I didn’t know exactly what a “majorette” was before I cracked open this book. I’m fairly sure in my high school experience the majorette was replaced with people who waved flags around. I don’t think there’s any flag-wavers getting slashed book, either. I wouldn’t know, I skipped most football games for pizza and the hundredth rewatch of Evil Dead II or a nasty slice of paperback horror. Much like The Majorettes by John A. Russo…

There’s an interesting bit of time when we, as a nation, really embraced a child murderer as our new pop-culture hero. That time was the 80s (and into the 90s) and that hero was Freddy Krueger. Maybe he was a hero we deserved at the time, maybe we still don’t deserve a hero like the burned child murderer Fred Krueger….

Do you like goo? Do you like ooze? Do you like jelly? Do you like gloop, glop and guck? Yes? Of course you do. The slimy stuff has long been a staple of horror, adding a little flavor with the “gross-out” scare. It mixes well with the blood and kills I suppose. So, we have determined that you the reader enjoy the gooey parts of horror. What about jellyfish? They are simple creatures, even lacking a brain. Surely, they couldn’t possibly be dangerous, could they? Well, just picture yourself back in the 80s in a time where (at least in a horror novel) that every living thing was out to get us humans. It was just a fact…

David Hagberg is going as David James on the cover and spine of Croc, a fairly slim little Belmont Tower paperback that asks the question “The hunters -or the hunted?” when there’s a crocodile in the sewers of New York City. Belmont was a second (or third) rate publisher in the 70s They churned out whatever the market wanted that month, seemingly. Westerns, crime stories, Men’s Adventure, mystery, gothics, romance, gothic romance, and even horror. They had great covers and good copy written on the back that didn’t always match up to the book inside. They sold books any which way they could…

Movie novelizations are gateway books I think. I can flashback to being a younger version of myself and reading Face/Off by Clark Charlton or Robert Tine’s Demolition Man during class or on a long car ride and desperately trying to picture the whole film in my head to stave off boredom. They were a transitional stage between, say comic books to “real” novels. They’re sort of dismissed as “hack” work, but translating a screenplay into full text seems pretty challenging to me. But they can suffer in comparison to the film running in your head. Prickly problem. So, what’s the solution? A novelization of a movie that was never made…

One of the things I really like about horror as a genre is all the little sub-genres that can even be divided up more into micro-genres and then divided EVEN more. With being said The Hippy Cult Murders by Ray Stanley is what you could call “Mansonploitation,” a sub-sub-sub genre brought on by Charles Manson. It’s got the evil cult angle, it’s got the serial killer angle, and it’s a bit of a slasher feel. It’s easy to see why this crop of books popped up after the Manson killings. Manson was/is the ultimate boogeyman for the 60s and 70s whose crimes shocked the nation, broke our national psyche and scared the hell out of Steve McQueen…

I don’t know who the hell Jack Yeovil is, but when he’s Kim Newman he’s a well known film critic, journalist, award-winning novelist, and TV/Film personality that seems to be on a lot of the Blu-Ray’s I own talking about horror and science fiction films. He’s probably best known in the book world for his Anno Dracula series about an alternate history where Van Helsing and the boys failed to kill our friend Dracula at the end of Bram Stoker’s Dracula and then poof the world’s got a lot of vampires. That spawned a metafictional series that blended history with fiction. You might need annotations to get all the references but that’s part of the fun…

Gary Brandner hit it moderately big with The Howling, though these days it’s just a side-note to the classic Joe Dante film. The Howling turned Brandner into a horror author, before that he mostly penned tawdry airport-type novels, work in the mystery magazine scene, and the wonderfully weird Big Brain series of Men’s Adventure novels. Which features a man with an exposed brain on the covers, but sadly not in the books. He pretty much stuck to churning out horror until he died in 2013, but never quite hit it as big as he did with werewolves…