliver Stone’s The Doors in 1991 is as 90s as the 50s of La Bamba (1987) and Great Balls of Fire (1989) was 80s. Quite a statement.

You Shouldn’t Always Get What You Want; cautionary tales of the 80s by Stephen King & Ramsey Campbell

The 1980s is a decade most often defined – at least in Western countries by some of its most visible features; greed and consumerism, accelerated capitalism, wealth-as-glamour, blockbuster entertainment (and not just in Hollywood; what could be more 80s than the novels of Jackie Collins and Jeffrey Archer?) Even charity – one would think the polar opposite of everything the decade stood for – took on a big, glossy, stadium-filling character. One of the decade’s most beloved humanitarian events, Live Aid was for all its positive impact, complicated at best; essentially an advertisement for the very culture that created gross inequality which simultaneously attempted to right some of its wrongs. If the 70s had been ‘the me decade’ with its post-hippy focus on the discovery and nurturing of the inner self, the 80s turned that focus outwards; now you know who you are it’s time to get what you want – all well and good if you had the means to do it.

Given that context, it’s no surprise that during that decade, horror authors should have taken on the venerable theme of the Faustian pact; the true cost of getting what you want. The most extreme and morally complex version (that I’ve read) is probably Clive Barker’s The Hellbound Heart (1986; filmed by its author as Hellraiser a few years later), but this article was inspired by a recent reading of two novels: Needful Things by Stephen King (published 1991, but written between 1988-91) and Ramsey Campbell’s Obsession (1985).

The stories are dissimilar but have a kind of 80s horror family likeness; both concern the effect of evil, perhaps supernatural forces in small, ‘sleepy’ communities (Stephen King’s Castle Rock and the seaside town of Seaward in East Anglia) and both depict the lives of their characters unravelling after they are granted their heart’s desire (or at least what they think their heart’s desire is) at a cost which is not apparent until afterwards.

Although more than twice the length of Obsession, Needful Things, in some ways the last of King’s big 80s blockbusters, is the simpler of the two stories. It concerns the arrival in Castle Rock of the sinister Luciferian salesman Leland Gaunt and his shop Needful Things, wherein the town’s residents find objects with apparently great personal value (a signed baseball card, Elvis memorabilia, a fishing rod) at surprisingly affordable prices; but in addition to the cash price, Gaunt also requires his customers to perform duties for him, in the guise of ‘pranks’ which range from the innocuous to the seriously criminal. At the heart of the book are the opposed forces of darkness – Gaunt himself but also the various underlying rivalries and tensions within Castle Rock which he brings to the surface – and if not light, then at least law and order, in the stolid shape of Sheriff Alan Pangborn. Needful Things is a very self-referential novel; King takes for granted that readers will recognise allusions to other ‘Castle Rock’ stories; most obviously The Dark Half (1989) which introduced Pangborn, but also Cujo (1981) and The Body (1982, filmed as Stand By Me), which introduced Leland Gaunt’s petty criminal henchman “Ace” Merrill as a juvenile delinquent teenager. It’s also typical of King’s long (790 pages) novels of the 80s in that it weaves together various plot strands and characters, bringing the story to a dramatic (in fact almost apocalyptic) climax reminiscent of the final, blood-drenched act of the typical 80s horror movie (though the movies themselves were arguably orchestrated in that way because of the influence of King’s earlier works like Carrie (1974).

Sometimes this structure works better than others. For me, it’s at its best in It (1986) where the final catastrophe has an inbuilt logic and even inevitability. The entity terrorising Derry (best known as Pennywise; and really, people think clowns are cool nowadays?? Surely even more lame than finding them scary) pre-dates the city itself and shaped its sinister history. So the destruction of the creature naturally entails the destruction of Derry. It works less well (again, just for me) in Apt Pupil (1982) where the genuinely disturbing opening (one of King’s best) and rising tension is undermined by the ludicrously spiralling body count and in Pet Sematary (1983) where the very human bleakness and nihilism at the novel’s heart is weakened by the over-the-top supernatural carnage of the closing chapters.

Needful Things falls somewhere in the middle; the town being literally blown up at the novel’s climax never feels as necessary or as cathartic as the destruction of Derry in It, but on the other hand, it’s a fitting end to a novel whose main villain is larger-than-life, theatrical and slightly campy and whose hero has a sideline as an amateur magician. If there’s a moral to Needful Things, it’s not only the proverbial ‘be careful what you wish for’ but also a very 80s one; if a deal seems too good to be true, it probably is.

Obsession (Campbell’s preferred and superior title was For The Rest of Their Lives) is less of an extroverted, cinematic rollercoaster ride than Needful Things, but ironically has the blood of a bona fide slick 80s blockbuster – and not a particularly inventive one – running in its veins. The novel’s genesis came when the author was sent to review Rocky III (1982) and became intrigued by the scene in which Apollo Creed agrees to train Rocky with one condition; with the caveat that he won’t find out what that condition is until the training is complete. In Campbell’s story, a troubled teenager in the 1950s receives an anonymous letter offering aid (WHATEVER YOU MOST NEED I DO) with the somewhat vague price of something you do not value and which you may regain. He and four friends take up the offer, with the short term effect that their wishes come true. A quarter century later, the friends are still in Seaward, living outwardly successful lives which proceed to horrifically fall apart.

Stephen King and Ramsey Campbell’s writing styles make for an interesting contrast; as a teenager I found Campbell’s books a little slow and understated for my taste, but in fact one of the most noticeable things about Obsession (which I just read for the first time) is that it feels a little rushed, unfolding over 280 pages where it could comfortably have been twice as long and half as fast-moving. Positively, this brevity makes the story fly by, but it also feels a little disjointed and illogical at times, especially in the final climactic chapters. Where King’s writing is largely conversational in tone (chapter one of Needful Things begins, In a small town, the opening of a new store is big news.* Campbell’s is very carefully-worded and precisely descriptive, although ironically this precision sometimes works against the effect, producing oddly un-illuminating pictures of the people and places involved. In contrast to Needful Things‘s almost cornily old-fashioned opening, Obsession begins Twenty-five years later, when Peter realized at last what they had signed away, he had still not forgotten that afternoon: still remembered the waves flocking down from the horizon to sweep up the fishing boats, the glass of the classroom windows shivering with the wind, chalk dust drowsing in the September sunlight, his throat going dry as he realized everyone was looking at him.** It’s typical of the ambiguous tone of Obsession that after reading what is quite a long descriptive paragraph the reader doesn’t really have a firm idea of the kind of day it was – sunny and windy presumably, but could equally be mellow and warm (chalk dust drowsing) or stormy and cold (waves flocking, windows shivering).

* Needful Things, 1991, New English Library, p.13

** Obsession, 1985, Futura Publications, p.9

Stephen King’s cast of characters is vividly and firmly drawn, a familiar mix of wholesome youngsters gone bad, feuding neighbours, eccentric old timers etc, whereas Campbell’s – at least the four main protagonists – are a little indistinct and interchangeable, not helped by their (entirely plausible but bland) names: Peter Priest, Robin Laurel, Steve Innes and Jimmy Waters. As adults, all four of them lead successful but somewhat tortured existences (Peter is a social worker, Steve an estate agent, Jimmy a police officer and Robin a doctor), all make strange, inconsistent and illogical decisions and can be a little irritating. Where Campbell really excels though is in the antagonists; not larger-than-life supernatural forces of evil like Leland Gaunt, but believable, intensely annoying and depressing people like Robin’s unbearable senile mother and the sinister but ultimately just petty and small-minded brother of one of Peter’s clients.

In keeping with its broad, movie-like feel, Needful Things gives us (relatively) clear dividing lines between good and evil, and shows us the tainting of one by the other, personal gain taking precedence over empathy, but Obsession has no real sense of good and evil at all. None of the main protagonists initially acts out of purely selfish motives, and few of the horrors that happen do so because anybody really means any serious harm. The main characters never seem to fully grasp the bigger picture of what is happening to them or why, and neither, in the end, does the reader. In Needful Things, implausible things happen and the reader, immersed in the story, makes the required suspension of disbelief. In Obsession, whether intended or not, the everyday action – small town dramas involving rival estate agents(!), romantic relationships, sci-fi conventions and drug smuggling – feels as peculiar and implausible as any of the perhaps-supernatural occurrences.

And yet, Obsession is the opposite of unreadable; the dowdy seaside town ambience is irresistible, the almost tangible feeling that the characters are trapped within their own lives, whatever the outcome of the actual plot, makes it both immersive and oddly depressing for an 80s horror novel. Stephen King builds slowly to a frenzied, bloody and cathartic finale where those who commit acts of evil are punished and/or expelled and good, however temporarily, prevails. Ramsey Campbell shows us a world where good and bad are punished equally, peoples’ lives are destroyed, a town is perhaps haunted, but essentially not much of substance ever changes; Stephen King gives us another (efficient and gripping) Hollywood blockbuster, Ramsey Campbell gives us Friday the 13^th Part 7 directed by Ken Loach.

What the books share is that they are variations on that cautionary, Faustian tale. The small town settings and down-at-heel characters mean that they aren’t really commentaries on 80s consumerism in the manner of the more imaginative end of horror cinema like David Cronenberg’s surreal Videodrome (1983) and John Carpenter’s satirical They Live (1988). Instead, and appropriately for the Faustian theme, they are concerned with human nature, and as such both books fit into the generally conservative nature of 80s horror (punish the transgressors, restore the status quo!); and although Campbell’s novel is less black and white than King’s, its very ambivalence strengthens that core message; be very careful what you wish for. You can’t always get what you want – and probably, you shouldn’t.

old books, old eyes, new readings

In Richard Linklater’s reputedly anti-nostalgic, but actually still quite nostalgic 1993 film Dazed and Confused, Matthew McConaughey’s Fonz-like character Wooderson articulates his Fonzhood in a way that – as far as I remember – the actual Fonz never does*: “That’s what I love about these high school girls, man. I get older, they stay the same age.” That quote popped into my head, in a sardonic kind of way, when I recently re-read the book that was the subject of this previous article, Richard Laymon’s Tread Softly. When reading books you first loved at an impressionable age, time makes Woodersons of us all; it’s the slightly eerie feeling of meeting old friends, only you have aged and they have stayed the same; except of course that in staying the same, they have changed too, because your perspective has changed. What once seemed profound may seem trite, what “you” once related to, you may not; re-encountering your youth – or even more so, your childhood – through books is as complex a feeling as looking at old photographs of yourself can be.

* to be fair to the Fonz, it would be hard for him to have this kind of perspective on the creepier aspects of his Fonzhood since, by the time he was in his 40s, the Happy Days “high school students” he lurked around were themselves in their 30s

What Wooderson specifically draws attention to, and what we are forced to do, is to relate to the things we once liked from the perspective of an older person. And this is where the “genre fiction” comes in. As a teenager, especially from the ages of I think 13 to 17, my preferred reading was, in order of importance, horror, heroic fantasy and science fiction. Recently, in addition to Tread Softly, I have re-read a few books that were among my favourites in my mid-teens (The Rats, Lair, Shrine, The Dark and The Fog by James Herbert, It and Carrie by Stephen King and Weaveworld by Clive Barker) and, for the first time, what struck me about all of them (ego alert) was that I am now older than all of the main protagonists, including the ‘grownups’ in It and the parents in Tread Softly. Which of course is partly because I am now older than the authors of those books were when they wrote them; a strange thought – it’s possibly just me, but I don’t think one ever feels older than an author whose books you read when young, even when their youth is obvious. Not that the age of an author necessarily correlates to the age of their characters, but there seems to be something about the horror genre in particular that makes writers simplify and sketch the main – non-villainous – characters, rather than draw them in vivid detail. Perhaps it’s because some degree of identification with the main character makes the horror more effective, and a certain amount of vague/generic-ness is necessary to make as many readers as possible identify with those characters. I think this is pretty much explicitly what James Herbert did with his ‘everyman’ heroes.

For a variety of reasons, it’s a strange thing to try to engage with your teenage taste in books, far more difficult than it is with music, or with the books one loved as a child. For a start, and with no disrespect intended to the authors, what has to be borne in mind with some of these books is that they weren’t necessarily (or definitely weren’t) aimed at the 14-15 year old who was reading them. When reading childrens’ books, adult me can be – CS Lewis’ Narnia books are perhaps the classic example – uncomfortably aware of the feelings and attitudes – the ‘adultness’ in fact – of the author behind the book. Sometimes – as with Jan Mark’s Thunder & Lightnings (there’s an insightful article about this excellent book here), or the best of Robert Westall’s novels – it gives me a new respect for a writer who until now I was mainly nostalgic about. Other times less so; for all the informative qualities, animal welfare concerns and anthropological information in Willard Price’s Adventure series (which I loved), the core idea of the two wholesome young American boys travelling the world, encountering its cultures with genuine (if occasionally paternalistic) respect and then catching its animals & shipping them off to zoos and safari parks, feels pretty uncomfortable. Far more so in fact than Biggles or Bulldog Drummond, where even child-me was aware of the dated imperialist attitudes and (in Bulldog Drummond especially) almost (or I’m tempted to think actually) parodic levels of jingoistic racism. But Willard Price wasn’t dealing in knowingly crass, simplistic thrills as “Sapper” was.

He was a genuinely philanthropic, genuinely respectful, extremely knowledgeable naturalist and social worker and I did in fact learn a lot from his books. But one of the things I learned – and I don’t think it was a bad thing to learn – was that the enlightened attitudes of yesterday, although certainly preferable to the unenlightened ones – are not necessarily the enlightened attitudes of today.

the beginnings of horror fandom? Dracula’s Spinechillers Annual

Julio Vivas’ artwork for The Drowning Pond

My interest in horror was probably first awakened when I was still very much a reader of Biggles & co. I loved the Dracula’s Spinechillers Annual I had got for Christmas when I was (I think) 8 or thereabouts. Around that age I also loved the (vastly inferior 80s) Eagle comic horror spin-off Scream! (which only seemed in my world to exist as ‘specials’ and never as a regular comic) Nevertheless, various things from Scream!, most notably a somewhat folk horror-ish story called The Drowning Pond with its illustrations of a skeleton with flowers in its long hair is still very vivid in my mind. And here it is!

Non-comics-wise, I remember borrowing (Doctor Who author) Terrance Dicks’ Cry Vampire! And Wereboy! from the Mobile Library (itself a very 80s detail although I’m sure they still exist) and loving them, and, later in Primary School Robert Westall’s The Scarecrows, The Watch House, The Wind Eye and The Devil on the Road made a big impression on me (and still stand up well when read as an adult). As a devotee of the phenomenally successful Fighting Fantasy gamebook series, I recall being particularly impressed by the horror-themed House Of Hell, which was very different from the swords & sorcery (or sci fi) leanings of the rest of the series.

Interestingly (I use that word advisedly, with the caveat; ‘to me’) my interest in gore was parallel to, but not at all dependent on horror. I remember in my English class, at the age of (I think) 12, having to write a story based on Robert O’Brien’s Mrs Frisby And The Rats Of NIMH, and writing, under the influence of Robert Shea’s supremely dodgy Shike: Last of the Zinja books, about ninja rats attacking their enemies and slicing their intestines into ‘spaghetti’. So I was quite ready for James Herbert already.

Herbert wasn’t the first ‘adult’ horror author I read though. I think that was HP Lovecraft, who I came to through two sources he would probably have found incomprehensible. Firstly, heavy metal (he is quoted on Eddie’s gravestone on arguably Derek Riggs’ finest – and certainly my favourite as a child – Iron Maiden album cover, Live After Death (1985)) and I came across him again a little later, through the roleplaying game Call of Cthulhu. Not that I played it (though I would have liked to) but as a subscriber to Games Workshop’s White Dwarf magazine (essentially, I now realise, for the pictures) I became aware of it and my interest in Lovecraft grew.

Derek Riggs’ finest (Iron Maiden) painting? Live After Death (1985) Lots of blue, lots of yellow & a bit of white; genius

Games Workshop’s 80s edition of Call of Cthulhu

Before reading any actual Lovecraft, I’m pretty sure that I borrowed the game itself in its hardback book edition from the local library (this would either be the Rats of NIMH year or the year after). Shortly thereafter I then borrowed (from the same library – Cupar) a hardback edition of Lovecraft’s The Shadow Out Of Time and other stories and since then, Lovecraft has been one of the few writers I’ve never ‘grown out’ of, or lost interest in. As such, he fades from this article now except for two more observations; firstly, Lovecraft’s protagonists – sensitive, articulate, terrified – are clearly Lovecraft himself. The author died when only a few years older than I am now, but both Lovecraft and his characters will I think always feel older to me than I do. People – like Michael Moorcock (another teenage favourite) – who don’t like Lovecraft’s writing, usually don’t like the florid style and neurotic tone of his stories – the elements which to me are his real strengths as a writer and make his writing – although widely imitated – genuinely inimitable; no-one else captures that tone. Secondly, that first Lovecraft book I read had no illustration on the cover (on the whole I think Lovecraft has been badly served by artists and illustrators, though I love many of their efforts – and anyway it’s his own fault the illustrators so often fail). but two pictures were instrumental in making me want to read his work; there was the art for a Call of Cthulhu module called Green And Pleasant Land that was advertised prominently in White Dwarf, and a Les Edwards painting (possibly unrelated to Lovecraft in origin) used in the Call of Cthulhu book. (Edwards’ Croglin Vampire*, also used in the book was a superb picture too, though less Lovecraftian*)

Lovecraftian inspirations: the cover of a sourcebook for UK based Cthulhoid adventures (left; still love tentacle-meets-cricket) and a Les Edwards painting used in Call of Cthulhu

*Still very interesting however; read about the ‘real’ Croglin vampire here

So anyway; although I have very shadowy memories of reading the opening of Cujo (I think my mum had it) and seeing the film versions of Cujo and Christine, the first horror novels I remember reading in their entirety are James Herbert’s The Rats and Stephen King’s Pet Sematary and It. I remember an interview in FEAR magazine issue two, James Herbert said that the characters in his novels were ‘everyman’ – and in his early novels in particular, it’s a very specific kind of everyman; In The Rats (1974), we meet Harris, “teaching art to little bastards whose best work is on lavatory walls. Jesus Christ!” and “At thirty two he was back [in the East End], teaching little facsimiles of his former self…” while in The Fog (1975) we find that “At thirty-two, [environmental investigator] Holman was still young enough to be angered by the seeming lack of resolution shown by his superiors when he himself had taken great risks to ferret out the proof they asked him to provide.”
Variations on these characters – tough, working or lower-middle class, cynical about the motives of those in charge; thirty two – are essentially versions of the young(ish) James Herbert himself, which is understandable, and they were to appear in the majority of his books until the mid-to-late 80s, when he seems to have become interested in characters with a little more individuality. Those ‘everymen’ – Harris, Holman, Pender, Culver, Bishop – are little more than ciphers, characters made of a few (mostly) well-selected details but overall as relatively simple as the dangers they face – that is, rats, fog, more rats, a fog-like darkness etc.

When the stories get more complex, as with The Spear, The Jonah and the aforementioned Shrine, it’s noticeable that the characters do too. In Shrine, the hero, Gerry Fenn is actually younger than usual (29) but even more jaded; a wannabe tabloid journalist(!) who we first meet “tired, angry and a little drunk” and ranting about “rent-a-left” loonies. As a teenager I took James Herbert’s statements about politics at face value (this isn’t quite a quote but I’ll keep the inverted commas as what he said in that issue of FEAR was definitely something like “I’m not anti-right, I’m not anti-left, but those in power always look after themselves”). Now – especially after reading his final novel Ash (2012) perhaps the most unintentionally funny book I’ve ever read – Herbert’s apparently apolitical stance seems – like his everyman character and his ‘have your cake and eat it’ attitude to sex (describe it in titillating detail but punish the characters who indulge in it illicitly) – pretty reactionary, although his point about the powers that be is of course a valid one. But still; maybe the strangest thing about reading James Herbert as an adult is not the paranoia about what governments get up to, or the preoccupation with violent death; it’s that supposed everyman. I guess as a young teenager I saw him/them as simply ‘an adult’, but as an adult – and an older one than most of those characters are – I see him/them as… a bit of an asshole really, which mars the enjoyment of the books a little for me. But maybe just for me; possibly ‘everyman’ really is a centre-right-to-borderline-fascist asshole. Complicating things further, sometimes – as in Shrine and especially some of Herbert’s later books like Creed – it seems like we are definitely supposed to view the character as unsympathetic/unpleasant, which is odd in that it diminishes the effect of the horrors they experience to some extent; the effect is a little like those ‘ghost hunters’ type of TV shows, where noisy, aggressive people blunder around in the dark taunting spirits for not showing themselves and then scream like hysterical children at the least noise or drop in temperature; good.

By contrast, Stephen King is interesting, in that the book that made his name – Carrie – has no hero at all to speak of, just Carrie herself, and the impersonal voices of the various documents that tell her story. As a teenager I wasn’t very keen on the book and found it, despite its brevity, far harder to read than It. I don’t think I really understood its popularity either. Reading it now, I find it far more impressive and effective, maybe because as a teenager, King’s insight into teenagers and their lives seemed unremarkable (ie I literally didn’t give it any thought) whereas now I think it’s one of the key features of almost all of his work that I like the most. In Carrie, as in It, the vividness of the horror is increased by the framing of the story. In It the story is being told “now” (although now is obviously the 80s) and segues into the 1950s sections in a self-consciously cinematic (or televisual) ‘flashback’ kind of way, whereas in Carrie, we know right from the beginning that Carrie’s story has already ended and become history. Although that sounds like it should have a distancing effect, what it actually does is give a feeling of reality. We don’t so much empathise with the characters as look on at their plight – but King is a good enough storyteller to engage the reader’s empathy without having to put them directly into the characters’ shoes.

Stephen King and James Herbert both brought a sense of modern-ness to the horror genre in the 1970s (not that they were the only ones, but for me they were the most important for the 80s horror fiction explosion, Herbert possibly less so in the USA), but they did so through almost opposite means. Both abandoned the gothic/melodramatic/romantic element of horror that had been at the genre’s heart, but after that, they part ways. Herbert is modern via the immediacy of his bluntly explicit descriptiveness; a very 1970s matter-of-factness; cold, harsh and almost industrial (the Throbbing Gristle of horror literature maybe?); horror with no politeness. Carrie, has a cold, clinical, matter-of-fact quality, but it’s entirely unlike Herbert’s – it isn’t about the viscera. With The Rats, James Herbert was telling a nasty story, as vividly and convincingly as he could, to make it feel real. With Carrie, Stephen King heightens the reality by saying this isn’t a ‘story’ at all; this is what happened. As a teenager I mostly preferred James Herbert, but as an adult I find that Stephen King is far easier to enjoy. From the adult perspective, King’s teenagers are still teenagers; in fact even more so than they seemed at the time; whereas Herbert’s adults are ciphers, or in his more developed characters, people who on the whole I just don’t like.

Although I mentioned James Herbert, Stephen King and Clive Barker as a kind of trinity of 80s horror in my Richard Laymon article, Barker is and always was the obvious odd man out of the trio. Firstly because – with a few exceptions – the standard idea of ordinary people encountering horrible things isn’t his primary kind of story. In fact the idea of ‘ordinary people’ isn’t one that I associate with Barker at all; not because (as far as I can tell) he is dismissive of everyday kind of characters, it feels more like he just doesn’t really believe in them. In Weaveworld (1987), the hero is to all intents & purposes ‘ordinary’ – “His name is Calhoun Mooney, but he’s universally known as Cal. He is twenty-six, and has worked for five years at an insurance firm in the city centre.” We first meet Cal trying to catch an escaped racing pigeon. A working class Liverpudlian in the 80s seems the very epitome of ordinariness, but as his name indicates, there’s always something a little otherworldly about Cal (even compared to for instance, the villainous, magic-using Shadwell, who fits in in Cal’s prosaic world far more easily than Cal himself seems to). I can’t remember if I felt this way about Cal, or the book itself when I first read it (another library acquisition I think, I certainly read it at the time of its first paperback edition if not before). He seems a younger, stranger character than I remembered; but then the whole book feels stranger. Not so much the overtly fantastical parts, but the Liverpool-set opening chapters.

Without thinking much about it, I had always assumed that Weaveworld was set “nowadays”, i.e. in the late-80s, when it was published, but there are odd mentions, such as the police arriving in a ‘Black Maria’ – I don’t know when the UK police stopped using black vans, but I know that even in my earliest recollections (late 70s/early 80s) they were white – that make the Liverpool Barker describes feel both specific and vaguely unreal. Is this intentional? Clive Barker grew up in working class Liverpool himself, in the 60s and 70s, but was not much older than Cal Mooney when writing Weaveworld (I wouldn’t be at all surprised if he started writing it when he was 29 in fact). And yet; I remember seeing him on TV around the time the book was published and being surprised at his relative lack of a Liverpool accent; perhaps because of his background in theatre and experimental filmmaking he seemed at ease on television, but always has a hint of the otherworldly quality I associate with his work. Weaveworld has been ‘in development’ in Hollywood for years, but I’d say that unless they can somehow go back in time and get the young Clive Barker, the production will never have the right Cal Mooney. In fact this 1988 interview with both Clive Barker and James Herbert could almost be with “Mooney” and “Harris” and probably tells you everything you need to know about the differences between the two authors’ work; If Harris, Holman et al are James Herbert and the gritty urban settings of London and its environs are their natural habitat, then Cal Mooney equally is Clive Barker, and ghost-Liverpool and the magical world of The Fugue is his. And I’m not sure either author had it in them – at that time at least – to write convincingly about the world of the other, even if they had wanted to.

So what of it all? I don’t know; are there conclusions here? Reading favourite teenage books is like visiting your school long after you left it – everything is familiar, but smaller than you remembered. Genre fiction is by its nature somewhat generic, and is largely plot, rather than character-driven. Lovecraft again is an exception, because somehow his stories manage to be neither plot, nor character driven, so much as they are perspective-driven; sometimes the horror, omnipresent in his best work, has very little narrative to fuel it, just a tone of voice. The heroines and heroes of most of the horror, fantasy and sci-fi I used to devour as a teenager were mostly there as stand-ins for the reader, or for the writer. Most horror authors whose careers last any length of time start to write novels about writers, just as successful musicians start writing songs about being on tour. Going all the way back to Mary Shelley and Bram Stoker, the villains in horror have always been more memorable than the heroes (actually, Frankenstein is more complex than just hero/villain, but I’ll stand by it), in the 80s with horror cinema this becomes even more noticeable…

At some point a real conclusion will come to me and I’ll add it here; until then, the thing I love about these stories? I get older, they stay the same age.

‘Cheryl Heard A Wet Thud’: Tread Softly by Richard Kelly

There’s a moment in Peter Bagge’s immortal Generation X soap opera comicbook Hate¹ where a character says “That need to reclaim a dusty corner of your youth can be overwhelming at times” and even when I first read that in my late 20s, the truth of the statement seemed obvious; and of course the need only gets stronger as time goes by and your youth recedes into the distance.²

And those corners can be pretty dusty. Today, for the third time, I bought a copy of Richard Laymon’s Dark Mountain (1987). My introduction to this book now seems archaic, although it was fairly typical of its time. When I first read Dark Mountain, in 1988, horror novels made up the bulk of my reading. If I had had to name my favourite writers at the time I would probably have listed four main ones, in any order; James Herbert, Stephen King, Clive Barker and Shaun Hutson, although I had an open mind about anything that looked gory.

The first UK edition of Tread Softly, with Danny Flynn’s classic cover art

Like Dark Mountain itself, this is a very 80s story. When I first heard of the book, it was called Tread Softly and nominally by “Richard Kelly”, a pseudonym Laymon mysteriously (to me at least) used to write several novels of exactly the same type and in exactly the same style as the bestsellers he was known for, such as The Cellar and The Beast House. I have never read either of those, but they are worth mentioning because both titles are invariably appended to the phrase “Richard Laymon, author of…” in my memory³; I read the blurbs on at a lot of books back then.

I first came across Tread Softly via a negative review (oddly, not the only time I’ve been intrigued enough by a bad review to check something out) in Fear Magazine, an invaluable resource (that is, “a good magazine”) for horror fans such as myself in those pre-internet days. The review (not sure by whom unfortunately) obviously made an impression on me – I remember with apparent clarity (possibly not accurately, I don’t have my Fears anymore to check, alas) that the writer referred to ‘lashings of teeny sex’ (the selling point to me I would imagine) and concluded with ‘…a downbeat ending. Does nothing for the genre.’ (that last phrase makes me think it may have been written by Fear editor John Gilbert, whose concerns with literacy, imagination and quality pushed me towards writers like Clive Barker, Ramsey Campbell and Nicholas Royle, where my instincts might have led me more towards Guy N Smith and – of course – Tread Softly). But it was one thing to read a review and see a cover picture (another selling point) in a magazine – how to get the book itself? In a way, this was possibly even easier then than it would be now for a young teenager with no money; I asked for it in my local library. Within a few days, I had my clammy adolescent paws on the WH Allen UK hardback copy of the book, its dust jacket pristine beneath the clear plastic protective cover. I remember distinctly mine being the first stamp on the card, which was obscurely pleasing.

Fear issue 1 with cover art by Oliver Frey

As that detail suggests, this whole story is one of those memories that is more vivid than it has any reason or right to be.⁴ There was no real frisson, I had no sensation of forbidden fruit; I had read far more extreme things, such as Shaun Hutson’s Spawn (borrowed from the same library, incidentally), one of only two novels to ever make me feel physically queasy (I got over it though. With the other one, Bret Easton Ellis’ American Psycho, I haven’t yet and hope not to). But still, it was exciting. The cover by Danny Flynn was eye-catching, if extremely typical of its era (partly, it turns out, because Danny Flynn painted lots of the covers that define that era for me, including the several key Shaun Hutsons) and a million times better than the style-less and boring edition I bought today), but part of the excitement was because of the resemblance it bears to the artwork of the thousands of alluring, generic slasher movies that then lined the shelves of video shops. It might be worth mentioning for younger readers, that video (rental) shops then existed in any town bigger than a small village, but even in small villages, the local ‘convenience store’ would usually have at least a couple of shelves of videos. These movies were all the more alluring because at that point, they were still beyond my grasp. It was odd to me then and is still odd to me now, that at 13 or 14 I could buy, borrow and read, without any adult objection beyond the odd funny look, books about any kind of violent or depraved act imaginable (which was good), but couldn’t rent even the lame, often almost bloodless Friday the 13th clones that were a staple of 80s horror cinema and which – surely – had little appeal to the over-18s they were in theory restricted to. In fact, the ideas in both the movies and most of the books I was reading were deeply conservative and (especially in the films) relied on the equally conventional reaction to them for what little shock value they had. And in fact, Tread Softly was – and Dark Mountain remains – more like an 80s teen horror movie than any other book I’ve ever read.

The story (two families, both with sulky teenage children, go on a camping trip in the wilds of California, where they are terrorised by a “swamp witch” and her depraved idiot son) and the structure of the book are, it feels, deeply indebted to the standard slasher movie. There’s a brief, establishing but fairly restrained prologue (couple attacked in tent), then the introduction of the families and the tensions within them, before the vacation – and the horror – begins. It’s extremely formulaic; the women examine their naked bodies critically in mirrors for the reader’s benefit, the men are ‘rugged’ and clear eyed, teenage boys are ‘athletic’, teenage girls have ‘smooth curves’ and pout sulkily – and extremely predictable. As with films though, you can get away with any number of well worn formulae as long as the execution isn’t boring. Tread Softly was rarely boring but, more surprisingly – by Shaun Hutson standards at least, and something else it had in common with the standard slasher film – it wasn’t all that bloody, really.

The story is fairly perfunctory, as one would expect; the group goes camping, the idiot son attacks them, is killed, the witch tries to avenge him, all against a backdrop of hot, insect infested summery swamps and simmering teenage hormones. The ending – spoiler alert I suppose – is kind of downbeat, but only in the bathetic sense that it’s actually upbeat; it’s unexpectedly happy and harmonious and lacks the final, punchy, expected-unexpected twist that a film would have had. But teenage me found it wholly satisfactory. In fact, I found the whole sentimental, nasty adventure extremely enjoyable. It may not have done much for the genre, but it did something for the part of me that enjoyed and still enjoys Friday the 13th Part 3 and Police Academy 5: Assignment Miami Beach more than many obviously better movies. Clearly, when I read the bad review that lured me towards Tread Softly, I didn’t want it to be “good”, I wanted it to be exactly what it is; trashy and titillating and simplistic, and – with no insult intended – it didn’t disappoint me.

I didn’t buy the book at the time, but oddly, although better books (back then this would have meant things like IT, Weaveworld, Domain and Victims) and theoretically similar books (Rex Miller’s Slob springs to mind) came along, I never forgot Tread Softly. Why the appeal? No doubt it had something to do with the teenage protagonists and my own adolescence. That conservatism – the (mildly) dysfunctional families pull together and defeat the threat, the teenagers pair off as the reader is supposed to want them to, the arrogant characters become humble, the insecure ones find their courage and all is well with the world – has a deep appeal to teenagers. The formula of the teen horror movie – even the cynical twist ending that Tread Softly strangely lacks – wasn’t only there to sell more, similar movies. The comfort of the familiar, the safe scare is a huge part of the appeal of the genre to a young audience. As one gets older, that appeal fades (I find at least), but, from browsing in bookshops (I still usually have a quick look at the horror section) it would appear that the ‘young adult’ wing of horror fiction (now very much a specific subgenre) seems to be in healthier shape than horror as a whole.

I have read a few other Richard Laymon books since, but although they were essentially very similar to Tread Softly, they were enjoyed (albeit to a lesser degree) and then almost immediately forgotten. But then, I didn’t read those when I was 14. But. At some point in the late 90s, I nostalgically bought Tread Softly itself in a charity shop, and though I found it sillier than it seemed before, it remained just as enjoyable and – far more unexpectedly – the emotional attachment to the hackneyed story and the sketchily drawn characters (or to my 14 year-old self?) remained intact. But – annoyingly (it was an original Richard Kelly edition) – I didn’t bother to keep it. Then, in the early 2000s, I ended up buying a copy of Dark Mountain. The title was wrong, the cover was wrong, but the book was still very much right. And then I let it go again; like it though I do, it never feels like a priority when having a clear-out.

Now, inevitably, I have bought it once more; seeing it, even in its inferior form, brought back the memories; of the book, of the library, of that bad review. And, having started re-reading it, the magic, more mysteriously than ever, is still there. This time it has the dubious bonus of being paired with an earlier Laymon novel, Beware! With fairly low expectations (I didn’t read that when I was 14 either), I’ll give it a go.

the incredibly perfunctory 2009 edition of Beware!/Dark Mountain – nice barcode placement!

**** 2021 Postscript****

Now, in the midst of a pandemic that the 14 year old me would have thought was like something out of a horror novel, although a surprisingly boring one, I finally possess the classic 1988 Richard Kelly edition again. Finally, because this time I feel like I’ll probably keep hold of it; but who knows?

back on the shelf – the 1988 Star edition

¹ That moment, fact fans, is in the bottom left hand panel on page 24 of Buddy Go Home! Vol IV of the complete Buddy Bradley Stories from Hate (Fantagraphics Books, 1997)

² There are several good articles about this and related subjects on the blog Into The Gyre, most recently this one

³ See also Burt Hirschfeld, “author of Fire Island” (not read) and Guy N. Smith, “author of Night of the Crabs” (read and liked)

⁴ Another pointlessly intense memory from the same period – essentially a memory of sitting in a room not doing much – was awoken in a Proustian kind of way recently by hearing the intro to Alice Cooper’s classic late 80s comeback single ‘Poison’ in a cafe

Further Reading; Paperbacks From Hell by Grady Hendrix is an excellent & highly entertaining book that’s well worth a look for any fan of 80s horror fiction, or anyone nostalgic about it